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Deltaville Maritime Museum ~ Chesapeake Float 2016

 John England’s Chesapeake Deadrise under construction.

  

The rain moved in overnight. However, “rain” does not adequately convey the phenomenon of water falling from the sky at the rate of 3 inches an hour. It’s like there’s a crew overhead bailing out the clouds with 5 gallon buckets.

Good news is the boom tent is keeping the interior dry. So there’s that. People slowly venture out in foulies and wellies, collect on the front porch of the old store with hot coffee to watch.

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Chesapeake Float 2016 ~ Cocks Crow

 Sunrise at Freeport Landing

 

Dawn is very noisy. There’s a rooster. A rooster very near, like next to my head. The sun is barely up, and he is hard at work. Also, something else making a racket I can’t quite place. A sheep? No sleeping through it, rise and shine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lightning #2833 with the boom tent

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Global Shipping, Visualized

This is fascinating. An interactive map of all commercial shipping worldwide in 2012.

 

 

You can pan and zoom to different parts of the world. Turn on color codes corresponding to shipping types for a dazzling visual effect. Play the audio/video for a quick tour and narration of what’s going on. Really interesting.

via Kiln via The Big Picture 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chickahominy River ~ Fossils & History

Lunch break on a beach 

 

Inside a broad cove there’s a sand beach, out of the wind beneath a bluff. Cypress knees serve well for docking cleats.

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Oysters, Alabama Style

 

 

When I was a kid, my dad, a traveling salesman, came home on the weekends. He drove all over the South, mostly small towns far from cities, from North Carolina to Florida and all the way to Mississippi.

Whenever he went through the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf Coast of Alabama he sometimes brought home oysters. Tired with roadburn, he’d pull into the driveway on a Friday evening and open the trunk of his old Mercedes diesel to reveal a bushel of Apalachicola oysters in a big burlap sack. We’d stand in the driveway in the twilight and eat them right out of the trunk.

Then we’d haul them around back in a wheelbarrow and invite all the neighbors over. Steam some on the grill under the same wet burlap, eat more raw. Oyster stew. Fried oysters. Oysters for days.

A great article in

The Bitter Southerner

 

“He beat the guy with a baseball bat, set him up in a rocking chair, and then shot him,” Brent says. “You might not want to get that graphic. You could just say it didn’t end well.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Datura Inoxia

Datura Inoxia time lapse

 direct Youtube link

 

One night, about 30 years ago, I was walking down a sidewalk in an old neighborhood in Richmond, on the way home from a social engagement. It was very late, the streets were empty. I was tired and pleasantly overstimulated – much scintillating conversation, coupled with subtle inebriants consumed on a visit with some very creative friends.

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Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

To Scale: The Solar System from Wylie Overstreet on Vimeo.

On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe.

A film by Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh

alexgorosh.com
wylieoverstreet.com

Copyright 2015

 

When my daughters were young we spent a lot of time looking at the sky. Comets, meteor showers, constellations, satellites, planets. On camping trips, especially; but sometimes we juat went out into the country to find dark places so we could see better.

Laying in the dew-wet grass, or bundled in winter coats on the still-warm hood of the car, we’d listen to the whippoorwills, the crickets and katydids, the owls, and distant trains, and look up into the big dark and empty that seems so full when the sky is clear.

In elementary school they made models for science projects, and posters. We used flashlights for the sun, and basketballs and baseballs for planets, and we tried to get our heads around the scale of things.

We are not alone, it seems. These guys did that, too, and tried to make it real on a much bigger scale. It’s beautiful on many levels.

via Colossal