Fire at the quarry…
4 minute read
March 14, 2024, 8:38 PM
Sometimes, you just have to be at the right place at the right time. I had a doctor’s appointment today near Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, but before I left, Elyse gave me a heads-up that there was a fire at the Aggregate Industries quarry off of Piney Meetinghouse Road. Funny thing about this: I discovered that quarry about a month ago on Maps, and added it to my photo list, which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” because of how infrequently I cross things off of it. So this worked out nicely, because I already knew exactly where the location was, and I would already be nearby. So I threw the drone in the back of the car and made plans to check out the quarry after my appointment. As I approached Interstate 270, the smoke became quite evident, with a large plume of smoke visible in the distance. After the appointment, I headed over, and found a safe place to fly that was out of the way, but where I could still see everything that I needed to see in order to fly safely.
Being a working fire situation, I kept my distance. I did not want to interfere with the firefighting efforts in any way, and truth be told, I didn’t want to be noticed at all. I just wanted to get in, get my shots, and then get out. I knew the kind of stuff that I would capture and how I would fly if I was flying under normal conditions, but this was not that, and so I adjusted accordingly.
According to news sources, the fire involved two liquid asphalt tanks, one tank containing used motor oil, and various other miscellaneous equipment owned by the F.O. Day Bituminous Company, which has facilities on the site. Due to its being an oil fire, they couldn’t use water on the flames, so they had to get a foam unit to come out from Dulles Airport to help extinguish the fire. The fire was completely out by the evening. Fortunately, everyone on site was safely evacuated, and no one was hurt. There was also no danger to the public or the surrounding area, and a fire department spokesman likened the smoke to a bad air quality day. So at the end of the day, it was only property damage, i.e. nothing that money can’t fix.
Continue reading…Categories: DC area local news, Montgomery County, Photography
Thinking about various church experiences…
22 minute read
March 9, 2024, 8:30 AM
Recently, I found myself discussing the Vacation Bible School that my sister and I attended in the mid nineties while I was in middle school. It came from a post on /r/exchristian on Reddit, asking, “What do you still have memorized?” My first reaction was to cite the offertory song that this program had us sing while they passed the plate around. In thinking about it, I was struck by how misplaced the priorities were when it came to what this offering was to be used for (more on that later). But then it also led to my recalling various other church experiences that I had while growing up, and how much of a mixed bag these things were. Some experiences were quite good, while some them were not exactly all rainbows and sunshine.
For some background, I attended church from 1989 to 2003. I was never that much of a “religious” person to begin with, having spent the first eight years of my life without it. My father grew up Jewish, and has practiced no religion of any kind for most of his adult life, i.e. he is ethnically Jewish, but does not follow the religion. Meanwhile, Mom grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and attended church regularly until she began college, and then did not attend church at all from 1969 to 1989. Thus my early formative years contained no significant religious indoctrination, short of attending a Baptist preschool during our first year in Rogers, and the religious side of things in that program was super light. I don’t remember doing much religious stuff there short of a few trips to the sanctuary and the “God is great, God is good” prayer before our daily snack. Outside of this, Mom would occasionally discuss religious subjects with me, though nothing too deep, but even then, I was kind of a skeptic. When Mom would try to explain this “God” person, the way that he was described defied everything that I had observed in the world, and so I was like, okay, sure, and not really buying it, even at a very young age. Likewise, I saw no purpose to the prayer that Mom and I did each night before going to bed for some time, because I never really thought that we were speaking to anyone other than ourselves.
Then in 1989, Mom finally found a church that she liked. As I understand it, when we first moved to Arkansas in 1985, Mom had First Presbyterian Church in Rogers pegged as somewhere that she had wanted to go from the outset, but she was unimpressed with the minister that was there at that time. By 1989, that guy had left and a new person had taken his place, and Mom liked the new guy a lot more. We typically went to church on Sundays, we did the after school program that they did on Wednesday afternoons, and then we also did the Vacation Bible School week during the summer.
Categories: Arkansas, Reddit, Religion, Stuarts Draft
The most pointless school day ever…
7 minute read
February 17, 2024, 8:03 PM
This year marks thirty years since the most pointless day of my entire school career. It was the only day that I attended where, if I were to do it all over again, I am 100% certain that I would have skipped it. That was the day that Augusta County decided to have a snow make-up day on a Saturday. Yes, you read that right: they had school on a Saturday.
