Free time 2...

So yesterday started with locally roasted coffee and a nice view:

 

Then off to Hancock, MD, to bike a piece of the Western Maryland Rail Trail.  The WMRT runs parallel to the C&O Canal Towpath for 22 miles on the old Western Maryland Railroad bed, starting near Ft. Frederick State Park and ending at Sidling Hill, and its paved surface provides welcome relief from the towpath’s rocks and roots while still sending you through beautiful countryside. 

On the way I thought I’d make a stop at an old favorite fossil hunting site.  I always seem to be in too much of a hurry when I’m by here anymore and don’t take the time to check out old haunts.  With nothing to do but enjoy a summer day, I hopped off US 70 at Clear Springs and took US 40 west until just before it merges back into 70.  There’s just enough shoulder to park on and it didn’t take more than a couple minutes before I started seeing some old friends:

Horn corals, brachiopods, and crinoids, oh my!  About 400 million years ago (without digging out my notes, I'm seriously ball-parking) they lived on a shallow sea bottom that looked like this:

The flowery looking things are crinoids - relatives of starfish and sea urchins.  The brachiopod looks like a clam, but it's really a different critter.  And while there are a few types of brachiopods left, one of the convulsions of extinction at the end of the Devonian wiped out most brachiopod species.  To try to add to the picture, the Devonian is when plants started appearing on land, allowing animals to begin to move out of the sea.  Up until then the neighborhood, no matter where you were, was probably pretty bleak looking.  

Fortunately, I had shorts and sandals on and I don’t care for poison ivy or I’d have spent the rest of the day picking over the hillsides and never made it to the trail.  But on to Hancock and west on the WMRT.  Not many people out, but a little bit of traffic:

 

 

The folks not out there sure missed a fine day.  Hot and humid days in the woods and along the river fill the air with that green, sweet smell that is so, so alive.  And the birds calling - cuckoos, yellowthroats, wood thrushes, tiny warblers hidden in the leaves.  Rustles and chirps, frogs in the canal croaking, tree stems creaking in the breeze.  Amazing sights, sounds, and smells all around.  Ain't a television or a shop in the world worth giving that up for.

The WMRT mostly follows the towpath, but pulls away in some areas and passes through meadows and old orchards, along old rail structures and farms.  Sometimes it's sad - you see a lot of abandoned houses sitting empty-eyed and overgrown.  The railroad left, the orchard business fell off, the quarries closed, and people moved on looking for livelihoods elsewhere.  But once I came up on a small, neat homestead, garden and grounds immaculate, rooster crowing, pond waiting for a kid with an inner tube and it made me smile because the place was obviously somebody's much loved little piece of heaven.

The WMRT currently ends at Sidling Hill, 12 miles west of Hancock, and because I'm doing the towpath in bits and pieces and I have to be able to say I actually rode every piece, I hopped over to it and started back east, thinking a bit too late that it would probably have been a better idea to ride UP the towpath and BACK on the paved surface. Oh well.  There's a ton of history along the way, like the remains of the cement plant:

And some pretty spectacular geology:

So I had plenty of excuses to rest me butt.  As I was passing through Hancock at the end I came up on a church group with pro-life signs running some sort of foot race and I wanted to take a pic but just then the storm that had been rumbling to the north started to get serious and so I just flashed them a thumbs up and quit shilly-shallying.  Good thing, too, because when it cut loose it cut loose and turned the drive back to a slow crawl.  It's just is all sorts of grins to be in a vehicle when it's hailing.  I always feel like I'm in a tin can full of pebbles that's being shaken real good.

Took out a lot of power, but cleared off into a nice evening.  A good one to hang out at the Canal House in Harpers Ferry.  Here's to Winchester resident and local performer David Elliott.  No power for food, and technically closed, but their patio, a couple bottles of wine and David's voice and acoustic guitar put a fine ending on the day.

 

A British reporter's take...

Most U.S. reporters couldn't find their rear ends with both hands and a proctology scope.  And they are tiresome in their determination to be ignorant and biased.  But saw this in The Telegraph this morning:  Sarah Palin email frenzy backfires on media antagonists.

You don't suppose any of the Palin deranged bunch will notice, do you?

Well, it almost went right...

So today’s challenge was to clean Dad’s Model 1922 Browning .32.  Note to Dad – I know you thought it was safely hidden in your underwear drawer, but I’ve known where it was for more than 50 years.  I did always try to make sure the t-shirts were put back neatly after I had been messing with it, though.

I don’t know where Dad got it - it was just always there. Made by Fabrique Nationale in Belgium,  it has the Nazi stamps that show it was made during the German occupation.  The West Virginians from Dad's area all went to the Pacific.  Dad was a medic in the Philippines, and his unit was supposed to move into Japan with the first wave of Marines when the U.S. invaded.  Then, after carpet bombing didn’t get the idea across, a couple of larger bombs finally convinced some folks that it was time to quit, and he served as part of the occupying army in Tokyo.   He did bring some souvenirs home - the blanket the gun is laying on was courtesy of some Japanese cavalry horse - but the Browning must have been picked up later.

