You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Pix' category.
We’re pretty rural out here. There’s a gun club just down the hill, and we hear shots a decent amount. It’s not the same as hearing shots in the city.
We haven’t seen any hunters, which is good. The deer aren’t tame, but they’re pretty comfortable in the neighborhood. How comfortable? This guy is pictured in one of our gardens.
The rest are of a different deer. He’s pretty comfortable, too. This is near our gourd garden.
He was comfortable enough to set a spell . . .
Yep, this was close to the house.
Real close.
And I’m quite happy to shoot them with only a camera.
On Thanksgiving day, I saw a bluebird sitting on the pole we hang the hummingbird feeder from.
Then he saw me
and voted not to be seen.
His choice. I reserve the right to take his picture in the future.
Rolled it over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer, that is. Saturday afternoon, about 3:30.
I bought the car on April 25, 1994. That’s 15 years, 7 months, and 4 days. Spreading 200K miles across 5697 days gives just over thirty-five miles a day. Not bad for a car that still zooms and travels nicely – our recent trips to Knoxville and Cleveland were in this reliable machine, and I’m getting around 30 miles per gallon in normal driving. It’s getting a decent amount of body rust, but it’s still a great car. Definitely not a clunker, by anybody’s description.
Last July, I almost scrambled some bird eggs. This was out back, near our cistern.
That is mulched grass you see on top of the eggs. I came very close to mowing these over.
I mentioned it to my friend Dude, who pointed me to a neat selection of the Smithsonian’s collection, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. And I found out that most likely, they were eggs from a meadowlark.
(description here).
Now Dude is a relative of mine, something on the order of second cousin twice removed. Or something like that. My dad’s a closer relative to him, but still not too close. The interesting thing is that my parents live in Sierra Vista, Arizona, which was once the training camp for the Harlem Globetrotters, who starred Meadowlark Lemon.
All this is not to be confused with Mount Lemmon, a couple hours north of my folks.
Now you see why my thoughts are scrambled??
Last Wednesday was a historic day. Oh, some may say that it was an historic day, but these are people up with whom I shall not put!
We had BLTs, two each. The reason it was historic is that we were eating tomatoes from our garden. The last of the season, eaten on November 18. Bettie had covered the garden with a fabric quilt to preserve them through the frosts. And it worked. We had one Roma and one – not sure what it was, but it was round and red and ours.
And it was tasty.
We’re planning on doing it again as soon as we can.
Or maybe it’s a different Newt. Or a skink. Anyway, this guy was crawling (slowly) in our carport just before Halloween.
Dr. Ferdinand Porsche – his friends call him Ferry, so it’s still Ferdinand for me – believed that a car’s brakes should be stronger than its engine. That way, you could always slow yourself down if the engine was stuck at full throttle.
There are, however, some limits to that line of thinking. There should be a balance between going and stopping, zooming and screeching.
This all goes back to the tilling I did on Saturday. The tiller I used was borrowed from Bettie’s Dad. It’s a big red MTD, from the second half of last century. Can’t get much closer than that. The other thing it has is Reverse Direction Tines. The concept is a good one – the front wheels pull the tiller along, and the tines chew the ground backward. Net effect, practically zero. You can walk along beside the tiller, guiding it with the faintest touch of your hand, almost doing it unconsciously as if you were riding a bike and leaning into a corner.
Almost as if.
The reality is that the reverse tines are much stronger than the slipping front wheels. I had to push, tilt, cajole, and muscle that thing to get it to move. The concept is great, digging the top grass down into the dirt. The reality doesn’t match up. My leg is still bruised from bumping it to get it going where I wanted it to go. It may be better the next time I till – and I expect it will: this new garden took three hours for the first pass and only an hour for the alternate-orientation second pass. Until then, I’ll try to think of my injuries as being from a pinball game flashing TILT at me.
Before and after
The rock pile containing the non-cenotaph (one of six piles)
And some idea of the size
It was a year ago today that we installed our mailbox. It took ten minutes.
And a year later, the mailbox isn’t doing so well. It’s having problems with the lock opening, and the finish on the sides is starting to rust.
The rust is a bad thing, but the company’s warranty specifically excludes rust. They have to – you can’t stay in business replacing fifty-year-old mailboxes. Still, it was disappointing. The lock was a bigger problem. This is a security mailbox – no key access means no access at all. When Bettie went back to the hardware store where we bought it, the manager asked if she had brought in the mailbox for him to look at. Reasonable question, but no. This thing weights forty pounds (it’s a secure security mailbox), and it holds our house number, for people to know where we live.
So, a compromise. A replacement lock and key costs nineteen dollars delivered. Comparing the cost of going through the warranty process and being without a mailbox, me paying under twenty bucks for getting my mail delivered again seemed a good choice. It was my choice – I’m sure the company would have replaced the lock under their lifetime warranty. But we’d had mail stopped, since there was the possibility of not being able to retrieve it, and I really wanted to get mail flowing again.
I ordered the lock online, and added a comment about it being my judgment that it would be quicker and less hassle to buy a replacement than to work through the warranty process. I got a call from the company (MailBoss) within twenty minutes. Chris told me that they were fighting a bad batch of locks, and that they’d replace the lock for free. Wow – real customer service, without a fight. Very nice, very friendly and professional. And very rare, sad to say, in the business community at large.
I asked Chris if he’d talk to Bettie about the rust problem. I didn’t want to deal with it – it was a work day, and I’d read the warranty where they exclude rust. If Bettie wanted to fight that battle, fine. But Chris had just a few questions, and wanted to see some pictures (above).
In less than another twenty minutes, before I’d gotten the pictures taken, Chris called back and said a new mailbox would be on its way. The whole thing, with a new lock. They had changed their process for making the mailboxes, and we were going to be the beneficiary. And in less than four and a half hours from when I ordered the lock, the new replacement mailbox was on its way – on them.
MailBoss and parent company Epoch Design, and especially Chris, I salute you for your customer-oriented policies. I thank you for going above and beyond the call of duty. And I’m pleased to be a company spokesman. Good job, folks!
Found this in the funny signs section of the LA Times.
My trusty car is about fifteen and a half years old. Edging up real close on two hundred thousand miles, and still solid enough to take us to Knoxville and Cleveland. I’d drive it across the country – it just doesn’t have problems.
What it does have is rust. Not rusted through, but rusted enough that the trim is starting to separate from the body, and the outside of the wheel wells are looking brown instead of green. Not sure if/when it will become a safety issue, but I know the car will have to be replaced before it gets here:
While we were traveling through the back roads of northern Ohio, we found a place with a lot of older cars. The owner let me take pictures. There will be a photo-fest coming sometime soon – this is just a teaser.
I don’t think the Goodyear GTs are original equipment on this one.
Recent Comments