I suppose that the lead-up to this made enough sense, because in Augusta County, the winter of 1994 was a very snowy one. School was cancelled for a total of 16 days over the course of that winter for various weather events, including one instance where we were out for the entire week. The thing about Augusta County, though, is that the schools use one calendar across the entire county, but being such a large county (only Pittsylvania is larger), the conditions end up being very different in various parts of the county. So if road conditions would be too treacherous for students in the more rural western part of the county to go to school, they would call a snow day. Thus, students in the more urbanized eastern part of the county (where I lived) would also get the day off, but our roads, being more heavily traveled, would typically be fine. So with 16 snow days, three were built into the calendar, i.e. they made the school year 183 days long, assuming that we would have at least three snow days, i.e. those snow days were essentially freebies because the calendar already accounted for them. That in itself was a first for Augusta County, as the previous year had no built-in snow days at all, therefore all of the snow days that we had that year had to be made up. For a region that is north enough to get a lot of snow but south enough to where people still freak out over it, it’s surprising that they didn’t build in snow days before 1993, especially considering that the previous year had 14 snow days (why do I still remember this?). So accounting for the three built-in days, that meant that we had to make up 13 days.
The way that Augusta County allocated make-up days was something that I disagreed with. They generally preferred to use existing time off within the year for make-up days before extending the year out into June. While they would add some days at the end of the year before some holidays, they only were in the make-up day plan after one or two other school holidays, conference days, teacher workdays, etc. had already been taken away. So having 16 snow days, we were going to school five days a week from the last snow event in March all the way to June 17, with no breaks of any kind, as every single teacher workday, parent-teacher conference day, and long holiday weekend had been commandeered for instruction. I would have preferred to just tack every single make-up day onto the end of the year in June and leave the breaks intact, because I felt like those off days had value because they prevented burnout all around (and trust me, the burnout was heavy that year, and was exacerbated by jackoffs like Frank Wade, who were more than happy to remind us that we had our Memorial Day holiday back in January). And really, with the schools’ being out for more than two months in the summer already, it’s not like anyone would really notice an extra week. If they had extended it out to June 24 or beyond, I doubt anyone would have cared much, except maybe those families who planned big vacations immediately after school let out (and they should know that the end date for the school year is really not set in stone until spring).
Categories: Augusta County, Middle school
Some spherical images of a dead mall…
6 minute read
February 12, 2024, 11:10 AM
Do you remember when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall back in 2015? I wrote about it in the second part of the “Everything Else” photo set, but what I didn’t show you, mainly because I lacked the capability to display it properly at the time, was that I also shot some spherical photos of the place. I was glad that I did, too, because the management would close the interior of the mall less than two weeks after our visit, and the mall was demolished about a year later in preparation for redevelopment. The property now contains an outdoor shopping center called Mill Station, and from everything that I can tell, the center is now thriving. I suppose that tells you that the mall itself was the problem, and that the area is, in fact, a good location for retail – just not that retail, apparently. It’s also spurred additional development beyond the old mall property, so clearly, things are going well there.
So as far as the spherical panorama images go, when we were exploring the mall, I used the Google camera app, which could shoot spherical panoramas, and took eight photo spheres of the place. You start in one spot, and then it tells you how to move the camera in order to image the entire thing. The result is essentially a single Google Street View image of wherever you are standing. I first learned how to do this in August 2014, and I did it on and off for about a year. I eventually lost interest in the photo spheres, after Google discontinued the Panoramio service and rolled it all into Google Maps. As is typical when Google rolls an existing service into another, much functionality was lost, and Panoramio’s going into Maps was no exception. The way that they wanted you to shoot photo spheres after that was with a separate Street View app, and it would more or less upload directly to Google Street View, and wouldn’t save as an image file of mine. So that was a bit of a deal-breaker for me. As far as this website goes, I couldn’t get the images to display properly on here natively, and really didn’t want to have any additional plugins for the site just to power a single Journal entry. Then I recently discovered that Flickr will embed these things on third party websites, such as this one, and we were in business.
Categories: Baltimore County, Photography, Retail
Nothing like making a weekend trip to New York and getting sick while there…
22 minute read
January 26, 2024, 11:03 PM
So as discussed previously, on January 17-19, my friend Aaron Stone and I went up to New York City for a weekend trip. We knew that it was supposed to be cold while we were there, and snow was in the forecast for the last day of our trip, but that was about it, and nothing that we couldn’t handle.
