Blame the Moon

It was a full one over the weekend, wasn't it?

Warning: This post is filled with totally unrelated incidents. Do not try to make sense of it.

I'll give you a short update on my trip out to Thacher Island. Weather was fantastic - HOT! A good day to be on the cool Atlantic. The reed organ is managing quite well...considering that it spends winters alone, with no heat. Either one of the repaired cracks in the soundboard has caused a minor separation at reed cells 11 and 12 of the Dulciana or those two pallets are binding on each other for some reason. There was not enough time to find out and fix it, as I was only there for two hours. I may make a run out late season or most likely wait until early season next year. The organ is amazingly tight. I pumped 'her' up until the spill opened, then depressed middle C (Dulciana stop).

And waited,
And waited,
58 seconds later and I finally could hear no sound.
I'm very pleased.
As you may have noticed, the photos do not go with the organ details. BUT, they ARE photos that I took while out there.

Shocker of shockers the other day. As y'all know, we (as in several in the immediate vicinity) have been having unruly behavior and excessively long duration-ed barking from a particular dog. For nearly two years! No polite requests or even dog officer visits have made a difference. I've shoveled more doggie-do and tossed it back to it's home from the front of our yard than I really care to remember. As I walked through my kitchen, yesterday, on my way to the cellar stairs, I witnessed the following:
Owner of said dog walking across toward our yard.
Owner of said dog having one plastic bag in hand.
Owner of said dog actually bending over and scooping up an enormous pile into the bag.
Owner of said dog tying up the bag and...
Taking it home!!!!!!!!!!
More bird pictures instead of dogs. These sparrows loved feeding on leftover seaweed on the traps by Motif #1.

I warned you.

Mom and I went to pick up all the tile for the back splash in her kitchen last week. I told her that she needed to go through the 3 boxes and check all of it for defects. The defects would be set aside to be used for cuts (the need for a partial tile). Each box has 10 'sheets' of mosaic tile. 30 sheets total and 20 were damaged! She called the tile store. They are reordering. I think the distribution truck must have driven over those boxes!

Thursday night (or should I say Friday morning?), I woke up in the middle of the night (don't get literal here, you know what I mean). I rolled over to see what time it was. The clock read 4:44. I went back to sleep only to awake a bit later. I looked at the clock once again as the sky was bright and I thought maybe it was time to get up. Nope, this time it was 5:55. Too weird. Saturday night (Sunday morning) I awoke and it was still dark outside. Glanced at the clock...1:23. Still kinda weird, but I've slept well since.
Last night was the annual meeting of the Thacher Island Association. I'm a member so I went. Paul gave an excellent presentation. The usual meeting 'official' stuff aside (he failed to mention my article in the Reed Organ Quarterly during his report on publicity, even though I had a color copy made for him), the PowerPoint presentation for past efforts and upcoming events was super. Then he finished with a short video thank you to all the volunteers. The organ was shown several times with the various keepers playing it. They have changed-up the web site so go ahead and check it out (I'm going to). What is the address, you wonder? It's in the sidebar to the right!