Saint Nick on Cedar Point Once Again

Flying Santa returned today and it was a wonderful visit for kids and adults alike. 

Thanks go to the entire Flying Santa organization, to Scituate Police and Fire for their help, to Betty Kincaid and David Ball of the Cedar Point Association who arrange for the event on this end, and to the many children who remind us all every year what the close of the year might be if we could hold on to our imaginations and innocence.

The departure by helicopter was dramatic and something about which you can never get jaded.

This was also part of the morning. A paddle boarder ignored wind chill down in the 20's to take a ride out to the mouth of the harbor. Balance and grace and confidence on display in Scituate Harbor.

Once again We thank the Stahrs

To the immediate right of this post you will see a new gadget added this week. I added a weather station with a portion of the funds donated by the Stahr family for such project. This weather station is mounted on the kitchen wall (with help from Watson Hardware of Scituate Harbor who donated a piece of pvc to get me over the roofline without a challenging trip up a ladder) and is tied into our network here and out into the wider world.

Clicking on the gadget will take you to the Weather Underground website where you will be able to see different trends in temperature and wind over time. I am still figuring out what you will find there in truth. There may be much more that I have not discovered in the few days I have been feeling things out.

Wednesday will be the first day with any significant wind here since the device was installed. I know I am looking forward to seeing how things go.  Check back for webcams and weather now, along with whatever surprises turn up.

One more note: Flying Santa returns next Sunday at 10:00. This wonderful tradition is one of the highlights of the whole year.

The Tradition Continues

The Friday after Thanksgiving has been a reasonably warm day the past few years and I have made it a tradition to get the Christmas wreath in place while the weather was on my side. This year that tradition continued. There was a stumble in the process that the video did not show you. The initial placement of the wreath saw my preset ropes break loose when the wreath was up top. After some bending and stretching to get it back to round it went up in a flash.  The cameras were clicking all night here as folks came by to get a slice of the holiday season by the sea.

Redecorating the Blog

From time to time I get the urge to redecorate. My family knows this about me. I look around and I decide it is time for a change.

The blog has been given a facelift and I hope you like the look. A wider field should allow for bigger photographs and that has been a long time goal.  Remember that clicking on any image will bring you to a slide show of all the images in a given post.

Also, there are now 9 cameras that take you inside and outside the Light; five of them should be available even in a power outage. As noted before, I took advantage of some abandoned wiring to bring the connections into the Cottage where I can supply power from a generator.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the renaming of two additional cameras for the late Henry "Hank" Stahr. I have been researching a weather station to add to the web cams and found that I could add two cameras as easily as the weather station. I have not given up hope on adding it,
but I am determined to be fussy and unhurried on that choice.  The note at the top of the page explains the two new connections and the password for all the cameras.  Hope that you like them.

Making Improvements

Blogging has been on the back burner once again. Lots of different projects have been in the works and some are close to realization.

All the windows in the Light Keeper's Cottage have been replaced at last. This has been a project in several stages and it was wrapped up this afternoon when a second coat of paint on the Utility room windows was followed by rehanging curtains.  It will be warmer and quieter here for sure with this project completed. A partner project was the replacing of old insulation under the center wing and the kitchen wing with blown in insulation. This happened several weeks ago. That task has shored up the floor in the living room as well. That floor has had some bounce in it since a winter of broken pipes several years ago.  Thanks go out to David Ball for making that happen so quickly and easily.

In a week's time the fence along the harbor side will be replaced. The posts were picked up in August in order to have time to prime them. Russell Totman will be on the job to dig the holes and Warren Cowing will be along to rebuild the rails. I disassembled the old fence this weekend and found that several of the old posts are ready to be pulled out without any resistance at all.  Betty Foster put them in more than thirty years ago and will luck, (and the revetment) these will last even longer.  We are going to taken advantage of the rails being out to bring the boardwalk in for the winter. The mild fall weather has kept the traffic tooling along on the boardwalk.

There have been several updates to the cameras here at the blog.  In a power outage it will now be possible to run cameras off the generator.  The Tower cameras go out without a simple remedy in a power outage. The new cameras will all tied into the house current and will be powered in a storm.

There is a camera that looks east off the kitchen. One that looks south placed right outside the kitchen door. There is also one that looks along the seawall from a window in the Tower. I tried to take advantage of some cabling that the Town of Scituate left here when they discontinued the wireless access that had been looped off my router. I am hoping for one more that will cover the look to the west and the inner harbor. Here are some looks from those cameras.

Today I was able to place a camera in the Tower on a tripod. This new camera is pointed at Minot's Light.  A snapshot of the view is below.



I am really happy to have been able to pull this off. It has been part of the plan for a while and I was never able to find the right tool (in this case an affordable camera with zoom capabilities) until the wonder of Ebay brought one to my attention.  The last step is to find the right weather station and I will have seen that set of goals realized. 

There have been a few other ideas brought to life this summer that guests here seemed to enjoy. I placed some banners on the cottage along the fence on the ocean side and it was quite rewarding to see how many stopped to read and note the history shared in this way. The banners were a great complement to the Etrusco stone and the Edgerton Bell. Finding new ways to teach with this site is what I love to do. I will be brainstorming how to do some more of that when next spring rolls around.

Light 'Em Up (Again)

The Annual Luminaria was held last night and once again the good people of Cedar Point did their share. Thanks go out to the many first time participants who walked the jetties with the milk jugs, sand, and candles and to those who did it twice to get all the makeshift lanterns lit.

It was a wonderful crowd and I had a chance to visit with some great old friends. Robin Chin of the Mariner was company for a while and you can look forward to seeing his work later in the week.

This morning began with the clean up and John Kincaid and Peter Martin are owed a debt of gratitude. They swept the big jetty and most of the small one while I got the beach.  The water bottles are rigged to the ceiling of the Cottage cellar now as a start for next year. 180 jugs are needed to pull off this project. I share a few pictures below.

You might notice that the jugs are weaving their way down the big jetty. 

The rookies will get better with practice.

This shot looks back across the harbor.

 I can already hear music being played from Cole Parkway this morning.

Both of the pictures above were taken with the web cams installed at the top of the Tower. There have been several upgrades made to all four of the cameras and they should be far more reliable. 

Big Moon; Good Crowd; See you next year.

Some Super Kids

In early June a wonderful group of elementary school students made their way down to the Lighthouse for a tour. All from Wampatuck School, these girls and their adult chaperones came loaded with questions and brimming with enthusiasm for Scituate Light. I could not have had a better time.

In a week's time I received an envelope in the mail. Below are a few of the thank you notes these girls sent. I salute them all!

There are a lot of perks to this job that you might never guess.

Snow Globe

With a big storm expected today - 15 to 17 inches and windy - take a look at what a more gentle version looks like. This is the snow globe storm of January 2017. A very nice picture of the Light is in this morning's Globe. I always notice when the Pulitizer Prize winner John Tlumacki is in the neighborhood.