DunnYet

We did it. One hundred finds. We hit the 100 find milestone on our Colorado trip at a cache in Pagosa Springs, one of three we found in that great town.

Tags: Geocaching, milestones

Duncanville got a sweep - Honor Band for BOTH Junior High and Senior High. Both Kathryn and Alex will be in San Antonio next February.

Tags: Band

Parades, fireworks, friends and family.
Another fourth of July has come and gone. With it is one of those lasts… Kathryn’s last time to march in the Duncanville parade with the band. Next year we are off as Alex will not begin to march till the summer after his freshman year.
I took lots of photos around the parade trying to work on my street abilities and quick composition. Check out the gallery for more.

A pool is a hole in the ground that you throw money into.

Never have I found that to be more true than since our pool pump started acting up earlier this year. It’s taught me a lot about pools - and pool supply stores. Most of all - it’s left me looking for a new source of pool chemicals, supplies, and advice.

When the pool started having problems with circulation, I took the pump apart and took the motor, impeller, and diffuser to our local branch of Leslie’s Pool Supply. Since the diffuser was cracked, they ordered a new one.

This is where the first problem occurred - when the manager said that they could order it for me she in no way said that there would be a special charge for ordering the part. I just assumed that they were having it sent over from the warehouse.

Surprise - when the part arrived there was an eight dollar charge for just ordering the part. Needing to get the pool flowing again I - grudgingly - paid the extra charge. Installed the new part, re-assembled the pump, and started it up again. Didn’t seem to draw very well - but I just assumed that I was not remembering how it was in the past.

Within a week the pump had stopped drawing again. No cracks or flaws in the pump parts this time - just can’t pull water through the system. I pulled everything apart, lubed all the o-rings, put it back together. Still no luck. Remembering the slow water flow I thought that possibly leaves had been pulled through the system and clogged one of the intakes. So began a process of cleaning the various intakes with pipe snakes, pressure, and eventually putting in valves to isolate each intake for pressure testing.

Finally, after three months, I had enough. I finally broke down and called a pool company to come check our now green pool.

Imagine my surprise when for my $200 I learn that … Leslie’s has sold me the wrong part originally. The diffuser was the incorrect part, leading to a melted diffuser, a damaged impeller, and many months of every weekend tearing apart and putting back together the pump, pipes, and filter.

Plus a green pool. A really green pool. A pool so green that trying to filter it out has just cost me a set of fins for my PacFab DE filter.

Thanks Leslie’s!

There’s nothing like a good Breakfast to start the day off right. Our hotel - Sheraton Crystal City - did a great job putting together an excellent bacon and eggs breakfast buffet. It was ready on time when the band started to make their way downstairs shortly before 8:00 am.

I actually need to go back and give the hotel a thank you for accommodating us last night when our boxes and boxes of pizza arrived. They let us use one of the smaller ballrooms on short notice without requiring us to purchase the food at the hotel - a rare thing in the hotel industry.

Fortified by our hot breakfast, we loaded the band onto the three charter buses that are our transport for the next several days and headed to the National Mall.  We were looking forward to a day of exploring the museums and dodging protesters.

Of course - you can not go to D.C. without seeing democracy in action. On the news this morning we heard that an immigration protest by a skinhead group was planned. Security preparations were already in evidence when we arrived shortly before 10:00 am.

The band scattered  to explore as they wanted. Rebecca and I walked back toward the Castle - both to photograph some flowers we had seen on the way in and to log a virtual geocache (An Englishman in D.C.) that we had located as being in the area.

Being with the band we were not able to take off on the Metro to find some of the other real caches in the area, so we had to make do with the virtual caches that kind souls have registered on the National Mall. Since the Mall is National Parks run - all the regular rules apply. (Come on NPS - Geocachers are taxpayers too!)

On our way to the Smithsonian Castle, the exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden caught our eye. We made a detour through the sculpture garden - taking some great photos in the early morning light.

Returning from the castle we stopped at the "The Cinema Effect" at the Hirshhorn. This fascinating exhibit features works created from moving images in new and surprising ways. My favorite work in the collection was Anthony McCall’s "You and I Horizontal, 2005" which features a projected image through a haze. The exhibit space is set up where you have to break the plane of the image projection in order to exit the room - making each visitor a participant in the shared creation of the art of the moment.

From there we moved on to have a quick lunch of FryBread at the National Museum of the American Indian. The cafe in the museum is said to be the current best spot for a meal - and it does offer a wide variety of interesting items from Buffalo burgers to ribs. We wanted to make sure we had plenty of time so we just grabbed a quick fry-bread and a couple of waters and moved on.

After a brief visit at NMAI we walked across the Mall to the National Gallery of Art. While not part of the Smithsonian - the NGA shares both space and price (free) with the Smithsonian on the Mall. We had hoped to see some of the Gallery’s collection of Ansel Adams photos, but the photo space is currently occupied by the "Impressed by Light" exhibit of British Photographs from Paper Negatives spanning 1840 to 1860. Since Kathryn has recently studied this technique in school, this was a great thing to get to see.

Leaving the NGA, we strolled our now tiring legs through the NGA Sculpture Garden, then down the map to the National Museum of Natural History. By this time in the afternoon the crowds had arrived - making the geology exhibit initially a daunting prospect. We made our way through the initial crowd, and found that inside past the jewelry on display the mineral exhibits were much less crowded.

From there it was time to start wrapping our day up, returning to the Air and Space Museum for a last look around before boarding the buses for dinner.

I have to give the folks at all the museums great thanks for an enjoyable, safe day. Even with all the activity in the Mall, I never felt safer yet less intruded upon by security. Even the ever present bag checks were carried out with a minimum of fuss and inconvenience. A well deserved thank you to the men and women of the various security details.