After the service this past Sunday, I found this bulletin on which creative notes had been taken. Based on the skill level, I would suspect that it was done by a 9 year old boy. It’s very likely that I could be the Dad in question referenced in some of the drawings, but I guess you’ll never know for sure. I’ve changed some things on the bulletin so as to protect the innocent.
On our second full day in Calgary, we went on a family trip out to Kananskis. The day started off overcast and foggy, but cleared up somewhat by the time we made it into the mountains. We each took a bunch of pictures. This is the story of one of the pictures that I posted on Instagram.
One of the pictures that I took was of the Upper Kananaskis Lake, with Lori and some of the kids on the shoreline at the bottom of the picture. Here is the picture in question.
Trying to do something slightly different, I cropped it into a short but wide picture.
Unfortunately, when displaying it on Instagram it was readjusted to a standard picture format, cutting out the people on the edges of the picture. Instagram has an associated app called LayOut which allows you to combine multiple pictures into one image. My first attempt was to combine the footer (cropped image as above) with part of the original picture. Here is the result.
I wasn’t quite happy with that picture, so I took a look at some of the other ones taken on the trip. Here is the one that I ended up using.
I then cropped the mountain fog photo and dropped it into the top photo frame, resulting in the following picture. It struck me that the resulting picture actually looked like one picture rather than a conglomerate of two different pictures. Since most people likely use Instagram on a smartphone, they likely wouldn’t notice the really flat far lake shore, nor notice that the trees at the waters edge appear rather suddenly. I decided to go ahead and post it. I’m not sure that anyone noticed, not surprising given the large numbers of pictures on Instagram that people flip through on a regular basis. Well, it makes an interesting hubcrate post, anyway.
Preamble 1: It’s been over a year since I posted anything on the hubcrate.com site. In the meantime, I’ve posted on Instagram, but find that although it’s easy to post, it’s a bit constricting (particularly in telling the story around the pictures). So, I (Ben Huber) am likely going to post here and on Instragram (with a link to the corresponding hubcrate post).
Preamble 2: We recently returned from our big event of the year; the Sept 22nd wedding of Rett and Elselijn. (Sidenote, Rett now spells his name as Rhett, but I know him as Rett so will likely continue referring to him as such. Besides, there’s still a lot of people, including some of my nieces and nephews, who refer to me as Benje, a name I haven’t gone by for a long time). I’m going to do a series of posts about our experiences in Calgary in September 2018, preparing for and participating in Rett & Elselijn’s wedding.
In talking with R&E about wedding preparation, they indicated that one of the things they wanted to do at the wedding reception was a game of Musical Hats. This is similar to the game Musical Chairs, but done with hats. A number of people sit in a circle, each with a hat. One person loses their hat and the music starts. The person without a hat takes the hat from the person sitting in front of them. Then the next person without a hat needs to acquire one. On things go in a sedate (or not) fashion until the music stops, and the person without a hat leaves the game, taking their chair with them. Another hat is removed and the next round begins.
On one of our first days in Calgary, Davison and I volunteered to go on a hat buying trip. We were attempting to purchase 15 hats, each hopefully unique and unusual. Rett already had one hat that we were going to use (a red one that said “Make America Great Again”, you may have seen people wearing them), but there were a lot to buy. I was concerned that we’d be spending quite a bit of money and having troubles finding unique ones. We went to two thrift stores and in short order had purchased 18 hats (yes, we lost count). Here are pictures of three of the hat that we found. You’ll be seeing some additional ones in a future post.
Yesterday, Davison was convinced that a young neighborhood lad (and good friend of Brock) had pocketed and walked off with one of the really cool minifigs from his latest Lego set. He was contemplating a plan of going over to said miscreant’s house to play, and while there he would case the joint for the missing minifigure.
By way of background, the bedtime book that I’ve been reading to the boys has been “Anne of Green Gables”. During this particular counselling session with Davison on the appropriate way of handling the situation, we reminded Davison of the amethyst brooch and shawl incident in the Anne of Green Gables story, where Marilla could not find her amethyst brooch and accused Anne of stealing it. Our point being that it is easy to jump to conclusions when dealing with other people’s motives and actions, and possibly being wrong in our over-reactions. Upon being reminded of such, Davison’s response was “Dad, I’m not going to find the Lego minifigure stuck in my shawl.” The decision was made to let the incident go without trying to confront the neighborhood lego pocketer.
