Rolling On One

Last year about the 15th of June we went out on the deck in Casco around midnight and saw six luna moths. Last Friday as soon as we got to Casco we turned on the deck light to see if we could attract some. When I went outside a little later I thought I saw one flying through the yard, but wasn’t sure. A little later there was a lot of action! In fact, I got swatted a couple of times by moth wings. They’re certainly not so massive that it hurts, but you do notice. The moths were making a lot of noise hitting the house with their wings, and taking quite a while to settle on the house.

I don’t think I got such good pictures as I had last year. Maybe it’s a question of not really knowing how to use the new camera. Here they are, though.

This one shows how translucent the wings are:

In the next picture you can see that the wings don’t necessarily last very long. We were a little surprised that the moth on the lower right was able to fly.

This one is taken from indoors, of a moth on the screen window on the other side of the house. You’re looking at the underside of a luna moth.

After seeing all the moths last year, Arlene decided that the name of our house (a friend who has a second home in western Massachusetts, who always refers to that place as “Crow Moon”, felt very strongly that we had to have a name for it) was going to be “Claire de Luna”. That sort of gets loons in there as well as the luna moths. I got a lettering template kit for my router so I can carve signs, maybe trail signs eventually as well as a name for the house and whatever else seems appropriate. On my third try I was satisfied with the results:

Several weeks ago (news flash! early May. The Fast Lane (= Easy Pass, automatic turnpike toll deal) statement says we got off the Maine Turnpike in Portland on May 12) Arlene found a bedspread advertised on the Maine Craig’s List. Someone had brought it back from Thailand years before but never used it. It looked like the Hmong stitchery that she likes. After many emails back and forth, which turned out to be complicated by the fact that the seller doesn’t really have email and was getting a friend to help with the posting, we arranged to stop in Portland on our way north.

The people selling it turned out to live in a lovely residential section of Portland that we had never been in before, in a condo in a renovated school building. The seller had been working in Thailand doing environmental law with some international aid agency.

Anyway, here’s how our bed in Casco looks now:

The pear trees seem to be doing fine. At least, they’re still alive. If they don’t make it, it’s not the fault of the nursery nor UPS. Here they are with lots of new leaves (maybe hard to see against the backgrounds):

Not only did I not murder four pear trees, but I also didn’t kill two raspberry canes. It seemed a little silly, considering how many wild raspberries there are on the property, but I bought a package of two cultivated raspberry plants at Hannafords several weeks ago. I didn’t read the directions carefully and hadn’t soaked and spread out the roots before planting them. They looked completely dead the last two times we were there, but this weekend there was new growth from the bottom of the canes. So I can hope to have some cultivated raspberries next summer, and maybe I’ll put in more of them next spring and see if I can really grow some under control!

I spent a lot of time thinning apples on the trees. That’s a step I hadn’t realized I needed to do until I read the booklet that came as directions with the pear trees. I checked in the book The Apple Grower and it concurred that it’s important to thin fruit on trees, at least apples, to one fruit per cluster. Maybe not having done it last year is why the red delicious tree, which bore a huge number of small fruit last summer, has set almost no fruit this year. At any rate, getting fewer but bigger fruit sounds like a good idea. Here’s the basket of marble-sized apples I cut off the trees.

The raised bed vegetable garden was pretty dry. The radishes are much in evidence, but aren’t ready to pick yet. Basil seedlings are up, lettuce and beet seedlings can use thinning, and marigold, tomato, basil, and pepper plants are in. Pumpkin plants are growing in the corners, but I doubt that they will prosper in this little soil. I put string bean seeds in this weekend.

And finally, this wildflower is growing in the lawn. There are more of them in the logging road. I’m disappointed in the way it photographed; maybe the flash wiped out the color, which is a deep magenta.

Gene Harriman of Plymouth MA posted these pictures of a bird club trip to look for sea birds and whales.

Whale watching enthusiasts (this means you, Maimun) take a look!

I haven’t linked from here to the Music Animation Machine, for some reason, mostly not thinking of it sooner.

I must have found it by searching for Claire de Lune, and finding links to a piece of music by that name by Debussy, one of which was a YouTube clip of a video generated by the Music Animation Machine. It looks like a color version of a player piano roll, but that’s just one of eight or a dozen different kinds of animation it can produce. Some time when you have time to get lost in a web site, give that a look.

I broke my digital camera on Memorial Day when I dropped it on my Aunt Mimi’s patio. It won’t extend the lens and keeps telling me I should take the lens cap off, but it’s already off. I’ve had the camera for over five years. If I had been buying film all that time, and taken as many pictures as I did, it would have cost lots more just for film than I spent for the camera. So, I couldn’t complain.