Our route up, however, was intentionally planned to be a bit unorthodox. Normally, for a trip to New York, from where I live, you would go straight up I-95 through Baltimore and then take the Delaware Memorial Bridge just before Wilmington, and follow the New Jersey Turnpike most of the rest of the way to the city. This time, we decided to be a bit more roadgeekish, taking US 15 up to Harrisburg, taking I-81 a short distance to I-78, and then taking I-78 all the way to New York. The goal here was to complete all 146 miles of Interstate 78 in one shot. It would only add about 45 minutes to the drive by going this way, and we got to complete a highway. I had previously traveled most of I-78 in the nineties and early 2000s, but I was missing a section in New Jersey, as well as the small New York portion. Aaron, to my knowledge, had never done any of I-78.
My memories of I-78 were never particularly pleasant, as I always associated it with family road trips in the nineties, where my father would drive. He was always very concerned about making good time on these family trips, and that meant some very long distances in the car along some incredibly dull stretches of highway, with nothing of any note to break up the trip. For an eight-hour trip from Stuarts Draft, Virginia to Fairfield, Connecticut, we would make maybe two stops the entire way, once around Paxtonia, and then another one somewhere in New Jersey, and those would be kept as short as possible. In other words, the journey was viewed as a chore, a necessary evil to be knocked out quickly, and not as a part of the adventure. And in those pre-Internet days, there was only so much that one could do to keep one’s self occupied. We would bring all sorts of books and such to read, but those only went so far before we got tired of reading. I-78 in Pennsylvania is largely rural, and while it does go through the Allentown area, it skirts it to the south, far enough away for there to be nothing interesting to see. It’s what led my sister and me to start calling Pennsylvania “the forever state” because it felt like it took forever to get through, and it was incredibly boring. About the only thing interesting on I-78 in Pennsylvania was the Delaware River toll plaza, and that was on the westbound side. I remember, at 12 years old, wishing that the toll plaza was on our side just to help break the monotony.
Categories: COVID-19, Friends, New York City, Personal health
A day in Filthadelphia…
10 minute read
January 3, 2024, 12:46 PM
On Friday, December 29, I went up to Philadelphia for the day with my friend Aaron Stone. We each had our goals up there, and for the most part, we accomplished them. I wanted to see the “Four Seasons”, and Aaron wanted to see the SS United States. And then we both wanted to go to King of Prussia Mall. Elyse, meanwhile, was unavailable, as she was on a work trip to Roanoke for bus museum business.
I feel like, for this trip, we scheduled it more or less perfectly. We had exactly the right amount of time for what we had intended to do. We left in the HR-V from my house, and made two quick food stops in Ellicott City and Catonsville. Then it was straight through to Delaware House. That was a bit more involved than I had anticipated, though, as there was a large backup just north of I-695, which slowed us down a bit. I was regretting not looking at Google ahead of time before deciding not to bounce at White Marsh and taking Route 1 for a ways, like I did last April on the New York trip. Route 1 is a viable alternative to I-95, and this would have been a good time to use it.
Then after Delaware House, we continued straight through into Pennsylania, taking I-95 through Wilmington. Every time I go through Wilmington, I always say that I want to explore it, but then I never plan a trip to actually go to Wilmington. It always gets bypassed, either by skirting it to the southeast on trips that go into New Jersey, or by never getting off of the highway while going through on the way up to Philadelphia. I went to Christiana Mall last year, but still haven’t done Wilmington itself. Aaron and I discussed possibly doing a quick side trip through parts of Wilmington on the way back down, time permitting, so maybe we’d do a little bit in Wilmington, but that can was kicked down the road for now.
Categories: Cameras, National politics, Philadelphia, Retail, Ships
A weekend in Augusta County, unsupervised…
28 minute read
December 22, 2023, 5:00 PM
I did my quarterly trip down to Augusta County on December 13-15, and this time, unlike most occasions when I do this trip, I was doing it completely unsupervised. Elyse was pet-sitting for a friend of ours, and so she was in Fort Washington while I went down to Virginia. With that in mind, I took full advantage of this situation, packing in all of the stuff that I would want to do that Elyse would probably not have the patience for. In other words, lots of drone photography, mostly photographing Augusta County school buildings, with the thought’s being that very few people would get good aerials of these relatively small schools. I had a good time, and I felt very productive.
