Free Solo
The message came into focus for me via Clipboard. It was a NatGeo article about a “movie” abut a dude that free climbs. It caught my attention. Yesterday we had a date night and went to see this movie. Watch the trailer and I’ll give you more information after.
Alex Hannold free climbs El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Its a National Geographic documentary film that’ll keep you on the edge of your seat at times. We were excited to see the movie itself and then were surprised to have the producer of the film, Jimmy Chin, show up and answer audience questions afterwards.
It’s 1 hour 40 minutes long. At the end it only felt like you were there for 15 minutes. It’s a great story of focus, passion, persistence and perseverance.
I have no fear of heights but still don’t think I would want to climb this mountain. See it? Yes. Climb it. Not really on my bucket list.
I’m glad we went to an actual theater to see the movie. Having Jimmy show up after was good fun. They asked that we help them since most of these movies succeed by “word of mouth” reference. So, go see it for yourself.
Lovettsville Oktoberfest 2018
This past weekend we celebrated fall in our small community of Lovettsville at the 9th annual Lovettsville Oktoberfest. It’s grown from a small event taking essentially one city block, a few vendors, beer truck and such to the event it is today supporting tens of thousands of visitors to the small town.
I flew the drone over the event and visited the main tent with the music and merged the two together.
I’m there primarily to help the Loudoun Amateur Radio Group (LARG) support the communications for the event. We play a critical role in helping coordinate public safety of the event each year. Our time is purely voluntary but the effort is very professional. This is our 9th consecutive year of supporting Oktoberfest at Lovettsville.
One of the more compelling events of Oktoberfest is the Wiener Dog Race. The dogs and training staff work on their skill set all year long to pull off this compelling event. Here is a very brief video of one of the races of this day.
We set up in two locations each year and then many of the members “roam” the event and provide another channel to help with anyone who many need it. It’s proven critically important the last few years.
The crew above was just who was there when this picture was taken. There were many others who helped this weekend. Hats off to everyone who helped us!
The venue has changed in a very big way from when we started years ago. There are so many more people there now! The first event was likely less than 1000 people. This year it was tens of thousands but I have no idea how many were actually there.
If you come next year and want an easier parking experience come on your motorcycle! That’ll shorten every bit of your time fiddling with traffic at this crazy intersection we call the “Squirkle”. It’s not quite a square; not quite a circle and takes 119 signs to help people navigate it properly. When it was first put in and operational it was quiet a fiasco. Lovettsville is different. I’ll leave it at that.
The food was great, the crowd was well behaved and seemed to have a good time. Lots of people were in the tents listening to the music, dancing and mingling with their friends.
After helping here I picked up my wife and we went for a motorcycle ride. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
We’ve past the Solar Equinox.
It’s inevitable that the days will get much shorter now that the sun has past the equator as a highest point in the sky. We’re into fall now and headed to winter. The trees have started to change color once again.
For me the mood can be a bit melancholy in the winter months. We seem to have more cloudy days than sunny and even the sunny days will be uber short in the coming months. I prefer the longer and hotter days of summer. Its 59º outside as I write this on September 23, 2018. It’s as hot as it’s going to be today. And, of course, it’s raining all day today. Since I can’t really work outside I’ve decided to hang out inside all day.
We live at 39º north latitude which enjoys a pretty wide swing of all of the seasons. Here’a 10 second video of two sunsets. One is on the longest day of the year around June 21 and the other right at the equinox three months later on September 21.
The sun will continue south until around December 22 when it’ll turn back north and signal the start of winter. That’s when it gets really cold around here.
Since we go on walks every day together we’re going to have to get used to the colder weather coming. The seasons change just slow enough that we figure out how to tolerate the cold before it’s thrust upon us. All of the cats do the same thing when they go out in the cold; they shake their front paws and whence before they jump outside. They would never wear a boot/sock or “clothes” to keep warm preferring instead to just be outside. Well, Mongrel anyway. The girl cats prefer to be inside all the time. Still their coats will become very thick soon as a part of the changing seasons.
Neither of us are totally happy to be stuck inside while it rains. Mongrel meows at me as if I can turn it all off and we can go for a walk together. You see, he doesn’t like his paws wet either. And I can’t turn off the rain. It’s interesting he thinks I can. It’s an elevated view of this clowder leader.
He doesn’t like me at my computer. His reminders to go on walks help me get out of this office and outside when we can. Today just won’t be one of those days where we take our three walks a day. Or tomorrow, Tuesday and likely most of Wednesday. But later in the week looks super. We need 4-5 days of sunshine and no rain to finish some projects around here.
Out there somewhere.
The hurricane is out there somewhere on it’s way up north.
In the next couple of days it’s predicted to rain a couple of inches even up here several hundred miles north of where it made landfall. That’s a lot of moisture!
I like to put the tower down when I am not going to be using it. It will lay flat on the ground if I need to do any work on it or the weather gets super crazy.
And Gloria is taking a walk which I didn’t see when I took this video.
Have a good week!
Monsoonal Air Mass.
The hurricane name Florence is a few hundred miles away but her outer bands are pretty far reaching. It’s been very humid and rainy the last few days as the air changes around the hurricane.
Instagram won’t let me post this photo with the kind of detail shown here.
