Robert Pence

That happened to me at a party. Cute, too, and just a little drunk. Then, his wife walked in.

Sherman - Excellent macro work. If ants were as big as dogs, humans probably would be extinct by now, along with a lot of other life forms. Corey - Nice light! Whenever I post a rural thread I can hear the yawns clear over in Indiana. If you want to see more of this, click on the photo:

Heavens, No! Far be it from me to ever do anything with malicious intent. I should have explained more clearly that in swerving to avoid colliding with the bikes, I extended one foot to help keep my balance. I inadvertently struck one of the bikes, and they all fell over. They should be glad I didn't fall and become injured because of where they parked their bikes; I'm sure they would have felt terrible. I hope they learned to be more thoughtful after that.

The first one I posted, on Rosewood, is gone to make way for yet another suburban office sprawl-plex. I don't know if local preservationists succeeded in saving some components like they had hoped. Last December I spotted one on Carroll Avenue in Michigan City (IN) that I've driven past dozens of times without noticing. The light was impossible, so I'll try to get a photo next time.

The keyhole is one of several portals in Ohio where alien beings move back and forth between our dimension and theirs.

Beautiful photos and interesting historical research. I enjoyed. Before all-weather roads and heavy trucks came along, a lot of railroads were built for resource-extraction industries like mining and logging, and when the economically-obtainable coal, silver, etc., was all gone or the mountain was logged off, most of those railroads were torn up and the equipment and rails were taken for use elsewhere. The woods and valleys were honeycombed with narrow-gauge logging railroads throughout parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and down into Georgia. The only remnant that I know of (east of the Mississippi River) that survives somewhat intact and operating as a tourist road is at Cass, WV.

The first thought that popped up when I saw the photo was "Chambered Nautilus." Neat composition. The Garfield Memorial dates to an era when public structures tended toward visually sumptious. It's a feast for one's eyes, with brilliant, elaborate stained-glass windows and almost every surface decorated with colorful murals and designs.

Marvelous job! Excellent photos, great scenes. Edit; There's another building you might keep an eye out for. I remember from the late seventies a former Studebaker dealership. If I remember correctly, it was on W117th between Clifton and the Rapid Station, a nice early 1900s white terra cotta facade on the west side of the street. There's also a Post Office building in Lakewood - might be on W117th also, right next to the former Nickel Plate railroad crossing, with the Railway Post Office logo on the front. Back in the seventies, it still had the swinging boom on the railroad side where they used to hang mail bags to be picked up.

You should get one of those really loud compressed-gas boat horns. That might scare them so badly they'd soil themselves. We get those groups quite often, and many are families that load their bikes on their SUV on Sunday afternoon and come in from the rural-splendor subdivisions to ride the greenway. Suburban families become so insular from cocooning themselves in their 4,000 square feet on 4 acres that would be better used if it were still farmland, that they haven't a clue that other people live and move in the world outside. You'll get Mom on one side of the path and Dad on the other, with a six-year-old looping back and forth between them, and all oblivious to anyone approaching from behind. They'll decide to take a break to sit in the grass, eat lunch, look at the river, and leave their bikes on kickstands on the pavement, again oblivious to other riders. One balmy summer afternoon, riding my big ol' 35-pound Raleigh 3-speed with the 28-inch wheels, around a curve I suddenly came upon a cluster of five or six bikes on kickstands blocking the path. In swerving to avoid colliding with the bikes, I extended one foot to help keep my balance. I inadvertently struck one of the bikes, and they all fell over.

Added the rest of the photos from Wednesday, when they stood the tower up.

Nice and serene. The season definitely is advanced there, compared with the way things look here.

It looks like it might have been a visually interesting place with some charm, once. Not recently, though.

Nice! I like Pennsylvania's small cities; a lot of them have abundant intact historic architecture.

