In Florida, the salt burns your eyes. In Ohio, the magnesium, mercury, raw sewage, and slurry seep into every orifice in your body.

Unless you're swimming in a canal or the intra-coastal, that's about equivalent to the Ohio River. :|

An Amish stand along Rt. 301 in Wayne County between Lattasburg and Pleasant Home:

It's interesting to see how the Amish work the "salt of the earth, plain folk" image for the tourist trade. My hometown area has many Amish, and they're Old Order, the most conservative. Yet if you look at the homes, the new ones are all built with contemporary materials -- vinyl siding & vinyl-clad thermal windows, etc. Many of the older homes have been remodeled with contemporary materials, too. When they present themselves to the public for commercial purposes, though, sometimes it's all weathered, ancient, run-down looking.

 

I'd be a little cautious about buying prepared food from them unless they have proper refrigeration, and many Amish do; at least one refrigerator maker in Northeast Indiana makes refrigerators that run on propane or kerosene. The refrigerators use the same ammonia-based gas absorbtion cycle that RV refrigerators do, and any heat source can power the process.

Something about Amish people using Kerosene to refrigerate their for-sale goods in a run down roadside shack seems like they're missing the point of being Amish.

Actually, the Amish are technologically adept, love technology, are not opposed to it. The concern is more with worldliness. They can use technology, but can't be connected to the grid. They have a better understanding than we do of what is the point of being Amish.

Some Amish are now permitted to use low-voltage electricity generated by wind power or solar panels. They just don't use high-voltage power from the commercial grid. I've seen some using cell phones, too, usually contractors who use them for business purposes. I suppose they can use their low-voltage power to recharge phones and the batteries that power the safety flashers on their buggies. I would imagine that they will ulimately use LED lights with their low-voltabe power. It would be safer and more economical than the kerosene or propane lighting they customarily use.

 

I've been in an Amish hardware store in the Shipshewana area that has gas lights, fueled with propane piped from a tank that also heated the house and provided fuel for cooking. They were dual-mantle fixtures, and before then I never realized how much loud that hiss is when you have several of them in a building, or how much heat they generate.

I've also been riding my bike in Middlefield (Middlefinger) Amish country before, heard a loud boom box radio blasting thinking a car was coming, only to see two young kids bouncing in a buggy to Tupac rap.

I've also been riding my bike in Middlefield (Middlefinger) Amish country before, heard a loud boom box radio blasting thinking a car was coming, only to see two young kids bouncing in a buggy to Tupac rap.

 

Amish G's!

I've also been riding my bike in Middlefield (Middlefinger) Amish country before, heard a loud boom box radio blasting thinking a car was coming, only to see two young kids bouncing in a buggy to Tupac rap.

 

LMAO 

I've also been riding my bike in Middlefield (Middlefinger) Amish country before, heard a loud boom box radio blasting thinking a car was coming, only to see two young kids bouncing in a buggy to Tupac rap.

 

Amish G's!

 

Living in an Amish paradise.. que Weird Al

 

More on this location coming soon.

1990: 35mm film Cleveland, Ohio

^ Thanks.

 

The cows were scared at first, but clamored closer to find out who this mysterious photographer was.

 

Taken at the crest of the Allegheny Mountains along U.S. Route 33 in eastern West Virginia, September 1, 2008.

 

They're coming to check you out because most often when a person comes around, he's bringing grain to supplement their grazing.

 

The sad irony is that those are beef cattle, blissfully unaware that in the not-too-distant future they will experience a role reversal, from being fed to being eaten.

nice cow shot, seicer

Out of sequence, here's yesterday's photo from the road:

 

 

Cambria County (PA) Courthouse, Ebensburg.

 

I don't see the picture :(

Utopia is spelled Vermont:

 

 

 

Gorgeous photo, Calvin.

Out of sequence, here's yesterday's photo from the road:

 

 

Cambria County (PA) Courthouse, Ebensburg.

 

I don't see the picture :(

 

Sorry. I was messing around with my site directories when I should have been sleeping, and I broke a bunch of links. They're fixed now, but the fixes don't carry through into quotes. Here's the fixed image:

 

 

I'll probably have the whole Ebensburg set up in a few days. Gorgeous town, a huge surprise for Cambria County. The deputy at the courthouse security desk wasn't sure if photography was permitted, so he gave the safe answer ("no"). I can't fault him for that, but the building is every bit as magnificent inside as it is outside.

Anyway, here's the drastic water level difference between just a three mile stretch of the river. Both photos were taken in Maumee. Here, the river starts widening and deepening across from Perrysburg. It looks roughly the same year-round:

 

 

A file miles upriver, the river fluctuates greatly between seasons. Sometimes the river completely dissappears in spots around the islands, like here. This is the lowest I've ever seen the river. Two months of drought will do this:

 

 

 

Picture 1 is backwater from Lake Erie ---

I took this earlier today. It was a bay on the north shore of Hawaii but I had gone to so many places i cant remember which one it was exactly.

 

I've gained such a huge appreciation for topography after living in Columbus for a dozen or so years.  Love those mountains!  The beach ain't so bad either... ;)

I just thought this looked neat

Holy crap... you thought right!!  Awesome picture!!

Oh Geez, Yes! Stunning photo!

I think I've driven past that spot.  Pittsburgh is a smorgasbord for photographers.  I like the way the hill fades out at top right and how the overall composition distracts from the center tower which should be a distraction according to standard composition rules. 

