But Is It Art?

While we get the New York Times at home (turned off while we are away), it is often hard to find on the road, even in St Charles in the Chicago suburbs. If leaving the house early enough (before 10am), I can usually find one at local grocery stores. Even when we are busy running around and I don't have the hour or so to go through one, I like to get it for my favorite sections in each day's edition. Tuesday has the can't-miss science section, Wednesday has the food and cooking section, Thursday has style and home, Friday has new movie reviews, and of course, every day has an original crossword puzzle that we both enjoy doing, though as they grow harder during the week, I can usually only finish a Monday or Tuesday, while Melinda gets much deeper into the week. In any case, every day has great articles you rarely see anywhere else and draw your attention.

While at the mechanic's on Thursday, I caught up on editions from earlier in the week. There was an interesting article in the Tuesday paper about an art project in London called "One and Other", a piece designed by artist Antony Gormley. You can read the article here. In short, volunteers occupy a vacant plinth on the NW corner of Trafalgar Square. Normally designed to support statuary of kings or generals, a statue was never built on the "Fourth Plinth", but is the stage of "One and Other", where volunteers can do pretty much whatever they want for an hour, webcast live, 24 hours a day for the next 100 days. From the website, "One & Other is an extension of the exploration of the connection between individuals. The volunteers on the plinth become both representations of themselves and of the human population of the world, viewed by fellow members of the wider society which they inhabit."

So, in effect, there is a continuous performance piece ongoing. I find myself frequently checking in - currently there is a well dressed man in suit and tie standing in the rain, striking the pose of an explorer, eyes wordlessly fixed on the horizon. I've seen a woman dressed as a pigeon (in celebration of the pigeons in the square), a dancer who performed with ribbons, a woman with 2 bubble machines who blew soap bubbles for her hour, and others who interact with the crowd. Besides the live video, you can also hear the volunteer and crowd noise as well. So go to the website link above and you can witness the ongoing art project.

More Homework!

Melinda missed out on all the fun today! Maj and I (and Jack the wonder dog)attacked the "scary" room for really the first time. The scary room really isn't that scary, but it is called that because at some point in the past, there were major roof leaks and there was resultant floor rot - resulting in a bouncy floor. At some point the floor was replaced with particle board, but the bounciness remains, so one of the next steps is to remove the floor and see what sort of joists remain. Regardless, there will need to be some reinforcing work done.

I mentioned in our last post that we are moving the wall in our guest room enlarging it a bit to become the master bedroom. The "scary" room will become a little smaller, and really, just become a walk-in storage room. To facilitate the wall move, Maj and I removed the beadboard from the ceiling, the wall that is shifting, and also removed it back to the new wall position. With the previous roof damage, there was a lot of crap falling down as we pulled off beadboard, and we both looked a mess by the time we finished. We cleaned up before the picture taking, so you get no sense of the mess we made. We actually tried to keep up with it as we made it so it didn't get tracked into the house so much, and we mostly succeeded.

Since the wall about to be moved was at one time an exterior wall, a door exiting to the porch was actually boarded up, but is now open again! In the vertical format shot, Maj is examining the roof around the chimney where she assumes the roof leaks were originally located. The wood is soft there, but while we worked today, there was some steady rain, nothing got into the house, though.


When Maj's carpenter is available, they will remove the floor, reinforce floor joists as needed and replace floor, jack up some dips in the roof and reinforce any damage from the old leaks, take down the old wall and move it to it's new position. If we are lucky, it might be done in a day - we'll see! Otherwise, most of the work of insulating, wiring, reinstalling beadboard and general finish work will wait till our return for another "vacation".

Homework!

It hasn't all been fun and games in our all-too-brief visit here in St Charles. Melinda's sister Maj has done a lot of work on the house in our absence, almost to the point where she was asked to "save some stuff for us"! Recent work has concentrated on the "guest room", which needed the ceiling removed to reinforce the roof supports. Maj doesn't do electrical work, but Melinda does, so we've been wiring in new outlets, a ceiling light with hardware for an anticipated fan, and reconnecting power to the closet and other house outlets beyond. A complicating factor is that we are moving one of the walls over 2 feet, so we are leaving enough cable so we don't need to do any other rewiring then.


The guest room used to be an external porch that was enclosed at some time in the past. You can see in this shot the white upright posts that were original roof supports on the porch. Melinda is pretty fearless with her wiring skills - checks the book occasionally, but does good work. I think the girls' plan is to get a real electrician to split the circuit that goes to the back of the house with the stuff we are adding, since we have 3+ rooms on the one circuit...

Both she and Roger are leaving today, Melinda back to Tucson to work, and Roger on to his conference in South Bend, Indiana. I'm staying a few more days working on the house some - Maj says I'm putting in insulation! Towards the end of the weekend I'll swing through Iowa visiting family once again, then head towards Dallas, where Melinda will rejoin me for the return swing through Texas and visits with more friends and relatives. Back to Tucson about the 22nd...

