hobby « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

hobby

Fossils

Here are some crinoids I picked up last weekend. I was wondering down by the creek bed enjoying myself quite nicely and it quickly became a scavenger hunt. Right there at my feet I found three of these at a glance. Why, then, I had to wonder around a bit to discover a few more.

Old seaborne fossils. Or, around these parts, definitely freshwater fossils. You can find them most anywhere that has water, seems like. Why do I still pick them up? Why do I bring them back to the house to take pictures of them?

These are, I believe, crotalocrinites. They are the sort I’ve always found. They are extinct now, but they appeared about 300 million years before the dinosaurs.

I’ve just discovered, online, there are star-shaped fossiles called pentacrinites. I want to find some of those.

Let’s jump in the time machine, though, and move up a few hundred million years. I pulled back the break lever just a bit too soon, however, and we’ve stopped 103 years before. It’s June 4, 1917. What’s going on in the world?

Oh. That. So the summer before there was a massive sabotage in New York. And two weeks after this Congress passed the Espionage Act, something Woodrow Wilson had been on them about for several years. I can’t find any details today about this person. So we’ll just have to be satisfied with these news briefs:

The next day you had to go sign up for the draft. Married men couldn’t duck it. You’ve already seen that peaceful registrations were predicted. And we now from earlier editions of the paper that several American men, even some locals, are going off to war in some capacity or another. Just down the page there’s a brief listing another handful of names. In New York, when the draft went into play, it was anything but peaceful. So, I’m sure, people were hoping for the best.

There are two creeks on either side of us that have these names.

And while people are out surveying damage, and you’re reading in another column the news that a former local who had moved to Illinois just had his house destroyed in the storms, you get this little ad:

A.H. Beldon had been a grocer. By the teens, he was doing insurance. He made it to 80 or 81 and died in 1939, the same year as his wife. Their son flew planes for the Army in World War I, in Texas, it looks like. That guy’s son served in the Army during World War II.

Enoch Hogate had some paralysis, and then he did not. Much improved was he, a relief to all it was.

Hogate had joined the law school in 1903 and served as the dean from 1906 to 1918. He also had a turn in the state senate prior to all of that.

Polio caused paralysis. I wonder if that’s what it was. He passed away in 1924.

This was the vessel, The Success. It was not built in 1790, but rather 1840. It was not a prison ship, unless it was. Sometimes Internet searches are contradictory. Anyway, it was by now a museum ship. A good fraud well executed, from the looks of things.

She was scuttled in 1891, re-floated the next year, restored and then sailed to England. In 1912 the vessel came to the U.S. and returned to cargo service in 1917, after which it sank. It was re-floated and turned into a museum in 1918, appeared at the Chicago World Fair and fell apart. The Success was to be scrapped on Lake Erie, but it sank for a third time. Someone pulled it up again in 1945 and it promptly ran ashore. In 1946 there was a fire that consumed it. The moral to that story, I guess, is don’t make up a fake history about your ship.

Get ’em a camera!

I wonder if they’re still hiring …

The second and third pages of the four-page rag were just poorly scanned photos of the graduating high school class, which is why we jump immediately to the scolding baby.

Look, baby, nobody likes a scold.

This one had a column jump, which is why it looks weird at the top. But let’s get a load of those people. George Washington Henley had graduated from the law school here three years prior. He went into private practice and got married soon after.

The well-known home boy would serve as a state lawmaker for a decade and, later, sat on the state Supreme Court bench for two months. He was a replacement until the end of a term, but he didn’t want to stay on. He needed to get back to his own clients and he just wanted, Wikipedia says, the prestige. He died in 1965 and was eulogized by the university president. His wife survived him by a dozen years, and was living in California when she passed away.

This is why you should keep Googling names. One of the attendants of their wedding was Paul Feltus. He would become a newspaper editor, witnessed and reported on the atomic bomb tests in 1946 and served as a board member for the university. He wrote four silent film scripts, served in the artillery in World War I and was a colonel in the state guard in the 1940s.

Now, a life of 81 years can’t be distilled into a paragraph, but a paragraph like that hints at an interesting life.

Because the second and third pages were poor artifacts, and because the last page was torn right through the copy, you’re getting a second wedding announcement.

This was Melvin’s second wife. His first died young after just six months of marriage. She was ill most of that time. They had 17 years of unalloyed happiness, I hope. His second wife had a child and died in her 40s, in 1934. Fender kept on farming, retired, and passed away in 1958 at 74.

