Second week of academy is over

And thankfully we are done with ladders (for now). The class included lots of practice climbing extension ladders and getting in and out windows.

Then there was practice at carrying a roof ladder (with two hooks at the end to hang over the ridge line) up an extension ladder...

then pushing the roof ladder up to the peak, then transition from the extension ladder to the roof ladder...

then climbing the roof ladder to the peak. The guy at the top is an instructor, he wasn't helping. Everyone had to do it on their own.

Then the class moved on to removing unconscious victims down the ladder. It was presumed we would use dummies for this, but NO... we got to use our full size classmates as victims.

It wasn't really much fun for the victims either.

Fall Colors

A shot one sunny morning in our neighborhood this week

Some Photos from the Fire Academy

Here are some pictures from the first week of the Fire Academy for Norris. The first picture is part of a little maze you have to navigate with all your gear on while your face mask is blacked out. In this part of the maze, you are crawling across simulated open attic joists till you get to the simulated floor collapse. The sloped part is normally propped up and they yank the support when you are on it so you fall to the concrete. Then you have to regain your composure and keep following the hose line thru the culvert on the left, where your classmates entrap you with plastic netting to see if you can free yourself before continuing to the next part of the maze, which takes you back under the attic in a space that is about 20 inches high. Not much fun with 50 or more pounds of gear and no vision.

This is the Entanglement Box. Still blindfolded, the object is to see how far you can get into the box before you get stuck, then see if you know what to do.

This is in the smoke tower, where you get to crawl into a culvert thats about 24 inches across, go about 8 ft into a little room about 2ft x 3 ft x 3 ft where you find a dummy victim, then drag the victim back out through the culvert with you. Its hard to see the culvert opening in this photo, but its on the wall between the two firefighters (not the manhole on the right).

fall gatherings

Here's a picture of the pinecones that have been littering the yard this fall. We did not have nearly as many either last year or the year before. Cheryl filled this basket and gathered about a hundred more - just by picking them up from around the landscaped parts of the yard where we don't need any baby pine trees.

Caution: Sticky when fresh!
(Lu helps find feathers on his walks. The tall one is definitely a turkey feather.)

Pilgrimage to Chickamauga

While visiting Norris' family in N. Georgia this past weekend, Norris and Cheryl took an afternoon to revisit the battlefield at Chickamauga, where Cheryl's great-grandfather fought with the 82nd Regiment, Indiana Volunteers. For this trip, we went off the automobile tour to find the markers in the woods where some of the action took place. We will post the photos in chronological order with the battle.

One thing we did not previously realize was the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Battlefield Park was the first military park in the United States, created in 1890.

Our first stop is off the Reeds Bridge road, near the north east corner of the park. A third of a mile foot trail over level ground led us to this marker. Markers like these were placed with the help of Veterans before the park was officially created. This one marks the location of the action the 82nd saw on the first day of the battle, September 19th, 1863.



This is how the marker looks when you have passed beyond it on a spur trail -


And for scale, here is Norris with the marker -



The Park has placed the same type of artillery in the positions occupied during the battle. These were the guns the 82nd was supporting.




This interpretive panel was a short walk farther along the trail and tells what happened there - click on the picture and you should be able to read the text.

Rodger Ruddick's book, From the Hayfields to the Battlefields (pages 155-6) gives more details about the role the 82nd played on the 19th of September supporting General Van Derveer's brigade. (The Forrest mentioned in the panel is the one and only Nathan Bedford Forrest).

Now we head to the center of the park for the action the 82nd saw on the second day of the battle, September 20th, 1863.

In this next picture, we are looking over the Union line of battle towards the line of the Confederates -


While we were there, I read the description of the action from Rodger Ruddick's book (pages 156-159) which describes Col. Hunter's orders and what happened to the 82nd at this critical point of the battle.



Back in the woods is the marker showing the position of the 82nd -


The ribbon on the wreath read XIV Army. We did not see any others like it in the park. It might have been placed there on the 20th of September.





A short walk further and you come to an opening of the woods onto a field, which is where the Ohio regiments on the 82nd's right had been positioned.



Cheryl had studied Rodger Ruddick's book and other histories. Every version of the battle tells of the mistaken report that there was a hole in the Union line and that Rosecrans ordered General Woods to move men in order to plug the supposed gap. That action left a real hole in the line at the very spot where Confederate General Longstreet ordered his troops, newly arrived by train from Virginia, to attack, leading to the defeat of the Union Army. However, it was only when standing at at this spot on the battlefield that we understood that the 82nd Indiana was but a short distance to the left of that hole in the Union line, with only the 17th and 31st Ohio between them and the gap where the Army of Northern Virginia attacked and was able to start taking over the field. And only on the battlefield itself do you realize how little space a regiment (nominally 1000 men in Civil War times) actually occupied on the front lines. At that point, you get a real feeling for what happened as you read the description from From the Hayfields, of Colonel Hunter ordering the 82nd to lie down while the retreating Ohioans ran over them, then to pop up and fire before retreating themselves.

