It’s fun to see the kids borrowing stuff

They’re using some of the tools I’ve collected to care for their place across the street.  It’s fun to see them making it their own, and keeping up on it.  I’m happy to help, and they take good care of my stuff, so win-win.

Nice sunset this past weekend!

Pretty crazy competition setup this past weekend

I still get out once a month or so to keep my skills sharp.  We got to shoot from cars, shoot while climbing up and down steps, and more! Fun Friday evening!

Cool blue glowy

Citizen watches have a really cool color of blue for the lume on their hands and hour markers.  It lasts all night easily too.  

It’s fun seeing people read my blog

This was a particularly fun exchange between the three of us recently❣️

I got my tire remounted and balanced.

It’s almost as good as new.  You can see where the buried root (that I accidentally dug up with my wheel while winching out) poked into the sidewall and popped it off the bead… What a freak thing!

I got this cool timegrapher…

I used my birthday cash to by this little meter that listens to the heartbeat of a mechanical watch so you can tell how it’s running.  It helps with regulating and maintaining them.  Pretty interesting!  Also shows my retirement watch is running super nicely and accurate :)

I asked my mom about the other pocket watch I remembered

She’d always had this one hanging on the mantle while we were growing up.  I got the full story! It’s cool to have five generations of time pieces in our collections!  She’s gonna have to keep me from swiping this one when she’s not looking! It’s crazy how the minute hand was curved from the heat of the fire.  The hair spring is broken too so not much chance this one’s gonna run, the the intricate case, beautiful movement, and precious memories are all still evident!

My mom found this map of our old house

She’d drawn it for my Grandma who was house bound so that she could see how it was laid out inside.  It’s a pretty good re-creation!

Tractor and bush hog lessons

They’re preparing us for the next time they need bush hogging done at Camp Jabez.  We were planning to do some this week, but working on the fence and electric wires was higher priority. 

My dad would have been jealous to see me running this.  I’m sure he got to play with bigger ones when he was working on a farm in his later years. 

Last week we were mending fences…

 

George Milo has a rough life as a barn cat…

One of our catalpa beans got stuck on my Jeep…

The gate at Camp Jabez is cool looking

Well my clone finally arrived…

It’s just kind of a fun experiment.  It looks good and runs well.  We’ll see if the Chinese movements are any good?  It’s by far the cheapest mechanical watch I have.  They’ve certainly paid attention to EVERY detail. You can even see the “crown” etched on the glass floating over the 6 o’clock position in the second pic from the bottom right after the last S in Swiss.  

I’m not gonna pass it off as the real thing, but I do really like the function and look, but not for $25K! I still cringed at a few hundred bucks… 🤪

Julie digging up old pics…

She found this among her mom’s stuff while going through it recently.  It was from pretty early in our dating life.

Mostly done.

The built in shelving system it came with made the task so much easier! You can see how Andy set it up including building a box for some of his longer tools on the lower right side.  He’s got one more box to build on the left for long stock and his tripod vise.  It’s gonna be sweet when he finishes.  My dad always wanted a setup like this where he could have all his tools and parts close at hand, but still be mobile. He would have loved to see this in his grandkids❣️

All hands on deck!

A few of us helped Andy move into his new truck.  Brandon is treating him well as a thank you for what Andy is bringing to the table :)

It was fun to jump in with some of the guys and help out.  He has TONS of room.  Four of us could work in there and stay out of each other’s way.  There’s even room for the microwave in the bulkhead over the passenger compartment!

Julie’s mystery snails are making babies…!

She found this attached to the inside of the lid on her fish tank.  Pretty creepy and cool all at the same time. We will see what happens.  Might be cool and fun to watch. 

Cool spiderweb at John and Savannah’s

I noticed this when pulling out of our driveway a few mornings ago.  I liked how the morning beads of dew were hanging on the web.

I used roughly a 24x zoom on my phone to capture it.  Pretty cool.  That’s like having a 600mm on a 35mm camera… Crazy that you can carry something like that in your pocket these days and get a decent image of something like this without even having to get out of the car…

A perfect day for a car wash…

The storm blew in just as I was finishing up… 

Crazy storm fronts moving through last week..