I got out of the house around 11:00, and then hit the road. This was a trip where I went down via US 29 and back via I-81, and things immediately did not look good, as I encountered major traffic on the Beltway. That was annoying, but I recovered well enough, though I did start to contemplate how much of a difference it would have made to go an alternate route for a Charlottesville trajectory, with the thought’s being to 270 to 15 to 29, going via Point of Rocks and Leesburg, or something similar to that. After all, the alternate route works well when I’m going to I-81. That alternate route bypasses the Beltway and I-66, going to I-81 via US 340 and Route 7 via Harpers Ferry and Winchester, and only adds seven minutes to the trip. I ran my proposed alternate route for 29 through Google, and it adds about thirty minutes to the drive to go across Montgomery and Frederick counties via local roads, and then 15 at Point of Rocks, and joining 29 just south of Haymarket. This also bypasses the busiest part of my route on 29, in the Gainesville area. The question really becomes a matter of whether this alternate route is worth the additional time to travel it vs. dealing with the annoyances of the Beltway and 66, as well as the additional cost involved with taking the express lanes.
In any case, once I got to the express lanes on the Beltway, I took them, and continued in the express lanes on I-66, because I didn’t want to risk any more delays. I made a pit stop at the Sheetz in Haymarket, and then from there, I took 15 to 29 and then the rest was normal for a trip down via 29. The plan was to dip into Warrenton on the way down to photograph some converted restaurant buildings. I had spotted a few of these on past drives through Warrenton, and now I was going to do them, along with whatever else I found interesting on the way down. This was also why I hit up the Sheetz in Haymarket rather than the third Sheetz (Bealeton) like I normally would. Warrenton came before the third Sheetz, and I wanted some food inside of me before I got busy.
Categories: Augusta County, Charlottesville, Family, High school, Middle school, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Stuarts Draft, Travel, Waynesboro, Woomy
Yes, we are back in the air again…
6 minute read
December 2, 2023, 11:27 PM
You may recall that when I wrote in this space about my recent trip to Chicago, I described how my DJI Air 2S drone went to a watery grave in Lake Michigan following a forced landing due to battery depletion while I was flying in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, taking my entire day’s worth of photos down with it. The good news is that I am now whole once again. I got a new DJI Air 3 drone, which, among other features, sports twice as much fly time per battery than the Air 2S, and then I also activated the flyaway coverage that I had with the Air 2S and got a new one of those, too. So all in all, I’m in good shape. I have new equipment that is faster and more powerful than my previous equipment, plus I also have some pretty solid equipment as a backup drone.
That also means that the Mini probably won’t see much action anymore. The thing about the DJI Mavic Mini is that it’s not a bad drone, but it’s not a great drone, either. It lacks collision sensors, so it’s not going to stop you from plowing headlong into an object. It’s also fairly slow-moving and gets kicked around in the wind a bit. It also uses wi-fi as a transmission protocol, and as such, it’s prone to interference. And now being the third one on the totem pole, it’s probably not going to see much use. I will use the Air 3 as my primary drone, and the Air 2S will be the drone that Elyse will use as well as my backup. So it’s like this exchange in the third episode of Roseanne:
Darlene: Mom, if Becky has a heart attack, I’m in charge, right?
Roseanne: Right!
DJ: Mom, if Darlene has a heart attack, I’m in charge.
Roseanne: Right, DJ! If both your sisters are dead, you’re in charge.
