Outdoors

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Our Cats

We got two kittens in the beginning of summer, but  they are teenager-cats now.

This is Shadow, who is a very good hunter.  She only likes to go to places her sister has already explored.

This is Shadow holding a chipmunk that she caught!

aaa

This is Patches, she is the explorer. When we first got the kittens, Patches explored the house. I guess that after a while Patches must have told Shadow that it was safe because Shadow started going with her everywhere.

This is Patches exploring our brush pile.

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That’s all for now!

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Charcoal Grill Project (1)

We recently purchased a very nice gas grill.  It’s really great, but we sometimes still like the flavor of charcoal grilling.   Rather than just buy a charcoal grill, we decided to build one from scratch.

Here is the beginning of the base.  We are going for a dry-stack look, but using mortar to make it very sturdy.

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Mixing mortar in the wheelbarrow.  Not too much water!

Mixing Mortar

Using rubber gloves to lay down the mortar between the stones.  It’s like a big puzzle.

Adding Mortar

 

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Spiders and bees and really small toads?

This photograph is of what appears to be a very small toad.  The item beside it is a 1/2″ diameter section of rebar, making this little critter about 1/16″ long.  I barely saw him.

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This bee appeared to be out it the cold a bit too long and was pretty sluggish.  This is taken on the back of by glove.

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Here is a daddy long leg in the garden, running as fast as he could.

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Restoring a Driveway

As part of an utility easement I negotiated with an adjacent property owner, we agreed that I would improve his driveway using fill from my property.

This took hundreds (if not thousands) of tons of dirt and rock to complete.  Nice!

Another excellent project completed by Simondale Excavating from Tyrone, PA.

 

Before:

 

 

After:

 

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Panoramic of Winter Scene

This one was comprised of about 87 overlapping photographs.

Eli took his new tripod, on a bitter cold day, and set it up on the “top tier” of cleared ground, capturing about 270 degrees of the scene.

Again, we used Hugin to stitch it together.

(click image to see full size version)

 

The cameramen at work…

 

 

And lastly, here is the recorded “activity” in the new Home School software.

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Panoramic Image of Woods and 3 Driveways

Using the Motorola Droid X, I took about 10 photographs at 5MP, freehand.  Then I used Hugin, the open source image stitching software.

I had never stitched images together, but I must say this tool is impressive.  The images were all various shades, angles, and since taken freehand, not straight.

However, see the result below…