Yerkes Observatory Day Trip

Our friend Roger is visiting us from Vancouver - on his way, actually, to an antique telescope convention on the campus of Notre Dame later in the week. One of the side trips he wanted to take in the area was to Yerkes Observatory, one of the world's great observatories 100 years ago. Run by the University of Chicago on the shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, it still holds the record for the largest refractor (lens-type) telescope - 40 inches (1 meter) in diameter.This telescope, and in fact, many of the premier telescopes of the 19th century were built by Alvin Clark and Sons, a source of research for Roger, so of particular interest. Refractors were soon superseded by much larger reflecting (mirror-type) telescopes and astronomers never looked back... Research is still ongoing, but mostly involving comparison observations taken decades ago with the same telescope. Of course, southern Wisconsin was never a great location for a large telescope, and there is considerable light pollution from metropolitan centers along the western shore of Lake Michigan.


So last Friday, the day before the 4th holiday, Roger arranged a tour of the facility and we did the 75 mile drive north, joined by Melinda's sister Susan as well. Our tour was given by Richard Dreiser, who has been there for 30 years. Melinda and I have been through the place before, but it is an interesting place and we learn something new every time. The tour starts on the outside of the building with the architecture and exquisite stonework before moving into some of the historic offices, library, and eventually, the cavernous dome of the great refractor.





The dome is huge! It almost seems larger from the inside that it appears from outside. Of course, the size of the dome is driven by the length of the telescope - one of the reasons the Mirror Lab where I work makes very short focal length telescopes - to ultimately lower the cost of the telescope enclosure. But partially because of the refractor optics, the color error they generally suffer from is minimized if the focal length is made longer, so refractors are generally long, this one being about 65 feet (20 meters) long. And as it moves around the sky, the instrument or eyepiece varies a huge amount in height, so the floor, a full 75 feet (22 meters) in diameter, moves vertically about 30 feet (9 meters). And as a precision device, it is built massively, capable of tracking a star without errors for hours. Some friends of mine have actually been part of a group to observe with the telescope, but that opportunity comes rarely, if at all.


The telescope was dedicated in October of 1897, after being on display at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. The included cartoon is on display in the hall of the Observatory, from the front page of The Daily Inter Ocean, a Chicago newspaper, on dedication day. It champions the use of industry and technology for research even while in Europe there was a buildup in the war machine.

More Blast From The Past Stuff!

After yesterday's post about the family '50s roadtrip and the folks' wedding, more information came out of the woodwork! Some of our family got together in Iowa today for my sister Kathy's birthday (4 July you know!). Well she and my sister Linda had some pictures from way back, including the official portrait from the afore-mentioned 28 February, 1953 wedding of my Mom and my Dad, still in the US Army's basic training at Camp Roberts in CA. This, of course, had been on our wall at home for many years or decades, and was well known to me.



Interestingly, on the back of the original were the original instructions for the colors of the clothes they were wearing, even eye color and jewelry - back in "the olden days" the pictures were taken in black and white, then hand tinted or colored to reflect actual colors. That was easier than taking and processing color film images. In fact, my high school graduation picture was done that way in the early '70s!




These other images, though were unknown to me. It shows my Mom and Dad before the wedding - the left one a bit of a mystery - he is wearing what looks to be camouflage pants, but perhaps a letterman's jacket. It might have been while he was in the army, but he looks considerably younger than in the wedding photo above, so might still have been in high school. I didn't think camouflage clothing was available in 1950 or so... The pic on the right shows Dad in what was purported to be his favorite car - evidently a real "Babe Magnet" from the collection of females around it, all fashionably dressed in rolled up jeans and saddle shoes. My future Mom is second from left. I had certainly seen photos of them as kids, but never together as a couple before the wedding, so it was a fun discovery!

Road Trip from the Historical Record!

Our recent trip brought to mind another family journey taken 56.5 years ago! I wasn't there, but came along 9 months later... The story involves my Mom and Dad's wedding held in Paso Robles, CA, near Camp Roberts where my Dad was in basic training for the Army. Sweethearts since high school, he was drafted and about to be shipped off to Germany - thankfully near the end of the Korean conflict. So the family loaded up a couple cars of friends and relatives and headed West!



There isn't anyone around who was on that trip, but the guest list included my Mom (Janice)and her mom and dad (Katherine and Arnold), her grandmother (Viola), my Dad's mom(Selma), and a great aunt and uncle of my Mom's (Anne and Lew). All have passed, though I'm not sure who my Mom's attendants were. My Dad also had some army buddies that took part in the ceremony, some of which we were friends with for many years. The souvenirs I've collected from that trip were from a shoe box in my Grandmother's house when she died 20 years ago. The goodies include a good collection of matchbooks collected from gas stations and restaurants along the way (my Grandfather was a cigar smoker), travel guide paraphernalia, and my favorite - vintage postcards sent home to my 17-year-old Uncle John (Sonny) who was taking care of the farm and animals in the meantime.


