This afternoon, it was not too hot, not too sunny, and not too windy. Perfect conditions for a chore that I have been putting off for one of the above reasons for some time now. Window washing was never a priority in any of the other homes we have owned. Here, however, we are constantly looking out the windows, and the experience is made all the better when they are squeaky clean. The tool I use for this has a sponge on one side and a squeegee on the other. I mount it on a short pole for the first-floor windows and a long pole for the second-floor windows. These photos, courtesy of our security camera show the basic operation on our smallest windows. I completed 25 of 37 windows and will have to tackle the remaining dozen another time. It may not look like it, but this task is quite the upper body work out and I was happy to burn off some of the calories I ingested last night during the birthday feast for the boys.
This evening, we did a joint birthday celebration for Kyle (33) and Nico (31). Maya is just back from Norway, and Nico from Binghamton, NY. I cooked some steaks on the grill, and they were mighty fine if I don’t say so myself. Jeanine prepared fresh corn from Verrill Farm, some of the best we have ever had, as well as a tomato salad and chocolate peanut butter mousse for dessert. I am so grateful we can still hang out like this.
Jeanine just shared this photo from last Friday. Lucia is a neighbor who was visiting with her mother, brother, and dog. She took an interest in my shop, and I wound up coaching her in the construction of a swing seat that she hopes to hang in her backyard. I might have used a straight edge to draw the cut line, but I had to admire her method, which was much faster. I taught her how to safely use the miter saw and drill press, the latter required ensuring that her long hair never came close to the spinning chuck. She was quite pleased with her completed project.
My sister’s new book, “The Power of Impact Circles,” is now available. I ordered my copy on Amazon this morning, and it is expected to arrive next week. Our father, himself the author of two books, would be delighted to see that his eldest daughter and daughter-in-law have both joined him as published authors. I am also thinking of writing a book. I will call it “The Stupidity of Blogging for 20 Years – An Exercise in Daily Suffering.” In all seriousness, I have the utmost respect for all the authors in this family and encourage our next generation to carry on the tradition.
Now and again, we see something new on the Sudbury River. Today, a single boat towing 7 canoes passed by the house heading downstream. My guess is that is has something to do with the water chestnut eradication project that has been underway for several weeks. Our neighbor and friend, Dave Witherbee, was skippering the tow boat, and I will ask him about this the next time I see him. I am curious to know how one stops such a flotilla without creating a pileup. I suspect you have to do so very slowly.
Andy is both a teammate and a friend. He makes, repairs, and sells violins and violas professionally. This morning, he came over to use my bandsaw to cut through several $300 slabs of figured maple and a couple of spruce. Much of the work he does involves hand tools, and although he has a bandsaw, it was not large enough for this particular job. It was fun being in the shop again and working with him. I have taken a fairly long break after spending every day for nine months building the cabinetry for the house.
There are a pair of branches that overhang the river just outside our living room window. It is quite common to see all manner of birds perched there throughout the day. Never before, however, have I seen two herons share this prime hunting perch.
I spent nearly the whole day working on my website. I hired a Ukraine-based developer to perform a site-wide software upgrade and theme migration. He completed the work in short order, and I felt good about directing my business to their war-torn economy. He helped me figure out why a 14-month period of my blog is missing all the images (at that time, almost 15 years ago, I was hosting my images on a platform that has since gone belly up). I spent the balance of the day, recovering each of those images and reinserting them into the blog, a very time consuming and tedious job. I repaired 6 months worth in as many hours and hope to complete the job over the next few days.
I challenge observant viewers to identify the main difference between these two scenes. The novice will identify differences in pillow placement and chair orientation. Middle-of-the-road detectives might observe the addition of a wooden box on top of the coffee table. Only a true Sherlock-class sleuth will notice that the couches are different, and only by close examination of the seams.
When this custom-ordered piece was initially delivered back in April, we noticed that one of the three sections was not quite like the others. The color of the thread and orientation of the seam folds were different. It is the kind of thing that you do not notice at first, but once you’ve seen it, you can’t help but see it every time you look at the couch. To their credit, West Elm, the store where we placed the order, offered to give us a BIG refund or replace the set. We opted for the latter, and the replacement couch finally arrived today. This is likely the last couch we will ever own, and I am glad we opted to wait for a properly upholstered one rather that take the refund.
The “butterfly garden” that exists on the common land of our neighborhood has been overtaken by Purple Loosestrife, an invasive plant. While it may not be welcomed, it is certainly delightful to look at.
This evening, just before dusk, Jeanine and I went outside to watch the bats. It is mesmerizing to watch them fly to and fro, guided by their echolocation, darting here and there to capture mosquitoes and other flying insects. At some point, I would like to try photographing one in flight, a goal that will be next to impossible to achieve given their speed and the low light conditions.
For some time now, Jeanine has been wanting to plant a rose bush beneath our bedroom window. Today, after a trip to a local nursery, we satisfied that dream. Digging a suitable-sized hole (16″W x 16″D) in the highly compacted, rock-strewn soil on which our house was built took the better part of half an hour with the aid of a pickaxe. Jeanine is pictured above scooping out the last bits of clay by hand before adding compost and fertilizer. It remains to be seen how the new rose bush will fare in this setting, and all we can do at this point is continue to water and hope for the best.
