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.
Hurricane Florence outer bands of moisture
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.
A man and his home – Wet roof; me in a tie.
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.
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.
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.
Mongrel and I went for our normal walk today. He was patient while I shot some photos and video during the golden hour of the day.
Sunset with Mongrel, July 18, 2018
Mongrel is a sweet boy. Well, as long as you are not another cat. In particular, another cat named Mary Jane. Otherwise he’s the most laid back and docile animal I know.
Around Mary the cat things change. She turns into the anti-Christ and he goes pretty nuts too. My thinking is that the relationship started out pretty rough and that just carried forward. At least for Mary it did and he doesn’t ignore her. When he was a kitten she would tear into him randomly; Swatting, biting, growling and the like. It was all good until he got older and stronger. When they meet now it’s quite a show.
It’s been an interesting week. Mostly good. Sometimes weird. Just trying to figure out where to point my rudder in the coming months. The path forward is not always clear.
Here are a couple of shots from today …
Looking east … long shadows.Panorama of the sunset.
Most of the day was cloudy and spitting rain. That was good for me because I had a ton of work to do around the farm. From trimming trees to bush hogging our road it was a busy day on machines of various types.
We also sold our ping-pong table to someone who would provide it a good home. I hope his kids have fun playing on the board. The best part of the sale of this is that it’s taking up space in his garage now, not mine.
Tonight I was cooking a steak and out of nowhere a wasp landed and stung me on my nose. I used to think that getting stung on the temple was a bitch but now I think the nose is the worst. It’s been over an hour and my nose is still throbbing. I get stung a couple times a year so I’m becoming an expert on where being stung hurts the worst.
The day was pretty hazy and humid. I wear loose cotton clothes that cover all my skin. That makes working in the summer hot. When I got home I was soaked from head to toe with sweat. It was nice to take a shower and relax in the cool of the evening. It was 75º as the sun set tonight.
Speaking of sunset … here’s what it looked like:
Sunset July 15, 2018
At about the same time I turned the camera away from the sun to get the valley between the hills where we live. Looking to the left of the photo is Harpers Ferry where the gap in the mountain lets the Potomac river come through on it’s way to the ocean.
Looking towards Brunswick, Maryland.
There are lots of pastel colors this time of the day.
The moon and Venus are very close to each other today and tomorrow. I was too lazy/tired to go get my camera and take a picture of that. Hopefully they will be reasonably close tomorrow evening and I’ll get the photo then.
If you know I like sunsets then you probably also know also like sunrises but I can’t seem to get up early enough to see them. Getting up early is not something I generally do on my own. I usually arrive there from the day before.
It would be way more convenient if the sun would rise around 10am. If it did, I could get up, get some tea, check my e-mail, pay some bills THEN look out the window. But, lately it’s happening around 5:30am. Who has time for that?!
OK, back to the sunset yesterday.
I’ve posted the following photo on Instagram and Instagram does what Instagram does best with photography … completely screw it up. How can you take a photo like this with such nice detail and screw it up?
Well, start with making it a 1 by 1 square. Then take out all of the detail that tells the story. Then make people put their words around it to explain what is going on. Then claim it’s the only way to get your story out.
Shenandoah Sunset from Hogback Overlook on Skyline Drive
I like the above photograph but it’s not my favorite. I took a few others that I liked equally as well. Here is one:
Shenandoah sunset from Hogback Overlook
In the photo above I was getting ready to take pictures right when the sun was going over the mountain. My goal in the photographs that follow is to tell the sunset story with some depth of the mountains in front of it.
At this time of the “golden hour” just before the sun sets light springs up from everywhere. It’s at this time of the day that I go from being isolated in my environment to where people start to show up all around me to take in the experience. While I like a good sunset others clearly do as well.
My favorite photos of the landscape are panoramas. The following shot is actually three shots that I’ve sewn together to make a single image. I do it in a way that you can not tell where one photo ends and the other begins. Over the years, I’ve obtain the skill and software to pull it off well. It’s been a long road trying to figure out how to do this. My journey in panoramas started in the 1980’s. It’s only been recently that I’ve figured out how to do it in a way that looks good to me.
Note that the photo below is only a thumbnail … you will need to click the photo to get the detailed panorama shot I mention.
The following photography is one I would actually print and hang on my own wall. After all, that is what photography is for me. It doesn’t matter to me that you might not like it. It matters a lot if I like it. The older I get the more I enjoy my own work. Why it took me so long to get here I really do not know.
If you do click the link below make sure you zoom in and look at the detail. And then realize I still have the original that has 10 times the detail in it. That photo shows exactly what I saw with my own eyes yesterday. I have to say, it’s pretty cool.