Of course, this road trip was a lot different from one today since the interstate highway system was still a decade into the future. I'm pretty sure they took Route 66 out to California, but returned through Tucson,AZ and Witchita Falls, TX, so came back a little different route, visiting some friends and relatives at a little more leasurely pace back to Iowa.


This last postcard, sent from Texas is my favorite because of my great-great uncle Lew's quote concerning the food they were eating "Uncle Lew says these eggs we are eating now never saw a chicken, and the margarine never saw a cow..." I remember Lew and Anne well because they lived on Camanche Avenue in Clinton, next to Clinton Corn Processing, which was intolerably stinky when the wind was in the wrong direction. Their house always seemed very hot, but they lived near Elwood Dairy, where we frequently got ice cream, and also, Uncle Lew slipped me a dime whenever I saw him...


Interestingly, the more things change, the more things stay the same - back then, they had inspection stations checking for insect pests. These days, there are even more inspection stations, not looking for insects (though I can recall insect inspections in the early 70s), but rather for undocumented aliens! In fact the wording of the warnings for the food supply and increased living costs almost sounds similar to the warnings that illegals bring - increased crime, stealing our jobs and threatening our way of life...


Of course, I came along 9 and a half months after the wedding, while my Dad was deployed to Germany. In fact, he didn't see me in person till I was about a year old. In any case, a shoebox of items help define a family event pretty important in the lives of my siblings and me!

White Sands National Monument

As Melinda mentioned the other day, just before sunset the day we left Tucson we passed White Sands National Monument, and stopped in to watch the sunset. I've been there a time or two in the past, but it was Melinda's first time and was she impressed! Hundreds of square miles of sparkling white dune fields extending nearly as far as the eye can see. The "sand" referred to in the name is not true sand, but coarse particles of Calcium Sulfate, or gypsum. It is rarely found in a particulate form like this because it is soluble in water, and normally, deposits would be dissolved in rainwater and eventually flow away in streams. But in the Tularosa Basin there is no stream drainage, so the natural deposits form as the frequently dry Lake Lucero evaporates and the wind-borne particles are deposited in the dune fields of the Monument.

As luck would have it, there were rain sprinkles earlier in the day, so the sand deposits were a little crusty, not as smooth as the dry, windblown drifts would normally be. So footprints hung around showing evidence for their makers passing. This applied to creatures as well as people. In the smooth track of a snow disk someone used to descend a dune were the footprints of a small animal. I was suspecting a lizard, but there is no sign of a dragging tail, so I'm leaning towards beetles which are supposed to be numerous. In fact, besides this picture of tracks, the picture that Melinda took of a yucca plant posted the other day shows a multitude of tracks in the side of the dune.


Supposedly the dunes can move 30 feet or more per year, so the roads through the dune fields need "snowplowing" occasionally. Even after the day's sprinkles, the little bit of wind was blowing the white stuff across the road, looking for all the world like a cold day in Iowa in January! The Monument is open well after dark - till 11pm in the summer, so while there was an opportunity to do some observing, we headed to our motel for the night in nearby Alamagordo. There is, however, a White Sands Star Party to be held this September 12th. While the lights of Alamagordo and Holloman Air Force base would light up the northern sky, seeing the Milky Way over the white dunes would be a spectacular sight, I imagine. A post-monsoon road trip?!

The Welcomes Home Continue

In my first walk through the local nature Preserve (Tekakwitha Forest Preserve) of our return, I was amazed by the spurt of growth that has occurred since our visit here 7 weeks ago. In May the buds were just peeking above the carpet of leaves and now the forest is at it's peak of green growth. Instead of going down the bike path like I usually do, I hiked down one of the trails that meander through the oak/hickory forest. Pictured is a ranger-built bridge crossing a ravine that leads to the Preserve's nature center - full of displays about both human, animal and plant life in the area. I was there after their closing time (4pm), so continued down one of the trails towards the river.


Evidently the Fox had been high enough lately that the trail paralleling the river was quite muddy and barely passable, so I cut over to the bike path for some asphalt walking. It was a popular place, busy with walkers, bikers, and a few fishermen dangerously close to breaking the "No Fishing Off The Bridge" rule. The short stretch of the pedestrian bridge over the Fox is where many of my Illinois bird pictures are taken. As if to welcome me back, over the course of 3 minutes, a dead tree along the bridge was populated first with a Baltimore Oriole pair, then a Cedar Waxwing, then a Kingbird. I didn't really have the right lens for birding, but took a shot of the Orioles that are shown here.


On the walk back up The Hill towards the parking lot, I could see where a couple had stopped walking and were staring into someone's yard. As I caught up to them, there was a good sized doe standing just off the path, seemingly content to be watched and photographed. With eyelashes to die for, she seemed comfortable with people nearby, but if you click on the image, you can see the skeeters are bugging her - one on the right cheek, and another going for the right ear (her left). And as the parking lot approached, I even saw the black squirrel (pic from last Sept), whose territory must include the very SE of the Preserve, which includes the parking lot. It is the only place I've seen him...


A nice selection of photographic targets for such a short pre-sunset walk. You can bet there will be a few more visits during our all-too-brief stay!