Zoooooooooom!

Does it get any funner than this? 

Alchemy

Alchemy (noun): a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life.

Ancient alchemists used chemicals and science, originally in an attempt to turn lead into gold. In a similar vein, I'm using chemicals and science, hoping to turn my green-black pool into blue. It's Memorial Day, which means time for the pool cover to come off. I've poured $300 worth of chemicals into the pool, and now it's a waiting game ...

I hope I do better than last year. 

Newton's First Law

An object at rest tends to stay at rest ... at least until after the object has had a nap!

Connections

Click to enlarge.

It's not the spiral of rings that are connected here, but rather the boy with his toy.

Submitted to Macroday.com (my very first entry ... on any photography site ANYWHERE!). Thanks, SaturnGirl, for the connection.

Talented

Went to Daddy and Sue's B-Day party yesterday. Daddy's birthday is on the 9th, and Sue's is on the umm, err, the 17th?? But we've always celebrated them on a shared day for as long as I can remember. In later years, with everyone out of the house, we crammed my birthday in, too. That didn't happen this year, although my baby sister, uncertain if she would see me in June, brought me an early birthday present -- two presents, really:

A thermal coffee mug (*wrinkles nose*) with my birth sign on it, an idea that she probably got when she started visiting my blog. And while I'm not a big coffee drinker, I absolutely love the mug (honestly, the neatest thing about coffee drinkers is that they get to drink from mugs that have really neat art on them). My new gemini mug is very cool, and will keep my cokes well-chilled!

But even more cool was the digital scrapbook (CD) she gave me, which was like a magical walk through time. I spent a bit of this morning sneaking peeks at it while at work. I really like it! Here's one of the photo's from the bunch:

That's me, as a young teen-ager, at one of my favorite (?) haunts. I didn't copy her entire scrap image here, but there was an inscription on the bottom of this picture that read, "Talented: We all took piano lessons, but you were the most."

Awwww, thanks, kiddo ... I really like BOTH gifts, a lot!

Honey

This is Honey, one of two dogs at the PureGemini household. Honey is a retired racing dog, and she knows how to take it easy. While Tucker will run at the end of his lead, pacing back and forth the entire time he's outside, we just put a walking leash around Honey's neck, drop it on the ground, and she's off to find a nice spot in the sun. This pic is a couple months old -- snapped in March -- you can tell by the yellow grass. I love this look in her eye, "Ohhhh, sunshine -- so nice to be out of the house for the afternoon."

After the Storm

Today's blog was going to be entirely different, until this remarkable image appeared in my front yard. It's funny how you start to see things differently when you look with a photographer's eye. I was excited to see the rainbow, but disappointed that the sky wasn't blue on both sides of that color spray. I wonder if that's true of all rainbows. I was amazed at how bright the red maples were at the foot of my driveway, with the setting sun dazzling through them -- these are colors I expect to see in fall, not in spring!

This is my first "rainbow" shot, and I'm pretty happy with it (aside from the utility pole and powerlines going through the middle of it). But now I want to find more rainbows, so I can add to this new collection.

Stop and smell the ... tulips

Kinda depressing that all of the opening pictures on my new blog are centered entirely on my flooded basement. In a way, that was the reason for starting the blog ... to share my woe with family, friends and work mates. And while I'll have more pics to share in that saga, today it was a chance to sit out in the sun, soak up the rays, and stop for a moment to smell the tulips. 

And the walls came down

View from the basement. This is, or rather was, the "finished" half of the basement -- my office. The carpeting has been ripped up, the wallboard has been torn down on the north wall -- still have 3 walls to go. That's my favorite easy chair in center frame. When it was reclined all the way back it was oooh, so very cozy. I spent a night or two sleeping there. Now smashed to pieces and piled in the dumpster. Exercise eqiupment is just out of frame on the right, that got ruined, too. None of this is covered by insurance, frustrating!

The Trash Man Cometh

And he left a big, 'ole dumpster in my front yard.

The picture is flat. The dumpster is angled about 10-degrees downward on the left side because, as I've mentioned, I live on a hill. Here's the kicker ... the dumpster is on wheels! I'm actually a little worried that as I fill this thing up, it's going to roll right down the hill, across the street and through the garage of my neighbor. That would just be a grand finale to a wretched weekend! I've put some "chokes" in front of the wheels ... but I'm still a little "on edge" about it.

That pile to the right of my dumpster is all the stuff we hauled up before the container arrived. Sopping wet wall-to-wall rugs, soaked wallboard, ceiling tiles, my computer desk, hutch and filing cabinets, 3 computers, 24-port hub, college text books, children's toys ...

So much stuff, that as we piled it all up, I realized the 15-foot dumpster that we had ordered was not going to fit it all. Called the Waste Management center, told them to super-size me! The driver was kinda peeved when he finally arrived; apparently he had been minutes away with the smaller, 15' dumpster when he received the call from the dispatcher to bring it back and haul out a 30-foot dumpster.

The best thing about this picture? That big patch of blue sky in the top right corner. After 9-days of rain, we finally saw our old friend, Mr. Sun. Although as I write this, 10 hours after the picture was taken, it's already raining again.