OK, “Bobby.”

I spent a lot of time looking into this ad. I’m not sure Bobby was a real person.

hobby / photo / running / Thursday — Comments Off
14
May 20

This is for the birds

I do believe spring and summer showed up on the same day, making themselves unmistakably known during today’s little jog. It was a simple and persperific 5K, and the first time this year that has felt actually warm during a ride or run. Oh, I’ll sweat in almost any temperature. We are, however, now suddenly, and without any proper build-up befitting it’s importance, flirting with that time when you wonder if the concept of sweat does, in fact, cool you down like you were always told.

Which sounds like I can’t be pleased by the weather. Too cold. Too gray. Too damp. Too hot. And for the first two those your analysis is correct. For the third, no such thing. For the fourth, I just need a week or two of acclimation, that’s all. And that’s where we find ourselves today, wishing there’d been a proper subtle transition. But sometimes you aren’t allowed nice things, meteorologically speaking.

Sometimes we complain just because we can.

Hey, 77 felt fantastic. And then I elevated my heart rate a little and the sweat started stinging my eyes and that was fine, I guess. Later I got to that point where the ol’ internal thermostat decides to flip on over and there’s a signal from the engine room: all pores answering. And that’s how my run ended, doing planks, sweating a lot, laughing at the idea of a spring, missed.

It sounds like a mid-20th American novel: The Spring Season Lost.

None were concerned at the bird feeders. The blackbird least of all:

Fun tidbit about the House Finch. It was originally a western bird. Someone took them east to try to sell them in the early 1940s, but eventually set them free in disgust. (“I just knew these people were going to want them as caged birds!”) And they’ve spread to be seen across the country and southern Canada since.

That’d be an annoying caged bird, if you ask me. But rare is the bird that isn’t. And they should all be flying free, filling their role in the ecosystem, not cluttering up the house.

Now this guy isn’t judging me, at all:

It took a long while to win over this blue jay for pictures. But at least he didn’t attack me:

I got a few nice shots of him. And I think I understand his hesitancy.

He’s conscientious about his combover!

cycling / hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off
11
May 20

So many photos to enjoy

Happy late Mother’s Day. I think all of our flowers arrived today. But the cards got there early. One of those years. Mothers, being moms, completely understand.

The cats are doing just fine. Phoebe is in a tunnel phase:

It’d be wrong to ascribe human emotions to cats, of course, but that is one content-looking cat:

I have decided to keep the cats out of my home office for the many breakable things. Any closed door, to a cat, is an opportunity. (A mentality I totally appreciate.) But figure out the pattern, dude. I open the door, you sneak in, I scoop you up and put you back out in the hall. He has not figured out the pattern. So I made a sign.

The Yankee says it was nice of me to put it at eye level. That, I thought, was the best part of the joke.

He disagrees. And he likes to let me know about it.

A view of one of the local lakes from Friday’s lovely bike ride:

One of the apps that I use — there are three — to track rides gives you the maximum speed you hit on each mile segment. There were 35 miles in that particular ride and there are a lot of times that make sense: 27.2, 25.2, 28.8, 24.5, 28.1. If you looked at the terrain or stop signs or things, it tracks very well.

Except for that one spot where, I know I was sprinting, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t hit 2,513.9 miles per hour.

I will accept the data it gives me for a split three miles down the road where it says I was doing 51 mph. Probably I wasn’t — in my experience when you hit about 46 it all starts to feel noticeably different — but I’ll accept it.

The Yankee on her weekend run:

I was on my weekend sit-on-the-deck phase …

I was sitting on the deck to have a Mother’s Day call and watch the birds. Check out this little guy:

You can sit up close to a bird feeder and, if they are hungry enough, most birds will come to accept your not being in the way of their dinner:

Anyway, it was a fine time, a nice long chat about this and that, some pleasant weather for a change and watching the wildlife go by:

Like I’m a nature photographer over here:

A red-winged black bird on the ground, very common in this area:

One of our neighborly cardinals, which aren’t exactly in abundance, but not scarce. I guess that means they are plentiful. There are at least four:

And a nice brief little look at an Indigo bunting:

We call the red-winged blackbird a Superman Bird. You can really see it when he flies. And I guess you’ll have to take my word for it since I only have pictures of it standing around:

And a nice red head finch wrapped up the photo safari on our back deck.