This year’s “Field Day” was held Friday through Sunday, June 22, 23 and 24, 2018. The planning for the event was started in 2017 and continued right up to the days before.
We moved the event from where we’ve been having it in years past to Franklin Park, Purcellville, Virginia. This is a very public location inside the park grounds where anyone from anywhere could come and join us for the event.
… if it weren’t for the rain. Honestly, I don’t know when it started and when it stopped or even how much we got but it was a lot of rain. We set up the towers on Friday in torrential downpours which continued through the days. It did manage to clear up some on Saturday but it rained every day this year.
And when we were cleaning up a small storm came through with wind and more rain! Here’s what that looked like on radar:
Thunderstorm. Field Day 2018.
Man, did it rain. I sought refuge in my van but others didn’t make it out of the path in time. Some of the tents had to be held down manually and some did not make it from what I understand which exposed a lot of gear to the elements. Last report is that all electronic gear made it out OK with some drying effort.
Speaking of van. I don’t know how I was able to get all this gear from my home to the park and back but managed to do just that. It took a lot of help from others.
Van full of gear. Field Day 2018
The preliminary report has been published and from that information it looks like we did a fine job. It wasn’t a year where we blew out the numbers but we all did a good job making as many contacts as possible. That is what it is really all about.
One thing I set out to do this year was to learn more about satellite operations. Steve, KS1G was kind enough to walk me through some of what he was doing there. I took this short time lapse of his antennae at work:
When things are moving that fast you have to deal with all kinds of physics (like Doppler effect). It’s a little like patting your head and rubbing your belly while saying your ABCs backwards. I still have a lot to learn.
I didn’t take that many photos and the photos I did take I did so with my mobile phone. So the pictures are what they are. Being sleep deprived most of the weekend I don’t remember much of the detail I just remember that I needed to take some photos every once in a while. So this is what I got. For those photos go here.
If you want to know more about Field Day for our club or our club in general go here.
All the gear is back in it’s place, my station is back to normal at home. Another Field Day is behind me. Next up for the club, a 100+ mile bike ride. Stay tuned.
The weather there and back was in and out of the rain and fog with a temperature range between home and Baltimore of about 20º. It’s just so odd that the temperature spread would be that different in such a short distance.
The ground is still very cold as is the temperature of the waters near home. When we went across the Potomac river we couldn’t see past the windows in our car. But when I came back across the river this is what I saw:
The Potomac River
It’s often not easy to get a photograph like this. I’d say that most photography that you don’t see every day has some element of crazy in it. I tried to describe it here.
I’m not posting these high resolution pictures on Instagram or Facebook because they take out all the detail. Since these shots were made by hand with very high ISO in low light they are already “grainy” which would look worse after “enhancement” by the big box social media sites.
As I stood on the river bridge like a crazy man the sky color changes like it always does as the sun sets lower in the sky. The colors changed from blue/grey to pastel. I did my best to capture that here:
If you want to see more detailed photographs you can touch the images. Following is a map showing the GPS coordinates of where I was standing to take these photos and video. I was on the west (left) side of the bridge.
I never get tired of the sunrises and sunsets around here. It’s pretty amazing watching the cloud layers going in opposite direction because of the coriolis effect. After getting my license to fly I’ve never looked up at the sky quite the same. There’s a lot going on up there.
Everyone should be home at midnight tonight. I checked the winds aloft forecast for Olivia’s flight home from Denver where it looks like, in places, the winds will be over 175 miles an hour.
That the winter jet stream playing in our favor. Oh, and in Santa’s favor too. Presuming he uses the jet stream. That’s a complicated situation. Flying in winter at high altitudes is for the pros. If you are interested here are some Santa tracker sites:
Only 1 more day until winter arrives on December 21, 2017.
I like this day for a number of reasons:
a) We can get on with winter.
b) The sun stops sinking further in the sky.
c) Every day gets longer between then and summer.
Pastel skies at sun set – a common scene in winter.
Below is what that sunset looked like over time. I do a little RC flying in the time lapse as well.
Recently I have noticed that a small family of deer (doe and two young post fawn types) have started to come to the house at night to eat the bird seed that the birds don’t eat during the day. At this point they have become a fixture around here. They don’t have the normal flee instinct when we come outside any longer. At night the sleep in the front yard where I can capture them easily on infrared cameras in complete darkness.
Deer in the front yard as seen in infrared. – We are all ready for winter to begin.
As we ease into night time here everyone is finding a place to lounge.
Sock; leaning on one of us while watching the other.
I hope you have had a restful night and a great day ahead.
