Game cam captures

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Mark P

A couple of months ago I found tire tracks up at our new house, along with some new garbage in the driveway. And then I found an old dishwasher dumped on the driveway. We decided we needed to keep track of what goes on when I’m not working at the house, so we got a game camera. I mounted it about 10 feet up in a tree, aimed at the cable we keep across the driveway. I hoped I could capture an image of anyone who came to the house since they would have to stop to take the cable down.

Most of what I got is me coming and going.

I feel bad about driving my truck to the new house when it’s just about a two minute walk from our current house, but I can’t carry everything I need by hand. I checked the back seat Sunday when I left the new house. I had my circular saw, sawzall, jigsaw, grinder, cordless drill, cordless driver, stapler and a bunch of odds and ends (like tape measure, pencil, drill bits and so on). I also had two long extension cords and my eight-foot stepladder in the bed of the truck. So I pretty much have to drive.

We occasionally walk over with the dogs to take a look.

I’m wearing a cap because the angle of the camera view emphasizes my receding hairline.

Over the month or so that the camera has been up, we have seen the buyers of our old house visit the new house a couple of times. That’s OK, since we told them they were welcome to take a look. They are probably disappointed in the progress; I know I am.

We have also caught some unknown vehicles. Here’s a visitor from Alabama.

This worked just like I hoped it would. The driver stopped close to the cable so the camera got the license plate. This person apparently stopped, looked, and then backed down the driveway without getting out.

This one stopped short, so the camera didn’t get the tag.

I don’t recognize this person, or this truck. The camera timed its pictures so it didn’t catch the person’s face.

This one drove up after dark.

The camera has an IR flash that’s supposed to be invisible to the human eye. The tag reflects it so well that it’s illegible, but I would probably recognize the truck if I ever saw it again.

But, wait, isn’t this a game cam? Why, yes, it is.

These are no surprise. We see deer fairly often, especially at night.

I’m not sure what this is. We have foxes, of course, but it could be a coyote.

Probably a fox, although the tail does’t look as full. This fox visited the previous day, almost exactly 12 hours earlier.

I was afraid the camera would have lots of empty frames because of limbs moving in the motion detector field of view, but that turns out not to be a problem. Of the 800 or so images it has taken, most by far are of me. It has caught several contractor vehicles, and also the truck that services the portable toilet on the site. The resolution is reasonable, although there was just starting to be some pixilization on the images of the deer as I cropped it. The night shots are just OK, but that’s probably because the camera is too far from the subject.

I’m thinking about putting another one where it can catch anyone actually entering the garage. Right now the house is completely open, since we don’t have drywall between the garage and the kitchen, and we can’t put up garage doors until we have drywall.

The City Clock

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Mark P

Robert Redden, a locally well-known pen-and-ink artist, sent my parents a card in 1970. It shows a rendering of Rome’s most famous (again, locally) structure, the City Clock, or the Clock Tower.

The brick tower was built in 1872 to house a water tank, Rome’s first source of piped drinking water. A year later a large, white clock was added to the top. The tower stands on Neely Hill (now often called Clock Tower Hill), two blocks from downtown. It’s visible from much of the immediate city. It’s also visible from our new house.

This is our view east off the front porch of our new house looking towards downtown Rome. The arrow indicates the tiny speck that is the City Clock as seen from around eight miles away.

The arrow is pointing towards the Clock Tower.

I zoomed in as much as I could with my little Nikon point-and-shoot to get this shot.

That close to the ground there are air currents, particulate matter and temperature gradients that compromise visibility even on a clear day. The blue sky also tends to give the scene an overall blue tint.

Leah’s mother Venita was a china painter. Here is her rendering.

This is hanging on our living room wall. My father’s sister Francis did this needlepoint or petit point rendering of the City Clock in 1977.

Here is a photograph Leah and I made Friday night.

The area several blocks around the City Clock is known as Between the Rivers. This Google Earth image shows why.

The upper river in the image is the Oostanaula. The river at the bottom is the Etowah. They join at the 100 block of Broad Street to form the Coosa River, which then flows into Alabama and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. The building with the green roof to the left of the clock tower is the old US Post Office, where my father worked for many years.

This is a zoomed view.