We were in Newton this past weekend for Arlene’s college reunion at Brandeis. One of her college suitemates, Jeannette, came up from southern New Jersey with her husband Rick for the reunion and stayed at our house on Friday and Saturday nights. We all went over to Brandeis for a class dinner on Friday. On Saturday morning Arlene and Jeannette went over mid-morning and Rick and I went to Newtonville Camera so I could get a new camera. I let them sell me a Nikon Coolpix L5. One of the things I like about it is that it has a special portrait mode which sets the flash to automatic red-eye reduction, the focus to face recognition focusing (so it figures out where there is a face, and focuses there!), and the depth of field to not much, so the rest of the picture has softer focus than the face. After taking the picture of my sweater sleeves, I immediately tried the portrait mode on Rick and Jeannette, with the following results. The reduced depth of field doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference, or it doesn’t show here. Maybe it’s more obvious if you look at the pictures full size.

I haven’t gotten much farther on my sweater than the last time I wrote. It’s warmer, not so motivating to work on a sweater as in the winter, and there are more other things to do. But I am doing a little on it at a time, and the sleeves are about halfway up from the cuffs. I don’t say “halfway done” because of course half the length of a sleeve is a lot less than half the work.

Hmm, the shape looks pretty irregular. Must still be knitting that fair isle stuff too tight, because that seems to be what’s pulling in.

I will say, I’m getting better at keeping the yarns from getting tangled in the circular needles. Finally, after many many mistakes and having to pull balls of yarn out from between the needles when the yarn got twisted around them, I found that I have to put the needle UNDER the ends of both colors of yarn before starting the next part of the round.

Someone left a comment recently asking if I had a plan for an inkle loom. I didn’t then, but I do now.

An inkle loom is good for weaving narrow pieces of fabric up to about four feet long, or longer if you build it with more zigzags than the one in this plan — I mean more dowels sticking out from the uprights for the warp to zigzag between. Anyway, one like this is good for weaving belts, guitar straps, handbag straps, decorative trim for clothing, etc.

Recommended material for this one is fir porch stepping, nominal 5/4 inch thick (tell the people at the lumber yard “five quarter fir porch stepping”) cut to about 2 1/4 inches wide, edges rounded off.

The plan came out with dimensions in decimals of an inch. By no means does it need to be precise! Think of all the “.38” as 3/8 inch converted to a decimal and rounded off; likewise all the “.13” are 1/8 inch. If your lengths are within a quarter inch of those given it’ll still work fine.

The hardest part of this plan is boring a hole straight through the tension block. If you have a drill press, it’ll work. Otherwise, good luck coming out anywhere near the middle of the block on the far end. I used to use a big long 3/8 inch carriage bolt as the axle for the tension block, with a big wing nut and washer to hold it on. Number 10 or 12 by 1 3/4 inch flat head wood screws are good for holding the parts together.

OK, here’s the plan. Write or comment with questions, and I’ll add more comments or edit this post to answer them. Or if this isn’t clear, I can make drawings of the individual parts. Probably if you want to make a loom from this drawing, you should save the .jpg separately so you can view it full size.

I’m turning in my dumpster diver credentials. On the way home from work I passed up, out on the curb,
one bicycle. Years ago I would have taken it to Bikes Not Bombs, but I don’t travel in that direction much these days.
two gas-powered lawnmowers. After fixing my electric mower, maybe I could try them? No, thanks. Noisy, have to start ’em, have to buy gas.
one gas grill. Or electric? I prefer my charcoal Weber, anyway.

I’m reading Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. I’m a quarter of the way through the third book, The Amber Spyglass. Don’t tell me how it ends.

When I was a kid I read a Tarzan book, Tarzan and the City of Gold which greatly impressed me at the time because it switched among three different groups of characters, probably a chapter for each, who would eventually find that their fates were intertwined. I had never read anything so complex before. The DaVinci Code is that way, also.

This book is like that, but even more so. This one seems like a three-dimensional chess board, with not only different groups of characters, but also different levels of reality and planes of existence with only limited ways to cross between them. It’s not really confusing to read, but it certainly is complex.

Now, for a review? I wouldn’t be up to the third book if I didn’t like them. I think they’re tremendous. It took me a very long time to get into the series, probably at least a third of the way through the first book, but then I was hooked. I think they’re way better than the Tolkien books. The characters are more interesting and more developed, not all just good or evil. The different kinds of monsters and non-human characters are more imaginative than Tolkien’s. The setting doesn’t rely on a map of a made-up world, but is in parts of our own world that you rarely read about and don’t know well — the Arctic north of Scandinavia and Russia, Siberia, the Himalayas, as well as alternative-universe England and Italy.

One thing I don’t like is that there are a zillion in-the-nick-of-time rescues. They are excused as not really coincidences but as happening because other characters have ways of knowing when help is needed. Not everyone is rescued in the nick of time, though; that at least adds a little versimilitude. Other than that, there are relatively few gimmicks. There are two gimmicks so far as I’ve read that do have phenomenal powers. The first two books are named for them, so I expect that there is another one coming up in the third book.