W.O.F.16 A Lotta Bull

Driving west on U.S. Route 224 from Findlay to the Village of Ottawa, you pass through the small town of Gilboa, distinguished mainly by a big grain elevator right off 224. Well, there's that elevator and then the big cow. Technically, I guess, it's a bull. Situated at the entrance to the Gilboa community park is this bovine masterpiece. It's probably at least twelve feet tall. I didn't measure it, but I had to stop on my way back from a meeting in Ottawa and take a couple pictures. Here it is with my car off to the side, to give some idea of scale:
I understand from a friend at work that there is a big chicken somewhere in southwestern Ohio. Perhaps some day I will have the opportunity to snap that one as well, and add to my collection of Huge Barnyard Critters.

The fruits of our labors, etc.

Friday night, we went to look at a bedroom dresser set someone was selling, to help our daughter and son in law in the interim before they buy a new set - to replace the stuff they lost in an apartment fire back in March. We ended up buying the set. Then my wife figured, while we were out in this neck of town that we seldom reach, why don't we pick strawberries? I look back fondly at picking strawberries. We used to do it with the kids when they were home, and it was a fun family activity. Except both kids have since told us - in no uncertain terms - how they HATED to go pick fruit, especially strawberries, because they are small and take forever to pick. Plus you have to bend over as opposed to picking apples or peaches right off the trees. Anyhow, it was 8:40 when we started picking and the place closed at 9:00. We got a quick four quarts in twenty minutes (possibly a new personal best) and called it a night; it is great to have the smell of strawberries around, and they do taste fine.

Saturday we attended a wedding of a friend of our son's. We know the family a bit and they were glad we were there, and it was a fine time, chatting with other parents of other friends of our son's. This younger generation was having a wonderful time out on the dance floor, just seeing each other, as some have been scattered around the state or country or planet to pursue school or career. It is good to see them together when they get the chance.

We even hit the dance floor for an an obligatory one song. There is just something about Ms. Aretha Franklin singing R-E-S-P-E-C-T that gets the happy feet going.

Got home to a houseful of friends from college who have kept up approximately monthly weekend visits for thirty years now. They come from Dayton, Lansing, and lesser known reaches. We somehow slept twelve here last night - everyone on some sort of mattress or facsimile thereof. Our son and his girlfriend left for Columbus this afternoon in a van containing that organ that had taken up too much space in the parlor. I'll miss it, as it had some cool features. But it is nice to be able to walk around in the parlor again. Meanwhile, a bedroom dresser set now resides in our garage until it is figured out how to get it to the daughter's place.

A fine weekend, all told, but the kind that makes you want to go to work on Monday (after some cereal with strawberries on it for breakfast!) to get some rest.

W.O.F. 15 -----Hess Monkey Town!

OK, this is a print of a picture that my sister gave me some time ago, from a series by this painter, Charlene Rene Clark, who has a weird fascination with oddball Baltimore things. Anyhow, I remember this place, this Hess Monkey Town, in Edmondson Village, a shopping center that was way ahead of its time, similar back in the 60's (maybe 50's) to the "power centers" and "lifestyle centers" like Easton near Columbus, or Levis Commons in Toledo, or White Marsh Towne Centre or whatever it's called in Baltimore. A bunch of stores you accessed directly from your car (pre-mall). They used to dress it up big time with lights at Christmas time. The architecture on the Hochshild's side of the street was uniform brick.

Anyhow, I recall hittin' Monkey Town for the occasional haircut as a young kid. There was a special carpeted ramp from which to view the monkey-shines. The monkeys held one's attention away from the fact that you were getting a hair-ectomy (and as a very young kid, I hated haircuts). Pretty entertaining, all right, and next to a Hess Shoes store. There was a Hochschild Kohn department store a few doors down, and a big ol' Hecht Company across the street, next to a cafeteria we used to hit on the occasional Sunday after church.

It's all gone now as the City and its blight spread out to the west along U.S. Route 40. The department store chains have fallen one by one, leaving, basically, Macy's. Maybe there is a renaissance going on in that area; I hope so, as Edmondson Village was pretty quaint. But I think the era of the monkey-festooned barbershop is pretty much over.

Going Macro

No, I don't mean some odd macrobiotic diet. And I'm not dusting off my macroeconomics textbooks from college. I just mean I figured out how to get the camera to take those "supermacro" shots where you are just about touching the subject matter.

The peonies are blooming full tilt, so here are a couple shots of them, the first with ant. I was reading up on the whole "ant and peony" thing and, near as I can tell, the ants love the nectar they get from the peonies, but in fact, the peonies really don't need the ants to accomplish their goal of blooming.
Anyhow, once I had that macro thing working, I took advantage of the other flowers out there in full bloom - a couple roses, an iris, and our wegeilia out back. (Did you know wigilia is a Polish Christmas feast? No relation to the flower. At least I don't think. They're spelled differently).
In other news, we (and by we, I mean mainly my wife) got nearly all the leaks in the hot tub gone, and we replaced the impeller - all just in time to have a hot tub as the temps reach 90 degrees F. So she is calling it a "cold tub" and I think it will feel pretty good at "room temperature".

