Overhead View of Construction

I caged these two photos from the Dredge Report. Thanks, Melanie!

The Lake Bed Shapes Up

I took these photos on Thursday. Suddenly, the lake bed is looking finished.

The Lake is Still a Mess

Here are some photos of the lake bed, taken the second week of August. Despite trucks leaving full of dirt every few minutes, despite the thumps coming from the lake, despite all the soil that's getting moved around by those dozers and cranes, things don't look much different than they did in late July. I'm sure one day soon I'll walk down to the lake and it will all visually make sense.

(Late note: I walked down to the lake today (25th August) and it did make sense. Post will be up tomorrow)

August Flowers

Hogan's Grocery

Long before Ingles stood at the corner of Rockbridge and Hairston Roads there was Hogan's Grocery.

I'm not sure exactly where Mr. Hogan's store stood, but these two photos survive.

Wally's Oddity Museum

Gentle reader, did you know Pine Lake was once the home of Wally's Oddity Museum?

Dry Lake, October, 1963

The photos below were taken by Claude Suttle and developed in October 1963.

Here's Mr. Suttle's shot from 1961 for comparison:

In Mr. Suttle's prints made two years later, the lake was dry.

The Big Dig

The lake restoration project has been underway for about a month now. Here are some photos I took yesterday, 1 August, 2011.

West End of Lake, As Seen From the Playground

Locked Out!

No, not locked out of my house-- locked out of my Blogger account!

I don't know how I came to not write down my password, but I managed. It took me an hour tonight to access my account so I could write this post.

My flight from New York was delayed for four hours on Tuesday, but Airtran bought me breakfast, gave me a $25 voucher toward my next trip, and then gave everyone on my flight a free round-trip ticket. Woo hoo!

It's been hot as dickens since my return, and I managed to leave my camera in New York. It's on the way via Fedex, and when it arrives tomorrow I'll brave the weather and take some photos of the lake bed for posting.

Posted from Westchester Airport

You gotta love flying.

To me, though, flying is 1000 feet above the ground in a Piper or Cessna, going 80 knots. Doing the airport-Delta-Boeing 717 thing isn't flying. It's Greyhound Air, without a sailor and his girl going at it in the back seat.

The Westchester Airport in White Plains, NY is a small place about 25 miles from New York City. It services about five airlines, which offer a small number of flights to limited destinations. Happily, Atlanta is one of those destinations.

The airport is just big enough to have a restaurant and a cafe, and has free wireless internet access, which is good, because I'm stuck here for four hours.

My flight was scheduled to depart at 7:15, but has been delayed until 11:30 because of a federal requirement that air crews get time off for rest after a busy day. I guess my crew's last flight arrived late last night, because they're ordering breakfast from room service right now.

I don't begrudge them the sleep, though. I would rather travel with a rested crew than an exhausted one-- and at least the delay wasn't caused by a malfunction in the aircraft.

What better than to pass the time than to dash off this blog while waiting to go through security?

Dope Box

I wish I had a vintage coke machine like this and a screened-in porch to put it in!

Keeping Things

 I'm a packrat.  There, I've admitted it.  I'm a packrat.

It's not that I horde things.  Please be clear:  I'm not saying I have rooms full of plastic sacks from the grocery or Hefty bags full of plastic six-pack holders and broken-off pull tabs from beer cans or every National Geographic since 1952 or old Popsicle sticks or a big ball of used aluminum foil.  No, I just hang onto things, unless they're broken or never worked properly in the first place.