Jeanine and I spent a good portion of the afternoon at the Cambridge Jazz Festival, where we did a little Salsa and Merengue dancing and enjoyed the Caribbean jazz sounds of Ron Reid’s Special Metal Project. There is a good chance, weather permitting, we will attend for a second day tomorrow.
In the early days of Truevision, the company I co-founded in my twenties, I hired an engineer from Switzerland named Frank Löffel for the role of an ASIC (chip) Designer. He wrote a well-researched letter describing his skills and capabilities, as well as how they would benefit the company. We granted him an interview, were impressed, and proceeded to offer him the job. He later told me we were the only company to respond to 30 similar letters he had sent out to other potential employers. When he moved to the US to start work, he had no place to live, so I invited him to stay in my spare bedroom. Eventually, he got his own place and went on to work for the company for several years. Frank and I both shared an interest in landscape photography. He was most drawn to deserts and his work was at a level I can only aspire to reach. We reconnected after ~20 years while we were both attending the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas. After the show ended we spent a day together shooting photography in Death Valley. I have wonderful memories of that day but damn few photos of Frank to share beyond the one above. Frank was a loner and would work intermittently to fund his passion for desert photography. He had a Toyota Land Cruiser fitted with huge tires and a pop-top camper. It had several spares on the roof along with extra gas cans, car jacks, and traction ramps. It was fitted with solar panels and storage areas for all his photo gear. He had recently spent several months in the Bolivian high dessert and had driven up from South America.
I recently learned that Frank died 6 months ago. At the time, he was being held in an Iranian prison where he reportedly committed suicide. The Iranian’s claimed he was a spy taking photos of a military base near where he was arrested, and it is suspected that he was tortured. My guess is he was there shooting landscape photography of the deserts he loved so much, finding himself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with a truck full of high-end photography gear and drones.
This was unbelievably sad news to receive, but even worse is that I can find no record of his online photography portfolio. He devoted much of his life to making beautiful images of some of the most remote and desolate places on Earth, and now it appears his photographic legacy may be lost forever as well.
Frank is pictured below in an early Truevision company picnic photo with his girlfriend. He is directly below the Frisbee.
I offer my condolences to his sister, wife, and son, and pledge I will do all in my power to recover his photographs.
When my brother last visited us in Concord, he left with a small section of a Linden Tree trunk from our yard. While in Ireland, he returned it in a slightly different form. Mark has become a skilled woodturner, and we have been the beneficiaries of several of his creations.
Our return flight to the US was not until late afternoon, allowing Jeanine and me another half day to explore Dublin. She opted to visit the Irish Emigration Museum, while I chose to wander around outside. Pictured above is the Famine Memorial, which vividly portrays starving people in rags, some carrying children and meager belongings, symbolizing the suffering faced by the Irish population during the famine when about one million people died and another million emigrated from Ireland. Below, a part of Dublin’s modern skyline is George Quay Plaza.
“The Portal” is an innovative public art installation that creates a real-time visual connection between Dublin and other cities worldwide. Initially, the portal was coupled to another portal in New York City and has since expanded to include Vilnius (Lithuania), Poland, and Brazil. It consists of a large circular sculpture with a rounded screen in the middle that streams a continuous, unfiltered live video feed of the other city. This allows people in Dublin to see and interact visually with those in the different cities as if they were sharing the same space.
It is without a doubt the most engaging piece of urban art I have ever encountered.
The Samuel Beckett Bridge is a cable-stayed swing bridge that spans the River Liffey. Designed by renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the bridge is noted for its elegant shape that evokes an Irish harp lying on its edge, symbolizing Irish culture. The bridge is 120 meters long and 48 meters high, featuring a single curved pylon that rises 46 meters above sea level.
The Chester Beatty, also known as the Chester Beatty Library, is Ireland’s leading museum of world cultures located within the grounds of Dublin Castle. It was established in 1953 to house the collections of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, an American mining magnate and collector. The museum holds an extraordinary collection of approximately 25,000 manuscripts, rare books, miniature paintings, and decorative objects from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa, covering a range of world cultures and religions. The Chester Beatty is acclaimed for its diverse exhibitions, including significant religious manuscripts such as early Bible copies, Qur’an, Buddhist scriptures, and the Gospel of Mani.
It was our primary destination today and lived up to its reputation as one of Europe’s best museums. I learned more about the religions of the world in one day than I have during my lifetime.
Afterwards, and in between ice cream breaks, we visited the nearby St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the largest church in Ireland and a prime example of Gothic architecture. Its history stretches back over 800 years, built primarily between 1220 and 1260 under Archbishop John Comyn, on a site believed to be where St. Patrick himself baptized converts in the 5th century. The cathedral was constructed in a cruciform (cross-shaped) layout typical of Gothic design, featuring pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and an elaborate 140-foot tall bell tower.
Pictured below is a random self-portrait I made. Jeanine studied this photo for several minutes and could not figure out what exactly she was looking at. See if you can figure it out.
UPDATE: In response to many inquiries about this photo, I am adding the explanation. I was seated on some stone steps in front of a boarded-up entry to an old stone-faced building. I photographed my reflection in a mirror being transported on a panel truck. The graffiti is on the plywood I am leaning against. The rectangular sticker below the graffiti is on the mirror. I am holding the camera above my head to get an angle that makes it look like I am sitting at the bottom of the mirror.
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