This next photo shows the view into the woods that the advancing Army of Northern Virginia would have had, the field with the split rail fence just behind them. The Indiana marker is not visible in the photo, but it's a very short way to the right, beyond where the trail seems to split.


Then from history .... (this next panel is at the Visitor's Center on the north side of the park.)

... we know that General Thomas' XIV Army Corps fell back to Snodgrass Hill, where they held off the Confederates while the Union Army fled back to Chattanooga. Rodger Ruddick's book gives a lot more detail about the actions of Colonel Hunter and his men of the 82nd as the first on the hill. We had pictures from the monument to the 82nd before, but will post them here as well -


As with all of the pictures, clicking on that image should allow reading of the text. This panel reviews the action of the 19th and earlier on the 20th before explaining what happened on Snodgrass Hill.

And here is the Park Service's marker -


Norris stands next to the monument -



A view of the position the 82nd held, looking toward the Dyer field they had crossed and from which the Confederates repeatedly attacked the hill until nightfall.


And a view to the right of the hill, where the parking lot for the driving tour is located.



On a future visit, we will need see if anyone has made a marker map for the Battle of Chattanooga so that we may find where the 82nd supported installation of the pontoon bridges over the Tennessee River, to open the Cracker Line that fed the besieged army, and where they attacked up Missionary Ridge on the 25th of November. Driving around the now residential neighborhoods on Missionary Ridge there seems to be a marker every few feet, so a map would be invaluable.

When bears get hungry

Sometime late yesterday afternoon, a bear apparently demolished one of our bird feeders near the back door. Unfortunately, we didn't hear the attack, so we got no actual bear pictures. So the best we can do is this picture of the victim...

and these crime scene photos of two of the pawprints left behind by the perpetrator. You can see from comparison to Cheryl's hand, the paws were pretty large. We bring our feeders in at night, but we were not prepared for a brazen daylight attack.

Nice Day for Mountain Hiking

We had a beautiful sunny day here with temperatures in the 80s, so we headed up the mountains and went hiking on the Rattlesnake Lodge Trail, which is a couple of miles from our house. Here are a couple of glimpses of the fall colors starting to appear along the trail.

signs of Fall in the yard and garden -

Cheryl took some pictures yesterday morning after a good rain fall, before the sun was shining on everything. There were a lot of pretty pictures and it was hard to post just a few.

Right behind the bird feeders -


and some Virginia Creeper, also in the back near the steps to the logging road -


A couple of leaves on the mulch at the end of the driveway


These are growing in large numbers along the road cut at the front of the property


The maple in the front has some color - a couple of lower branches have been brilliant red for a week or so.


The native dogwood and the ones our landscaper planted are about the same color - but you can get up close to the berries on the little ones we had put in.


This is the sourwood that grows right down the steep bank in front of the house, seen from below. It is a prettier red today in the sunshine

Madison County Heritage Festival and Weaverville Fire Dept Open House

Saturday morning we headed a few miles up the Interstate to Mars Hill, where they were holding their annual Madison County Heritage Festival. In addition to the usual crafts and foods, there was a lot of bluegrass music and clogging. The Mars Hill College clogging team, the Bailey Mountain Cloggers, put on an hour-long show. The Bailey Mtn Cloggers are perennial winners of the national clogging championship, so they take clogging to levels you don't usually see at the Fiddling Pig or at the summer Shindigs.

In addition to the more traditional square-dance type clogging above, they also do precision team clogging pictured below, which is the type of clogging Cheryl does on Tuesday nights.
On the way home, we stopped at the Weaverville Fire Dept for their open house, where they showed off their new fire station and their fleet of white fire trucks, some of which are pictured below.

The Window

Cheryl picked this piece out during a quick stop at the Art in Autumn street-art-festival in downtown Weaverville. It is by Selena Glass and Metal of Burnsville. Selena is made up of two artists: she does the glass, he does the metal.

The Window, Selena, about 10"x20"

Click on the photo to get a better idea of the quilt-like visual effect. Looking at the "crosshatching" on the purple part for example - that was done in a 3 or 4 step process with layers of resist - so more and more of the medium was sandblasted on to color the glass, producing the darker shading to give the dimensional effect. The opalescent parts are done with the application of a metallic foil. The soap bubbles (silver) and the gold swirl are depressions on the front side of the glass painted with metallic paint, so they float over the rest of the image, which is on the underside of the glass. The glass plate floats over a sheet of copper mounted on a wood frame.

The artists' sign on the piece said, "Here you see a curtain gently blowing in the breeze, while soap bubbles waft up from the kitchen sink. Mindfulness can be felt in all aspects of life, even in doing the dishes."

October - time for pumpkins

and here's a pumpkin quilt. I did this one a few weeks back, but saved the picture for today.



This was for a very prolific customer - I've got a stack of her quilts in the studio waiting to be quilted.