Saturday, August 20, 2011

Rain!

It rained here a day or two ago. I know what your saying. It always rains in Ohio, so what's new?!

You don't understand. It REALLY rained here a couple of days ago.

The still photo is a pic of a small brook which runs right through the historic sites here. The little trickle you see is actually a bit larger than what it sometimes is.  It is spring fed and so never runs dry, but most of the summer it is just this gentle little trickle of water running over the stony bottom.  Thus it's name, Stony Brook.

That is, it is like that most of the time. But not all.  The video shows the same section of the 'brook' after one of our major rain storms here, though this was a bit worse than most. We've never seen it quite this full.  There is about ten feet of bank there. It was lapping at the bottom of the bridge I was taking this video from. Through most of its length, it was full to the very top of its banks.

The rain continued for two days and so did the level of the creek.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Hale Historic Farm

A couple of days ago, we went with a couple of other seniors to a historic farm located south and west of here about 45 miles.  The farm is the largest and most complete operating historic farm reserve in Ohio, though there are quite a few smaller farms around, too.  It was a fun day, though it would have been even more enjoyable had the temperature been a few degrees cooler.

First, we saw this old truck.  Then, virtually right next to it was an old safe.  Nothing special looking about the safe, until you find out that it was "Joseph Smith's Safe!"  We would know it as the safe that was used in the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Bank Company.  If you look closely, you may notice that there doesn't seem to be any visible way to open the safe -- no key hole nor combination.  In fact, we couldn't figure out how it opened and the people on duty there didn't know either!  Interesting.

Later, we watched a re-enactment of the Civil War.  It was really quite a production.  Lot's of noise from cannon such as this one and muzzle loader rifles.  In fact, the whole area became hazy sometimes from the gun smoke!




We kind of wondered that with all that shooting and them at such close range, nobody seemed to get shot.  But then someone reminded us that it happens all the time in Hollywood movies!