Upcoming: a weird object needs to be found tomorrow, then we host some college friends and their kin, and then we attend a wedding of friends of our son's this weekend. We have reached that stage where peers of the boy are old enough to marry. This does not bode well for feelings of youthfulness.

Reunion Extraordinaire

I just spent three days at Pokagon State Park in Indiana at a family reunion - my mother's side of the family. We had last done this - just the cousins - a month before 9-11-01, so it had been a while. This time, we also got my dad and an aunt to come along, lending a more intergenerational feel to the thing.

Once we started chatting, we picked things up as if we had never let them go. It did not feel like a seven year hiatus. Frankly, it felt like those days back in the 1960's when we all gathered at Grandma's and Grandpa's, back on the Eastern Shore.

Time and geography have a way of separating families, if you let them. I am so glad we made the effort to overcome those obstacles and take time out to let time stand still.

There can be a magic to family reunions such as this, surrounded by an overwhelming aura of decades of shared experiences, right along with new entries into the family circle such as our son in law.

Kind of funny; we named the reunion after the surname of my Mom's parents. None of us actually carry that name since Grandma and Grandpa had three daughters. Yet we all carry that name, really.

Anyhow, the park was a beautiful setting for the event. Others know this; a wedding was taking place outside while we were there.

Here are some pictures of the place and some if its native inhabitants. It will be interesting to see the perspective my sister has on the park as she posts her pictures as well.

W.O.F. 14

Well, for this week's Weird Object, I could post my sister, or my father, both of whom are "in the house" on the way to a family reunion in Indiana. But I won't.

We went to this tag sale a few weeks ago, where a houseful of items are up for sale because some household has come to an end. It's sort of sad, really. But off in the garage was this ancient Sony
TC-105 model Tapecorder, probably a remnant from the early 60's. It was tagged at a dollar; the lady said "just take it".

The tape didn't spin so I had to remove the front panel and tinker, thus the "guts" of the thing are exposed in this picture. But I got it moving, and on the tape were a series of old, Lawrence Welk vintage songs. Picture, if you will, a Saturday night, reel to reel tape recorder spinning along, a soft big band song wafting through the air, my wife gazing lovingly into my eyes... well, she did look at me, and we even "cut a rug" to one of the less cheesy songs.

Anyhow, I do have a history with reel to reel tape recorders. My neighborhood buds and I used to have a couple of them between us, and we'd be radio talk show hosts, sports announcers, you name it, on tape. Three of us had a "band" of sorts and we'd cut tapes on my friend Gerald's Sony that could tape two tracks, "sound on sound". I still have a pile of old reels of memorabilia that I hope to take a listen to, maybe convert a few historical moments to CD. Of course, now they'll tell you that CDs are passe and everything now is just torrents of electrons, bits and bytes, taking up no space at all except a few kbs on the hard drive. Not sure today's efficient technology has quite the magic of those mesmerizing, spinning reels of tape.

Summer Kicks Off

Our daughter's in-laws can always seem to draw a crowd of relatives and hangers-on (such as ourselves) for a great pot-luck picnic, and Memorial Day seems to be a tradition with them. So we put some food together (including an amazingly good watermelon), thankful for the invite, and headed down. Here are some scenes from the gathering that do not so much involve the actual people involved as other dwellers in the area, although for starters, here is the rowboat that has been in my family since my Grandpa bought it to keep us cousins occupied on the water back in '63 or so.
Then here is our daughter's dog, who wanted to get at that blade of reed grass or whatever it is, but did not want to get very wet. So she stretched toward it and barked at it repeatedly. Didn't do too much good.
They have horses down there. Two big ones and two pretty new young'uns. The larger ones make for a pretty good ride.
Then I need to include the following couple of shots for my sister's benefit. Anyone who knows her knows that these should be special to her...
There's a pretty substantial pile of dirt next to the pond, and it is a magnet for small children. I am guessing there will be a few baths tonight...
And so, with a splash of the oars, a woof, a neigh, a ribbit, and a few giggles from the dirt pile, summer is underway.

W.O.F. 13 BIG MUSKIE!

So, I was headed northeast out of McConellsville on Route 78 yesterday, and this big object on the left side of the road caused me to make a U-Turn and check it out. It is the centerpiece of the Miners' Memorial Park I wrote about yesterday. It is a 220 cubic yard bucket for Big Muskie, a HUGE machine used for strip mining in southeast Ohio. Regardless of what you may think about strip mining, this machine was awesome. It was built in the mid 1960's and was used from 1969 to 1981. It weighed 13,000 metric tons and stood 22 stories tall. It took 200,000 man-hours to construct Big Muskie.
The machine was built to get into coal seams running 185 feet deep. This thing, over its lifetime, moved twice the earth that was moved when they dug the Panama Canal!
Anyhow this bucket can hold two Greyhound buses. Below is the picture of Big Muskie on display at the miners' park. If you can zoom on the picture below, notice the little insert at the bottom left. That is a picture of this bucket with a MARCHING BAND standing inside it!