Categories: Cameras, Montgomery Village
A trip to the Midwest…
11 minute read
November 11, 2023, 10:17 AM
From November 2-9, Elyse, our friend Kyle, and I took a road trip out to the Midwest. We went to Austintown, Windsor, Detroit, Dearborn, Chicago, Sheboygan, Gary, Elkhart, Cleveland, and lots of places in between over the span of eight days. The genesis of this trip was a desire to visit Chicago to see my sister and do stuff there, and then it expanded a bit into a much larger adventure. This was always intended to be a road trip, and we put quite a few miles on the HR-V over the course of the trip. It also means that the new HR-V has traveled further in its first year than any of my other vehicles ever did over their entire careers. The new HR-V has gone as far north as Ottawa, as far south as Charleston, as far east as Brooklyn, and as far west as Chicago. The only vehicle of mine that has gone further in any of those directions is the Sable, which traveled as far east as Quincy, Massachusetts in 2010. The highlights were a visit to The Henry Ford, where we not only saw the exhibits, but I also viewed a photo of mine that the museum licensed from me a long time ago, doing my own version of a walk through a Chicago neighborhood that SpinnWebe did as a spoof of a photo set of mine, a visit to the Kohler factory up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a siren test in Niles, some drone flights around Gary, Indiana, a visit to Garfield Heights, Ohio to see the former City View Center shopping facility that was later successfully repositioned as an industrial park, a visit to the Kent State University May 4 Visitor Center, a small museum about the Kent State shootings, to see a photo of mine that was used there, and finally, a ride on Cleveland’s RTA system. Unfortunately, my DJI Air 2S drone did not survive the week, as a stronger-than-anticipated wind caused it to run out of battery power on the way back from a flight in Sheboygan, which caused it to force-land into Lake Michigan, taking all of my drone shots from that day with it. However, I had my original drone, the DJI Mavic Mini, on hand in case Elyse had wanted to fly, so it was quickly pressed into service to complete the trip.
I’m going to do a full photo set about this trip for Life and Times, so right now, I’m just going to share a few photos of the highlights.
Categories: Canada, Chicago, Photography, Travel, Wisconsin
Playing with the AI image generator…
22 minute read
October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM
Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base. I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me. My first idea was to have it generate me. The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.
The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA
I can’t believe that we went to South Carolina…
18 minute read
October 13, 2023, 5:51 PM
First of all, I have some news for you: I bought a bus. Elyse had been trying to talk me into buying a bus for a while, and I had consistently said no. But then one came up on GovDeals, which is a website where public agencies sell surplus property, that had promise, and I said okay. This unit was a New Flyer D35HF from CARTA, which is the transit agency serving Charleston, South Carolina. If this sounds familiar, “Biscuit” at Commonwealth Coach is another unit from the same agency, and is the same model of bus. I won the auction for a surprisingly low amount, as we paid nearly twice as much to get “Biscuit” for Commonwealth Coach. We then immediately made a deal with Trevor Logan, a fellow transit enthusiast in the DC area who runs the TTMG website, to trade this bus for an Orion V that he owns after he expressed his thoughts about the significance of the unit. It worked out quite well, because while Elyse and I simply wanted a bus to have as a fun vehicle of sorts to take places and show off, Trevor wanted to fully restore and preserve the bus for sentimental reasons, as he had a close relative who worked for CARTA some years ago, and that relative had operated this specific unit. So swapping made everyone happy, as Elyse and I would get a bus to have fun with, and Trevor got something of great personal significance that he would restore.
With that said, buying a bus from a transit agency in South Carolina meant going down to South Carolina to retrieve it, because these auctions are typically as-is-where-is, i.e. the agency provides little to no assistance with the removal of the item. I wanted to line up this pickup trip with a three-day weekend that I had later in the month, but unfortunately, with deadlines for removal and such, it couldn’t wait. So I would spend October 5-6 traveling down to Charleston and back with Elyse and our friend Montigue to retrieve this vintage bus. The whole week prior to our heading down, I was saying to myself, “I can’t believe that I’m going to South Carolina.” Then on the way down, I was like, “I can’t believe that we’re on our way to South Carolina.” And then once we were there, I was saying, “I can’t believe that we’re in South Carolina.” Seriously. This was not something that I had anticipated doing this year.
