2:30 am, then 4

Last night I sat with Seth for a while after his 2 am feeding. Debbie has not been feeling 100% the last couple of days so, as I was already awake, I held Seth for a while until he went back to sleep. After having his diaper changed he was wide awake for a while and the two of us sat in the rocker and gazed at each other for a while. Eventually he drifted off. If anyone else kept me up that long, that late, I would be pretty cranky.

My Happy Boy!

Wating for Spaghetti

It's the last day of a long weekend and I am sitting here typing this while I wait for dinner to cook. Debbie is feeding Seth.

It was a good weekend all in all. We saw my whole family, plus some cousins and frineds. We ate well and slept reasonably well considering that we have a six week old.

I could have done with a little more leftover turkey, believe it or not. But that might actually be a good thing because we will probably have more turkey at Christmas.

A visit to Grandma and Grandpas

We spent an enjoyable day day over at the parents house today. Seth did very well. He even took a little nap for a while.

Tomorrow we have to go to a funereal viewing. A friends mother passed away last week. These things aren't fun, but they are necessary.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving Day! We are all thankful for the many blessings of this life. Family, friends, health, and happiness.

Happy Thanksgiving! Part 2

Foiled by Tripod.COM

I signed up on tripod.com to get some free web space today. They have some cool stuff like html resources and background images etc. I tried to use one for this page, but apparently they only allow you to host images that are for your tripod web site, which carries the obligatory adds. Oh well, the search for a cool background continues.

Rediscovering 4 am

It has been a long time since I was up at 4 am. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and read for a while, but I haven't done that in years. The last few nights the baby has not been sleeping soundly, so Debbie has been up with him a lot trying to get him settled. I sat with him from 4 to 4:30 or so and got him to sleep until 5:30, I think. It is kind of hard to remember.

My coffee tastes really good this morning for some reason...

Thinking about going to sleep

The baby is sound asleep and I am thinking about going to bed myself. It is nice to have this little person in the house.

Seth in the morning, Looking out the window.

Off on another visit

We are off to Woodbridge, VA today to visit some friends who haven't seen Seth yet. This is the beginning of the holiday season and they are already gathering for Thanksgiving so it is a good time for us to go see them. Debbie's best friend from high school has come up from Atlanta.

I'm sure we will be travelling around a lot over the next month or so.

The Trip Home

Mt St. Helens Continues to Erupt

I've been watching Mount St Helens lately through the Volcano Cam web page at http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/. Here is a photo of the new dome from November 12th.

Click for a larger image

More recent pictures of the dome can be seen here.
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Images/MSH04/

Working At Home

Debbie had a doctor appt today so I am home babysitting Seth. I can work from home if I need to. So, while he is napping, I am taking care of business. Not bad. Right now he is sleeping in his crib and I am sitting next to him in the rocker "blogging." I suppose I should go finish the proposal I am working on.

Baptism Class

Today we went to the baptism class at the church. A couple of years ago they started this class to give parents an opportunity to learn something about baptism before they actually have the baby baptized. It was ok. I guess the best thing about it was the opportunity to focus on why we do this in the first place.

Another Saturday Outing

The three of us went on an antiqueing expedition today to north central Maryland. It was a nice sunny day and good for a trip in the car. Seth sleeps when we are driving so he was pretty relaxed all day.

I ended up buying some depression glass. A sugar and creamer and a coffee cup. They are all Block Optic pattern, the sugar/creamer are green, the cup is yellow. Yellow glass in this pattern is a little unusual, so I bought one of the cups as a specimen piece. (and also because it was cheap)

The New Belly Button

I've finally gotten around to uploading apicture of the new belly button. Looks like a perfect innie fo far!


It looks like another beautiful Saturday here in DC. I think rain during the week and sun on the weekends is a good idea.

Cord Free!

Seth lost his umbillical cord today! Hooray!

Boston A Success

The Boston trip went very well. I got done what needed to be done and also gained a little "political capital" with this group. The guy that I was seeing has some influence over the future of the project so I am glad it went well.

The flight up and back on Independence Air was really good. Unfortunately I heard yesterday that their parent company might file Chapter 11.

Boston set a record low temperature Tuesday night. It was about 25 degrees when I got there.

It's good to be home.

Ironing my shirt

I just finished ironing my shirt for tomorow. I have to leave at 5:45 in the morning to fly up to Boston (Cambridge actually) to visit a customer. It will be a day trip so I will be home mid-evening tomorrow if all goes well.

The forecast high for Wednesday in Cabridge is 42 degrees, so I will be taking my gray felt coat. That will be the first time this fall that I have needed it. It has been such a nice month here.

Art 101

Seth gets his first art lesson. He actually seems to focus for a short while on black and white images. I suppose the contrast is easy for him to see.

Click to enlarge

A Good Weekend

I had an enjoyable weekend. It was very Family oriented.

