The Summer is finally over ....

 \

Sarah Jessica Parker has to put away the pool toys and get ready for the fall.

September at Long Beach

 Scenes from a September visit to the beach!

It’s still warm enough to go to the beach!

It's been a good week

Got some work done, it is only 92 degrees now and it will cool off nicely this evening. While posting a picture I noticed a picture I took on January 17th - how quickly we forget.

That snapshot made me think to take another one right now from the same vantage point:

What a difference five months makes.

No particular reason but I do like the Staple Singers.

Ah, summer...

Long hot days, plenty of sunshine so I can work as much as I care to, and by golly, I am gittin' 'er done.

Today I started with some boards that I sawed out of some slabs of silver maple yesterday:

I planed them down and sawed them to width and length - once I finish sanding them they will become cutting boards like this one:

I created a nice heap of chips and dust:

And because it wasn't hot enough I burned that pile this afternoon. Then it was just about right.

Then we had a nice sunset. All in all a good start to the summer.

These are the days...

Rain!

We finally got some rain today. We may get rain for days. We need it.

Got some work done - that was a good and necessary thing.

I have always liked this song.

Summer versus winter

Bet you can't guess which one I prefer. The first picture was taken last July, the second this morning.

We need a weather report, plus, at least when he was sane, this would be my choice of bass player.

P. J. O’Rourke: "Why I hate the beach"

"I just came back from a family vacation at the beach. Will someone please explain the beach to me?"

An Ironman triathlon is, shall we say, a day at the beach compared getting to the beach from the beach parking lot carrying beach umbrella, beach towels, beach toys, beach bags, and a beach picnic in a beach cooler the size of a Manhattan studio apartment.

I consulted my wife who had spent two weeks Googling “beach” to make sure we had enough beach stuff to carry to the beach from the beach parking lot.

She said walking in the sand dunes environmentally degrades the sand. Sand being ground-up rocks, you’d think sand is about as environmentally degraded as things in the environment get.

She also said beach grass in the sand dunes is home to deer ticks, even though a crowded beach is an odd place for ticks to look for deer.

Another memory I have of youthful fondness for the beach concerns tiny bikinis. Not anymore. Please, you leviathans, don’t wear tiny bikinis. No, what am I saying? Please, you leviathans, don’t take them off! (read more)

Gizmodo: The World's Tallest and Scariest Waterslide

"We conceived of it around 2012, in October, at a water park show," Schooley told Gizmodo. He and Henry were walking around with people from the Travel Channel, and when they asked Jeff what his next project was, he said he wanted to build the world's tallest and scariest water slide. Henry wasn't joking. He started seriously planning with Schooley almost immediately. The two men have worked together building water parks since the '90s, but this is their most ambitious project to date. They specialize in a park design they call "transportainment," where they design everything in the hopes that park patrons will spend most of their time on communal rides, not in line. That's why making the tallest water slide a group experience was so important to the duo."

 "Basically, we were crazy enough to try anything," Schooley said. "We decided to design something entirely new, because we decided to put a three or four man boat down it, and we wanted not only the fastest and steepest water slide going downhill, but we wanted to take it uphill over a hump, to give people a weightless experience going down the other side." What's fear without a side order of astronaut nausea to go with it? (read the whole thing)

Darrone: Kate Knibbs said...

I'm confused. Maybe this is the old man in me who remembers when phones made calls and cars were driven by people, but what the hell is the point of a water slide if your strapped into a vehicle? Isn't that a less-aggressive roller coaster with a misting spray added? It's basically a log flume right?

The last strawberries