Summer Activities 2013

Jeff and Darla and the girls had the opportunity to visit with Stan and Kristin and family at a lake in Alabama. Jordan, Britain and Ashleigh seem to be enjoying the lake.

Rod went down to Mark's current shop to help trace some of the electrical circuits. It wasn't a matter of walking around and measuring circuits! The ceiling is about 40ft up and Mark had to move around on a lift to check the circuit points. We were measuring high voltage on the hot and neutral wires all over the ceiling area. Finally we found where the neutral wire had been cut and were able to reattach it, getting those circuits back to normal.

Rod and Brenda are spending more time at the Bent Tree house this summer. After surviving the electrical crisis of June, we became aware that there are a lot of little repairs that are needed after 38 years since the start of the house.

We didn't take many pictures because we were both working really hard on the house. But Rod got captured by his "small-game hunting" urge when he walked outside and saw what appeared to be a granddaddy longlegs being given a piggy-back ride by a black beetle. Upon closer examination, the beetle was dead and the granddaddy was carrying it slung under its belly. I had never seen that before.

Mark is back on the movie set for the sequel to the one he worked on last fall. Lots of steel work in the large sets.

The large sets in the World Congress Center involve some very heavy steel work.

Mark did some welding with extraordinarily high voltage and current to get half-inch penetration in steel with the structural welds.

Large forms will be clad with other materials to produce the final product.

This gives more perspective on the size of some of the elements of the set.

We are headed back to the Bent Tree house through the lush green woods. Brenda focused on larger game than Rod above when she captured this lovely doe beside the road. Note the yearling fawn in the trees extreme left.

The doe stopped in the edge of the trees to pose for Brenda.

This was the best view we got of the fawn. It was much more skittish than mom, a fact that I had noted with the twin fawns on the day of our summer picnic.

We enjoyed the colorful patches of yellow on the way up the mountain. This is the most dramatic display of these flowers we have seen in several years, no doubt partly due to the abundance of rainfall.

This was our peaceful introduction to Bent Tree on our way up Friday afternoon. It was a good thing, because we worked really hard on cleanup and repairs for the next 24 hours. It was still nice to be up in the mountains to enjoy the peace and quiet and the lush green brought by this very wet summer.