Dayton Train Show, November 4, 2018

The day was overcast and windy but it wasn't raining.  Hooray!  Our van was parked way out.  Steve spotted the Ford from the 50s immediately and took a photo with his cell phone.  Parked next to it was a very nice  Porsche but he liked the Ford better.

Tom and Steve headed toward the entrance to the show.  I tagged along behind.

Inside, Tom paid our entrance fees and we put on our wrist bands.  My first thought was if this is the train show, it has really shrunk in size.  And then the money taker told us this was only one of four sections to the show.  There was another tent the size of this one and two permanent cement block buildings as well.

The buildings are the first ones that have been put up at the new Montgomery County Fair Grounds.  I am impressed.  The chosen site is beautiful, and large.  The old Montgomery Fair Grounds was close to the heart of Dayton and crowded.

Steve had two goals in mind.  I don't know was highest on his list but I think it was seeing Sam Swanson.  The other goal was just being at the Dayton Train show.

Steve is well known at the show.  His dad, Ray, was active in setting it up for many years.  Vendors know him...

And Exhibitors know him...These two asked me to remind Ray, Steve's dad, that Ray had been the one who got them into working this show.

I followed Steve from place to place until my legs wore out.

Here is an overview of part of one of the buildings.  When Steve saw closest train, he ran to the layout.  "It's The Spirit.  It's The Spirit.  I saw the real one with my dad."  

The Spirit is first in line, a locomotive painted to honor the U.S. Armed Forces.  Here is a closer look for you. It was traveling at a good clip so the photo is not quite in focus.  I didn't think about switching to video mod. 

While Steve and I were roaming about, Tom found a treasure, an advertisement with a map of the Nickel Plate Railroad which ran along the back property line of his childhood home.  He gave it to Steve to hang in his bedroom.

By the time I saw Tom, I was worn out from keeping up with Steve. Tom took over keeping up with Steve. I found a chair and sat down.

Shortly afterward, Terry came and sat down beside me.

I told him Steve was searching was searching for Sam.  Terry said, " I know he is here.  Maybe he stepped out to get something to eat." 

What was even nicer was that Terry started calling Sam on his cell phone.  Sam's phone was busy.  Terry kept trying every five or ten minutes and eventually reached Sam.  By this time I was back to following after Steve.  We were at a train layout talking to a vendor when along came Sam.

There were trains in every imaginable gauge.  Steve seemed most drawn to the HO and N gauges.  

Above is a rail yard in an N gauge layout.

This man's hand adding a car shows the tiny size of N gauge.

This is the town on  the N gauge layout.

Here is FRED...The arrow points to him...Flashing Rear End Device.  Like always, Steve said, "Hello, FRED.  Goodbye, FRED."

Closer view of FRED...

And here is Sam.  Thanks, Terry and everyone else who alerted Sam that Steve was looking for him.

Mission accomplished.  Steve and Sam had a good reunion.  Later Tom and Sam had a good talk, too.                                  

Busy, Busy, Busy Weeks...Fall...And Then...Brr

We have been busy the last couple weeks.  We usually do a lot this time of year because it is difficult for Tom to get out when the weather is bad.

There has been the usual yard clean up, the hose to store, the generator to check out.  The grass is growing more slowly.  I haven't mowed since the tenth of October.  So far I have been able to "rake" the yard by using the mower to blow the fallen leaves up around the trees.  We will have to get out the old fashioned rake in a week or so.

The last time I mowed I noticed there were quite a few hardy plants sending up a flower or two.  There were a very few late New England Aster blooms on the plants we bought at the Aullwood Farm and Nature Center a couple years ago.

I checked out the other New England Aster, a cousin-in-law gave us many years ago.  The original came from Wisconsin.  It is different from Ohio's plants.  It doesn't begin blooming until the Ohio version is finished blooming.  The buds were still closed.

On October thirteenth we took a walk along the Miami County Bike Trail.  We walked  across the Great Miami River on the bike trail bridge for the first time.  Tom was hoping to find colorful foliage.  This is what we found...just a little bit of color.

We made a trip to northwestern Ohio last weekend to visit friends and relatives.  We also visited the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art.  The leaves were more showy up there.  This one was beside the parking lot.

As we headed back south, we continued to see colorful trees.  And the next morning when we looked across the street at the neighbor's yard we saw this.

In the backyard the last flowers were gone from our "Ohio" New England aster but the "Wisconsin" New England Aster looked like this.

Grandma Moses Paintings Now at the Dayton Art Institute

Tom and I celebrated our fifty-fourth anniverary by going out to eat and then to the art museum to see American Sampler, Grandma Moses and the Handicraft Tradition.