I don’t remember a summer that was this wet before, especially August.  I guess it’s making up for all the drought last year?!  Cool clouds though!

Andy showing off his spacious brand new truck!

I like little details like the airplane shaped date hand pointer…

Mechanical works of art!  I like the hand currently showing August 11th.

The man behind the legend

It was fun to see this YouTube of Junlge Jim’s and Jungle Jim (the guy on the left that created it).  The YouTuber on the right got dressed up in one of “Jungle’s” costumes and roamed the store with him while they chronicled their history adn approach to the fun that defines the place.  I put a link to the video here along with the screenshot in case you wanted to check it out.

84K likes, 5K comments. "America’s largest grocery store should be ...

Morning Brew youtu.be

All cleaned up looking good in the evening light

I got everything put back in place, or at least drying and waiting to be put back.  We used about everything I had.  At one point we had two two straps, a tree saver, and a winch extension involved hahahaha.

Spin balance?

One issue in driving your Jeep home after getting muddy is you can have issues with mud causing balance issues in your wheels.  But it the mud is still fresh, and you don’t have too much, they tend to spin themselves balanced pretty well.  The leftmost pic shows one that spin-balanced nicely on the way out.   It helps if it’s raining, which it was at the time.  The middle pic shows the wheel I popped off the bead.  It didn’t get a chance to spin balance (or get washed by running in the rain.  Quite a difference.  I needed to clean it up enough that the tire shop would be willing to touch it, which is what the pic on the right shows.  I little power washing goes a long way, but I couldn’t get it all without taking the wheel off the rim.  But the shop was good and willing to finish the cleaning, and get it all re-mounted and re-balanced.  All at no charge.  They always take good care of me at Discount Tire.  Have for decades.

If you don’t winch, you didn’t try hard enough…

I’m known for taking that attitude when off-roading.  While I was out with Zac, he got the chance to prove that after four recoveries haha.  We still had a great time and even Chloe kept saying she was still enjoying it.  We were 30 seconds from the end of the ride and I might have failed to give the mud proper respect and got stuck in the ruts you can see behind me (lower left).  Zac didn’t have enough weight or traction to recover me so we had to winch using several big bushes as anchor points.  I might have popped the tire off the rim’s bead in the process of winching (on an underground root I somehow managed to dig up with the wheel as I was coming up out of the rut), lower right pic).  The ground was too soft to use my normal jack and platform so Zac drove me home and the Jeep spent the night on the trail. (Three of us, our gear, and two dogs filled his Jeep for sure)  The next morning, my amazing wife offered to rescue me in her Subaru 🤪 by loading it full of everything we might need to jack it up and/or winch out some more (upper right).  Luckily, the spare tire change only took 30 mins with a real jack (and some wooden planks my dad saved), and I drove right out the rest of the mud bogs first try in about 13 seconds.  It was a good thing because a bad storm was blowing in right at that moment.  It took out several trees that blocked the road so we had to go the long way home.  incidentally, this was the exact same time that Columbus was getting hit with tornadoes.

The upper left shows me all safe and sound at home after the jeep spent the night on the trail. Still one of the cleanest it’s been after off-roading.  Partially due to not having mud tires flinging stuff everywhere, and partly since my new wheels sit inboard 3/4” more so I get a little better fender flare coverage. 

Do I regret not having mud tires and selling my beadlocks yet?  Hmmmm.  I don’t think so.  I sure realize how important it is to make sure you have your stuff with you even if you’re doing light off-roading.  I’m not planning any more treks for a while so we will see what’s next…

Play til you drop…

Sometimes you just run out of energy while playing and end up with your toys on your head…

Julie made us another tomato pie

These are SOOOOOOO yummy.  Cheese, mayo, more cheese, tomatoes, more cheese, and baked to golden brown and delicious.  What’s not to love.  

Meanwhile, Sophie is enjoying Percy time❣️

We might have gotten into a little mud…

…You know it’s bad when this is what your glasses look like when you get home!

Zac climbed the Waterfall in his Jeep.

I promised him a redepemption run after I had to tow strap him over it in his Ranger a year ago Christmas. Good times!