Categories: New Flyer D35HF, South Carolina, Transit, Travel
A blank slate for the future…
9 minute read
September 20, 2023, 8:46 AM
From September 13-15, Elyse and I made our usual trip down to Staunton, where we photographed a bunch of stuff, did a bunch of other stuff, and also saw my parents. On the middle day of our trip, I did what I consider to be a final update on the demolition of Staunton Mall. The demolition work had been completed some time between our December trip, when I flew the drone around the mostly-demolished facility, and our March trip, but due to scheduling issues, I wasn’t able get out there to actually photograph it again until September. With demolition completed, I intended to physically go in and photograph things with my DSLR and my phone, rather than go in by remote via the drone. The idea was that with the demolition work completed, whatever was left should be pretty stable, so I didn’t need to worry about falling debris or anything else, because it was being left for an indefinite amount of time, until whatever new development that is to replace the mall begins construction. Don’t get me wrong: the drone is a great piece of equipment, but it isn’t able to capture the same amount of detail that one can get by actually going in with a conventional camera and getting right up close to things. That’s not a fault of my drone by any means. You really don’t want to take the drone close enough to anything to get that level of detail in the first place, because that comes with an unacceptable level of risk of an accident. If the drone makes contact with anything, the motors will stop, and it will go down. The drone, by its nature, is also much faster moving photography than one might do when shooting conventionally, and as such, you’re not usually able to stop and appreciate what you’re looking at when you’re flying a drone, i.e. it’s easy to miss a lot of details in the moment. With fairly limited fly time (a drone battery only lasts about 20-25 minutes), it behooves you to get in, get your shots, and get out. By walking in, I was able to slow down and take more time to focus on my surroundings, and I noticed a lot more detail than I would otherwise.
Categories: Augusta County, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Urban exploration
Two stories about Woomy…
3 minute read
September 8, 2023, 11:33 PM
Recently, while we were driving home from shopping, Elyse asked ChatGPT to tell her a story about everyone’s favorite orange curmudgeon: Woomy. I don’t know what the exact parameters that she gave it were, but it came up with decent enough material to come up with something at least somewhat heartwarming. Check these out:
In the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, there lived a curmudgeonly orange octopus named Woomy. Every day, rain or shine, Woomy would climb aboard the DASH bus, his tentacles a tangle of frustration. He’d grumble and grouse about the noise, the crowds, and the whole human world around him.
Passengers would stare, amused by this unexpected commuter. Woomy’s sour expression became a familiar sight, and people began sharing stories of his antics. But despite the attention, Woomy remained steadfast in his curmudgeonly ways.
One winter’s day, as snow painted the city white, a young child with curious eyes got on the bus. Ignoring the stares, the child approached Woomy, offering a small, hand-knit scarf. Woomy’s eyes widened, his expression softening just a bit. He accepted the scarf with a tentative tentacle.
Categories: Alexandria, Artificial intelligence, DASH, Woomy
Toronto was fun, and flying… wasn’t bad.
34 minute read
August 11, 2023, 8:09 PM
So the trip to Toronto that I discussed in my earlier Journal entry about going flying again was a whole lot of fun. I did not know that one could pack that much fun into three short days. Seriously, this was a really fun weekend trip, where we got to spend time with friends and see lots of interesting things.
First, though, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, I went through with it and went flying, and no, I didn’t die. I don’t know if I would necessarily characterize flying as “enjoyable”, but it was at least relatively painless. This trip was in part a test to see how well I would tolerate flying, with one of two possible results: either my horizons would be expanded greatly, or I would never fly again. Fortunately, it was the former, as I think that my being much more mature since the last time I flew, plus my doing a little bit of research did me well. I also had Elyse with me, who is something of a seasoned flyer and knew what we needed to do, so I just had to do as I was told. We took public transit from the house to Dulles, via the 58 bus, the Red Line, and the Silver Line. Then security at Dulles was relatively straightforward, throwing all of our stuff on a conveyor belt and running it through this massive machine. Though I did roll my eyes at having to take my shoes off – but I wore flip-flops on purpose in order to expedite that process. Once we got through security, it was just a matter of waiting until our plane arrived and then it was time to board and depart. This whole airport thing was totally new to me, so I was just sort of taking it in. I’d never been past the main atrium at Dulles before, so there was lots to see. We took the air train to our terminal, which was pretty straightforward, but seeing as it was fully enclosed, it was no fun for fanning, since there was no real angle to get a photo of the vehicles. Though with its being fully automated, there was no cab, which meant that you got a great view of the roadway ahead.
Smoke blankets the city…
3 minute read
July 4, 2023, 10:02 PM
Funny how things work out. The smoke from Canadian wildfires that blanketed the eastern US in a thick layer of haze in early June was not a good thing to have happen for any number of reasons, but putting on my photographer hat for a moment, I was kind of kicking myself for not getting out in it and photographing the haze like I meant it. All I got were a few phone shots taken from the car, going southbound on I-95 while heading home after taking Elyse to Ramblewood, a campground up in Darlington, on June 8 for an event:
The view at the northern interchange between I-95 and the Baltimore Beltway.