A(nother) New Blog

I put a new blog on line last week.  ”lightmonkey dreams” is a foray into digital black & white photography.  I have always liked black & white photographs and the processes in the darkroom.  For the last almost twenty years I haven’t had a darkroom, making do with a laborious conversion of the bathroom when ever I needed to make prints.  Then I got a digital camera.  Last month I packed up my enlarger and put it in the closet.

I have tried to make digital black & white photographs in the past but have not been happy with it.  I’m trying again…I still prefer black & white photographs.

Seeking Venus

Several weeks ago I alluded to some interesting events in the night sky that will be occurring this year. One of those will happen this week. Venus will be at its inferior conjunction on March 27^th. “What is that?”, you might ask. The inferior conjunction is when an inner planet passes between the Earth and the Sun. When that happens Venus will go from being an “Evening Star” to being a “Morning Star”, even though it is not a star at all. Because it is closer to the Sun it takes less time to make a complete revolution than the Earth does. A few weeks ago, Venus was high in the post-sunset evening sky. Now it is getting lower each day as it catches up with Earth. On the 27^th it will catch us and then move ahead of Earth.

So what makes this all so interesting? The Earth’s orbit, along with the Sun at its center, forms the ecliptic plane. If Venus’ orbit was also in that plane, an inferior conjunction might be pretty boring. But Venus’ orbit is inclined at angle to the ecliptic. At this particular conjunction Venus will be high above (north of) the ecliptic and because the ecliptic is inclined at an angle to our horizon, it is possible to see Venus, 1) in the evening and morning of the same night and 2) in morning and evening of the same day… rare events.

Possible but not necessarily easy. Its rising and setting will be within a few minutes of the Sun’s in a bright sky. Because it lies in the direction of the Sun not very much of the disk will be lit, only a small sliver. Because all of the action happens down near the horizon you need an uncluttered one. I have to drive to the top of a hill a couple of miles away to get that. And of course, the biggest difficulty of all…it is March in northeastern Ohio. Wednesday, March 25^th, is supposed to be the best day from the celestial standpoint but the weather forecast is for clouds and rain. So I need to try every other chance I get.

It was cloudy this morning…

 

Postscript

It was also cloudy Sunday evening…

Monday morning I took my wife to the airport.  We left early so we could be in the parking lot of the bagel shop near the airport at sunrise.  Most people would call it clear.  It wasn’t clear enough and the sky was really bright.  I think this is going to be even more difficult than I originally thought…

Monday evening was cloudy…

Tuesday morning’s sky was as close to perfect as it is going to get but there was still a thin veil of clouds…I didn’t see Venus.  There was a bitter wind out of the east.  I will try again this evening if there is a chance to see it but rain is forecast for after midnight…my chances are fading.

My chances are gone.  Tuesday evening (24th) was thickly clouded over.  I’ll have another chance in eight years.

Another Rocky Mystery

Yesterday morning I had to complete some maintenance work on one of the sensor stations we use for the research project I’m working on. This particular station was four hundred yards or so off the road at the edge of a large corn and soybean field. Since it was muddy, I went on foot, carrying my toolbox and replacement instrument package.

After I finished, I started back across the barren field, my load lightened considerably to just my toolbox. Suddenly, I realized that there was something peculiar about that rock I just walked past. I went back an picked it up. What an odd formation…it looked like a hole clear through it. It was plugged with mud so I pulled a Phillips head screwdriver out of my toolbox and poked the mud out. Wow! There was an almost perfectly round hole in this rock. One side was perfect, the other looked fractured, as if something had exited there.

It looks like it was drilled. Who drills holes in rocks? And leaves them out in a soybean field? If it was punched through by some unknown piece of farm machinery, why didn’t the rock break? Was it struck by a bullet, possibly one shot into the air far away, coming down into this field? I don’t know about bullets but why didn’t the bullet mushroom and come apart? Was it some kind of military bullet for piercing armor? I didn’t look for evidence like that. It is another mystery…

I need to stay out of corn and soybean fields…too many mysteries out there.