Pumping Out the Basement

Ignore for the moment, as best you can, the putrid green color of my house (yes, I hope to paint it a different color some day). Ignore also the brown patches of "lay and grow" lawn turf near the side of my house (which although they were laid carefully and in compliance with the instructions, did not live up to their part of the agreement by growing). Ignore the wheel tracks cutting through the lawn, which were created by me yesterday as I carted 25-gallon totes full of water, in a child's plastic riding wagon, from the back bulkhead of my house to the front driveway.

What your attention should now be centered on is the creatively (albeit hastily) assembled water trough I made. The black, corrugated tubing that carries water up from the sump pump only extends 30-feet. Which means it carries the water from my basement and deposits it in my backyard, where it then seeps back into the ground, and undoubtedly back into the water shed underneath the foundation of my house (where it can rise back into my basement).

So I temporarily ripped a couple of the rain gutter spouts from the house (you can see the end of one such spout coming down near the Master Bathroom outhang) and extended the distance the pumped water moves away from my house to just a bit further down the front yard. This probably didn't accomplish much, but at least it moves the water closer to a slope that flows down to the street. And that made me feel better.

The green garden hose that also feeds into this water trough comes from the second sump pump, loaned by my sister-in-law. What you can't see very well from the angle of this picture is the amount of water that's flowing out of the trough. The water is JETTING out, filling the full pipe and puddling at my feet. The two rain gutter pipes are not welded together, or even loosely connected. I just laid them end-to-end. There's some trickle of water coming out that small gap in the middle, but mostly the water just hops over the gap as it comes flooding down toward the second pipe.

It's not much to look at, but it sure beat bailing the water out by hand.

Under Water

This is a picture of my basement, under approximately 4-inches of water. It still amazes me that I live high on a hill, and my basement floods repeatedly. This is the second flood we've had since moving into the house, and it wasn't until after our first flood that we learned the previous tenants had been flooded many times, too. But that's another story.

This flood came during the mid-May deluge of rain, more than 12-inches in Greater Manchester and surrounding communities. They're calling this the 70-year flood and in other parts of the state, it's tearing down bridges, flooding over damns, and sweeping away roads. The only thing that kept me sane the past 12-hours is seeing news footage of other people who are worse off than we are.

I have a sump pump in my basement, of course, but even though it's pumping water out from under my foundation at a rate of 1-gallon every 5 seconds (yes, I timed it), it just isn't enough to keep up with the run-off from my neighbors yard (who happen to live behind me, and just a little higher on the same hill).

You can see form the photo that the water is actually down several inches. There's a water line on the foundation support pipe, and a more evident one on the cardboard storage box in the top right corner. I estimate the water rose as high as 8-10 inches. It ruined many boxes of Christmas decorations, some of my old RPG manuals, and files of "not so important" papers (mostly past year tax returns). I lost two beautiful posters that I had framed for my office, back when I used to manage from an office (rather than the cube farm, that I now manage from). Crates filled with childrens' toys, which are no longer played with, fell over and got soaked and mostly ruined.

I spent all day pumping out the water. In the early part of the morning, I was actually down there with a 5-gallon bucket and a smaller "transfer pail". While crouching precariously at the bottom of the bulkhead stairs, I would dip the pail into the flooded water, transfered that collected water to the larger 5-gallon bucket, and then carried the bucket up the stairs to the children's wagon -- where I would pour the 5-gallon bucket into a larger (25-gallon?) plastic tote. Rinse, repeat, and once the tote was filled, I'd haul the hole thing off to the front of the house and send it down the hill (hoping that my neighbors on the other side of my driveway weren't getting similarly flooded by my efforts).

Yes, it seemed futile to me, too ... but I had to do something! If you're curious, I timed myself at 1-gallon every 53-seconds. Not nearly as good as a sump pump, but it kept me busy. Finally, WD was able to get a spare sump pump from my sister-in-law (an investment I'm going to make myself, once local hardware stores are restocked on them -- they were completely sold out today). The combined output of both sump pumps started lowering the water about 1-inch every 1.5 hours. The basement was mostly empty of water (and by this, I mean that there was nothing more for the sump pump to collect, but there were still huge puddles that must now be mopped up) shortly after noon.

I'm going to spend the next couple of days fighting with my insurance company, hauling soggy trash and lost possesions up from the basement, and tossing them into a "rent-a-dumpster". I'll probably have Service Master come out and take all the mildew and mold out, since that's a project I really didn't manage well with the flast flood. And after that, I'm going to install two more sump pumps in my basement ... for next years flood season.

Welcome to my new project

So this is me, JP.

Yeah, that's me on the left, with a little to much sun on my face and a little too much grey in my beard. The picture was snapped at Higgins Beach in Maine, at Dad's summer cottage. It's one of the few photo's that I like, because my hair is short -- and not greasy. I have this bad habit of letting my hair grow too long, and then going to the gal that cuts my hair and telling her to lop it all off.

I posted this pic, because one of the first thing blogger asked me for was a self-portrait. So that's why I'm here ... but now I'm curious, why are you?