Off-roading with Zac and Chloe

We had fun angles (left pics), and good food - BLTs made by Chloe (lower right).  I thought my Jeep looked pretty picturesque in the woods (upper right).

Trying to get a good downy woodpecker pic

Julie got me one more sticker since I was keeping my Jeep

These little black cat stickers are so cute!

I got this cool pic of Julie’s bamboo shrimp

She calls them fanboys since they always sit there “fanning” their filters feeding appendages. 

Julie’s fanboy (bamboo) shrimp are so fun and cool

It’s fun to watch them collect goodies out of the jet stream and then occasionally clean off their filter “feathers” as a little snack.

Stumbled across this on the internet

The design of this watch, fae and hands doesn’t appeal to me as much for some reason, but I do like the complications.  This is a mechanical Swiss watch that has the most complications I’ve seen crammed into one movement.  It has the same movement as the Omega Speedmaster, but they included the moon phase on this one. Crazy that you can have all this running on tiny gears, springs and jewels in there.  So if you ran the chronographs as a second time zone you would have GMT, day, date, month, moon, 24hr, and time.  What more could you “need”? Hahahaha.  

Random pics from Facebook…

Facebook offered me a post from a relative who’s name or picture I didn’t even recognize, but she was posting this pics of the five of us plus my grandma and grandpa Barton (bottom pic, couple on the left).  I think the couple on the right is Aunt Suzie and Uncle Chuck?

Foul weather friends

The dogs stay close when it thunders ALL day.  I don’t remember a July and especially an August with so much rain and so many storms before.  I guess it’s a needed contrast from last year’s drought…?

I imagine this being Andy’s garage one day…!

Woah, he flashed his rubies at me!

AND I was lucky enough to get a decent shot of it on my phone.

We got our murder back this summer

There’s normally six or seven, but this morning we only had one crow for a while.

Happiness is a warm pup in the lap…

And the pup is happy too!

Just some of the fun from my birthday week…

Not just one, but TWO free ice cream offers from Graeter’s!

Free birthday coffee at Starbucks

 I stopped in to grab a free light roast cup of blonde coffee for my birthday.  As I was browsing, I saw this Ohio themed mug.  They pretty well nailed some of our faves.  Football, lady bugs, the lighthouse, and even Skyline made the cut❣️

More watch stuff…

Being a mechanical engineer, I marvel at these kind of mechanical watches like all the ones I have from my grandfathers that can keep time as well as all the other complications like day, date, month, stop watch, 24 hour time, etc.!  Really cool to have, learn about, and reminisce of the previous owners❣️ 

Jeep tire carrier hack…?

I picked my bumper and tire carrier combo so that I could adjust it and let the spare tire just barely rest on the bumper.  Even though I have an HD tire carrier, this way there isn’t as much stress on the hinges or door when bouncing around back there.  It works pretty well and has stayed solid for a one time.  You can see there isn’t any clearance between my spare and the rear bumper when the tailgate is closed.

Getting ok pics of hummingbirds

I’ve been playing around with manual focus to help me “see through” the window screens.  It takes a bit longer to get set to take a pic, which’s makes it challenging to capture the hummingbirds that tend to only hang out for a few seconds at a time.  This was my first decent capture.  A male, ruby throated. They’re so impossibly small!

Such beautiful craftsmanship!

I’ve enjoyed reading up on the details of this watch and company!  The serial numbers put it right at the turn of 1906 to 1907.  120 years old, AND it’s still running.  It is keeping decent time hanging up, struggles a bit when laying flat.  Howard watches from the late 1800s and early 1900s were some of the best examples of watch making in the US and rivaled what the Swiss were doing at the time as well.  He revolutionized pocket watches by coming up with the first stem wound versions.  He also invented the adjustable regulation mechanism you can see in the upper left of the lower right inset pic. 

This particular specimen was made just after that when the successor (Keystone) was making watches from the parts Howard had in stock after the sale of the company.  The name eventually sold to Hamilton which is still a renowned American mechanical watch maker.

In these days, the watch movement and the case were two separate products.  The case is made by the Chicago Crescent Watch Company.  It is an open faced design housing the crystal, the back cover of the movement and an outer back cover.  All these can easily be opened with a fingernail for viewing.

I love it❣️