The tower will be stabilized by guy wires at multiple levels. The slender design has two benefits that I can think of; it minimizes surface exposure to high wind pressures, and minimizes the wake or slipstream that might affect the instruments. Anemometers willl be placed at two or three different levels on booms that extend out from the tower five or six feet, in order to get them as far as possible from the tower's wake. The tower will report meteorological data periodically via cell phone. I don't know what size turbines they use in Iowa. Wells Prairie will get 1.5 megawatt units. On those, the nacelle is about 260 feet up and the blades are 130 feet long. That puts the top of the rotor's arc at about 390 feet. The ones in Wood County, Ohio, outside Bowling Green, are 1.8 megawatt units, and on a clear blue-sky day you can see the tips of the rotors above the trees for quite a distance. I think I clocked it at almost seven miles once, from first sighting on the horizon. I did a little rough estimating from the stats on the 1.8mw turbines, and at full output the shaft horspower generated by the rotor appears to be roughly 2,800 based on a guess at about 85 percent mechanical and electrical efficiency from the dynamo and drive train. One of my Air Force buddies in the detachment at IU in Bloomington used to come home with me sometimes on weekends. He was from Renovo (railroad family), and he said he had never lived anyplace where he could see more than a quarter mile in any direction. He thought the spaciousness of our flat farmland was incredibly beautiful in summer.

Farming Wind - setting up a MET (meteorological test) tower April, 2010 All Photos Copyright © 2010 by Robert E Pence Wind Capital Group has initiated development of a wind farm in Wells County, Indiana. They have secured enough acreage under lease to proceed with the project and are setting up MET (Meteorological Testing) towers to track wind direction and velocity and other atmospheric conditions in order to most effecitvely site turbines. They plan to use 1.5 megawatt turbines in this project. One of the 60-meter-tall towers is sited on farmland owned by by brother, David, and me. The 60-meter height puts them just under the 200-foot limit that requires lights to warn aircraft. On Satuday, April 17, 2010, we took a look at what the setup crew was doing. At that point, they predicted that the tower would be pulled upright about Wednesday. Saturday, April 17, 2010: It's a good hike through corn stubble from the arched white barn to the tower site, so we drove: David's latest toy, a Ford 8700 Diesel from about 1978 [url=http://www.nationalwindassessments.com/">National Wind Assessments</a> set up the tower. The area is flat and wide open, and every year more woodlots get turned into corn-and-soybean acreage. The temperature was in the mid-40s (Fahrenheit), and one of the setup guys commented on how windy it is out there. I reminded him that the peristent wind is why he's there. The tower's guy wires will be marked with the yellow tubes and orange globes to make them highly visible to farm machinery operators. The tower is made up of sections of galvanized steel tubing that fit one insde the other, like a stovepipe. It's mounted to a hinged base and secured by guy wires fastened to soil anchors. The tower is being assembled on the ground, and will be pulled upright using a gin pole. Wednesday, April 21, 2010: Instruments are attached and they're ready to pull the tower upright using a gin pole and a 12-volt electric winch. Adding a temperature sensor. One man controlls the winch, and the other two crew members are where the guy wires attach to soil anchors. They communicate with walkie-talkes, and make adjustments to keep the tower straight and the guy wires at the proper tension. It's a slow process, raising the tower a few degrees and then adjusting the guy wires. Going Up! My attention wandered, and I took a photo of the former Henry Dunwiddie round barn. It's undergoing demolition by neglect; there are holes in the roof, and the cupola already has collapsed in on itself. Round barns often are stick-built, and unlike a mortise-and-tenon pegged timber structure, it doesn't take long for them to fail when the roof goes bad and lets rainwater in. Almost there. It took about an hour to get to this point. I left, but from the sawmill I could see that the crew still was working for quite a while on fine-tuning the guy wire tension.

Nice photo. Williamsport has some pretty good buildings; I'm impressed with what i've seen of it in your photos. It's a lot more city than I expected in that part of the state.

We have to get their guns first, so they won't be able to barricade themselves in their 4,000-square-foot suburban homes with three-car garages and resist when we come to get their Navigators and Escalades. No need to worry about the Lexus GS460s, though; they will have all rolled over by then. Come to think of it, there were a lot (alot) of big pickups and SUVs parked in the vicinity of the rally. That's doesn't really signify anything here, though; that's typical of anyplace, anytime in Northeast Indiana. You'll even see them with Indiana's Environment license plates and save-the-whales and no-nukes type bumper stickers.