Anyway, this gun hasn’t been fired for I don’t know how long, and I thought it was time to make it useful again.    So, first step:

Safe?  Yes.  No surprises waiting.

Next step, take it apart.  I've a fair amount of confidence that I can take it apart.  It's the putting back together that concerns me.

OK.  Yes.  Some of it's a bugger just trying to move little pieces that haven't much to get hold of, but it's safely disassembled.    Now for application of a great deal of cleaning oil.

All the serial numbers on the parts match.

If I squint I can read all the stampings and see the German eagles on each part.                                       

Then came the reassembling.  Ummm... well.  It's the barrel.  No matter which way I turn it, I cannot get it to lock back in the way it is supposed to. Watched a video on field stripping this model, swear I'm doing it the same.  Went through it step by step to make sure I was doing exactly the same thing.  Over and over.  But that barrel ain't about to move past a certain point no matter how much wiggling or grumbling I do.  

So that's where I am right now.  Thought I'd set it down and go do other things for a while and see if I develop a magic touch in the interim.  Or if the shoe elves will fix it.  I wonder if there's a patron saint of I-took-it-apart-and-now-I-can't-get-it-back-together causes?

Added 10 min later:

Dang!  Decided to take one more crack at it and slide, click, done.  No gaurantee it will fire, but, hey, I figure this was a victory!

Take precautions against disease...

The U.N. doesn't like our guns

Saw this from Forbes this morning.  Bad enough there are people in the U.S. trying to butt in where it ain't their business, but the U.N. has to be fended off, too:

U.N. Agreement Should Have All Gun Owners Up In Arms

Spare time 1

So as if my own yard and garden weren’t enough, I interfere with others in my spare time.  My parish is responsible for two different churches and their property, including old St. Peter’s in Harpers Ferry:

 

 First built in 1833 and then extensively remodeled in 1896, it’s open with docent-led tours on Saturdays and Sundays and Mass is celebrated there at 11 am on Sunday.  If you walk through the narrow area between the church and wall/road, you come to the old rectory, now used as a retreat house.  Look to the right, and there is Mary’s Garden in the grotto:

 

 All are welcome to come for a bit of peace and quiet and prayer, but many people stop at the front, not realizing she’s down here.

About three years ago I was joshing our Deacon via e-mail – our roads are so bad up here in places that his wife had told me that she’d never come up here.  I commented that she was missing my flowers blooming, the hummingbirds at the feeder…In five minutes the phone rang.  It was Deacon Dave.  “You like to garden?”  “I love to garden.  I don’t know what I’m doing, but I love doing it.” “Um, I was just praying for help when I got your e-mail.  We have a problem at St. Peter’s, could you meet me over there?”  Well, OK.  So off I went.  Like many others, while I had been in and out of the front (although I usually go to Mass in the Big Church over in Charles Town), I had never gone back to the grotto.  And it was a mess.  Somebody had tried years ago, but the whole thing was out of control, unordered, untended.  Shade plants were somehow making it in the blistering sun that gets focused like a lens into the grotto in the morning, and they were taking over everything else where it was actually shady.  I don’t like green-flowering hellebore and it was everywhere.  And if you reached down into the plants what you hit was rot caused by the plants being too close together too long.  Deacon arrives – “Can you help? The bishop is coming, he stays in the retreat-house apartment and I’d like for it to look nice for him.  He works so hard, it would be nice if he could look out and see something beautiful in the morning.”  And Deacon is looking at me with that beautiful, shining, open face of his and my brain is going “Oh no no no no no…” and out of my mouth came “Well, yes, I think.  No guarantees, but I could at least get it cleaned up.  How much time do I have?”  “He’ll be here Father’s Day.”  !!!!!!  Father’s Day as in less than two weeks.  And when Deacon left I’m standing there thinking “Oh. My. God.  I just said I’d rip out and replant this disaster for our flower loving bishop.  The one who was rector at the Basilica in D.C., with its lovely, ordered flower beds.  What have I done?!”  But there was nothing now but to get to it.  Ten hours to rip everything out and amend the soil.  Then ten hours of shuttling back and forth to the local nursery for recommendations and plants.  A lot of prayer to Mary and St. Fiachra. Finally, weeding the slope, a difficult job because the shale slips and slides under your feet.  I made it with a few days to spare, which gave me time to watch the plants and make sure none of them went toes up on me before Bishop Bransfield arrived. 

And, of course, you know that when anything runs by volunteers, once you’ve touched it, it’s yours.  So now Mary’s Garden is “mine”, and I happily tend it.  I’ve got a bit of wild purslane starting there - I hope no one gets helpful and weeds it out before I get it transplanted to the house:

The bishop sent me a nice letter about it, which one of my cats, aka Destructo Kitty, immediately shredded – thanks, pal.  And since I know the secret parking lot I take my bike with me and go from there to the towpath.  Not a half bad way to spend one’s evening. 

Point proven

Well, I seem to have proven that a lot of folks say "Everybody has their own opinion and that's OK" with the subtext "As long as I agree with it" on both Facebook and the community web site in the last 24 hours.