Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A plaque from La Pointe Pottery. This was a Christmas present from Karen!

Solarography, Summer/Autumn 2011

I found some coffee cans at work on the "Free to a good home" table. I had made some solargraphs using 3-pound coffee cans I had gotten from the same table. I had made some with Guinness cans and quart paint cans. I found the smaller, 12-ounce coffee cans just before the summer solstice and decided to add one more round to the solarography project.

I put the cans back on the chimney's spark arrester the evening of the summer solstice. They just barely fit under the cap of the arrester. They came down the evening after the winter solstice. So it includes the day before and the day after the winter solstice. The overlap of the sun's path probably isn't noticeable but it's there. Oops.

Here's the view from the chimney looking to the southeast.

The dark bits at the bottom corners are little magnets I used to hold the paper tight against the can.

Here's about the same view taken with my fisheye lens. The sun is in the tree on the right.

And, just for fun, here's the picture in black and white to compare with the black and white solargraph.

Here's the view from the chimney looking to the southwest.

And the fisheye lens's view.

And the black and white version.

My original proof-of-concept attempt at solarography used a tiny camera made out of a 35mm film canister. I made another camera with it and strapped it to the weather station's tripod. For such a tiny piece of paper it captured a rather detailed image. It's looking south. Too bad its hole was centered on the side of the canister so it didn't include the full wintertime path of the sun.

 The fisheye view from the weather station.

 In black and white.

I haven't loaded the cameras up again so don't expect these views again. I need to find other places to put cameras. The little, 35mm film canister could be put out in the wild with some chance of its being left alone. But I have only one. New ones come with rolls of film. Film? Who uses film? Is there anybody out there who kept such ancient artifacts on the off-chance that might someday be useful? Mom?

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A nativity scene by Randy Chitto.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A sand painting-like turtle ornament. We recently picked this up in Madrid.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Another ornament. Etched glass.

We rediscovered this one that had been stuck in a box marked "Stuff" for years.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A little wind chime we got in Taos many years ago.

It's hanging on a wall in the family room so it doesn't do a lot of chiming.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Another horse hair pottery turtle from Madrid.

Others of the herd can be seen here.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

From my underwear drawer.

(Sensitive people who have been living in a cave for the last six months should not click on the following link!)  Does anybody need an Anthony Weiner-like shot of these?

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A plaque from our recent visit to Taos.

Magic Meryle Cohen on the Rosie Show

Remember the exciting news about Ms. Magic Meryle Cohen, Cohen the Violinist, being filmed by the Rosie Show's crew? Be prepared for more excitement!

We set our DVR to record each episode of the Rosie Show so we'd be sure to see Magic Meryle. The show runs each weeknight. I had a bunch of the shows recorded and finally decided that I needed to free up the DVR's disk space. So I started playing the shows. I'd start the playback then hit the fast forward button a couple of times. Each episode would fly by in just about two minutes. I'd go through a couple of weeks of shows each evening.

Last Friday night I was coming to the end of what we had recorded. I was flying through the show recorded the night before and there she was! Magic Meryle Cohen! On coast-to-coast television.

Meryle had sent me a note before Labor Day asking if I knew anyone who could record the Oprah channel. She didn't say why she wanted to know but a Google search filled me in. I told her that my friend Ray gets that cable channel and has a DVD recorder. Meryle didn't get a message from Rosie telling her when her segment was going to be shown. Neither did I. So I hadn't known to ask Ray to record that episode. I thought that we were going to have to get our DVR and Ray's DVD recorder together.

I sent Meryle a note saying that I had recorded her episode and I would need to arrange to get it recorded when I could get our DVR over to Ray's DVD recorder.

Then it occurred to me that the Rosie Show was probably repeated. Sure enough, the Thursday episode was reaired three or four times on Friday. But that was too late. Well, lordy, it was aired one last time Saturday at noon!

I discovered this too late to make phone calls to see if Ray could record it for me so I sent emails and text messages. Fortunately, Ray was able to set up his DVD recorder to record the Magic Meryle episode before he left town for the afternoon. Thanks, Ray!

I made a couple of copies of the show for Meryle.

