Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Personal Protective Equipment
I ran across this video on You Tube, and it shows why you should always wear your safety gear when you fire up your saw. The operator is cutting hams in this video, so there is no blood, but it will hold your attention. It is important to note that chaps may not prevent you from being cut, but they will jam your saw, and can greatly reduce the severity of injuries, and may save your life. Older chaps are usually oil soaked, and they do not stop a saw as effectively as new chaps. Follow the manufacturer's advice on cleaning your chaps so they will work when you need them.
Retire your chaps when they are old, oily, or cut. Cut the straps off of them so you won't be tempted to use them again. They make great pads to use on your shooting bench.
Retire your chaps when they are old, oily, or cut. Cut the straps off of them so you won't be tempted to use them again. They make great pads to use on your shooting bench.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
The Marchers, 1955
"The new motel at Americus was clean and comfortable, the bed smooth; still I could not sleep. Again I looked at my watch: a little after 4 A.M., so it would be hours before the February sun appeared. I got up and dressed. I drove into northeast blackness along that road grown so familiar-Georgia State Highway Number 49. The road brought me, eleven miles away, into a dark unpopulated valley where water trickled from a certain storied spring.
For a time I parked near that spring. Frogs were singing like birds along a tiny watercourse where new grasses tufted fresh as salad leaves. There was the thought of monuments looming, thought of a bareheaded boy made of bronze who stands, cap in hand and eternally youthful face uplifted amid a low forest of white marble slabs. But the graves were yonder, to the north. Now I did not wish to go there-I was heartily afraid to go, although I had gone many times before in daylight, and on occasion illegally in darkness. Regulations declare that a United States Military Cemetery may not be visited at night; yet on occasion I had sinned so, and had not felt myself a sinner; I'd felt that I belonged there. Almost I might wish to lie there eventually, could it be permitted. I felt that I was nearer to those dead than I was near to a breathing, sleeping world of mortal men and women.
About five o'clock I drove up the south slope of this valley and parked near the summit. Barely in gloom could I make out the few naked markers which approximate the position of the old Andersonville stockade. Actually I stood within the stockade area-the South Gate would have been over here, to the left; the gallows directly ahead, the raiders' pavilion ahead to the right. Still that constant spurting symphony of frog voices cried in the pretty ravine, the ravine I could scarcely distinguish in its mystery.
Clouds were thick, oppressive, blocking the light of even a single star. An owl spoke among underbrush masking the ancient Island. All fifty-odd thousand of you, I thought. Where do you drift now? Guards and prisoners alike-Henry Wirz with the rope mark on your dusty neck-sniveling child and hulking bully, serene martyr and master-of-the-hounds...I thought (in that intense awareness of one's own dream the egoistic concentration which impels one to to tell the story which he feels must be told)-Men and boys, I am here, waiting. Where have you gone?
I heard them coming. They twitched in a whispering rank from woods at the north, they rose up beyond statues and the superintendent's house; they came walking, massed and steady. Gently, they traveled through and over and under distant trees, came out into open ground where little circular fences protected the wells and tunnels they had dug-black pits drilled down though colored layers of clay. The marchers passed the fences easily, pacing nearer and nearer. There would be no resisting them.
I turned in panic, and stumbled back to my car, I flung myself into the front seat, heard the frightened slam of the car door go banging off through haunted distance. It was no illusion- I heard those soft footed thousands walking ever closer. Now their phalanx was pressing down the opposite slope, passing Providence Spring. I had summoned them, their reply was in their implacable approach.
Why was I afraid-I, who had called them brothers for so long in my mind, who dared to feel that I belonged in their misty column? It was not solely a fear of ghosts, a quailing away from the Dead. I had been close to death on a number of occasions in two wars, had walked within Buchenwald, had climbed into trucks loaded with dead, had tripped across their stiff outflung arms when they lay upon the ground. It was something more. In the next moment, as that unseen soft-treading horde pressed over the crest of the Sweetwater branch, I recognized the answer.
They had come to tell me that there must be no compromise, I had invoked their name and thought for nearly twenty-five years; they were thronging at last to force me to the task.
