Nine hours of light a day

The sun rises at nearly 7:30 in the morning and sets before 5:00 in the afternoon.  So it's mostly dark by the time I get off work.  The temperatures have been slowly dropping, but we're pretty lucky so far to have had a number of really beautiful days.  It's usually not the weather that gets to me anyway, it's the dark.  But we're only a month out from the winter solstice, so the amount of daylight we lose each day is slowing down and soon we'll be gaining light again.  Then it's just the endurance contest that is waiting for spring to come.

We had trail work day again this Saturday morning.  Bernie already had his bench installed at the junction of the entry trail to the loop.  He donated the materials, built it himself, hauled it into the woods singlehanded, and set it in concrete.  Heck of a job and it makes a great place to set and rest.

He's already suggested that he'd like to put in another bench, and we've looked at at a nice spot back by the crabapple grove.  He's already made such an impact on this project, and now he's going even further.  I really appreciate having a great guy like him associated with our project.

We also started laying the rocks on the tread.  There's an area that had a bunch of flagstone type sandstone buried in the dirt, so we dug out a bunch and moved it on down the trail.  This weekend Dave James, his son and another scout tackled the job with me.  We laid all the stone that we had stockpiled - one section about 25 feet long and then another section about 10 feet long.  I'll be back in there digging out more rocks, and we'll see if we can get another stockpile and then do another section.  Next week we may start on the real rock work - laying a path across the swale at the top of the trail loop.  We already have a ton or so of rock sitting there, along with a bunch of smaller stuff.  We may have to move some dirt as well, but it shouldn't be that hard to get a nice sustainable tread.

Took a bunch of pictures this week.  Got a couple of a the home of a disgruntled Ohioan in the boonies north of us.

Look at the beautiful brickwork on this old building in Youngstown.  They certainly don't do work like that any longer.

Took a few shots of the abandoned (??) church out by Silica Sands.  It looks like the steeple is starting to slip off the top of the building - much like that old church just north of Lickingville, PA.

I've been trying to take some shots at just after sunset, when the sky is getting dark but still has some light.



Northeast Ohio in November.