This evening Jerry and I took the DVDs over to the Oceanside Sunset Market. Today is the first Thursday of the month, the day that Meryle said she plays there. I had sent an email asking if she would be playing there tonight but I hadn't gotten a reply. We went up and down all the streets of the market, DVDs in hand, looking for her but Magic Meryle was not to be found.

I didn't want to lug the DVDs around so we took them back to the car then went back to look at the booths of the market. Jerry bought something that might show up some Tuesday.

After we had seen everything a couple of times we gave up hope and were about to leave. We decided to make one more loop around the market.

As we passed by one booth Jerry grabbed my sleeve and said "There she is!" She saw me and excitedly introduced me to the vendor she was visiting. She hadn't been playing yet because the tips aren't too good for the first couple of hours of the market.

We learned that the day they filmed her was a really nice day. They filmed several hours of her day. It was edited down to four minutes or so. They thought that some of what was recorded that didn't make it to the show would be posted on the Rosie Show's web site. But, alas, that doesn't seem to have happened.

Magic Meryle was amazed that they would send a crew out to California to film her. Apparently Rosie is going to do this with other of her pen-pals. Oprah must have deep pockets.

We went back to the car to retrieve the DVDs. Magic Meryle was thrilled to get them. She hadn't yet seen her network television debut. I hope she's happy with the result.

Here's the Magic Meryle Cohen segment of the Rosie Show.



I thought the tune she plays at the end was an odd choice. Magic Meryle explained it. Now it makes sense.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A soapstone plate from Kenya, seen with a soapstone egg and Eames elephant we've seen before.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A sand painting for tourists (mass produced) from Galeria Ortega (next door to Ortega's Weaving Shop) in Chimayó, New Mexico.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Yet more netsukes.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A candle. It's on a plate that is bright green under a black light like a 1955 plate that Poss gave us. Uranium?

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Nesting turtles (from Poss).

 The smallest one's head is MIA.

Here they are all nested together.

Renovation, Part 8

Last time we saw our new concrete whose release agent had been hosed off. It's a nice color but a bit dull. It needed one more technique applied to it. It got a sealant that makes it glossy and richer.

Before being washed and sealed:

After:

And what it looks like today with the stucco repaired, the paint touched up and the sun shining:

Next project: The fence!

As I've pointed out before, the oleanders are dying of oleander leaf scorch. There's a hedge of oleanders running between the neighbors' driveway and and our chain-link fence. When those oleanders are dead there is going to be nothing to block the world's view of our side yard. It's got our trash bins, a tool shed, gas and electric meters and other assorted stuff. We don't want those things to be what people see when they approach our house. Besides, we now have a vast area where we might want to have a nice, private, candle-lit dinner in the great outdoors.

So we had a fence put up as part of this project. You've seen the beginnings of it earlier. The day after they sealed the concrete they came back and put up most of the fence.

The huge gate came later and Jerry sealed the wood.

Matt, the foreman, gave us a cable to pull on to open the gate's latch.

We have a secluded place to relax and watch the hummingbirds.

The gate is wide enough to let their tractor back in if we need to have more work done!

The caps to the septic tank's two-way cleanout got stained to blend in with the walk.

Weeks and weeks after all this work was done Matt finally came back and installed some grates over the vents that let the house breathe. They're below the walk and we didn't want to have to keep cleaning leaves and other junk out of them.

We moved our compost bins out of the way before all this started. We got a new composter from Costco and put it on some of the pavers that were taken out of the front yard at the beginning of the project.

It seems to be doing a much better job composting our yard and kitchen waste than our old ones. I didn't get around to turning them. This one makes turning the pile so much easier!

We are still seeing a lot of bare dirt around this new walk. We have another project ahead of us.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Some mystery turtle hooks.

These came in the mail a few days ago. No note.
We haven't decided where they're going to be hung.

Renovation, Part 7

The day after they poured the concrete we got to look at things more closely.

We got to see the side of the house for the first time.

You'll notice (you probably already noticed last time) that the surface of the concrete isn't your normal, broom finish. We wanted a finish that is more attractive. So we had them stamp a stone finish onto our walks.

We also wanted something prettier than your basic concrete color. They gave us a card with samples of all the colors available. The card listed three grades of colors. The foreman told us that all the colors were the same price. That didn't seem right but we chose a bold red from the highest grade of colors. It turned out that we were right in thinking that it would be more expensive. The owner of the company convinced us that the color probably would be a bit too bold and we didn't want to have the added expense. So we went for a less bold (and less expensive) color.

