A Puzzle

I was on my 2 mile walk, shortened from 2.6 miles because of the heat.  I walk by the swimming pool at Tappan Beach every time I walk, but never noticed this.  But I was walking earlier in the day and the pool was still open and this is one of the attendants I am thinking, sitting in a chair on the other side of this privacy fence. This just caught my eye and I stopped and quickly took about four frames and then looked at them on the back of the camera and figured that I got it.  I think it is unusual for me to shoot anything like this.  I called it "The Puzzle" because it looks like one, I thought.

 

Storm Warning

Today was Dunkin' day at the beach.  It was very windy and there were low gray clouds overhead. I noticed these red and green flags frantically blowing in the breeze and wondered what it might look like if I tried to take a photograph of the flags against the sky.  I really only tried one view, with a slight move from left to right to get the flags so they didn't overlap.  These are not about storm warnings at all, of course.  They are the flags posted on the beach, with one set to the right of the lifeguard tower, and an identical set to the left of the  tower, so that the swimmers know where to swim and where not to swim.  I like the photograph a lot because of the mood it establishes.

 

Flowers at Rum Point

When I was down photographing the water company workers, I wandered just a small distance down the sidewalk to look at this little park.  It is not very big, but has maybe 5 benches that people can sit on while looking out at the harbor.  I used to stop here at the end of my bike ride and cool down.  I realized recently that the park looks so much nicer!  The lawn is no longer bare and someone has made this beautiful garden of flowers.   So I spent some time looking for the best view.  I love the geese seen through an opening of the fence.  Oh, they have a sign there that says this piece of the land is called Rum Point.

 

Observing Night

This is my friend Lawrence and I out observing for the first time together.  We have been trying to get together with our telescopes for more than a year.  He found a used telescope in a shop and wanted to go out observing so that I could show him a few things about using it.  Tonight was the night and the skies looked pretty good so we went to Sunken Meadow State Park.  It turned out that there was a lot of light pollution but we saw a globular cluster and a galaxy and a triple star and a beautiful double star, with stars of different colors.  This was his first time observing and he was overwhelmed by the experience and can't wait to go observing again.  We will have to head further out east to darker skies for out next trip

 

Finishing Up the Water Main Repair

                             

Boy, this watermain damage turned out to be a big deal!  I could not believe all the trucks and heavy equipment the water company had on site to fix the damage. They had to close our street where it met Shore Road.

The big red arm on the upper right was a tank truck vacuum cleaner to pump water out of the deep hole that the excavator at left, dug.  It was at least six feet to get to where they needed to be.

Because the hole was so deep they needed to put heavy wood planks around the hole to keep the soil under the road from collapsing into the hole because a worker needed to be down at the bottom to make the repair.

We can assume the workman in the hole is almost 6 feet tall and all we can see is his helmet.

Look at all the trucks lined up on the left side of the road in this photograph.  And they needed to keep shore road open, so things were pretty crowded while the work was going on.

They worked past quitting time on the last day of their repairs, and then filling everything back in.  All you can see here is the blacktop they covered all their digging with.  If you click on this photo you can see smaller black patches on the road going back into the distance, where they had made other holes in order to repair the water main.

Maybe the Last of the Smoke?

This photograph is also from the walk yesterday when the smoke was still heavy.  I love how, in the background, you can see the trees that are furthest away from me, get lighter and lighter from all the smoke, and the closer trees are darker.  Because they are closer, I am not looking through as much smoke to see them.  Those trees, by themselves are not enough to make an interesting photo.  In this case, the long string of geese paddling by gives the photo a lot more interest.  Well, I hope it does!

 

Smoke is Still With Us

When I go to the bottom of Laurel Avenue, instead of heading south toward where the old powerplant was, I turned north and into a park that leads to a strip of beach with these kind of breakwater rocks leading out into the harbor.  It is such an interesting photograph looking out over all these rocks up to where boats are moored off Sea Cliff beach and Glen Cove Creek.  As you can see the two sailbots on the horizon like are barely visible through the smoke from the fires that is still with us.  But I think these rocks make a really interesting photograph.  If you click on the photo to enlarge it you will see many more sailboats moored to the right of these two.