Good Morning Everyone!
Happy Birthday to Fred and Elvis!

Another warm day. The water is running off the roofs and down the roads. Fred was out taking pictures a few minutes ago. There was a fog bank over the pond and along the valleys. West Shore Road looks like it does in early spring - before the mud season sets in seriously. Our driveway is clear and some of the shrubs are poking out of the snowbanks. Unfortunately, the flies are waking up, too. The chickadees have been feasting on them near our big picture windows, driving Woody a little crazy and keeping him dashing in and out most of the morning.

We let the fire in the wood stove go out this morning. The house is very warm with the sun coming in the big windows, and outside my window here in the office, the thermometer is reading 50 degrees, and that's on the cooler side of the house. Out front we have a reading of 56, but the sun seems to have gone in momentarily. I'm sure it was warmer than that when I was outside a little while ago.

By mid-afternoon we'll probably need to start the fire again, but for now it's very comfortable.

I've posted a few pictures of our January thaw. Now it's time to make a birthday cake!

Here is something entirely unrelated to anything current, but I rec'd one of those sometimes bothersome "forwards" recently about old photos from a Brownie camera and finally, today, I found some background information on those photos. You might be interested: Pearl Harbor Photos

The "forward" mentioned that the photos had been found in "the footlocker of a sailor, etc." - but that may not have been the case. Read this comment I found about them.
From:
Subject: Pearl Harbor Photos
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 17:39:08 -0600

By now you must have received several comments or explanations re: the photos of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. Whoever posted them, in various numbers and formats, also included a tall tale of them being found "in an old Brownie camera, in a sailors footlocker, a sailor who serverd aboard the USS Quapaw (ATF110)"

Well, of course, sailors have seabags, not footlockers, the keel of the Quapaw was not laid until Dec. 1942, and they are all high quality (not Brownie camera quality) US Navy photos, taken all over the battle area. The aerial photos were taken by Japanese pilots as they attacked Pearl Harbor. The US DoD or War Department (in 1945-46) acquired those and other miltary photos after Japan's unconditional surrender.

I had seen most of the pictures in Life magazine in the 40s. All these pictures, now in US Archives, got wide display in 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the attack. Looking closely at the aerials you can see artwork has been done on the photos, for clarity and intelligence use.

I have a long experience with photography, particularly Navy Photography, from 1953 in Navy Photo School, through 1996 when I retired as a Navy Photo Lab (civil service) manager.

Bernard R. Cleary,
Chief Photographer's Mate