I was crying. I had not cried in many years, but now I was crying. Get out of the car, I said. You must show them that you have fear no longer, that you are ready to accept orders. My feet were on the grass, the door clicked shut behind me. I stood waiting. The wide rustling rank moved fairly in my face. Then they were touching me, they were all around me, brushing my face and hands, the hair of my head.
Rain.
A thin slow-speaking, slow-stepping rain had formed somewhere among miles and ages of darkness before dawn. So it had moved on many small feet from the direction of the cemeterey, had walked open glades, put its coolness on monuments, now it was touching me. I was glad to brushed by it, glad to feel it on my lips.
At this time I had written perhaps twenty-five thousand words on Andersonville, and knew that I must write at least three hundred thousand more. Often the recollection of that rain walking the late hours of a Georgia night came to prod or sustain me......
And the breath of these Andersonville people was especially compulsive; it came cooled by the ice of ninety years, ninety years to the minute.
The book was not written chronologically-few books of such scope could be written chronologically. Nevertheless, it was begun ninety years from the month when the stockade was first reared; and Providence Spring burst forth exactly ninety years from the week when Providence Spring did burst forth; and the last tattered relics were conveyed from the pen in May, 1865; and last word of this novel was written in May, 1955, and strangely the last word happened to be Andersonville."
Excerpts from The Marchers, 1955, page 308 in The Day I Met A Lion, by MacKinlay Kantor, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1968
For a time I parked near that spring. Frogs were singing like birds along a tiny watercourse where new grasses tufted fresh as salad leaves. There was the thought of monuments looming, thought of a bareheaded boy made of bronze who stands, cap in hand and eternally youthful face uplifted amid a low forest of white marble slabs. But the graves were yonder, to the north. Now I did not wish to go there-I was heartily afraid to go, although I had gone many times before in daylight, and on occasion illegally in darkness. Regulations declare that a United States Military Cemetery may not be visited at night; yet on occasion I had sinned so, and had not felt myself a sinner; I'd felt that I belonged there. Almost I might wish to lie there eventually, could it be permitted. I felt that I was nearer to those dead than I was near to a breathing, sleeping world of mortal men and women.
About five o'clock I drove up the south slope of this valley and parked near the summit. Barely in gloom could I make out the few naked markers which approximate the position of the old Andersonville stockade. Actually I stood within the stockade area-the South Gate would have been over here, to the left; the gallows directly ahead, the raiders' pavilion ahead to the right. Still that constant spurting symphony of frog voices cried in the pretty ravine, the ravine I could scarcely distinguish in its mystery.
Clouds were thick, oppressive, blocking the light of even a single star. An owl spoke among underbrush masking the ancient Island. All fifty-odd thousand of you, I thought. Where do you drift now? Guards and prisoners alike-Henry Wirz with the rope mark on your dusty neck-sniveling child and hulking bully, serene martyr and master-of-the-hounds...I thought (in that intense awareness of one's own dream the egoistic concentration which impels one to to tell the story which he feels must be told)-Men and boys, I am here, waiting. Where have you gone?
I heard them coming. They twitched in a whispering rank from woods at the north, they rose up beyond statues and the superintendent's house; they came walking, massed and steady. Gently, they traveled through and over and under distant trees, came out into open ground where little circular fences protected the wells and tunnels they had dug-black pits drilled down though colored layers of clay. The marchers passed the fences easily, pacing nearer and nearer. There would be no resisting them.
I turned in panic, and stumbled back to my car, I flung myself into the front seat, heard the frightened slam of the car door go banging off through haunted distance. It was no illusion- I heard those soft footed thousands walking ever closer. Now their phalanx was pressing down the opposite slope, passing Providence Spring. I had summoned them, their reply was in their implacable approach.
Why was I afraid-I, who had called them brothers for so long in my mind, who dared to feel that I belonged in their misty column? It was not solely a fear of ghosts, a quailing away from the Dead. I had been close to death on a number of occasions in two wars, had walked within Buchenwald, had climbed into trucks loaded with dead, had tripped across their stiff outflung arms when they lay upon the ground. It was something more. In the next moment, as that unseen soft-treading horde pressed over the crest of the Sweetwater branch, I recognized the answer.
They had come to tell me that there must be no compromise, I had invoked their name and thought for nearly twenty-five years; they were thronging at last to force me to the task.