The stamping process uses a "release agent" that adds more color and depth to the surface. It lets the stamps be removed from the concrete without lifting any of the concrete with it. As I recall, we didn't choose the release agent's color until just before they poured. I had no idea what was involved and I couldn't visualize how this new choice was going to affect the final product. I let Jerry figure this one out.

This batch of pictures show the fresh concrete with the release agent not yet washed off.

In addition to the stamps for the stonelike surface, they have other decorative stamps. Like turtles! (The page with the turtle stamps is currently showing only the stamps and not the end result. But you don't need that missing picture.)

Let's look at a turtle. Here's a close-up of one of the turtles stamped in this project.

This one is at the beginning of the walk from the garage to the front door. The release agent hasn't been washed off so it looks kind of chalky. You can see another of the turtles in this picture from the last edition (just below the cuidado tape).

The next day they washed the release agent off the walks.

That didn't improve the appearance a lot.

Here's a view of the above turtle after it got its bath.

Remember our two-way cleanout? Here it is (well, its caps) after it got washed.

There's still an oleander down there at the end of the walk. What is its fate?

Renovation, Part 6!

When we last checked in, the framing had been completed. That was a Saturday. They didn't do any work on Sunday. Or Monday (it was a holiday). Or Tuesday.

By 6:00 Wednesday morning a swarm of people had descended on our yard.

A few things needed to be done before the concrete was to start flowing in just a couple of hours.

Before this project was started we had been sending the water from our washing machine out to the yard rather than into the septic tank. We had the washer drain into a trash barrel that held a sump pump that had a garden hose connected to it. When the washer drained into the trash barrel the pump would turn on and send the water gushing through the hose, under the garage door and out to the yard.

That solution wasn't going to work with our nice, new walkway. We didn't want an ugly hose crossing our new walks. Besides, we eventually want to get the yard nicely landscaped and the ugly hose would look even uglier.

We added a little feature to our project where they would run a pipe under the concrete to the dirt by the driveway. Then they'd run a pipe from the laundry through the wall and connect it to this drain pipe.

In the last edition we saw this picture:

There's a skinny white pipe on the ground running along the garage. I was in a panic. There was no way that that little pipe would be able to keep up with the washer when it is draining. The little pipe was still there on concrete day and we hadn't seen anybody between the time the pipe was set up and concrete day. Yikes, yikes, yikes!

Fortunately, the owner of the company knew the wrong pipe was set up and brought the correct pipes and  everything would be just fine.

The only problem was that the pipe is pretty wide and would need be be set into a trench so it didn't live up in the new concrete. They just couldn't dig the trench through the concrete that held the old gate post (seen here beneath the scarred wall where the post was up against the house):

They had to fire up their jackhammer at 6:00 AM to carve the trench through the old post's anchor. The neighbors must have loved us.

We went off to work while they were doing their final preparations.

We came home to an all-new yard!

There's a pipe sticking out from under the new walk that will be able to carry the water from the washer!

We have a grand walk leading you from the driveway...

...to the front door (and from the front of the garage across the front of the house)!

And at the back of the house!

It's fresh and we can't walk on it yet. This picture was taken from the neighbors' driveway that runs along our fence. We can't see what the other side of the house looks like.

We've achieved concrete!

Renovation, Part 5

In Part 4 we saw a ditch being dug under the new walkway near the septic tank. Well, here's the pipe in its full glory:

We occasionally have problems with the drain and we have to get a plumber to visit to clear a clog. Whoever built this house didn't think to have any cleanouts on the line. The plumbers would have to remove a toilet to get to the pipe to shove their auger down. One plumber suggested that we could have a two-way cleanout installed for about the cost of two visits that involve toilet removal. We had concrete over the pipe so that would have been hard to install.

Well, all that concrete was removed so we added this little improvement to our project. A plumber came and installed the cleanout.

With any luck we won't have to use it. But it's nice to know we have the ability to clean the lines without the cost of dismantling a toilet.

Things were buried

Rebar was added to the walk-in-progress

And four days after all this rebar was installed they came and finished framing the front steps

What will the next day bring?