Roger’s Ramblings

Swim Meet 23 Jan 2010

23 January 2010 was another Age Group Swim Meet for Kyle and Zoe. This time it was at Rockford, Michigan. Kyle and Zoe both swam. The YouTube videos are below.

Zoe 50 Yards Backstroke. Zoe, 3rd from bottom in Lane 4 (the gap in the video is Uncle Roger pressing the wrong button on the camera at the wrong time). Zoe wins her Heat in 47.09 seconds.

Kyle 50 Yards Butterfly. Kyle is in Lane 4, diving in over the orange cap of the swimmer from the previous race. Kyle wins this heat in 30.94 seconds – not quite up to his 30.18 from 2 weeks ago – a better turn would have helped.

Zoe 50 Yards Breaststroke. Zoe is in Lane 2 at the bottom of the picture. She won this heat, but less time looking across the pool would have given her a bit faster time . 1:01.82 – hey it’s still waaaaaay better than I could even think of doing!!!!

Kyle 50 Yards Backstroke. Kyle is at the bottom in Lane 2 – a great start and then an easy swim sees Kyle winning this Heat in a good time of 35.11 seconds- more than 5 seconds ahead of anyone else.

Great Job Kids!!!!!!!!! See you next weekend

Yet Another Olde Photo

This one is perhaps the most difficult one so far. It starts out as a tiny 2 ½ x 3 ¼ print, so there’s not a lot to work with getting started…

Before and After showing progess of Restoration

Still quite a bit of work to do yet on this one.

Swim Meet 9 Jan

Saturday 9 January was the Quad Swim Meet for Byron Center, Zeeland, Rockford and a team called “Heat”, although I don’t remember what school they were. This is part of the West Michigan Swim League.

Zoe wasn’t swimming today – she was a Church Camp, but Kyle competed in a Relay and 2 Individual events.

50 Yards Butterfly…

Kyle finished a close second in this one.

100 Yards Freestyle

Kyle won this race very easily, but his time was second overall – the winner of the first race was 7 seconds faster.

A couple of other shots here, including an “action” diving shot.

Another Olde Photo

This one took a LOT of work. Not helped by a very inopportune Photoshop crash

Before and After of Olde Photo

A lot of work with Adobe Photoshop CS4 to get the left version to the right version – all from an original that is 3 ¼ x 2 ½ inches.

Farming in Michigan

Well it was just a three weeks ago that our “neighbours” arrived with the giant green combine harvester on tracks and harvested the corn from the field out behind our property.

Today they’re back with a giant tractor cultivating the mud, dirt, water, ice and snow.

A closer view of the tractor and its running gear. The tracks are about 2 feet wide on the ground.

Pictures below.

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Christmas Newsletter 2009

2009 is all but done…

Mount Washington Summit

… it’s been an interesting year. Lisa is still at the same job she’s been doing since she started work in 1985, but after several changes of ownership is back with General Motors again. Roger continues taking care of the house and yard, as well as lots of computer related work for the Western Michigan Genealogical Society and the Clan Moffat Society. Roger also helps others with genealogy websites, and has customers as far away as Denmark and Israel. Read the rest of this entry »

Fixing Olde Photographs

Here are a couple of before and after shots of some olde photos I’ve fixed up for a friend.

Young Pat Smith

Young Pat Smith's Sister

After scanning the photos it was lots of time with the tools available in Photoshop to Clone, Heal and Patch the damage. The second photo had been torn nearly through and then “fixed” with sellotape at some stage in the long ago past – what a mess!!! It kind of reminded me of watching the curators work on the Dead Sea Scrolls some years ago when we saw them at the Field Museum in Chicago – gently scraping away the decades olde tape that had been put on them.

First Lego League Michigan Finals

One part of the Michigan State finals of First Lego League was held at Carman-Ainsworth Middle School in Flint, Michigan on 12 December 2009.

The team from Byron Center – Team <Default> – made it to the State Finals for the first time ever thanks to their performance at the Regionals at Grandville on 20 November 2009.

Overall as a Team they finished in the lower half of the 48 teams present, but they learned a lot from seeing and competing against the other teams. They did however win the “Alliance Challenge” – a time limited challenge whereby 4 teams had to work together on a plan to have their robots each drive down the course and for all of them to end up parked in the smallest possible space.

Alliance Challenge Winners

Kyle’s idea of having the Team <Default> robot run up a ramp that was on one of the other robots, thereby effectively parking 4 robots in the space occupied by 3 robots proved to be the winning idea. A photogallery of images from this is available when viewing the whole post. (click link below if it’s not showing.)

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Corn Harvest

We live adjacent to a large field that is planted in either corn or soy beans each summer. I don’t know who owns the ground, nor who does the planting and harvesting, but they sure have access to some very large machinery. At the end of November we got an inch of rain over Thanksgiving, which came on top of already very wet and soggy conditions, and it seemed like the corn might have to stand all Winter, or at least well into the Winter until the ground froze enough to let the get on it. But on 30 November a monstrous combine harvester on very large rubber tracks turned up to harvest this corn. And it needed all of that support and drive that the huge rubber tracks and large rear drive wheels could offer to get around the field. It was accompanied by an equally large IH Case tractor with 8 drive wheels pulling a large bin that was on rubber tracks to take the corn from the combine out to waiting semi-truck and trailer that was beside the road.

Here’s one picture, and a gallery shows if you open this post.

John Deere 9770 STS

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Chihuly Toledo

On 25th November Lisa and I took her Mum down to the Toledo Museum of Art to see the exhibit of Dale Chihuly glass works “Chihuly Toledo!”

We had been to the Toledo Museum of Art during the Summer to spend a day there looking at displays, including a fascinating glass blowing exhibition in The Glass Pavillion and learned of their upcoming Chihuly display. So the day before Thanksgiving we headed off there to take a look.

In the Chihuly exhibit room I didn’t see any signs saying “No Photography” as I walked in, so took a couple of pictures before I got scolded. Turns out the only sign was in such a place that you’d see it only as you exited the room. So here they are…