I was crying. I had not cried in many years, but now I was crying. Get out of the car, I said. You must show them that you have fear no longer, that you are ready to accept orders. My feet were on the grass, the door clicked shut behind me. I stood waiting. The wide rustling rank moved fairly in my face. Then they were touching me, they were all around me, brushing my face and hands, the hair of my head.
Rain.
A thin slow-speaking, slow-stepping rain had formed somewhere among miles and ages of darkness before dawn. So it had moved on many small feet from the direction of the cemeterey, had walked open glades, put its coolness on monuments, now it was touching me. I was glad to brushed by it, glad to feel it on my lips.
At this time I had written perhaps twenty-five thousand words on Andersonville, and knew that I must write at least three hundred thousand more. Often the recollection of that rain walking the late hours of a Georgia night came to prod or sustain me......
And the breath of these Andersonville people was especially compulsive; it came cooled by the ice of ninety years, ninety years to the minute.
The book was not written chronologically-few books of such scope could be written chronologically. Nevertheless, it was begun ninety years from the month when the stockade was first reared; and Providence Spring burst forth exactly ninety years from the week when Providence Spring did burst forth; and the last tattered relics were conveyed from the pen in May, 1865; and last word of this novel was written in May, 1955, and strangely the last word happened to be Andersonville."
Excerpts from The Marchers, 1955, page 308 in The Day I Met A Lion, by MacKinlay Kantor, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1968
Poets' Corner: Memorial Day
THE LAST POST
The stars are shining bright above the camps,
The bugle calls float skyward, faintly clear;
Over the hill the mist-veiled motor lamps
Dwindle and disappear.
The notes of day's goodbye arise and blend
With the low murmurous hum from tree and sod,
And swell into that question at the end
They ask each night of God--
Whether the dead within the burial ground
Will ever overthrow their crosses grey,
And rise triumphant from each lowly mound
To greet the dawning day.
Whether the eyes which battle sealed in sleep
Will open to reveille once again,
And forms, once mangled, into rapture leap,
Forgetful of their pain.
But still the stars above the camp shine on,
Giving no answer for our sorrow's ease,
And one more day with the Last Post has gone,
Dying upon the breeze.
Vera Brittain, V.A.D. Nurse
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Weekend Steam
Photo from the November 1965 issue of Engineers and Engines
Ted Young began showing his engines more than forty years ago; he and his family are still at Old Threshers every Labor Day weekend operating his creations for your enjoyment. The steam and gas engine show season is upon us, so check out the links on the right side and make your travel plans.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Disaster Waiting To Happen
This red maple resides only thirty feet from a house, and it presents a serious risk to the homeowner. Early in its life it forked, probably because of storm damage, or improper pruning. The forks are "Bad Branch Angles," a safety defect in any tree, because steep branch angles are easily torn off in storms. The fork closest to the camera is at least a strong joint, but the one in back has included bark, which makes the fork even more likely to fail. Included bark means that the two sides of the fork are pushing each other apart as the tree grows, and failure is inevitable. Strong joints have a ridge between the stem and the branch. Joints with included bark do not have the ridge.Looking up in this tree, we see two more problems. Old topping wounds are sending rot down the branches, which are reaching over the house. The branch nearest the lens has a split running for several feet, so this branch is failing already, and is likely to come down in any blustery weather.
Soft maples are popular as shade trees because they produce shade in a hurry, but numerous problems come with that speed. The wood is weak, it rots easily if the tree is wounded, and the roots tend to run on top of the ground, making the tree very susceptible to root rot due to wounding from lawnmowers. Homeowners regularly top these trees to control the height, and that introduces rot, and bad forks. My advice to people wanting to plant new trees in their yard is to keep soft maples at least 100 feet away from the house. They will grow to 90 feet tall, and you have a little safety margin. If they are planted any closer to your house, someone is eventually going to have a very expensive removal problem.Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Memorable Encounter
A few days ago this bluebird created quite a racket and kept circling me. I clicked off several pictures before I came to the realization that this was not normal behavior. Her not-quite-ready -to -fledge offspring was on the ground, practically at my feet. I gently "herded" the baby to the root swells of a white oak so it would be somewhat concealed from predators and left the area.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
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