at the niger seed feeder
Thanks, Gareth, for the loan of the big lens. Wikipedia has an interesting note about this bird seed, sometimes misnamed thistle: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizotia_abyssinica
124 Argyle Road
As seen recently on Google Maps from St Stephens Ave:
Built about 1900 maybe, Wena’s birthplace, the Roberts home for sixty years. Not in frame was a renovator’s sign, Project One. Changes since we knew it: the front garden gone for parking of course, with new entrance on St Stephens Ave. Also gone, both the side door to the street (you can just make out the new brickwork where the door with no doorknob used to be). The nearby door in the wall permitting entry to the back garden is also gone. So is Ieuan’s motorbike shed, revealing either an extra window or a new door to the scullery. (And are those two kitchen windows new? Otherwise Ieuan’s shed would have blocked them, and I don’t remember that.) Definitely new since we were there, perhaps replacing the leaky old scullery skylight, is a vaulted skylight perhaps providing light both to the scullery and the dining room, probably a very nice idea. And there’s a new skylight above the back bedroom. Not in frame here, but a rather fuzzy view on Google seems to show an almost derelict garage at the bottom of the back garden, with an entrance from St Stephens Ave. The satellite view of Argyle Road at this point shows the strikingly straight row of perhaps twenty houses, presumably all the same except for this, the only one with a turret (above the master bedroom, which Ieuan said was the coldest, draughtiest room in the house). This house was said to have been kept by the builder for himself. I think Granddad must have bought it on his schoolteacher’s salary about 1920. It sold in 2002 for £700,000.
Fifty years ago
Pics from the Queen Mary just before docking at Pier 90:
Also see Gareth’s animation on his website.
Here’s what we had been doing earlier:
(No direct response to any of those messages has yet arrived. However I did hear that year from a boy in the north of England presenting himself as an officer of the International Bottle Club.) Assuming the four-hour time difference and the coordinates were correct, I certainly got the London time wrong — it would have had to be four hours later, not earlier. And I was mistaken at that point about being in the middle of the Atlantic. We were almost there! Here’s what Google Maps makes of those coordinates today:
Here’s where we’d stayed the night before we sailed from Southampton:
House Lights Up
We replaced the incandescent icicles with LEDs (too many duds and half-lit strings), but miss the warm glow of the old kind and wish these weren’t so blue.
Working the election Nov 6th
We 15 election officials at the Hartwood precinct (in the new assembly hall of the historic Hartwood Presbyterian Church) served 226 voters per hour for 13 hours (6am to 7pm). We had four laptop check-in stations in almost constant use, and one more at the help desk in frequent use for special cases. Two printers issued check-in tickets, exchanged for ballots at our single ballot table. We had 14 ballot booths, one combination scanner/ballot box, and one touch-screen/audio electronic voting machine reserved for just three visually challenged voters. All others voted with Stafford County’s usual paper scan sheet ballot. A few of us did an hour or two of setup the day before. All of us convened on election day by 5am and worked until 9pm. I took paperwork and voting machines to the courthouse after that, and was home and in bed by 10pm. Most of the results below appeared on the website of the state board of elections next morning, although it took a week for the provisional ballot results to appear there. [On November 15th, I inserted below a chart from Google showing national results.] At our precinct eight provisional ballots were collected — none of our voters had to use the specially designated provisional ballots for voters unable to present identification on election day. (Eligibility of provisional voters is evaluated by the electoral board in the days after the election in order to determine whether or not to count their ballots at that point.) We had to replace about 40 spoiled ballots for voters who accidentally voted for more than one choice within a given race. About fifteen handicapped or elderly people were able to vote curbside from their cars — I did five together at one point. Several came early, in front of a hundred others standing in line, but none came in the last few hours at the end of the day. There was no line when we closed the doors at 7pm, at which point there was only one voter left in the room.
Hurricane Sandy
Sandy and I survived Sandy. Lost power from about 9pm to 6am, slept in the basement for fear of the house being blown away (or bashed by the nearest oak tree). Outside things are quite wet and a little battered . . .
. . . but doggone, I need to get out with the chain saw to fix the back fence before the next time the dogs need to go out.
Hurricane Sandy weather statistics from near Heflin Road, a couple of miles from our house:
Dilwyn was here!
October 19th we visited Mount Vernon (but did not take the river cruise), then walked the South Valley Trail in Prince William Forest.
