A Summer Sail

While it's snowing today, the day before Easter, when Spring should be blooming and birds singing, I needed to go back and work on some "warmer looking" images to get myself in a springtime mood. Here's one!

Last summer we took our nephew out on the Dennis Sullivan schooner for an excursion on Lake Michigan. It's a replica of the type of schooners that used to sail Lake Michigan regularly, ferrying freight from port to port in the 1800's.

The weather was drizzling, warm and the ride, thankfully smooth when sailing inside the breakwater. The sails caught a bit of a summer breeze and the passengers enjoyed the view. I think this image tells the story of the evening sail quite well. Quiet, skies somewhat foreboding and the canvas sails from yesteryear.

Catch a ride on the Dennis S. Sullivan at Discovery World in Milwaukee, WI.

Down with the old. . .

Time demands change and nothing could be truer in the field of construction. In my neighborhood, it's the construction of Columbia-St. Mary's new hospital and the destruction of an old medical office building that once housed the St. Mary's Nursing School.

I'd watched this building be prepared for demolition - windows gone, doorways boarded up and nothing but early morning sunlight pouring through openings that had long been closed up. But it was the brick by brick process of the tearing down that caught my eye.

I watched the human-directed robot make brick and stone collaspe like legos. It took less than 5 minutes to take down a column of brick and mortar and I reflected on the number of muscles and minutes it would have taken to put it all up.

When he and the robot neared the large stone that formed the front, main entrance, I felt a twinge of sadness. Here it took but a single pneumatic shove to loosen this heavy stone from its moors and see it tumble down to its demise. When he tried the cornice piece at the top of the arch, it held. Perhaps it was pure stuborness on the stone's part - it wasn't ready to go just yet. In what seemed like a show of respect, he moved away from emblematic piece of stonework and found a weaker point to work on. Another day.