SAYIN' IT LIKE IT IS--



This is a custom made sign hanging on the fence of Blue Stream Oil and Gas Rental and Supply Co., Highway 90, New Iberia, LA.

The photo and information were provided by a good friend who likewise has built a business, made payroll for lots of years and, I believe, shares Mr. Hebert's thought about Mr. Obama being affectionate.

A PICKIN' AND A FISHIN'--

Saturday, Sue and I with square dancing friends the Kargers and the Meinzers meander north to very rural, southern Huron County for the Buckeye Bluegrass Festival where we found bass instruments, bass vocals and bass of the aquatic variety in abundance.  Well, maybe not the latter according to the friendly fisherlady pictured.  That's the back of the main stage just above and to the right of her.  We hope you enjoy our story as much as we enjoyed the show. 

A FAILED PRESIDENCY--

What would you do if the president of a company you owned ran it into debt so deep it would be unlikely your children and their children could ever pay it off?

You would fire him.

Of course.

BOOK REPORT--

Under the Surface by Tom Wilber

While this book looks at the economic and environmental challenges of drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation it is germain to Richland County where disposal of liquid fracking waste only recently entered our area's consciousness.  Fracking is the process of forcing chemical laced liquids under extreme pressure into wells in an effort to open horizontal seams around the vertical drill hole thus increasing the quantity of the flow of petroleum or natural gas.  The question then becomes are we willing to accept the obvious risk of polluting our ground water in return for increasing our supply of fossil fuels.  This is a journalistically balanced look with a good peek at consequences most people do not want to endure.


The Lower River by Paul Theroux

Ellis Hock is maturing through a placid life in this novel as a storekeeper in Massachusetts when his wife finds his email file is loaded with sizzling dalliances; all innocent but she is unconvinced and suddenly Hock is estranged from all things normal.  He then realizes the one place he wants to go is a dusty African village in Malawi where he spent four of the most exciting years of his younger life. Naturally, things of his Peace Corps memory have changed and he winds up struggling with escape rather than basking in enjoyment.


Five Days that Shocked the World  by Nicholas Best

Subtitled "Eyewitness accounts from Europe at the end of World War II", the  book closely examines five days in the Spring of 1945 when the war in Europe was belching to a close.  Readers are in Hitler's bunker when he and his mistress commit suicide.  We are in Italy when Mussolini and his mistress are mutilated and hanged.  We are in Pozzuoli, Italy where Romilda Villani is living in squalor with her two illegitimate children Sofia and Maria, Sofia being a war casualty that rescuing US soldiers described as "...so ugly and skinny at the age of 10 she looked as if she had never had a square meal in her life."  We came to know her in later life as Sophia Loren.  The book is an outstanding read.

GEOCACHING II--
...our second outing

Mark, Nancy and Sue are dwarfed by the woods sparkling in the late afternoon sun (above) along the north side of the Clear Fork Reservoir near Lexington on the Stoller Rd. Trail.

We were in pursuit of the "Hunny Pot", a geocache about 700 meters--nearly 1/2 mile--into this sun dappled woods.  Hunny was a clever corruption of the word "honey" and turned out to be a significant clue in our ultimately finding this hide.

Prior to this ambitious hike we found our first cache of this outing in the Troy Cemetery hidden under a decaying log.

We were distracted during this search by a respectful peek at some old, very old, tombstones.  One in particular celebrated the life of an Elizabeth Black who died at the age of 33 years in 1826.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died that year too.

Her gravestone described her as the "consort" of James McFee.

I wondered how lively the definition of that word might have been 186 years ago.

In a nearby picnic area along SR 97 we failed to find a cache which clearly was hidden around or under a pedestrian bridge near the handicapped fishing facility where a small bay pokes its way inshore from the main reservoir.  That's Mark (right) doing what all four of us did, repeatedly, in this failed search around the bridge.

Nancy explained sometimes caches are stolen or simply lost to curious "muggles", uninformed folks who just happen to stumble upon these novel collections of mostly eclectic souvenirs.

Along Gass Road our second cache find was in a hide-a-key attached magnetically behind a guard rail just north of the reservoir's dam spillway.  This one reminded me I have to outfit my yet-to-be geocache kit with protection from both poison ivy and mosquitoes.

We launched our search for the "Hunny Pot" around the corner on Lexington-Ontario Rd., in a little parking area, the second one north of Gass Rd.  That's Nancy, Sue and Mark (below) discovering this cache in the hollow of an old Beech tree--much like the place where bees might choose to store their winter supply of honey.

This cache reminded me to add a mini-maglite flashlight to my kit.  Frequently we are poking our searching hands in dark places--like this tree--where reasonable people might choose to avoid that method.