Dilwyn tried to fit in, even wore his half-marathon shirt, but after breakfast had to leave us for a long drive to South Carolina. We went south too. Erin was in Fredericksburg for the annual alumnae game at the University of Mary Washington. She had a ball. They won.
Tomato harvest completed
Columbus Day yesterday, a Monday holiday for the federal government and a few lucky others. We pulled out the tomato plants, pruned the forsythia, and grubbed up three or four heavy bagfuls of wild mushrooms from the new patio garden. Sandy made pumpkin muffins from the new church cookbook, but they’re not lasting well.
Prognostication for November
(I added race results notes on 11/29/2012 to the bottom of this article.)
Borrowed from campaign documents:
No, not that race. This is the 103rd annual Run for the Diamonds nine mile race in Berwick, Pennsylvania, to be held on Thanksgiving morning. In 2008 I ran 1:25:53 (pace 9:32/mile) and in 2010 I ran 1:18:17 (pace 8:42/mile). Like Lynchburg, this race includes some seriously hilly terrain, but unlike Lynchburg, it’s all downhill after the half-way point. Hoping my third attempt might continue my trend. See 2010 writeup.
Update posted 11/29/2012: I finished 21st of 41 men aged 60-64, time 1:24:21, pace 9:25. This was 6 minutes slower than in 2010, but 1 minute faster than in 2008. The 475′ total climb of the Run for the Diamonds nine-miler at Berwick is 64% greater than the 304′ climb of the Virginia Ten-Miler in Lynchburg! QED: yes, it is a tougher race.
Update posted 11/29/2012, being my race report submitted to Dead Runners Society and to Runners Gazette:
The 103rd Run for the Diamonds nine-miler occupied 1,614 finishers on Thanksgiving morning at Berwick, Pennsylvania. The weather was perfect, with bright sunshine, temperatures in the mid-40s, and even atop the ridge not a hint of a breeze. The arrowhead-shaped course starts and finishes downtown, mostly uphill out into the country and mostly downhill on the way back. Mapmyrun.com says the course climbs 476 feet. The most strenuous part of that climb is packed into the unrelenting third mile up the ravine from Foundryville to Summerhill. During the 2010 race, the steep camber and icy road here had me worried I could slip and slide left into the ditch. I was glad for the guard rail on the right, where it could otherwise be a long slide down into the creek below. But this year the entire course was dry pavement. Before the four-mile mark near the top, three ladies were kept very busy handing out tissues — despite the sunshine, evidently there were a good many runny noses at this point. This race has great community support. In the town, the course was almost entirely lined by cheering residents, but even out in the country there were dozens of community gatherings of spectators. I was five hours drive from home, but somebody with a roster at mile six cheered for me by my name and hometown. I heard my name called as I crossed the finish line too. Winners included Derek Nakluski from Kitchener, Ontario, 45:51, pace 5:06, and Karaleigh Millhouse from State College, PA, 52:58, pace 5:54. As a solid middle-of-the-packer in my age group, and with a two-hour drive to Thanksgiving dinner, I did not stay to witness the awards presentation, but 22 diamond rings and pendants were due to be awarded as well as many other prizes. The two $500 prizes for new course records would have gone unclaimed this year. Those records remain with Peter Pfitzinger, 1980, 43:20.9, and Heidi Peoples, 2009, 50:35.
Addendum provided to Runners Gazette:
The finishers were 41% men and 59% women. Their individual paces averaged 8:37 and 9:51 respectively.
The first man with an 8:37 pace took 547th place of 949. The first woman with a 9:51 pace took 381st place of 665.
About 24% of finishers listed Berwick or Bloomsburg as their hometown, and 90% listed Pennsylvania as home state. 10% of the finishers were out-of-staters, travelling from as far away as Alaska, California, and Florida, with larger contingents from New York (34), New Jersey and Ontario (13 each), North Carolina (12), and Virginia (11). The Canadians could have had a five-hour drive to Berwick — but they were rewarded by hearing Edwin Livsey’s annual clarinet performance of both the Canadian and American national anthems at the starting line.
A detour on the trip to Lynchburg
Stopped here Friday afternoon about 7 miles north of Lovingston hoping to get a few quick snaps of the slabs I’d hoped to find in the Dameron Family Graveyard (on behalf of Findagrave.com.) But as I couldn’t find it, I will have to pass that assignment on to somebody else with time and energy to identify the location of the cemetery.