Another Reason to Dislike Cell Phones

This article  on the loss of ’silent fluency’ in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Read it and talk to your children face-to-face.

Fire Station Tour

Daren gave the boys a 45 minute bells-and-whistles tour that I really enjoyed because I did not know much of anything about the equipment.

Here two boys are “driving” a truck.

Here they are going over some equipment and the use to which it is put.  Daren is holding a heat scanner, used after a house fire to find any hidden hot spots.

Making Glass Bottles

Easter Sunday evening we were visiting neighbors and heard how glass bottles are made.  One of our friends designs the machines that checks them for flaws so he has spent a lot of time in glass plants.

Angela and I were wishing we could go on a tour.  Tonight, while visiting the farm, which has fast internet access, I tried Youtube and discovered there are several videos on the topic.  Here is one on how glass bottles are made.

Stand and Deliver and Agincourt

Stand and Deliver was made in 1988 and set in East LA in a poor Hispanic high school.  A great movie, especially if you have Hispanic children, since the more things change the more they stay the same.  And the title song by Mr. Mister plays at the end credits.

Public Libraries are one of the blessings of living in the USA.  I just finished Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell.  I had read one other period history novel by him and was not impressed.  But the Wall Street Journal and at least one other reviewer liked this book, so when it appeared on the New shelf I checked it out. And was not disappointed.

When we visited England for our 20th anniversary, we made a trip to Tunbridge Wells, then took a steam engine train out to Groombridge.  We walked from the station to Groombridge Place, which was used as the Bennett House in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film.  The formal gardens in May there were stunning.  Off in one corner, almost hidden near the Secret Garden, was an ancient Yew tree.  The tag informed us that the tree was planted in the 1400’s after England’s victory over France at Agincourt.   Why a yew tree?

Now I know.  Because the longbows used by English archers were made of yew.  And because English archers and the weather made the victory against overwhelming numbers at Agincourt possible.

The article is not nearly as intriguing as the book. Nor as bloody.

Camera Tales

When we were married we bought as a present to ourselves a good Nikon single-lens-reflex camera.  Not that I knew that term until the middle of last year.  What I knew is I could effectively control what the final photo would look like.  We took multiple hundreds of pictures on that camera. Beautiful photos.  After we learned how to correctly load and unload the camera.  That was on our honeymoon to the Pacific Northwest, where we exposed a roll of film with pictures on it trying to take it out correctly.

It was well used.  It went through life with us. It got old, it had a crack in the housing that duct tape would sometime prevent light from seeping in, and sometimes not.  Digital cameras came along. Two years ago Mr. Monte gave me one of his older Kodak digitals.  All of a sudden I could edit photos immediately!  I could post them online! Angela told and taught me about Gimp and Adobe Photoshop Album Starter.  Both are free, and though I use them all the time I am sure I use only a minute fraction of their tools.  But–the Kodak digital did not allow me the control of light and distance to take the kind of photos I was used to taking with my old Nikon SLR.  It was restricting, annoying, maddening.

Then Angela told me of digital SLR cameras.  She finally convinced me that one would actually take photos as good as my old Nikon.  Seeing the beauty of pics she put on her blog convinced me.

Last Christmas my (very large) present was a Nikon D40 digital SLR camera, which has been a joy and delight to learn to use.  It came with two lenses!  I bought some more magnifying lenses with Christmas money and have been happily taking flower and insect pictures ever since.  As you may have noticed.

But then, this week the boots I was wearing slipped on the wet morning grass of a short steep slope near the house and I fell on my back, camera in hand.  Something did not sound right afterwards (in the camera).  And then the lens stopped moving except for a fraction of its range.  I removed it from the camera body and a plastic part fell off.  Oh, sadness and gnashing of teeth!

It has been sent to the Nikon camera hospital.  I am in picture taking withdrawal.  I am trying to use the other lens, sometimes.

Fin Straightener

In the course of painting the bathroom, the hot water baseboard heater has to be taken apart and sanded.  That means I had time to clean the fins of the heater.  But how to straighten them?  I had never been able to figure out how to do so before today.  Today I thought of a wooden skewer.  With it I pulled lots of dust out from between the fins, which a vacuum cleaner helped remedy.  And it did a good job straightening the fins and keeping my fingers intact while doing so.  Left to right–from finished to undone area.