Postscript

My wife needed to go to the local lawn & garden store on Saturday afternoon.  While she was inside, I wandered around looking at the lawn equipment.  A bigger, heavier version of this could go a long way toward explaining this mystery…

Wood Frogs and Woodcocks

On two occasions of our morning walk last week my wife and I heard an unusual sound that neither of us could identify. It seemed to be a bird but it was dark so we couldn’t see what kind of creature it was. It almost had the sound of a nighthawk but it seemed too early in the year for them. We were puzzled.

This morning she said something to our friend Bruce at church. Bruce is a birder. He thought that the description sounded like a woodcock. We had never heard woodcocks here so we were excited. Plans were made to try to observe them this evening.

But since it was such a beautiful day we also decided to take a little bicycle ride on the trail after church. We hadn’t gone a mile before we heard another sound. There were lots of vocalizing woods frogs in a pool near the trail. You could see them in the water, there was a lot of activity, possibly some predation or cannibalism, possibly just mating… we couldn’t really tell. We stopped to listen and observe for a while.

A little further up the trail, we heard spring peepers and possibly a chorus frog or two mixed in.

This evening Bruce met us at the spot we had heard the woodcock sound. We waited for darkness. We were talking softly when Bruce said, “There he is!”

Sure enough it was the same sound we heard in the mornings last week. We moved a little closer and watched against the twilight sky for the courtship display. “There he goes…” Sure enough, we watched him circle a couple times and then lost track off him, only to hear the soft fluttering, chirping sound as he returns rapidly to earth. We watched one more display before it got too dark to see anymore.

Spring is beginning to show itself in Holmes County…

Books

My brothers were talking about the Kindle, Amazon.com’s electronic book, the other day. I haven’t seen one in person but I’m skeptical.

I spend a lot of time using computers for all kinds of things. I actually enjoy them, most of the time. But I don’t like to read on them. Obviously, I read a lot on computers, but only to get to the information I really need. Then, depending on the length and complexity of the material, I might print it out to read it.

Books are made for reading. Our house is full of books. Field guides for birds and butterflies, animal tracks and the atmosphere, snakes and amphibians. Books on physics, mathematics, seismology, geology, and geography. Astronomy, computer programming, photography, and Bob Dylan. Books on contemplation, the Bible, and how to build Shaker furniture. Even a few on farming, leadership, and writing.

What is it about a book that distinguishes it from a Kindle? Can you stick your fingers in two or three places while you check out another page? Can you remember, that yes, the information I need is about in the middle of this or that particular book…on a Kindle? And go to the shelf and find the information you need?  The book in the upper left-hand corner of the photograph is my old CRC 15th edition of the Standard Mathematical Tables published in 1967.  I don’t use it too much any more but I still pull it down every now and then.  I put little tabs on the pages years ago to quickly find the information I used most.  I don’t even know if they sell math tables anymore but it was a pretty handy book at the time.

I have an old (1978 edition) paperback copy of “The Random House Dictionary” that my wife gave me when I needed a dictionary for work. Even now when I write, using a modern word processor and connected to the internet, I use the old dictionary held together with the duct tape on the spline to look up a definition or proper spelling. I could use an online dictionary but I wouldn’t see all of those other interesting words, the ones that catch your attention on the way to the one you needed.

It probably wouldn’t hurt me to get a new dictionary…another small paperback to keep next to the computer.

Muddy Waters…

Sunday my wife and I rode south to Killbuck and back on the Holmes County Trail. Much of the trail between Holmesville and Killbuck runs through marshland along the Killbuck Creek. Just outside of Killbuck the trail follows along the shore of a little more open water. Near the south end of the body of water my wife noticed fresh work on a beaver dam. We went down for a closer look.

Last year I put about 2000 miles on my bicycles riding up and down that trail. 2000 miles over the same 15 miles of trail…people ask me if I don’t get a little bored with it. This beaver dam is an example of why I don’t. Everyday we have the chance to see something new, and we often do. From big Sandhill Cranes to little Northern Brown snakes we see different wildlife than we see on our farm, just a few miles away. We watch the seasons come and go. It is muddy and drab right now, but over the next three or four weeks the marsh will transform itself into a lush, green place of beauty.

I’m looking forward to at least another 2000 miles this season.

Growing Up

Several years ago I put together a family history CD for my extended family. I started after my dad had copies of an old photograph made for each of my brothers. There were many other old family photographs so I bought a scanner and started scanning.

