OMG

Thundercats - the movie?

Yeah, it's a fake trailer - but wow.

Look here:

The Wedding

This past weekend, June 13th, marked the wedding of June's son Adam to his girlfriend of many years, Anna.

For as long as I have known June and Adam, there was no doubt that he and Anna were going to get married at some point in the future. They were equivalently High School sweethearts who, now in college, decided to get married over the summer so that they could finish out their degrees.

When I showed up to the Amphitheater at Greenbo Lake, I saw the usual spread of chairs out in the green lawn and picked up that it was an outdoor wedding. True to Adam's style, I also noticed that the groomsmen, bridesmaids and others in the wedding party were in garb. Here you can see a picture of Anna being escorted to the altar by her father in a kilt.

The wedding march itself was a piece of bag pipe music that I only know as Scotland the Brave. It was a very cool service. Adam's younger sister was there to shoot the place with her camera - a budding photographer. I've seen her work and the girl has a very good idea for capturing the shot.
It was a small ceremony - perhaps attended by no more than fifty to sixty people - but no less enjoyable. It should be a lesson for the times and perhaps a good theme for their marriage:

"Keep things simple".

One Word

CHEEZECAKE

Tseo says Hi

Two posts in one day...

Amazing.

Once I got home from the lake, I decided to fire up the outdoor kitchen again and cook something for lunch. When I was finished and putting things away, I saw something gray walk down from the hillside and into the back yard. Originally I thought that it was one of the stray cats in the neighborhood coming down to eat at the bowl of food I put out for strays.

Well, I was half right.

Someone's been busy...

Today, like other Tuesdays, is a day that Josh and I get out of the house for a while and try and do something adventuresome. It does not always work since we're trying to keep it cheap so we're usually just traveling to local parks, lakes and the like.

Today we went out to Turkey Creek Lake on the west side of Portsmouth and went creek-walking.

As soon as we showed up to the park, there was something that was different about the place. Large stones that had been part of the hillside since I was a kid had slid down and altered the landscape and the creek had altered its course. As my eyes followed up the length of the creek I was surprised to find that someone had been busy.

Stacked stone sculptures and monuments are as ancient as any human civilization. A rock might point out a boundary or barrier between one area and another. Circles of stones (some as large as those creating the stone circle of Stone Henge) are ancient symbols dividing the ground within the circle and the ground outside the circle as separate; perhaps as simple as the difference between the mundane world and the spiritual world.

Stacked stone monuments, such as the structure above, were commonly found across the European landscape as markers for everything from trails, burials, environmental dangers, etc. They require only time and patience to build since there is no mortar and creek stones are fairly plentiful if you just hunt around for them.

The thing that I find most disturbing about the discover and construction of this stone monument is that =I= didn't do it.

Given the time and inclination, this would have been something that I could have and probably would have built. I didn't think that there were people in this quaint corner of Ohio who would even contemplate the idea of creating a stacked-stone monument. Anyone can stack stones to create a small dam in a creek but it takes patience to collect the stone and stack them so that the shape is maintained.

Near the monument was yet another piece of construction - something that I found rather curious.
A few feet from the monument, someone had stacked and piled stone, sticks and leaves in what I can only best describe as a spiral. This picture doesn't quite capture the design that well, but if you look below there is a close up of the various layers of the form.

The dead sticks are piled at the center of the spiral and then, as it expands, the channel is filled with leaves that are only slightly wilted. I would surmise that this structure (or at least the leaves) were harvested and piled over the weekend since they haven't completely wilted.

So then I thought:

Who would have created two ancient symbols of stone; the monument and the spiral?

I have my own theories as to who -could- make such things but not necessarily if they would or not.

Again,

Someone's been busy.