***March 24, 2024- March 30, 2024 Weekly Show, Tell, and Critique***

[A127943]

"Liquid Dreams"

 

[KBTinto]

Wow you redid the entire kitchen. My connection stinks was thinking of uploading some pics....

but here's a link.

NYC is Finished... My Honest Thoughts

 

[Dak on cam]

Wow you redid the entire kitchen.

No, we only undid the kitchen of my mother. There was nothing to "redo" in my place since it was empty, with just the conduits in the wall. Today a friend from Aachen (100mi away) came over to take stock of the bits and pieces and helped with planning and execution of something useful for my place, and we got the kitchen counters bought and sawed to fit and a sink undercupboard (the doors weren't in stock, I need to mail-order those) and the stove and cooking fields matched. Didn't have a camera with me. Photographs are to follow, possibly tomorrow.

It's kind of surprising how countertops with a material I like (not sawdust and plastic but solid beechwood) will make me feel good about a kitchen that by and large is not what I consider fabulous.

Since those countertops will need to get oiled before I can continue (and I need some kind of sealing for the sink that agrees with beechwood), work there is mainly paused until Tuesday when shops open again.

Neighbors came over and helped preparing the next to last room for painting.

My connection stinks was thinking of uploading some pics....

but here's a link.

NYC is Finished... My Honest Thoughts

Well, I am afraid that 20 minutes of rant cut in a manner to not retain a second of pause are not really my favorite format. I always try to find some kind of written documentation before even considering a video tutorial which forces a particular speed of reception onto me.

 

[Dak on cam]

View over Leutesdorf and Andernach


View over Leutesdorf

[ATTACH alt="Little path from the "Rheinsteig" . This is a 320 km long hiking trail along the Rhine. We live in the middle of it, so you can go on great hikes from home. "]3518066[/ATTACH]
Little path from the "Rheinsteig" . This is a 320 km long hiking trail along the Rhine. We live in the middle of it, so you can go on great hikes from home.

This hits surprisingly close to home: I've never lived in the vicinity but I've been around these places often enough (including several bike tours alongside the Rhine), so the landscape and vegetation and colors are very familiar.

It's not like photographs from the U.S. feel exotic to me, but the degree to which this feels like "my corner of the world" to me was surprising.

--
Dak

 

[Dak on cam]

The wind finally abated. We were able to leave Amarillo, TX, and drove across the high desert to Albuquerque, NM. At first, it wasn't a bad drive - just not much to see to my uneducated eastern woods-dweller eye. The dogs were comfortable - poor Nancy not so much.

That looks like a very bright outside. Hard to recognize anything with my educated Western town-dweller eye either.

Then the weather began to change and we drove in and out of howling snowstorms and wind. You could see them coming from far away.





By the time we finally got to Albuquerque, there was a sideways blizzard. Since we are so much further south from where we live, I expected it would be hot here. I didn't even bring a warm coat. Apparently, things are different in the SW. Weather and temps are controlled mostly by how high you are.

That's a similar baseline elsewhere as well. In the metric centigrade regions, you can roughly count 10 degrees centigrade for every 1000m of height. That would be very very roughly 5 degrees Fahrenheit per 1000ft. It's been eternities since I was on vacation in Mallorca where the typical tourists stayed indoors because of the unbearable heat during parts of the day while basking at the beaches during much of the other times while we were hiking up in the mountains and just got back to sea level in the evening. Very pleasant temperatures where we were during the day.

Live and learn.... View of the truck out the windshield:



The wind destroyed the faulty slide topper. I couldn't get the slide closed so we were once again rendered immobile. Spent a day trying to fix it - couldn't. Finally, this morning, the weather was good and I climbed up on the roof and just cut the &^%$# fabric off, so the slide would close.

You mobile home looks like a train car in size.

Now we are able to move again, but the locking holes on top of the slide roof are open to rain and snow, so I will need to climb up there and seal them with makeshift covers when we stop (and remove them before we can go).



A real PITA after spending $2k for a brand-new slide topper. :-(

That's enough of an expense that one would want it to fix things for good.

After doing that, we took the dogs out to the Petroglyph National Monument and did about a 10-mile hike in the high desert, finding hundreds of petroglyphs. After all of the sitting, we really needed the exercise! Nancy And Bliss Of The High Desert:



While I wouldn't recommend driving all the way out here just to see them, the countless petroglyphs on the steep basalt rock slopes were pretty cool.



This one looks like some of the crazy pheasants we hunt:



Can you picture the artist asking his buddy to "hold my beer" when he did this one??



Snow-covered peaks overlooked us while we hiked. The area did make we wonder why the ancient Indians would go to such an inhospitable place with no water, etc., when they could go anywhere?



Since we are now mobile again, I think we'll move camp tomorrow to Santa Fe for a few days. Albuquerque is WAY too much city for me. We'll try to see Los Alamos and numerous natural places around there. Nancy wants to "shop" in Santa Fe, which is supposedly a very upscale art community. More later, hopefully.

Quite more barren background than what one usually sees behind your dogs!

--
Dak

 

[Birddogman]

[No message]

 

[Reitsportfotos]

Hi Dak,

I'm glad you like the photos and that you can see where they come from. But what you wrote is true, you can kind of see where the photos come from. The Rheinsteig actually passes our front door...

Kind regards,
Achim