San Diego

Went west to celebrate family friend's wedding in San Diego. Great city, lots of fun.

Botanical Building, Balboa Park

Fountain, Balboa Park

George, on beach at Hotel del Coronado

Mermaid pose, beach at Del Mar

Sunset from wedding reception porch, La Jolla, CA

Blood Mountain

Taylor and I joined with an Appalachian Wilderness Hikers group, climbing Blood Mountain from Reece Trailhead (just to the north of Neels Gap.) Not a very clear day, but got better as the day wore on, and the views from the top were nice.

Nice vistas from high on Blood Mountain.

Taylor lunches at the summit, looking west towards Suches.

Fall sunset cruise

Sunset

Cruising home

Charlie and the Pumpkin Patch

We visited Hillside Farms Orchard this morning and came back with some pumpkins.

Charlie wants a big red tractor for Christmas, just like this one!

Bluegrass at the farm, courtesy of the Front Porch Gliders:

Jake joins the Polar Bear Club

Water temperature, after a week of cool Autumn weather, is 61 degrees. Chilly!

Bungee baby

Johnny-Jump-Up was a big hit with Charlie!

Romney, Obama appear at Mountaineer Festival

Obama overheard whispering to the guy in the green shirt:
'Being a scarecrow is way easier than debating that other fellow!
You think we could sneak outta here and do 18 at Kingswood Country Club this afternoon?'

They call it that good old mountain dew,
And them that refuse it are few.
Well, I'll hush up my mug, if you'll fill up my jug,
With that good old mountain dew.

Rabun Library's scarecrow; reads, of course.
Not so good at keeping crows out of the Old School Garden, though.

Bluegrass band entertains at lunch-time, playing Love of the Mountains:

  

The burning of the green wood on the fireplace

The fallen snow around the red bud trees

The branches of the laurel by the creek bed

And the rippling waters of the gentle stream

Now a bright moon is shining in the valley

   An old wagon leans against a stack of hay

   Two graves on a hillside by the cabin

   My mom and dad are resting there today

Quilt lady puts the sales jive on Georgia . . .

Mantis Momma

Mantis mother lays eggs on broom bush overlooking the hot-tub.
Then she walked off and left her several hundred young-uns on their own.
"Have a nice life, kids!"

From Wikipedia:

The mating season in temperate climates typically begins in autumn. To mate following courtship, the male usually leaps onto the female’s back, and clasps her thorax and wing bases with his forelegs. He then arches his abdomen to deposit and store sperm in a special chamber near the tip of the female’s abdomen. The female then lays between 10 and 400 eggs, depending on the species. Eggs are typically deposited in a frothy mass that is produced by glands in the abdomen. This froth then hardens, creating a protective capsule. The protective capsule and the egg mass is called an ootheca. Depending on the species, the ootheca can be attached to a flat surface, wrapped around a plant or even deposited in the ground. Despite the versatility and durability of the eggs, they are often preyed on, especially by several species of parasitic wasps.

Sunflowers and okra

Our big successes, this time of year!

George gets lost in the sunflowers and okra plants

Paddling Yonah Lake

Taylor and I went paddling this morning on Yonah Lake, an impoundment of the Tugaloo River, which forms part of the Georgia-South Carolina border, just downstream of Lake Tugalo. (The river name ends with 2 o's; all other names (lake, park, village, etc.) end with one 'o'.)

Taylor paddles south from Tugalo Park boat launch at head of Yonah Lake

No picture of it, but as we paddled south, we came upon a massive bald eagle in a lakeside tree on the South Carolina shore, startled it, and watched as it circled around us, no more than 100' away. Very, very impressive!

Tugalo Dam, at the head of Yonah Lake.

View of Tugalo Lake, from the road to Yonah Lake. Tugalo Park is a Georgia Power
campground and boat launch, located at the foot of Tugalo Dam,
and at the head of Yonah Lake.

From the road to Yonah Lake, you can see what is probably the biggest house in Rabun County, overlooking Lake Tugalo.

Near top-center is an enormous house on a hilltop overlooking Lake Tugalo.
Photo below shows a Google Earth detail of that house.

The shadows reveal the Disneyland-like towers of this house.

Yonah Lake is the most-downstream of Georgia Power's lakes on the Tallulah watershed. From the top, they are Burton, Seed, Rabun, Tallulah Falls, Tugalo and Yonah. Burton's lake level is 1866' above sea level; Yonah's is 744', and below its dam, 670'; a total drop of 1196', most of it harnessed by hydropower turbines. Yonah has some houses around its shore, but relatively few compared to Burton. Most of the houses on the Georgia side have road access; most of the South Carolina houses are boat-access only.

Taylor's wind sock

Looking for a better mounting, but here it is!