So that was the weekend. And how was yours? And back to the new week. How’s yours shaping up?

hobby / Monday / photo / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off
18
Nov 19

Remember the old saw …

Measure once, cut twice? I’ve been measuring and measuring.

First, I created a test version of this project I’m working on. And we decided how to change the project. It is going to be smaller. Just six inches high, and not seven and change. And so the work model was disassembled. Part of it was plywood, and that was stacked away neatly for some future project that might require quality plywood.

The original side pieces will be re-used for the finished project. So I ripped them down to size this weekend:

And I took some extra pieces of pine and cross cut those to (more or less) the width of the finished project. It will require three pieces:

One of them is warped. It might have a warp in a whorl, I don’t know. But I think I figured out a way around that. Measure twice (measure a few dozen times) and cut once.

Then! Use the belt sander to sort it out:

I’ve learned several things, working with wood the last two years. One of those things is that I prefer the product to the process. So it’s a nice side hobby, but this is never going to be a primary interest. (Begging many questions, I know.) I’ve learned which parts of the process that I like less than others. Usually it has to do with some moment that marks no going back. But, I remind myself, measure twice and so on. And I’ve learned to recognize when it is time to stop for the day. Before you get frustrated. Before you rush. Before you hastily get past some no-going-back moment that belies the notion that it’s only wood. Before the process wears you out.

This was much of my weekend.

At least until I overdid it with the belt sander, so the new phrase is this: Measure twice, cut once, use the belt sander to sort it out, and then cut it again.

So, really, get lumber larger than the size of your finished project. For refinements.

And this evening I glued up and assembled some of the pieces. Later this week I’ll make the final cuts, and glue the final pieces. And then, we’re going to finish the project, so it is a finished project. Probably next week I’ll show you what this is.

Turns out I’m a slow worker on matters that aren’t the primary interest.

hobby / photo / running / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Oct 19

Just add sawdust

That parking deck, I said to a colleague yesterday, is like a sundial. The topic was how you could tell the time of day just by what floor you wind up parking on. I usually get the second level. Yesterday he barely got the fourth level, and almost had to park in the rain, horror of horrors. The bigger issue was he had to trudge up two more flights of stairs because anyone that rides that parking deck’s elevator will only do it the once.

But that parking is also a clock looking from the outside in, as well. There, at the turnaround onto the second deck, you get this view just before you hang a right:

Those trees are telling us a story and, right now, it is the best part of the morning drive.

This evening I got in just over an hour of sanding, which means I got one piece of the current, and perpetual, project halfway done.

At this rate, in three more hours I’ll be two-thirds of the way through the sanding.

No one likes sanding, but it is acceptable to like the process toward the result. If anything it slows the project down, though, just because you have to work up the morale to sit down and sand the wood that will make the darn thing. (Plus there’s the rest of your life to consider … ) For me, to know you’re going to get an hour here and there doesn’t really fit the workflow. People that can steal a few minutes and make progress, on any project, are geniuses. I need big blocks of time, for any kind of project, it seems. This is a problem with sanding, though, because I am doing this project entirely by hand and you can’t sand for hours at a time without having a shoulder fall off. So the problem is the sanding, really. Which no one likes.

The idea, which is well more than a year old, and which begin in December, picked up steam in April and then lulled its way into a soft summer slumber, is going to gain momentum in the next few weeks just because I am going to grit (Get it? That’s a sandpaper joke!) my teeth and push through.

Why, the next time we talk about this, I might be three-quarters of the way through the sanding.

Sanding, I think, is the part of the project where you really get to know the wood. And this particular lumber, which is a Western White Pine, is telling me a lot about itself.

Here are some photos from yesterday’s run. I got in four miles, which is the longest run since my April injury. I guess I’m on the slow road to recovery. Emphasis on slow.

Like my shutter! She’s both almost in, and definitely out of, focus:

Some years back, whenever they were planning that particular neighborhood, some designer drew these on a map. And a purchasing agent filled in some paperwork and then a delivery guy dropped off the order and a few people dug some holes and put these in the ground, just for moments like these:

So what you do today may take a bit of time to reflect its beauty. We may never see it, other projects and parts of life and all of that, maybe you just forget to go back and check. Other priorities, and all of that. Maybe it just never occurs to you. But there it is, out there, doing their thing, because someone got the thing started.

The trees on the path running behind our house:

That first rain of the fall, the first few leaves:

It’s easy to love the moment. But there will be more leaves, and then perhaps more rain. And that’ll turn to who knows what. Those moments are less easy for me to love. But that’s just me.