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I still have a couple things to do to the bracket before it’s ready to fly, but I’m getting close. I still need a cap nut at the picavet. It’s all held together with a zip tie right now. I also need to trim the threads of the eye rings on the picavet.
Driving North on 476, you could drive right by them without seeing them. Going south, however, they appear majestically around a bend in the road. As I was driving south last Friday, the thunderstorms let up just long enough for me to take a couple pictures from the narrow shoulder on the road.
I’m making pogress on the new aluminum camera bracket. I thought that aluminum would be harder to work with. This barstock from Home depot bent very easily. It was also vry easy to cut with a metal blade on my jigsaw.
I’ve straightened out the frame a bit since these pictures. If I ever find my drill, I’ll drill some holes to attach the frames together. Next, I’ll start working on the picavet.
I haven’t been around online much this week. I photographed a friend’s wedding this past weekend. I took a lot of pictures so I’ve been deleting bad pictures for a couple days now.
My new kite came today. It’s a para-foil, so it relies on the wind to keep its shape. Once it’s inflated, the shape creates an airfoil and lift. Hopefully, it’s enough lift to get my camera rig into the air. I’m ditching the carbon rods and rubber connectors I was working on before. It’s just not stiff enough. Home Depot sells aluminum bar-stock in 1.5″ wide, 1/8″ thick. I’ll try to bend it into a square frame similar to this one. My idea isn’t nearly as ambitious as that one… yet 
Here are some more pictures from the East Bethany fossil site. I had these in a bin and just hadn’t had a chance to photograph them. All of these fossils are from the Devonian period.
Lori and I walked the South Meadow trail this afternoon. It was nice to get out and walk, now that the heat has let up a bit. I tried something new this time. I took off my 90mm macro lens, and opted for the 70-300 macro. I don’t like this lens at all. It’s slow, cheap, and has artifacts on the glass. It does have a long distance macro, though.
I have to get really close to the subject with the 90mm. I’ve bumped into more than one butterfly trying to get just a little bit tighter. that’s the coolest feature of that lens. The minimum focusing distance is just a couple inches. The last time I walked the high meadow, I couldn’t get within a dozen paces of any of the cool critters. They just flew off before I could get into range. With the 70-300, I could take pictures from a distance, but still get close shots. I really need to replace this lens with something better.
As I was driving to Lollypop last Sunday, my car hit a milestone of sorts. 22,222 miles. Ipulled over and took a picture. I’ve been noticing symetrical numbers for years. It’s a strange phenomenon. At first, I thought I was just noticing 11:11 because that’s when the first commercial break of the late night news happens. Now it happens all the time, even on clocks that aren’t right. I see 1:11 through 12:12 on clocks all the time. It freaked me out enough that I switched from a digital watch to an analog one.
I decided a while back that this synchronicity happens when there’s a transition in my life. It’s not always really significant. The clock read 3:33 when I got out of the car today, transitioning from the garage to the house.
Time, indeed events, are not so static as we make them out to be. Take the firing of a canon. The light, which I captured in these pictures, reached me first. Then the sound and shock waves. Since those waves hit the spectators at different times, we all experienced the canon firing at different times. So, me noticing odd times on clocks may represent anything. Maybe they represent events that happened eons ago in a far away Galaxy, and I’m just noticing them now.
Along the southern shore of Lake Ontario, there are many small bays. It’s an interesting habitat. Some of the bays only connect to the lake seasonally, when the lake level is high enough to cover the shallow channels to the bays. Braddock Bay is almost half covered with cat tails. The ground has become a spongy mass of previous years’ plants. It’s a perfect habitat for migratory birds. I’ll stop by this fall a couple times to get more pictures. We mostly saw sparrows while we were there. I guess it’s the wrong time of year. We had a nice walk, though.
The boardwalk juts a long way out into the bay. Not quite past the rushes, though. It’s closed during some parts of the year to protect the rushes from intrusion during migration and nesting.