Kitchen improvements

Two things:

1. We've built a new cabinet into the largely-unused space over the refrigerator. This will be useful for storing large, not-often used things like canning equipment, crock-pot, etc. We used tongue-and-groove boards, glued together into panels, for the cabinet side and doors.

New cabinet over refrigerator

2. We've modified the base cabinets to the left and right of the sink cabinet, so that now each contains two full-width, full-depth drawers (about 24" x 24"), mounted on full-extension drawer slides. Huge improvement, compared to getting down on hands and knees to find stuff in the back of the old cabinets! We built the drawer fronts of knotty-pine, lightly-stained and varnished.

New drawers make these cabinets more usable

To get to the back, lower section of this cabinet, before drawers,
you had to get down on the floor and do the gator crawl. Much easier now!

Bony fish

Now hanging from the Blue Fish sign, in front

Thanks, Ruthlyn!

AC and company

Johnny, Lynn, Ann Cox, Jake, Daniel and Laura

Moon set, Labor Day weekend

Moon set, pre-dawn, over Timpson Cove

Detail: waning gibbous, 96% illuminated

All quiet on the western front

How bout them dawgs!

Propaganda starts early for Charlie

Charlie and Gran

Charlie and Gail

Darnell Falls

Darnell Falls

More below the break (click on 'read more').

Classic barn

Of course it's red. It's a barn!

On Wolffork Road, west of Rabun Gap.

Lyrical street names

Probably not named by a real estate developer!

On Persimmon Creek Road, about a mile after it forks off Persimmon Road.

Nice weekend

Would have been a perfect weekend with the trifecta of our kids, had Laura been able to make it with her boys, Jake and Charlie. But two out of three isn't bad, either: Andrew with Hillary, and Taylor, too.

Rub-a-dub-dub, three folks in a tub! Andrew, Hillary and George.

Supper on the deck. Taylor, Andrew, Robert and Hillary, behind.
Check out those ka-bobs! Chef is proud.

George, Hillary and Andrew relax after dinner. Check out those boots.

Say cheese! Hillary and Andrew.

Friends and neighbors

Hannah, Bill and George

Clouds between the storms

Looking west over Timpson Cove, late afternoon

Crepe myrtle blooming

From the boathouse bridge, above the Spa Garden

Log slice table

We're working on making a table-top out of a log slice taken from a large pine, about six to eight inches thick. It was cut where the tree had limbs radiating out in all directions, at the same elevation, so there are about a dozen knots showing, all around the outer edge.

Representative radial knot, fine-sanded and lightly rubbed with tung oil.

The log slice is about 4 feet in diameter, and 6 to 8 inches thick. Heavy!
Back of the pickup makes a decent work table for this project.

Counting tree rings, it looks like the tree was about 60 years old, when felled. Pines grow fast!

So far, I've done rough-sanding on the top, with 40-grit belts. Been through 15 of them so far, but I think the rough part is mostly done. It won't be totally flat, but it should be smooth, anyway. It was cut with a chain saw, working from one side, and then the other, so there were some cut lines that had to get extra work. There's lots of resin, too, especially around the knots, so the sanding belts get pretty gummed-up. The bark is starting to fall off, so I expect the edge of the table to be bare wood, all around.

I haven't completely decided about legs. I'm thinking that I'll use some small pine-log sections, from a tree which fell next to our house. We'll probably make it a low game-table, with legs about a foot long, and have low stools to sit on. As heavy as it is, I'm reluctant to have it full height. Not sure yet how the legs will be attached; maybe mortise and tenon joints, or perhaps with anchor bolts on the leg tops, screwed into threaded inserts set in the underside of the table.

New sun deck

Our sun deck, with a western exposure, suffered from 16 years of intense sun, heavy rains and heat, and needed new decking. This week, we got it!

Decking will be stained in near future

New doors, too. No more squeaky hinges!

Blue Fish says 'Welcome'

How to find stuff in the kitchen

Here is a pictorial guide to the kitchen: where the stuff is hidden, all secrets revealed! These pictures were taken before we installed drawers in place of the door cabinets, but the arrangement of contents is pretty much the same.

Click on read more, below . . .

Dining at the Lake Rabun Hotel and the Blue Fish Lodge

George, Bill and Shirley, at the Lake Rabun Hotel.
We had to share our little nook with 'Daydreamer,'
a brown bear available (still) for a cool $3200.

This was our second dinner at the Lake Rabun Hotel. It's very nice. Every Thursday, they put on a Featured Farm menu, with food from one of the local farms. A couple of weeks ago, we ate with Ann from a menu using Mill Gap Farm in Tiger; next week, they'll be featuring our community garden on their Thursday menu.

George, Bill and Shirley, plating up at the
Blue Fish Lodge's boathouse dining room.