Category: Life

Grandmommy’s Clock

My paternal grandmother stitched this clock from a kit many years ago. It’s spent most of the past decade carefully packed away in a box since it was damaged. It had fallen on the floor when someone brushed against it, shattering the glass and mangling the frame.  A few weeks ago I found it as I was making sure I had found all the boxes with photos.  Instead of putting it away, I carried it to Jack and asked if he could glue the frame back together.  It took him about 20 minutes.

The clock originally had a cord to supply electricity to the workings, but the cord had been cut at some point.  Rather than try to repair it, I went to Michaels and bought a battery operated clock kit.  The brass hands in the kit didn’t show up very well across the room, so Jack sprayed the hands with Copper Rustoleum. Without the flare of the camera flash, the hands are about the same color as the Roman numerals.

I am very happy to have the clock working again, hung on the wall in a low-traffic area.

Bridge Building

Tuesday, Jack and I went to help a friend put her garden bridge together. I didn’t do much besides observe and help carry it to its final place. There were three large sections and three structural posts so it went together a lot faster than I thought it would.

The finished result:

Hazmat Spill near Monument Colorado

I don’t know how many of my readers know that I live near Monument Colorado.  This morning my mother woke me with a telephone call to tell me there was an evacuation near Monument due to a leak of hydrochloric acid.  A train car is leaking and there is a chance of a vapor cloud.  I had to look up the cross streets in Google maps to find the evacuation area.  I think we are a comfortable distance away but am monitoring the situation via local television.  Since I don’t normally watch local television, I am once again amazed at the the commercial to content ratio.

I hope they get the area cleaned up quickly so that 250 families that have been evacuated can return.  Trains along that track usually carry coal down from the north, or the empties from the south, but we’ll occasionally see other types of freight.  The tracks, to judge from the railroad crossing we use every day, are well maintained.  The twitter hash tag is #monumentacidleak.

Stalking the Wild Sunrise

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November means Chinook winds, and Chinook winds lead to dramatic sunrises.  It also means it is warm enough that I am out on the deck at dawn in my jammies snapping pictures.   My first encounter with the Chinook was my first night in our house, about this time of year eighteen years ago.  I was in a sleeping bag on the floor of the master bedroom surrounded by our dogs in their crates.  (Jack was still working in Texas.) I lay there feeling the house shake in the winds and kept reminding myself that the house had lasted seven years and that it was unlikely it would blow away my first night.  I was partially wrong:  we found most of the shingles from the garage to the east of the house.  Keeping the shingles on the house has been an ongoing battle ever since,  though the new roof put on last spring seems to be holding, so far. Colorado is tough on houses.