At Lessons and Carols, St Paul’s Episcopal, Haymarket, Virginia
Family and Friends
The weekly Zoom
Reservoir Dried Up
A government website says “The Youghiogheny River Reservoir is approximately …16 miles long with … an average depth of 54 ft and a maximum depth of 121 ft…”. It’s crossed by US Route 40, known at one time as the National Road, and always a convenient stop for a picnic on the journey between home and Dad’s. On holiday weekends in the summer it has powerboats and sometimes water skiiers. But thanks to this year’s drought, Elspeth and Tim’s family found it almost dry, and got to walk onto the old bridge built many years before the reservoir was there. The first picture shows the current road bridge, way up in the air above Cora.
3H Half-Marathon
Hazy, Hot, and Humid, on the Dahlgren Heritage Rail Trail, 3 August 2024
Zooming
Gareth showing the cedar waxwing, and identifying the downy woodpecker behind me (which had been watching me refill the birdfeeder earlier today, not six feet away).
Dad’s 103rd
Photo by Erin
Under Sail
Erin/Dylan Run/Ride
Race: Heppe 15k
Fredericksburg. Karen H and I each got an age-group first place, and Stephen F got a second. Stephen and I formed the entirety of the M70+ age-group. The race directors are chiropractors Erica and Scott Heppe. My time was 1:27:54, average pace 9:26 per mile, overall 45th of 85 runners.
Solar Eclipse, 8 April 2024
We had our weekly Zoom chat April 7th. Gareth said “Today’s clear sky was great for eclipse photo dry runs… Spent hours fussing with cardboard filter-adapters and such.” He’s the only one of us living in the Zone of Totality.
Sandy and I weren’t in the zone of totality, and we’d heard we’d only get about an 86% eclipse. We sat on the porch for the duration. Assuming only 14% of sunlight, we’d expected our afternoon to get much darker than the slight reduction we experienced. Another puzzle for me was it seemed as though the moon didn’t cross the sun in a straight line. It entered the sun from the lower right, seemed to move straight right-to-left, then veered upwards and departed from the top middle. (Somebody living only a few miles from us made a Facebook post showing exactly how we saw the eclipse.) Gareth thought if we’d viewed the eclipse at noon from the equator, then the path might have been straight. Here’s Nick’s photo of Dad, followed by one or two more for the scrapbook.
Another view, via Facebook and a NASA website:
