Category: General

Jeep Thoughts

I saw a picture of my old jeep pop up on my screensaver and thought I’d post a few pictures of it as a tribute. I only had the jeep for a couple of years, but I did enjoy it.

It also made me appreciate my Honda cars a lot more too! 🙂

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These are pictures of Mich and I on one of the North Georgia mountains on a fun weekend trip.

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Overly somber pose by me travelling through one of Georgia’s towns

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Wisteria hunting with Mich so she could take pictures. You don’t see her in any of these since she insisted on taking all the photos!

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Here we were out doing a “pre-jeeping” trip on Rich Mountain with a fellow called Jay Bird who was introducing us to a local jeeping club. Yes, that’s mud and water and yes, we had to keep our feet on the drain holes in the floorboard to keep the water from pouring in!

Completed Turtle Pond

A while ago we picked up a “mini-pond” that we could easily host within our screened-in patio. We used it to replace the kiddie pool that we were using to give our turtles (red-eared sliders Zippy and Arthur) a “summer home” during the great long summer we have here.

You can see the black polyethylene (or similar) pool in the first picture below. It’s not super attractive to look at, so we built a frame for it and one of our friends offered to paint a long, attractive beachy scene on some canvas which we would then affix to the framework and then have a bright-looking enclosure.

Unfortunately, the canvas thing fell through and it took a little while to get up the momentum again but below I chronicle the update of the enclosure from a spartan frame to a painted beadboard accent piece.
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Here is the enclosure inverted so I can measure the beadboard and install the feet on it. I had to add some 2×4’s to raise it up a bit as Authur figured out how to get himself out of the pond and enclosure when it was at its original height.

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Here is the beadboard, I had them cut it at Home Depot so that all I needed to worry about was length, they were all the same width.

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After cutting the beadboard to size, painting it with KILZ, attaching the 2×4 feet and then the adjustable felt feet.

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Another angle of the above, also waiting for the application of wood putty to make up for a gap caused by the original frame and my complete inability to compensate for it when measuring and cutting the side panels. I tried twice and got the exact same gap both times, even though I could SWEAR I took extra special precautions the second time. Ah well, I suppose that’s why I spend most of my time working with computers rather than with wood…

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Now with the paint applied and drying on it. Michelle did this part. She’s much more skilled than I at painting so she did the two finishing coats.

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Arthur enjoying his new enclosure. I can see now that he can no longer see over the top of the enclosure. I need to get some nice, flat fieldstones to build up his sunning area so that he can see outside but can’t use them to “bridge” his way out of the enclosure on his own.

Starling Art

These are some of the noisiest birds you could ever want to have in your neighborhood. But it is always fun to go outside and yell “Boo!”. It’s quite a show to see them take off in unison swoop around almost as a single entity and then land back in the trees again.

I spotted this picture on Boing Boing

Canada Day Party

Since the July 1st / July 4th weekend is SO busy we’ve decided to host a small Canada Day get together with some of our Canadian friends.

In preparation for it I needed to find the Canadian National Anthem (the official lyrics for which can be found here).

It is amazing to me how many truly lackluster the renditions of the Canadian National Anthem are out there. Most of them easily transport you back to those days in grade school where the old (even then) upright pianos were clanging away the songs in the midst of a cacophony of kids’ voices shrilling out the songs imprinted on ditto paper.

I finally found a pretty good version by, of all people, Céline Dion. I’m not her hugest fan but she does a great job with the both O Canada and The Star Spangled Banner. Appropriate for this weekend. For the songs you’ll need to jump to about the 3 minute mark as there is a brief interview that preceeds her singing.