On the way home Mark and Nancy shared a cache they had found on another recent outing--cleverly concealed behind a round reflector high on a no-parking sign post near Hanley Rd., and I-71.

In short order this new activity has led us to places I had never seen before and would not likely have seen if it weren't for geocaching.  

And so it goes....

GEOCACHING--
Scavenger hunting in the high-tech style

We found ourselves in the above cemetery on a dead-end road high in the forested hills of Vinton County, several miles from the nearest paved road and couldn't remember the last power line we had seen.  I still shudder at the image of the last human dwelling we passed.  I think there was a shack in that trash smothered mess on both sides of the narrow road--somewhere.

I remember the hair on my arm standing up as the haunting tune "Dueling Banjos" rattled through my memory.

This adventure started as we were rolling south on SR 93 toward an evening of square dancing in Jackson, OH and began to discuss geocaching.

Nancy Meinzer and husband Mark (above) have been using a geocache application on Nancy's smart phone and shared their growing experience with Sue and me for our first time that day.

With her phone Nancy could simply search for nearby caches and an amazing selection of them would appear for our choice.  After selecting one that sounded promising we were provided the latitude/longitude coordinates of the cache along with the direction of travel and distance to its location.

Our task then was simply to adjust our direction of travel, keeping the distance decreasing.  If the distance began to increase, we were headed away from the object.

Nancy also could find written directions and hints from an on-line site.

This particular cache (above) was nestled in a food storage container which kept its contents dry.  Folks finding the cache are free to take an object they like and/or add a trinket as evidence of their finding it.

Folks also log the date of their visit (right) and can comment on, for example, items they may have taken or left, or where they are from to add to the enjoyment of the next geocacher who finds this "treasure".

There can be some peril in this experience.  The green leaves above the ladies in the lead picture and the yellow leaves behind Mark were poison ivy; the yellow ones evidently reacting to a recent application of herbicide.

The lower photo shows our arrival and departure road which achieved a dead-end at the cemetery; that phrase itself starting another episode of hair standing on the back of one's neck.  Going the opposite direction of this photo, the road immediately dissolved into a steep downgrade of rutted and weed infested clay. 

As an aside, the oldest tombstone we found had a date of death noted as being in the year 1827.  The newest tombstone was current, decorated with an eclectic assortment of tributes, and, was made of wood.  The location was known as the Baird Cemetery and the cache was established in June 2011.  It had attracted 20 folks before us.

We headed back toward civilization hoping we had not annoyed any fiddle-playing Bubba's on our way in.
   

 
The following day we enjoyed finding another cache at the end of a bike trail atop an abandoned RR line in Newark.  This one was well hidden in a camouflaged, circular food container made to appear like part of an abandoned fence post...

...and two more caches at the Velvet Ice Cream Old Mill near Utica.  One was in a large, bulk food container stashed behind some decaying stumps along a nature trail and the second was inside a duck decoy resting atop some antique food processing equipment.

In the latter case, the cache creator had some fun with words because there was a pond full of ducks in the vicinity which could divert searchers who were too casual with the author's creativity.

I have a strong feeling there may be a smart phone or a dedicated geocaching GPS in this writer's future.

Stay tuned.

A PERSONAL RENDERING--

of the Ferris Wheel at our county fair

This gently circling ride was invented by a Pittsburgh engineer, George W. Ferris, for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  It remains a staple of theme parks and amusement midways all across our land. That's one pictured above and right in slightly warped presentations by the slightly warped mind of this blog's author.

We had just finished a square dance demonstration at the Richland County fair when I was attracted to the south end of the midway by this very colorful ride.

It's lights streaked and flashed and changed color as it anchored the visual mayhem of the fair's midway.

For stability, I squeezed my Canon Rebel T3i digital camera against a nearby utility pole and explored exposures measured in seconds, and long fractions thereof, using extremely small apertures to avoid over exposure as the ride's velocity went up and down and lighting romped across the spectrum.

About half of my 16 exposures made it to the computer's hard drive and this two of them were totally abused in Photoshop Element's incredible, photo editing software.

Just as an abstract artist might splash paint across a canvass a digital photographer can do similarly by manipulating the near infinite quantity of pixels from his camera's pallet.

The camera records an image already manipulated toward the limits of the photographer's creative ability, then the computer and software take over and have the capability to do things to the basic image that were unimaginable a few years ago.

Here are the original images.  The left one was done as an exposure test while the ride was staging.  It morphed into the lead photo above compliments of the software.

The one on the right is a one second exposure at f/22 and ISO 400.  The streaked lights you are seeing represent the distance the individual lights moved during that one second of time. 

It morphed into the small image upper right by my fiddling with various components of the software--that I can neither precisely identify nor ever exactly repeat.  The creative process simply oozes along until the artist is mostly pleased by the result but never sure if it is complete--or not.