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18 August 2010 tagged 2010triptomaine, bad little falls, history, machias, maine with no comments
as is the case with many places in the area, machias was named by the passamaquoddy people. the name machias means, “bad little falls”, a reference to the falls the run through town. while not the most impressive falls you might ever see, i imagine the passamaquoddy wanting to warn folks about the stretch of rive that might result in a bad little fall if you ever went over the falls.
turns out, the falls were also a great location for setting up a saw mill and the town was officially “settled” in 1763 ( although it has a long history prior to that date ), when one of odin’s relatives joined with 16 others came to the area to build a saw mill next to the bad little falls.
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17 August 2010 tagged 2010triptomaine, clam, day2236, ericiv, mollusc, odin with no comments
ed: this is also the day i realized i probably wouldn’t rely on my crappy loaner cell phone’s camera to document the trip.
odin helps pack up after our night in greenfield, massachusetts where we collapsed after 13 hours of driving.
at last, we’re finally on last leg of the trip to maine!
i’m sure the folks in cars around us wondering why we were all very excited to see pushkin gallery as we drove through greenfield, massachusetts. we all miss our pushkin though i doubt the feeling is mutual since he’s staying with a dog sitter who has 3 other dogs!
after 1,700 miles of driving, we finally arrived in machias, maine and the first order of business? a big plate of clams from helen’s restaurant. while we wait, odin enjoys a maine root sarsaparilla root beer.
finally, the clams arrived! mmm mmmm molluscs!
strangely, i still can’t get odin to try the delicious molluscs steamed to perfection.
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16 August 2010 tagged 2010triptomaine, jetta, tdi, volkswagen with no comments
on our trip to maine, after almost 600 miles I suppose it was time to stop for fuel.
gotta love the TDI engine and getting *almost* 50 miles per gallon. i could have broken 50 if i wasn’t driving just a titch over 65 mph.
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16 August 2010 tagged day2234, ella, ericiv, jagger, odin, smile with no comments
odin enjoys a moment with some of his cousins, pretty much unaware that he’ll be spending at least 10 hours in the car tomorrow as we make our way to snowdeal ancenstral homeland.
whooweee, they grow up so fast.
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14 August 2010 tagged book, day2233, down east, ericiv, maine, odin, reading with no comments
whoohoo – we’re heading down east for a long overdue vacation!
theoretically, we’re leaving in 40 minutes 
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14 August 2010 tagged animal, chicken, hen, thegirls with no comments
we’re leaving on vacation and we have A Chicken Sitter to watch after The Girls.
hopefully we have as many chickens when we get home as we did when we left!
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14 August 2010 tagged flooding, la farge, wisconsin with no comments
i decided to bail on work after getting 4" of rain in 2 hours just a wee bit concerned that i’d get stranded with no clear route home. i didn’t know it at the time, but the roads were officially "closed" adn nobody had time to put up signs.
they say you really shouldn’t drive over water running over a roadway because it’s always moving faster than you think. it’s hard to tell from this photo but the water was moving at a pretty good clip.
i decided to wait and see if the jetta on the other side made it over.
it did, so i went for it, which – really – is The Wrong Decision.
there was an impressive amount of debris across the road a little further down the way from a stream that turned into a torrent and jumped its banks. even more impressive how quickly crews were cleaning it up. thankful i didn’t try to drive through the deluge any sooner and found myself at that spot when the debris came crashing through.
and doubly happy that i didn’t find myself on this hill when the torrent of water coming down the hillside decided to follow the path of least resistance. phew!
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10 August 2010 tagged card, cards, day2228, ericiv, odin, old maid with no comments
odin and i were playing a round of old maid ( which i had no idea evolved from an ancient gambling game in which the loser pays for the drinks ) and i noticed a flash of devilishness cross his face as he not-so-subtly arranged the cards in a not-so-subtle attempt to influence my selection of cards from his hand.
odin, after a few rounds of watching me pass up on the extended card, grew puzzled. “poppi, why aren’t you taking this card.”
“which card?”
“this card, you know, this one.” ( presumably the “old maid” card that you don’t want to get left with at the end of the game )
“oh, i don’t know, i think i don’t want that one.”
“oooooh, yeeeeesssss, you dooooooooo.”
while it’s cute to watch him push the boundaries of the rules, i think we need to work on his poker face.
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10 August 2010 tagged bee, flower, plant, sunflower with no comments
ah yes, time for another photo of one of the high-oil sunflowers that grow in and around cropp/organic valley this time of year to be pressed into biodiesel. some might recall the sunnier side of biodiesel or odin crossing over into or from another space/time in middle of a field of sunflowers. some of sunflower shots have even ended up on the side of mobile biodiesel press.
this year i decided to “go small” and caught a little bee of some sort improvising as it attempts to collect pollen. if you look closely you can see it’s resting its feet on a floret as it streches to gather The Good Stuff.
bonus points will be awarded to anyone who can tell me what kind of bee it is.
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9 August 2010 tagged trebuchet with no comments
some might recall a year ago when i thought it’d be fun to build a trebuchet and later discovered that there was on in the area. already built! and ready for launching stuff. so some friends and i packed it up, moved it and attempted to fling things. only to discover that it was harder to fling things than we thought, mainly because we didn’t anticipate how much counter weight you need – about 100x the weight of the thing you’re flinging. so a 5 pound object needs 500 pounds of counterweight, which – if you think about it – is a lot of weight.
well, it took a year, but we finally got the whole gang together and launched some water bottles filled with rocks about a 100 yards which was about the best we could do with the 250 pounds of counterweight we had attached.
it’s a low-tech trebuchet with none of the fancy mechanisms for holding the launching arm in place before letting it loose.
you have to pull the arm down and let go and hope and pray your feet don’t get tangled in the lines.
it you look closely you can see the bottle in the upper left portion of the frame.
i had hoped we could launch watermelons, or boulders or flaming cauldrons of tar. but alas, the laws of physics dictated that we could only launch water bottles filled with pebbles with 250 pounds of counterweight.
certainly not going to storm the castle with water bottles!
all-in-all, flinging water bottles the length of a football field was fun, but the marauder in me did wish we could have flung something more substantial. but the 100x counterweight rule of thumb is brutal. the trebuchet was creaking under the strain of the 250 pounds of counterweight and it’d take some serious design chops to build a trebuchet that could, say, launch a flaming piano.
hmmmmmm….maybe next year?