Local governments in areas like mine (Northeast Indiana) are beginning to aggressively promote utilitarian cycling (work, shopping, errands) as an alternative to driving, and paying closer attention to quality and functionality while building and expanding path and trail systems. Even though the city, for the first time I can remember in the thirty-odd years since the first designated bike route was opened in Fort Wayne, last winter used park-department equipment to plow and sweep the greenway, bicycles are useful for most local people 6 - 8 months of the year, at most. A much smaller number of hardy individuals bike year-around. I think a lot of elected officials' advocacy for bikes as utilitarian transport is politically motivated to capitalize on the current groundswell of pro-environment sentiment. Unfortunately, any sudden change in public policy inevitably results in a backlash which, exacerbated by economic conditions that won't change soon, may cause a lot of progress to be lost with funds for maintenance cut off and some networks and connections left uncompleted. I didn't see many bikes at the Tea Party rally on the courthouse plaza - maybe two besides my own. Political and social change always happen slowly, either in short bursts interrupted and partially reversed by backlash, or in increments that progress slowly and quietly and avoid evoking reaction. There are times and places for both approaches.

I dunno about that. All too often we see posts from Hell on the forums.

As others have pointed out, drive time is non-productive (at least if you're a safe, attentive driver), while train time is multi-tasking time; you can work at your job while you travel to an out-of-town meeting or appointment. Further, time isn't the most important factor for every traveler. Many who will ride the trains are people who don't have access to cars, can't drive because of physical impairment, or simply prefer not to enter the arenas that our interstates have become.

What they did to the courthouse is unfortunate. It looks like the old one likely was quite elegant, and the design of the expansion would have been a striking building if standing on its own. By stacking the new one atop the old one, they spoiled both. I've seen many examples that prove that County Commissioners never should be allowed to make any decisions involving architecture.

The mention of microwaves reminded me of the microwaves in the cafeteria, and that reminded me of the cafeteria, and that reminded me of a bunch of annoyances. Approaching the serving line was more dangerous than trying to cross an expressway on foot. Look both ways, because the same super-sized folks from payment-processing, who ceaselessly complained about their ineffective diets while loading up at the ever-present tables full of birthday/anniversary/new-grandshild/retirement treats in their work area, would head for the food with a determination that, well, you'd best not get in their way! They outweighed me by at least two to one, and I literally was crowded aside on two occasions. Then there were the two microwaves for use by people who brought their lunches. One was always broken, and there were a couple of people who would put an entree in a microwave, set the timer, and then go to round up a salad, dessert, coffee, etc. and not get back until long after the bell had rung, while others waited timidly. Finally one day I took an abandoned entrees out after it and finished, and set it on the counter so I could put my food in. The woman came back, saw what I had done, and went ballistic; "Don't you ever touch my food again!" Dammit, lady, it's in Tupperware and still covered with Saran Wrap, and from the smell of it, there's nothing I could do that would hurt it! A couple of days later, I got the chance again. She came back, saw her entree on the counter and saw me there waiting for my food to finish heating. She took a deep breath and got ready to start in on me, and I just gave her my "Go ahead. Make my day" look. She grabbed her Tupperware and stormed away, and I never encountered her again. Maybe she changed her lunch break, or found another microwave in one of the offices. And then there are the ones who will fill their coffee cup from the urn or coffee machine and stand right in front of it blocking access while a line forms, as they add creamer, stir thoroughly, add some sugar, stir some more, taste, add more sugar, stir some more, just as if they were in their kitchen at home alone. I never could figure out a way to mess with them, because the worst offender was a great big guy and most of the aggrieved were too mild-mannered to join me in an angry mob.

Six Phases of a Project 1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the Innocent 6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants

Your first appraisal probably was right. The legit charities don't pressure, and their people have some kind of credentials. Further, they collect donations through businesses and direct mail, and rarely just approach strangers on the street. Probably a scammer or panhandler.

Attractions like Cedar Point do their best to avoid any spillover into the community. They want to keep everyone on their premises and spending money there, just like casinos. Look how much prosperity those bring to their host cities! :| It's been years, but the last time I went out to the islands, I learned the hard way that the best and cheapest way to go was via a ferry from Marblehead. We got on a boat from Sandusky and we were the only males on it who weren't wearing mint-green doubleknit slacks and Hawaiian shirts with white shoes and belts. The "music" they advertised was some old guy playing Lawrence Welk favorites on an electronic organ - loud, for the hard-of-hearing - and it was piped all over the boat and impossible to escape. We only survived because the bartender was well supplied with wine coolers. It was all about the boat ride, not the destination, and was slow by a long, circuitous route.