I labeled the Clock Tower. This view is almost straight down to the clock. The tower’s shadow is visible pointing slightly to the left of up in the image. We took the picture standing near where the “m” is in “Camera.” The street that runs above the City Clock roughly bottom right towards top left is Fifth Avenue. Fifth Avenue is a very steep downhill two blocks to Broad Street. When my father was a kid, he and his friends would time the traffic light at Fifth Avenue and Broad Street so that they could push off on their bicycles right at the base of the clock tower, zoom down the hill and hit a green light on Broad Street. I think he was a lucky kid.

Leah’s father’s family lived about a block from the City Clock. My father’s uncle Charlie lived for a time on Third Avenue.

Some of Rome’s oldest and most impressive homes are in this area. We took our photograph next to, and later on the steps of, a house that recently sold for over $1 million. You can see one of its columns to the left in our picture. This house as well as many of the others in this area are huge monuments to something or other. Conspicuous consumption, I believe.

Although Between the Rivers is a prestigious area, living there does have its drawbacks. One of them is a 32-inch-tall bronze bell at the top of the City Clock that chimes the hours. Every hour. Day and night.

The next time Leah and I are near downtown, I want to use some binoculars to try to see our new house from the City Clock.

Stag Party

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Mark P

The artist known as “Emily”, about whom we posted back in December, is a winner of the Colorado Art Awards and will have her sculpture “Stag Party” displayed at the Denver Art Museum with other winners from around the middle of February to the middle of March.

Since you can never have too much art or too many stags, this seems like the right time to show more pictures of Stag Party.

These are the stag in various early stages.

The cat, known as “Spencer” in the art world, sniffed out the work before the stag got its antlers. He is not part of the sculpture.

Here are some other views.

It’s pretty cool. I wish we could get out to Denver to see it at the museum.

Happy New Year!

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Mark P

We hope everyone has a wonderful 2016, one that’s even better than you hope for, filled with friends, family, cats, dogs, turtles, blue jays, round rocks, octopuses, great books, delicious braised short ribs, noninvasive plants, and clouds full of arcs and haloes.

Lighter than air memories

Posted on December 10, 2015 by Mark P

When Leah and I went to Little River Falls on Wednesday (Dec 2), I saw something in the distance that I thought was a hot air balloon. It turned out to be a blimp.

So, not the Goodyear blimp.

As it happens I actually sat in the pilot’s seat of the Goodyear blimp during a flight over Augusta, Ga, back in 1978. Being a newspaper reporter didn’t pay much, especially in Augusta, but it did have its perks. When the blimp landed at the Augusta airport, they let some local reporters go for a ride. Each of us got a chance to sit in the pilot’s seat and twirl the large wheel that controlled its vertical direction. The wheel was at my right hand, next to the seat, spin it forward to make the nose go down, and backward to make the nose go up.

This is what I got after the flight.

I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Goodyear Blimp Club.

A few days after the blimp left, we got a call in the newsroom that the blimp had crashed at the airport. It turned out that it didn’t crash, it just tore free from its mooring. There is a special line that unzips the blimp’s envelop and deflates the balloon if it comes free from its mooring. That’s what happened, apparently during a thunderstorm. I couldn’t find the article I wrote for the newspaper, but I found the Associated Press story we sent in another newspaper.

Way, way back in the very old days, my family used to go to Akron, Ohio, to visit my mother’s family. Once so long ago that the memory is dim, we drove by the huge blimp hangar at the Goodyear plant, located at Wingfoot Lake outside Akron. During the war (that’s World War II), my grandmother worked at “the Goodyear” as they called it.

Goodyear doesn’t build blimps any more. The current Goodyear blimp is not, in fact, an actual blimp. A blimp has a completely fabric envelope. The only solid parts are the gondola and its engines. When the blimp unzipped itself in Augusta, what you saw was the gondola and a large area that looked like someone had put drop cloths down for a huge painting job.

Today’s “blimp” is actually a semirigid airship, probably more accurately known as a Zeppelin, especially since it is what Goodyear calls a hybrid of a Zeppelin airship with Goodyear modifications. It was constructed at the Wingfoot Lake hangar.

Leah named one of the stray dogs that have passed through here Zeppelin, since we were on an initial-Z naming spree.

You can find more information about Goodyear’s blimp operations at their website.

The Directv blimp is, apparently, a true blimp.

Another perk I got as a newspaper reporter was a ride in a machine that is almost the polar opposite of an airship. I’ll post about that later.

CaniConfidimus

Loyal. Trustworthy. Sometimes with fleas.

Category Archives: General

Game cam captures

The City Clock

Stag Party

Happy New Year!

Lighter than air memories