A couple of hours later, Davison came downstairs and was chuckling. Upon being asked, he told us that he had found the missing stormtrooper, The really funny part was that the stormtrooper had somehow got tangled up in the corner of a dress-up shawl that was hanging out of a not-quite-closed drawer in the playroom.
We’re not sure how the story resolution could have been any more perfect, but were quite happy that a big scene was not part of it.
Well, it’s Tuesday evening in Houston and I thought that I would provide an additional update. Things were fairly dry today, we actually had a blue sky and sunshine late this afternoon. My measure on the amount of rainfall that we received in total is in the 38 to 39 inches range. Lori and I took a short trip yesterday up to the Sprouts grocery store for eggs and milk. On the way Lori took some pictures of the flooding that we observed. I’ve marked up a flood plain map to give you an idea of what we saw. The green star is where our home is approximately located, a pretty good distance from the designated floodplain areas.
Heading north on Hiway 249 on our way to the grocery store, we passed the local Lowe’s hardware store on our right. It is the #4 red star on the map. It looked like it had 1 to 2 feet of water covering the parking lot and the lower part of the store. Sorry, no picture on that one.
Coming home, Lori took some pictures of what we saw.
Just to put things in context, here is the YWCA facility in happier times:
And here are a couple of updated pictures around our place – the detention pond (currently empty), and a view of our house across the green space, again without all of the water.
Texas is currently experiencing Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey which hit the coast near Rockport and is now dumping a lot of rain elsewhere, including Houston. Our house and neighborhood have traditionally handled flooding fairly well, but Harvey is really dumping a lot of rain. At this point (Sunday afternoon), we’re in pretty good shape. Here are some pictures of what is going on.
I’m playing around with a new theme for the www.hubcrate.com site. This is a test post on it – but as a bonus to you, the reader, here are some pictures of Baby Brock (all the way from 2009).
From the picture, it looks like Brock had dropped his toy, a jar lid apparently.
Ben
Back in mid-September, we had a family mini-vacation (3 days, 2 nights) down the coast in Corpus Christi. I am working on a post about that trip which might make it up before this post, but maybe not. In the rental home we were in, there were a I couple of games, one of which was “Telestrations”, labelled as “the visual equivalent of the party game telephone”. Based on my past experiences with Telephone, my immediate response was to decline, but I overcame that emotion and we went ahead with it. It turned out to be a lot of fun and we’ll probably be picking up a copy – although likely the 8 or 12 person edition.
By way of explanation, each person gets a flip page pad (with pages which alternate between drawing a picture based on a description and writing a description of a picture) and a random word. The starting player on each pad writes down the original word, flips the page and then draws a picture. The pad is then handed to the next person who looks at the picture and writes a description of what they think it is. Then the page gets flipped and passed to the next player who can only read the description and has to draw a picture. Once three iterations have been completed, we were done – and then shared the iterations that each word had gone through.
While the odd word (like the word “book”) made it through intact, most got quickly garbled. The garble effect was likely enhanced by Brock (and Davison somewhat) who don’t have quite the drawing skills and breadth of experience of others. Probably my favourite Telestrations (which I didn’t get pictures of) started off as “president” which then morphed to “Abraham Lincoln”, then to “hobo”, and then Brock had no
idea of what exactly a hobo was and thought it was a crazy man. Hmm, come to think of it in light of the upcoming US elections, perhaps a more appropriate starting place for such a conclusion should have been “Republican presidential candidate”.
Anyhow, here are some compilations of some of the end results. The original word is in the caption at the top. Then read through the picture-description-picture-des… iterations left to right, wrapping down the page. Bottom right is the final description arrived at.
In our front yard flower bed, we had planted two watermelon plants – one from seed, the other from a bedding plant. We’ve only had a few watermelons show up, most (that would be qty of 3) of which went rotten when they were pretty small. However, one of the watermelons has grown to a reasonable size. On Saturday morning, Heidi and Mikaela picked it and stashed it in the fridge. We cut it up as part of our Sunday evening meal yesterday. Here are some pictures of The Watermelon.
I’ve previously shown some pictures of our yard and growing efforts. In this post, I’d like to show some pictures of the garden that my Dad and Mom put in at their campsite, on Marlin’s land near a private lake. If memory serves me correct, this particular patch of ground used to be a feedlot of sorts at one point, so there is lots of nutrients in the ground. That being said, it takes skill and hard work to make it into a garden – Mom and Dad Huber are master gardeners (and can correct my captions as I’m not sure they are entirely correct).