That cloud looks like a person running a race

Last week was Bluffton (Indiana) Street Fair, long regarded as homecoming week for all the expatriates. Our BHS Class of '57 had so much fun (really!) at our 50-year reunion last year that we decided to get together during Street Fair this year. We gathered at First Reformed Church, which happened to be the place of my religious persecution until I fled to the bright lights of the sinful big city. I hadn't been in the building since my brother's ill-starred wedding more than 35 years ago.

 

Here I was subjected to the rigors of the Heidelberg Catechism and various other spiritual tribulations. Mostly I tuned out the sermons and studied the windows. Here are a couple of them:

 

 

 

Great stained glass work there.  It's interesting that they don't feature religious themes.

Great stained glass work there.  It's interesting that they don't feature religious themes.

 

The Reformed Church and the Lutheran Church were outgrowths of the Reformation in 1516, and one of the manifestations of change was the removal of images and placing the Word of God at the center of worship. I believe certain Christian concepts. like the Trinity, are coded in some elements of the windows, and I think there's symbolism in the floral design at the center. I've never seen an interpretation of these windows. I recall that the pastor who was there during almost all of my membership denounced the Roman Catholic Church as idolatrous.

 

Some Reformed congregations still showed their German roots well into the 20th century, and when I was young I remember that a lot of the older pastors still had very German surnames and the patriarchal families were descendents of German immigrant founders of the communities. Dad said that when he was a young boy, pre WWI, the services in this church were conducted in German.

 

The Reformed Church in the United States was chartered in 1725, and in 1934 merged with The Evangelical Synod, chartered in 1840. I believe it was in the 1960s that the merger with the Congregational Church formed the United Church of Christ.

 

Last year a number of the old Reformed congregations split from the UCC over the issue of same-sex marriage and reconstituted themselves as Reformed Churches. This was one of those churches. Remembering the strict conservatism I grew up with, I wasn't suprised.

Eastbound South Shore Train 117 at Beverly Shores, Indiana (flag stop) Sep 16, 2008

 

who knew there was one?

 

Activity at Cleveland Volcano, Aleutian Islands, Alaska

 

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/ISS013-E-24184_lrg.jpg (186 kb)

 

At 3:00 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time on May 23, 2006, International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 13 Flight Engineer Jeff Williams contacted the Alaska Volcano Observatory (http://www.avo.alaska.edu/) to report that the Cleveland Volcano had produced a plume of ash. Shortly after the activity began, he took this photograph. This picture shows the ash plume moving west-southwest from the volcano’s summit. The event proved to be short-lived; two hours later, the plume had completely detached from the volcano. The AVO reported that the ash cloud height could be as high as 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) above sea level.

 

Cleveland Volcano, situated on the western half of Chuginadak Island, is one of the most active of the volcanoes in the Aleutian Islands, which extend west-southwest from the Alaska mainland. It is a stratovolcano, composed of alternating layers of hardened lava, compacted volcanic ash, and volcanic rocks. At a summit elevation of 1,730 meters, this volcano is the highest in the Islands of the Four Mountains group. Carlisle Island to the north-northwest, another stratovolcano, is also part of this group. Magma that feeds eruptions of ash and lava from the Cleveland Volcano is generated by the northwestward movement of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tectonic_plates.png. As one tectonic plate moves beneath another—a process called subduction—melting of materials above and within the lower plate produces magma that can eventually move to the surface and erupt through a vent (such as a volcano). Cleveland Volcano claimed the only known eruption-related fatality in the Aleutian Islands, in 1944.

 

Astronaut photograph http://eol######c.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?mission=ISS013&roll=E&frame=24184 was acquired May 23, 2006, with a Kodak 760C digital camera using an 800 mm lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and the Image Science & Analysis Group, Johnson Space Center. The image in this article has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast. Lens artifacts have been removed.

 

The http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/home/index.html supports the laboratory to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the http://eol######c.nasa.gov/.

 

 

I don't feel like posting much right now, but these two should suffice.

 

 

I actually enjoyed that photo shoot Ronny. I'm thinking of crawling around Interstate 71 where it junctions with 471, and along Central Parkway. The nights are getting longer, which means more opportunities...

I'm going back in December. I'll be curious to see if these are still there.

 

 

 

CTA Green Line station at E63rd & Cottage Grove.

I don't feel like posting much right now, but these two should suffice.

 

 

 

I LOVE these!!! 

EWWWWWW

 

I love this shot.  I wish the Cincinnati sign were a little more pronounced (and the T were the same shade) but oh well.  This is going on my desktop (if that's a problem PM me)

I have a higher-res one. PM me your dimensions and I can crop one for you.

florida clouds -- looks warm!

Pretty skies! It hurts to look at that and be reminded of what this place will look like in a couple of months!

:-)

Here are two I took on Sunday:

 

That first place really inspires confidence in the business advertised on the sign. Of course, the banner hanging from the porch assures me that these are righteous folks, so it's probably just fine. :|

HAHA, that first pic with the two kids making out on the porch with the christian flag reminds me of my new favorite quote from the Tina Fey version of Sarah Palin

 

"I believe that marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers"

From the Red Bull Soap Box Derby:

 

 

HAHAHAHAHA, the middle pic is AWESOME! 

I think the photo seicer posted is the limo for an alabama wedding party. They were inside at the rehearsal dinner when the photo was snapped.