Most of these photographs were of people I never knew but there were pictures of my grandparents too. Even though they have been gone for many years, I remember them well. I realized that they were always “old” when I knew them. Now I was seeing them, in the photographs, when they were young and it changed my perspective. This was particularly true of a photograph of my maternal grandparents sitting in the south yard of their house, the house that they lived in for many years and that I remember visiting as a kid. As I looked at the photograph, looked at their faces, I wondered what was on their minds right then…what made them happy and what made them fearful. They lived in a different world than I live in and I wondered what it was like. I wondered how many joys and concerns I share with them, even now, across the decades. I could look at their faces and see the people they became, people who I knew, and it affected me deeply.

Now when I look at people of all ages, I imagine them in their other stages of life. We all have a story, part of a continuous story. The world today is so different than the world than the world of my childhood. I remember when Holmes Lumber Company was lit by gas lamps. I remember stories of hardship in the Great Depression as told by my parents. My mother remembers stories of Indians told by an elderly neighbor… Then I wonder what the world will be like when my sons are my age.

Walking Rocks

Last Sunday on our morning walk, my wife noticed something out in the large corn/soybean field that we walk around. I was pretty sure it was a rock that we had seen before but it was quite noticeable this particular morning. On the way back, her curiosity got the better of her and she headed off into the field to check it out.

Sure enough, it was a rock and probably big enough to cause some damage to any farm equipment that would hit it. However the thing that caught my eye was that it seemed to have been recently displaced from a former position. To its south was a depression that looked like the rock had formerly rested in. This depression was not weathered like the surrounding ground…it looked freshly disturbed. There was also a large agglomeration of dried mud and vegetative matter peeling off of the rock. The rock looked as if it had moved!

Moving rocks are not unknown. There is a remote playa in Death Valley in Southern California known as the Racetrack where rocks move. But of course, I am not in Death Valley. So what happened here?

We had strong winds the week before, but the strongest were out of the north. I don’t think it was the wind. The temperature has been fluctuating…if this rock did move under natural forces, I am leaning toward freezing and thawing as the explanation.

There is another possible, and much less exotic, explanation as to how this rock could have moved. The farmer is clearing fencerows on the other side of the road. He could have noticed the rock, just as my wife and I did, walked over to it, and kicked it over. But why didn’t he remove it from the field? It was too heavy? Yes, it would have been heavy to carry out of the field. Knowing the location of the rock relative to where he was working, I don’t think this explanation is any more plausible than any other…it is just another possibility.

Are there any other explanations that I haven’t considered? Comments are welcomed…

Now You’ve Done It!

Late yesterday afternoon just before supper, my wife and I decided to go out and work at cutting up some trees that have either blown down on our fences or that have gotten out of hand and intruded into the pastures.  

We cut up a couple of small windfalls on the fence south of the barn.  Although they were pretty easy, one of them was covered with a tangle of poison ivy.  We used pitch forks to keep our distance but there is a good likelihood that we will be itching later this week.  The south pasture is pretty clear for now.

North of the house several trees are reaching east toward the sun, cheating a little to get some additional sunlight by growing sideways.  These branches are so low I can’t mow the pasture so I wanted to take the worst one out.  The others I will trim later.

I am usually very sensitive to stresses on wood that I cut.  Because of that I have cut several tree clear though that have axial loads on them…to the point that after they are cut they collapse together as if they haven’t been cut.  I have some experience.

I didn’t see it on this tree.  In retrospect I should have but I learned a new lesson on this one.  I started a steep cut, thinking that the tree would just keep pulling away from the saw until it went over.

Instead it split both ways from the cut and pinched the bar.  Ooooooh!  I hate it when that happens. My wife retrieved the wrench while I stood and held the saw.  When she returned, I removed the engine to a safe distance, leaving the bar stuck in the tree.  I went to get some more tools.  When I came back, my wife had gotten the bar out, as the tree continued to split, crack, and settle into its final state of equilibrium, unstable though it may be.

So there it is.  My newly refurbished chain is stuck in the trunk.  I haven’t tried to put another chain on the bar which was, by the way, brand new…I hope it isn’t bent.  That is a job for the upcoming week.  

And then to try again to take down this tree but this time with a more experienced, lighter touch.