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Fun With Fungi: Chicken of the Woods Edition

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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic most people, until recently, have opted to stay at home and indoors bingeing on Netflix and learning to make sourdough. At Temple Sinai essential workers like me have continued to work though, doing building maintenance and a lot of cleaning and building ways to socially distance people for whenever everyone else returns to the temple for services and religious school. We've cleaned and polished everything to a blinding gloss. After awhile though we sort of ran out of work to do inside and have moved outdoors to tackle the sorely neglected landscaping. With the school being closed so there aren't any kids running about Mother Nature has taken over the grounds in some pretty interesting ways. We have been using several types of wood chips and mulch to cover large parts of the playground and other areas and, with all the rain we had early in the summer, there has been an amazing array of fungi popping up all over the place like never before. ...
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See Ya Later Kid

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Ardi dreaming baby squirrel dreams. It's been pretty hot in DC this summer with record-breaking high temps all month. Even I have been restricting my outdoor activities at work and at home (not out hiking and fishing in this soup, no sir!). Yesterday, however, I had to get in my pizza oven on wheels to go get some lunch. As I walked across the parking lot I could see there was something under the front tire. It was a baby squirrel! I thought it had to be dead as I didn't know how long it had been there but it couldn't possibly survive long on the blazing blacktop. I got a glove out of my car to pick it up and it gave a little squeak!      My boss suggested leaving on the ground near a tree but I thought it's chances of survival weren't very good as it was getting late and, besides the foxes, possums and raccoons that frequent the property, people in the neighborhood often let their dog run free in the parking lot when they think no one is around to say anyt...
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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - A Brief Review

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My current favorite subject lately has been 19th-century crime as I had recently acquired four volumes of  Rick Geary 's "Victorian Murder" series and finished  The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America  awhile back.  Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter  fit in well with my obsession. I recall seeing the trailer for the movie adaptation and it looked like some ridiculous fun to have Honest Abe portrayed as a kung-fu version of van Helsing. Alas, the movie came and went before I got a chance to see it but I found the book at Goodwill for a buck and figured what the heck. The writing moves along at a good pace, combining historical fact with the fiction, quoting from Lincoln's actual writings as well as fictionalized "secret" diary entries. It does rely a little too much on the new-Hollywood idea of the vampire hunter in a long, black coat filled with gadgets but that's just part of the fun. There are actual...
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Style Section: Artful Framing in Takoma Park

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Pictured above is a piece of art I've had for almost 10 years that I, finally, got around to framing. It's a, possibly, 18th Century erotic painting in the Mogul style. I don't remember where or how I got it. One possibility is that I found it in the trash room in the apartment building I used to live in near Washington Cathedral. I used to find a lot of cool stuff  there. The neighborhood was full of students from Georgetown, George Washington and American Universities and lots of foreign service workers from the various embassies, all fairly transient people. They move in to neighboring apartments and start acquiring stuff then they move on leaving behind the things they have no room for in the moving van, the trunk of the rental car, the suitcases, their new lives. Well, as has been said many times, one man's trash is another man's treasure. I had this framed at Artful Framing in Takoma Park because they are one of the best, locally, at what they do. This w...
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Real Deal of the Day: IKEA Style

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The Kitty checks out the new chair, prefers the box it came in. So, I decided that, since I've been in this apartment for 16 years, I should stop buying cheap dorm room furniture of fleeting quality and get something a little more substantial. Having the day off I ventured out to IKEA in College Par k to have a look around. I like IKEA because, unlike my other fave store, Target, they have cheap dorm room stuff and some pretty good mid-price, home goods. I also like the fact that they don't seem to discontinue merchandise as quickly as other retailers so, if I decide to buy another chair, say next year, they'll still carry it.  I bought the POÄNG chair because I wanted a comfy chair, with a high back and arms, that wouldn't overwhelm what's left of the floorspace in my living room. I had this thing unpacked and put together in about 20 minutes (probably would've taken less time without Kitty's "assistance"). The cushion cover is washab...
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Location: Washington, DC, USA
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The Dad, William R. Waynes.

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Blade Runner: Sebastian's Apartment

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The interior of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles, CA taken with a Canon TX in 1988. This is the real-life building used in the movie Blade Runner as well as some other, mostly forgotten, movies and television shows. I found the building totally by accident. There was a mural across the street that I wanted to get a better shot of so I wandered into this unassuming looking building and was stunned by the beautiful, bright interior with a glass roof. It took me a few minutes of wandering around before it dawned on me that I'd seen this place before. It wasn't until months later, as I was looking thruogh my photos that I made the connection to the movie. I also realized that it was the same building used for one of my favorite episodes of The Outer Limits (original series) titled " Demon With a Glass Hand ".
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