Unfinished Business - Weird Sports Team Names

It seems that my previous mention of "Furious George" as a great name for an Ultimate Frisbee team led to a comment by a friend and team-mate of my son's. He called me out, saying a better name is out there: SOCKEYE. Indeed, the Seattle Sockeye works on a couple of levels. First, it is indeed a fish that enjoys the cold northwestern waters. (A muskie is a fish, too...a theme emerges...) Second, what might you fear while playing Ultimate? Yeah, gettin' socked in the ol' eyeball. So there you go.

Long Day

I just drove 350 miles, round trip, for a two and a half hour meeting. While this may seem odd in light of four dollar gas and all, it was a good meeting and we were kicking off a project where I believe it was important to have "face time".

When we have to travel this far, it is cheaper to rent a car than drive our own and get the federal mileage rate, so I got to tool around Ohio in this spry little Dodge Caliber. This is where renting is kind of fun, as you get to test drive various vehicles.
The Caliber was a responsive little booger but I thought the road noise was a bit loud. This one had the requisite (for me) CD player and it got a lot of use. The sound system was average; not great. I did not calculate gas mileage but it seemed to do pretty well. I think I bought 12 gallons of gas and drove almost 360 miles, so that would be about 30 miles (a lot of highway) per gallon.

I was in McConellsville, down in southeast, "Appalachian" Ohio. It is a cool little town on the Muskingum River, and while it is the county seat and largest town in Morgan County, is has fewer than 2,000 residents. Yet there are two grocery stores (the locals say two and a half by virtue of some convenience store) and a movie theater showing first run flicks right in the middle of this building, which is also City Hall:
I drove down using the boring Interstates that I already know, then followed SR 60 south of Zanesville, following the Muskingum. But driving back, I followed one of my key rules: If there is more than one way to get somewhere, don't you DARE return the same way you came.

So I took State Route 78 east. It is a squiggly thing with lots of signs that look like this:
It traversed a large portion of the territory that was strip mined years ago. This is a view of the lay of the land from an actual miners' memorial park along 78.
Farther east you get into older forested areas like this:
Then I hit I-77 and traveled north, marveling at two things. First, the clouds. They were mesmerizing...
Second, this family cruised past me in this immaculate, clean, cream puff of an Oldsmobile station wagon that reminded me totally of Big Red, our very similar if not identical wagon that took us to the Pacific Ocean and back in 1998, three of the best weeks of my life.
I really like to drive, so a day like this does not bother me, aside from the price at the pump, for which I get reimbursed. The great weather helped, and I got home by a respectable 7:00.
Plus, along the way, I saw and was able to photograph a great Weird Object. But that will have to wait for tomorrow...

GRACK ATTACK!

I've been going through old magazines and tossing them in recycling or "lug to the libes" piles, and since I am in a rush, I don't read a lot, but I stop for pictures. Since some of the mags come from environmentally related groups, there are lots of pictures of exotic birds such as macaws. One picture showed dozens of bald eagles all gathered in one place in Alaska to chow down on fish that basically expire after they spawn.

Even some fellow bloggers (Jessica comes to mind) are quite good at attracting an array of colorful and diverse birds to their yards and feeders, etc. And yeah, we get our fair share of cardinals and blue jays and woodpeckers and others. However, our big lure to get birds right up by the window is one of those suet cakes in a wire cage that we buy for less than a dollar at Drug Mart. These have yielded good results and a lot of entertainment over the years. For the last couple of days, though, the suet cake has been pretty much the domain of a bunch of grackles, and they've been going through them like hotcakes. These particular birds are indeed not colorful, but they are expressive, and it is entertaining to watch them position themselves out in the yard and on branches to be the next one to swoop in and take a few quick pecks before their replacement zeros in. Sort of like watching the planes circling above the airport, lining up for the final approach, except in this case the birds are improvising without any air traffic controller.

Anyhow, in honor of our latest visitors, here are a couple less-than- satisfactory shots of the birds, shot through what has clearly (or, more accurately, unclearly) become a quite dirty window.

Azalea City

There's this house about three blocks from us and their overplanted forest of azaleas comes alive with a multicolor show every year about now. A couple shots from our walk over there this afternoon:


And on the way over to Azalea City, this dogwood caught our eye:
A quiet, cool weekend in northwest Ohio, with intermittent showers. If it weren't for all the blooms all over the place, one could almost be convinced it was autumn. But there are plenty of other signs of spring. Birds flying around and acting a little crazier than usual. Fishermen lining the banks of the Sandusky River for the annual run. Wife wanting to go out and paint and plant things. Yeah, the signs are all there despite the cold and cool weather.