On Friday and Saturday we had dinner at Mom and Dad's. Friday the whole family was there. Sunday afternoon was spent in Old Town Alexandria wandering around shopping with Debbie, Seth and the in-laws. It was a beautiful, warm day.

My Birthday

November 7th in History
1872: The ship Marie Celeste sails from New York, eventually to be found deserted
1944: Franklin D.Roosevelt elected for a record fourth term as President
1972: Richard Nixon re-elected as the US president

November 7th birthdays
1867: Marie Curie, First woman to win the Nobel prize for physics
1918: Billy Graham, American evangelist

My Birthday Part 2 - Harmonic Resonance

TACOMA BRIDGE COLLAPSES:
November 7, 1940

Only four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State suffers a spectacular collapse.

When it opened in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. Built to replace the ferry system that took commuters from Tacoma across the Tacoma Narrows to the Gig Harbor Peninsula, the bridge spanned 2,800 feet and took three years to build. To save cost, the principle engineer, Leon Moisseiff, designed the bridge with an unusually slender frame that measured 39 feet and accommodated just two vehicular lanes.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened with great fanfare on July 1, 1940. Human traffic across the waters of the Tacoma Narrows increased dramatically, but many drivers were drawn to the toll bridge not by convenience but by an unusual characteristic of the structure. When moderate to high winds blew, as they invariably do in the Tacoma Narrows, the bridge roadway would sway from side to side and sometimes suffer excessive vertical undulations. Some drivers reported that vehicles ahead of them would disappear and reappear several times as they crossed the bridge. On a windy day, tourists treated the bridge toll as the fee paid to ride a roller-coaster ride, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earned the nickname "Galloping Gertie."

Attempts were made to stabilize the structure, but they were in vain. On November 7, with a steady wind blowing at 42 mph, the roadway began to twist back and forth in an increasingly violent fashion. Before closing the span, the toll keeper on the bridge's west side let one last motorist pass, Tacoma News Tribune copy editor Leonard Coatsworth. Halfway across the bridge, Coatsworth lost control of his car. When the roadway tipped so sharply that it seemed his car would topple off, he decided to flee on foot. He tried to retrieve his daughter's black cocker spaniel from the back seat of the car, but the dog snapped at him and refused to budge. Coatsworth ran to safety and called the Tribune, who dispatched a reporter and photographer to the scene.

Tribune photographer Howard Clifford was the last man on the bridge before the center span broke off at 11 a.m. and plunged 190 feet into the turbulent Tacoma Narrows. Trapped on the suddenly destabilized side spans, he narrowly avoided being thrown off and ran to safety. The sole casualty of the disaster was the cocker spaniel in Coatsworth's car, which fell into the Narrows and disappeared beneath the foam.

At the time, the engineering community was perplexed about how a bridge designed to withstand winds of up to 120 mph could collapse in a wind of 42 mph. Experts still disagree on the exact cause of the bridge's destruction, but most agree the collapse was related to resonance, a phenomenon that also comes into play when a soprano shatters a glass with her voice. In the case of the Tacoma Narrows, the wind resonated with the natural frequency of the structure, causing a steady increase in amplitude until the bridge was destroyed.

After the Tacoma Narrows disaster, bridge builders took care to incorporate aerodynamics into their designs and build structures with complex frequencies. Wind-tunnel testing of bridge designs eventually became mandatory. A new Tacoma Narrows Bridge was finally erected in 1950, complete with a wider roadway, deep stiffening trusses under the roadway, and other features designed to dampen the effect of wind. In 1992, the remains of Galloping Gertie in the Tacoma Narrows were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

A Minor Injury

How 'bout that new background?

You have probably noticed that I have been playing with the settings on my blog template. I am trying out different looks from time to time, but don't worry, if it gets really awful I won't keep it.

The cool thing is that I am finally learning a little (very little) about HTML.

What a train wreck

I had to go downtown for a meeting today and decided that because of yesterday's Metro accident I would drive instead of taking the red line. Good Idea! Everyone else thought the same thing! Between that and the rain it took me an hour and a half to go 12 miles! Needless to say I was a little late for my meeting. It went well anyway.

Here is what the wreck looked like

An empty Red Line train crashed into a stopped train at the Woodley Park-Zoo Station in Northwest Washington. (Michel duCille -- The Washington Post)

My Web Gallery

I recently was granted a gallery to display my liquid emulsion prints at AlternativePhotography.com. The site is dedicated to alternative process photography which means almost anything that is not standard color or black and white photos. Most of these processes are antique ones that are being revived for their artistic value.

For the prints that I make, I hand coat paper (or other things like slate or glass) with a liquid photo emulsion that makes whatever is coated light sensitive. Then I make the prints using normal development techniques.

You can check it out by clicking here:


Check Out My Gallery