Both of us enjoyed the show.  Tom had never seen crewelwork and was impressed by the beautiful pictures Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961)  made with worsted wool.  One crewelwork picture is on the cover of the flyer advertising the exhibit.  I scanned both the front and back so you can read about some of the upcoming special events associated with the exhibit.  Click to enlarge.

 Both of us enjoyed the farm scenes she painted. Tom was raised in the country and though I was raised in what would now be called a suburb, I had many aunts and uncles who lived on farms.  Every time we visited the farms, I did things I never did at home...played in the cornfields, jumped off the loft into mounds of straw. When I was six I even fell into a fresh cow pie.  I expect you know another name for cow pie.

Grandma Moses didn't begin painting until her hands were too gnarled to sew.  She used housepaint in the beginning and whatever she could find that she could paint on.  One of her first projects was painting on her wall because she ran out of wallpaper.  She was fond of using glitter on her winter scenes to give the snow the effect of sun shining on it.

I had a hard time deciding what to buy in the gift shop as a memento of the visit.  Even now I'm thinking, "If I go back, I'll buy the children's book with a spring poem by Robert Frost and pictures by Grandma Moses."  What I bought was a children's book about Grandma Moses.  I have about a dozen other books in this series.  They are inexpensive, have nice reproductions of the artist's work and give a brief overview of the artist and his or her work.  There are amusing cartoons to accompany the text as well. One of her paintings is on the cover. Click to enlarge.  These books are written and illustrated by Mike Venezia.

In the hall leading to the exhibit hall there were "thread paintings by Mary Borkowski, a Dayton folk art painter.  These were mostly silk embroidery on silk.  They are very different from Grandma Moses crewelwork but are still considered folk art because Mary Borkowski was untrained in the fine arts and had a unique vision just as Grandma Moses did.

The last section of the American Sampler exhibit includes text that explains how some of the embroidery stitches are made.  It also includes samplers made by young children and women  who used the samplers to decide what stitches to use for future sewing projects.  The samplers are another example of folk art.

The exhibit will be in Dayton until February 21, 2016.  I hope you live close enough to visit it.

Up and Down, Southwestern Ohio's Typical Winter Weather

It was 4 degrees F yesterday morning.  By the end of the day we had rain.  Overnight it was cold enough for yesterday's rain to freeze.

This morning we have white ice and black ice on the driveway.  The temperature is 35 degrees and it is raining again.  A Facebook friend carrying a load of odds and ends sat down on black ice this morning.  Fortunately, she didn't hurt herself.

We are expecting snow and colder temperatures this afternoon.

This is our second cold spell this year. We had a cold spell starting early in January but by the fifteenth of January we had balmy temperatures in the 40s and 50s.  The weather has been cooling down again since January 25.

The ice covering the falls at Charleston Falls Preserve was gradually melting until this new "blast of arctic weather" as the weatherman called it.

January 17....

January 20...

January 23... You can see that the snow on the ground on January 17 has melted.

But on January 26, I awoke to see a backyard covered with a new layer of snow.

I haven't been back to the park yet but I expect, especially since more cold weather is coming in today, that the falls will soon look  like it did on January 17.

MetroParks Prairie Seed Nursery

Tom and I had another commitment so we didn't go to the Germantown Prairie Seed Nursery with the Butterfly Transit Walkers and other area naturalists.  Thanks to Phil, I have these photos to show you.

Tom and I visited the nursery several times in the 1990's which was when the nursery was established.  At that time we were attending the Ohio Prairie Conferences.  The Ohio Prairie Conference was a fairly new group at the time.  This group is interested in preserving Ohio's remnant prairies.

Because Ohio has been heavily populated over the years, most of the prairies were destroyed for one reason or another.  The only natural prairies are those which are inaccessible to industry, or unusable for farmland.

In the 1990's, native prairie seeds were difficult to obtain so the Prairie Seed Nursery was established to fulfill that need. Now seeds are more readily available.  According to the people who went to the nursery, much of the seed now produced is distributed throughout the Five Rivers MetroParks to reseed likely prairie sites.

Here, the group is walking out to the seedbeds.  Each wide row contains a particular prairie species.  The woman is the red shirt is a volunteer guide who, Phil said, gave the group a lot of interesting information about the nursery and the plants in it.

In this row, a lot of seed heads are nearing the time for harvesting.

The group visited the building where the seeds are dried.

Their guide explained the process to them.  I wish I had been there to learn how this was being done.  I'm sure the process has evolved over the years.  Back in the years when Tom and I visited, the beds were still in the process of being established so not much seed was being harvested.