It’s hard to describe the rain that has come out of the sky except to call it a monsoon like rain. Thick and condensed and straight down without any wind. Then it clears up and the sky looks like the above.
The ground is completely saturated and I’m afraid it’s going to be raining for a while more before all that stops. Hopefully the hurricane stays far away but we are ready in any case.
28 Trombones do Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”
I thought this was cool enough to post on my blog tonight.
I ran into this on YouTube yesterday and immediately thought of my brother who both plays the trombone and loves Queen. After listening to them on my headphones I thought it was really cool how they mixed it together. I’ve seen people sing in a multi-track like this but not play an instrument like this.
Enjoy
Iceland
Well, it took about as many days to pull this page together as it did to travel there and back but I did finish. If you want to see the details of our trip to Iceland in August 2018 you can find that page here.
I managed to take some 1,500 photographs while I was there. Thankfully, I’ve narrowed it down to my favorites on this travel page.
We saw some new things, revisited some old places, enjoyed some awesome sea and other food, swam in the warm waters heated by the earth even though the air was 45º and otherwise had a great time on this trip to Iceland.
This is the first time we’ve rented a camper van on a vacation like this. I’m happy to report we think we’d do that again in the many places we plan on traveling together.
Enjoy the page. If you see any whacky words let me know. I’m author and editor on this one so there’s likely a mistake or two.
I hope you’ve had a good day today!
Sunrise July 27, 2018
The sun (barely) poked through multiple layers of clouds this morning before the rain returned.
So far this week, in just the past 3 days, we have logged 6.5 inches of rain. We went from being pretty dry and things looking deep green again. I know all the plants are much happier with this water.
It’s too bad I didn’t’ think to get it on video but we also know that at least some of the animals are happy with the rain. With my girls as a witness we watched a fawn just go absolutely nuts in the water puddles two days ago. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl but it was driving the adults pretty crazy with its hyperactivity. It was the kind of unfettered happiness of seeing something new for the first time and being consumed by it all. It was fun to watch.
Above is the USGS station near my home. It’ hasn’t updated fully for today yet. You can see we went from essentially no precipitation lots of rainfall lately. In particular was the 21st when the rain first started falling. It was “heavy at times”, as the weather man likes to explain.
Personally, I like the rain. And the snow. Since I no longer have to work in this stuff it’s nice to be able to get rain on my face again. If this were snow it would be SIX FEET deep. 1″ of rain is about 1 foot of snow equivalent. That would be interesting.
I hope at some point when we live here we get 6 feet of real snow. I just want to see what that would be like. I’ve seen almost 4 feet of snow a couple of times. But it always stopped there. It would not be easy to dig out but I’d eventually do that. It would make for some interesting photos for sure.
This is my current weather. The temperature is very nice and it’s a bit breezy with spitting rain. This beats 100º for sure! I made the graphs you see below and you might also notice that the “green zone” is between 60º and 80º. This is my favorite temperature range.
Here are a couple of random photos of what happens when the skies change around here. They are taken with my cell phone so the quality is not like my still cameras but you’ll get the idea.
We have the prettiest sunsets around here. From the pastel skies above to the most beautiful rainbows of anywhere I’ve ever lived.
And this is very consistent weather. Anytime there is a storm come through in the evening where the sun pops out of the sky we get edge to edge rainbows. Super bright and very distinct colors.
And if there is a sunset with clouds in the sky they turn pastel as the sun angle dips below the cloud line like the picture above. I can take this same picture any given day of the week when there are clouds present. Deep pastel colors of deep blue, pink and purple are always present.
I hope it’s pretty where you live and that you love where you’ve hung your hat as much as I do here. Have a super day!
The calm before the rain storm.
In another few hours it will start raining. I’m writing this after the fact not knowing exactly when it’ll start and how much it rains but what I did know is that we needed the rain.
When we go from dry to wet the sunsets before are pretty spectacular.
I do my best to capture what it looks like around here when the sky changes during the golden hour of dusk. The photo is nothing like standing around here watching the hues change from harsh light to pastel. Then the light fades into infrared glow and then, around here at least, total darkness.
No, just some hay bales from 400 feet above.
20 years ago I wracked my brain trying to figure out how to get a camera elevated to take some photos. I figured that the view up there with a still camera that could be somehow controlled would make for interesting photography.
My process was a complicated and unscientific process involving a big kite and a windy day; the polar opposite of what I do today. But I kept trying because I just knew there would be interesting photography up there. I knew this because I flew an airplane and wanted a way to capture the beauty of what I saw when I flew.
My ideas didn’t amount to much. Most of the photography I have is from a camera in my hand while at the controls of an aircraft flying over 100 miles an hour. Hardly stationary but with some work I could get the photos I was looking for. But boy was it expensive and time consuming.
I’m glad I was able to see this process unfold in my lifetime. This is a view you can only get from a stationary platform relatively close to earth but high enough to see the contrast that will tell a story.
The photo above is a story of mid-summer harvest. The fruit of someone’s planning. Some of the bales are new and some are from the last harvest. Still, there must be a need for this stored energy.
They made hay while it was dry and made some interesting etching on the earth in the process.
It would rain the next day. Four inches of rain fell from the sky and turned everything deep green again around here.