Faith has been hacking like an old diesel tractor sputtering to life. For her it probably feels more like a sputtering out. She needs her spark plugs cleaned, maybe a gap adjustment, timing tweak, and that air filter has to be changed. I'm sure the right tools are here, somewhere in my little red toolbox.
"Sure you operate on the dog and cats," she'd say, "but I'm much more complex."
Indeed.
Instead I wandered out to the deck and marveled that the clouds had dispersed and left us with a surprise star show. The Milky Way looked like galactic phlegm, what with Faith's tortured accompaniment, but it was still a lovely sight. Out with telescope to transport one eyeball closer to the crowded starriness.
A short viewing wasn't enough. Bring out the air mattress, blankets and pillows. Jupiter and the Moon are strolling out around sunrise, what better means to ensure a front row seat? Zeke is roused from his comfy bed to come out and "enjoy" a night of deck camping.
Telescope be damned, sleeping under the open sky still rates as a most rewarding viewing experience. A few meteors zipped by and somewhere between the passings of satellite light pinpricks I fell asleep.
Waking a couple hours later the Milky Way had rotated towards the overhead. No clouds. Good. Not too long now.
Another hour or two passed. Roll over. Milky Way. More stars than ever. Great. Zzzzz...
Last wake-up. Not quite five. Brightening. Clouds cover the sky from horizon to horizon. A light mist has covered blankets, telescope, and dog. Haul them all inside.
Maybe next week.
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email thisIf you've been following this site for a few years you'll surely remember Chris in his many other guises, activities and contemplative moments. Few people realize that he travels extensively, teaching and reading to the less fortunate.
Belated birthday wishes to Grandma who celebrated her 103rd while I was on the road last week. Sorry, no doctored photo of her and Teddy Roosevelt, but that is her farm in the next entry.
This is a 1912's era photo of the farm where Mom grew up (taken long before she was born). The photo appears to be a colorized black and white mounted on some type of cardboard backing. It once lived in an oval frame. Mom asked if I could fix it up.
For the restoration it was scanned in three passes using a cheap flatbed scanner. Since the photo isn't totally flat there were registration errors as well as changes in color and brightness. The photo was also taller than the flatbed frame and rather than break up the scanning into more segments (to get the rounded bottom) I decided to clip the top and bottom evenly. That's way too much grassland, even for South Dakota.
The next step was putting the three pieces in as separate layers in photoshop and aligning the edges. Plenty of overlap in each scan, leaving enough material to blend and erase overlapped edges without too obvious of a seam. Getting colors to match was tough. With more time I would have tried scanning differently, maybe even flattening the photo.
Two tools were indispensable: the clone tool and healing brush. To fix the smaller water damage streaks and tears I used the healing brush. For the huge section of missing sky it was necessary to clone large parts of existing sky, and then use smudge and healing brush to fix it up so it's not an obvious clone.
It's not perfect. There are areas that need to be brightened or sharpened and the seam could be cleaner.
This is the Johann Knapp Homestead, the photo my father dated at being from about 1912. Grandfather Knapp came from the Ukraine in 1874, prior to that the Knapps resided at the foothills of the Voges(sic?) Mts in Alscae, France. Searching for religious freedom and being pacificist, they left France about 1784, wande(rather floated) down the Danube and ended up farming on the Steppes of the Ukraine with the Czar's permission and promise to not have to serve in the military. Grandfather didn't offically file this homestead until 1917, probably due to his second marriage. My grandmother and namesake, Philippina, had died after givingbirth to her 13th child around 1900. The farm was sold in 1958 when my parents retired and moved the same house into Eureka, S.D. Where my mother resided until 2002. The house still is in Eureka.
Probably the Vosges Mountains, in Alsace, France. See:
http://www.visit-alsace.com/where_is_it/ou_c_ang_pays_montain.html
Just saw your picture of Chris, laughed so dang hard I nearly fell off the chair. Chris of course wants to send a copy of it to George.