Saturday, September 30, 2006
They're ba-a-a-a-ck!
The office turkeys have returned from wherever they were summering, and are wandering around eating acorns from the parking lot. They seem to grace us with their presence in spring and fall, and spend the rest of the year elsewhere. It's hard to imagine them doing any serious migration, but they do disappear.
Somebody somewhere probably knows, but I haven't seen anything on the subject. And I'm not so curious as to wrestle one to the ground and attach a radio collar. (Even assuming I had a radio collar, which I don't.)
There haven't been nearly as many geese around since the turkeys arrived a year or so ago. I don't know if that's coincidence or a deep antipathy between the two. The geese are less creepy in appearance, but they crap absolutely everywhere. I see very little turkey dung on the pavement.
Does a wild turkey shit in the woods?
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Windows -1.0
Winter is fast approaching – well, approaching, anyway – which prompted me to renew my more or less annual fixing of the windows. Our house has the old, double hung wood windows that slide up and down, counterbalanced by cast iron sash weights on ropes hung over pulleys and moving up and down in cavities in the wall. Gratifyingly 19th century in all respects; no space age polymers, no tilt-in convenience. My grandfather would have recognized these windows.
Of course, they let in a non-gratifyingly 21st century breeze, left to their own devices. So after taking the window out (one of the most useful things I learned my senior year in college, courtesy of my friend Bobby Olson), I’m putting in spring bronze weatherstripping, which let me tell you is not easy to find, since the only market for it is retro-cranks like me who refuse to replace their old windows with space age polymers.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Great Stuff (tm)
This expanding insulating foam is an aptly named product: it really is great stuff. I got a couple of cans as part of my long-running project to keep our stone basement walls from falling apart, letting in cold air, and providing condos for mice. You spray it in a crack, and it expands as it dries, filling all the nooks and crannies.
If you spray in too much, which is almost inevitable, it oozes out like some B-movie outer space killer slime. Cool.
It’s very light weight when it dries, and very rigid. In the right hands – probably not mine – it has great Halloween costume potential. People who should know say that it sucks for lost foam casting, if that's an issue for you. And the gummint says you probably ought to have more ventilation rather than less.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Art 1, Life 1 in the bottom of the 11th
A recent sunset reminded me – as I’m sure it reminded few others – of 
Frederic Edwin Church’s “Our Banner in the Sky”, a shameless propaganda piece that Church painted and circulated in 1861, when things were looking pretty bleak for 
the Union.
Church swore up and down that he and a lot of other people actually saw what he painted, and maybe they did. At least, I know from my own recent experience that you can get some pretty good red and white stripes in the sunset. The stars, I suppose, could happen in a darker sky than most people in North America have these days.
He so made up the tree trunk/flagstaff.
(The only reason Church is in my brain to be reminded of is that shortly after the dawn of time I took an American art history course from a really good art historian, David Huntington, who literally wrote the book on Church.)
Frederic Edwin Church’s “Our Banner in the Sky”, a shameless propaganda piece that Church painted and circulated in 1861, when things were looking pretty bleak for 
the Union.Church swore up and down that he and a lot of other people actually saw what he painted, and maybe they did. At least, I know from my own recent experience that you can get some pretty good red and white stripes in the sunset. The stars, I suppose, could happen in a darker sky than most people in North America have these days.
He so made up the tree trunk/flagstaff.
(The only reason Church is in my brain to be reminded of is that shortly after the dawn of time I took an American art history course from a really good art historian, David Huntington, who literally wrote the book on Church.)
