Fireworks at Greenville Country Club on July 1st

Finally uploaded a movie of the fireworks we attended on July 1st. I certainly haven't gotten the hang of taking pictures of fireworks with my iPhone 4, but the video turned out well.



Enjoy!

Video of White heron Flying around Shellpot Creek

Finally caught video of a White Heron flying around our section of Shellpot Creek north of Wilmington, Delaware. I fell a little bad following it around to get the video because it finally flew onto the roof and then downstream to feed because of me.



Up on the roof of our house.

Hopefully it will come back some day when I am not around to bother it and eat some tasty fish in our section of the creek.

Carriages at Point to Point

Many pictures of the horse drawn carriages at Point to Point.

Deldot Traffic cams, my favorites embedded.

Just trying to see if I can embed the Deldot Traffic Cams pictures in a blog post. It looks successful to me. These will not update automatically, just refresh the browser to see them update. I chose cameras that are roughly on my way to and from work.

Traffic cam Rt 141 and EX stat., Cam 60



Traffic cam Rt 141 and 100, Cam 88



Traffic cam Rt 141 and Rt 48, Cam 76




Traffic cam Rt202 and Silverside, Cam 49



Traffic cam Rt202 and Rt 92, Cam 48



Traffic cam Rt202 and Rt 141, Cam 50



Traffic cam Rt261 and Silverside, Cam 51

Overflowing Shellpot Creek video and photos from todays monsoon

For the first time since we have lived in this house, Shellpot Creek lept its banks and flooded portions of the backyard.

The waterfall is an almost flat raging, rushing torrent.

A view of the flooded backyard from an upstairs window.

Just as dramatic was that it couldn't drain fast enough in front of the house.


The creek flows from the cul-de-sac...

...down the street.

Technically, for a short period this afternoon, our house was on an island in the middle of Shellpot creek as the creek flowed down Stoney Creek Lane in front of the house and joined the main branch further upstream, even as it flooded from its usual location in the back of the house.

Here is a video showing the creek first beginning to leave its banks.



Here is a video showing the height of the flooding of the backyard.



There was really no damage except some lost mulch that had just been put down, perhaps some plants were swept away and the regular creek junk left in our yard instead of high in the creek bed. You can see the creek is so high that the waves from the creek just crash across the yard. I also watched as large logs and debris from the creek floated through my yard and under the fence to the neighbors (and hopefully back to the creek so they don't have to deal with it).

It was a dramatic flooding event, but the house suffered no damage whatsoever since it sits high on the lot.

UPDATE: Charts from the the USGS stream gage on Shellpot Creek. This gage is downstream from my house, but since the water at my house, plus some more goes through the gage, it is a useful, official measurement of the creek flow.

The discharge in cubic feet per second. You can see July 13th's morning rain, July 14th's morning rain, and the high peak of the flood recorded in this post. Note that the scale is a log scale, so the peak at 3100 cuft/s at 2:35pm on 7-14-2010 is 50% more than the 2130 cuft/s at 6:45am on 7-13-2010.

The gage height. Gage height is a linear scale.

At least now I know that ~3000 cu ft/ second and a gage height of ~7.5 ft means water in the backyard.

Monster Truck on I95 in Delaware

Yesterday we were driving back home from Norristown down I476 to I95 when we spotted a unusually tall pickup truck in front of us.

It was a monster truck driving with us on the road.

It was driving next to us on I95 from Norristown to at least the Marsh road exit just south of the Delaware state line where we got off. This vehicle was just a little pickup truck on huge tires and a suspension to go with them. The tires and modifications made the vehicle literally twice as tall as our Prius.

We got a closeup of one of the tires.

Besides the silliness of seeing a monster truck on the road was the advertising on the side for Estep Electrical Services. You know the "owner" of the truck "uses" it for work and the expense of those crazy modifications were written off of their taxes.

Fireworks from Greenville Country Club

Good friends of ours live behind Greenville Country Club in Greenville, Delaware. Each year they invite us to watch the country club's fireworks from the comfort of their backyard meadow. This year's fireworks were on July 1st, tonight. As always I tried to get some pictures.

Where are people moving to?

Forbes has an interesting interactive map compiled from IRS data about county to county moves in 2008. I used it to generate this map of moves to and from New Castle County, Delaware.

Red lines represent moves out of the county and black lines moves into the county. The connections are interesting. There is a lot of red to very populous cities, folks are leaving New Castle County to go to New York, Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Dallas, and Houston. Presumably some are retiring to the Florida counties and to Las Vegas and Arizona. There also seem to be some moves, possibly due to the chemical industry to the Texas coast, New Orleans, Buffalo and Rochester.

There is expected inflow from obvious places like New York, and Philadelphia. I also see what I think is college inflow from Penn State area, Univ of Wisconsin, Univ of Minnesota, Univ of Michigan. All of these are my suppositions. The full data is available at the links below.

(via Metafilter, via Forbes, data via Data.gov: Inflow data from IRS, Outflow data from IRS)

Pictures from Point to Point at Wintherthur

Point to Point, was run at Winterthur yesterday. I got this action shot of the race horse jumping over the jumps. At our jump we saw one rider fly off of his horse when it avoided the jump, while the rider didn't. He appeared to be OK. There was also one hose that completely stopped and refused to jump during one of the races. It was very hot, especially for the horses.

Before the races, I also tried to get some actions shots of the fancy carriages.

Tiny ponies pull a carriage.
More tiny ponies.

There were some larger horses. The outfits that the carriage riders had on appeared historically accurate and ridiculously hot. I doubt folks had blankest on there legs in 90 degree hit at the turn of the century. Or are they there to keep the dirt from the hoofs from flying up onto their clothes?

Large horse pull a carriage.

Tiny cute ponies pull a carriage.

Vice President Joe Biden at the Delaware Children's Museum Gala

The Delaware Children's Museum had a grand opening Gala and fund raiser this evening. We had a great time and got to finally meet Congressman Castle and also Vice President Joe Biden.

Here we are with the Vice President. I gave my camera to a woman and asked her to take our picture when we got a chance to say hello to the vice president.

She took more picture than that. There were other folks in line ahead of us, most noticeably a marine in dress uniform.

The very nice woman took pictures of us as we got to say hello and finally the great shot when we were posing. I never even got to thank her for the extra pictures. I told him he was doing a great job, I did not say it was a big f***ing deal, though I was tempted.

He gave a touching speech about how important it was to support the DCM. Being a parent and grandparent you could tell he was touched and of course as parents, Lynn and I were touched by his speech. Beau was the announced host of the Gala, so I was wondering if his dad would show up. When we had to go through metal detectors to get in, I knew something was up.

Snow pictures #7 A sneak peek at Shellpot Creek

I know that pictures of a snow covered Shellpot Creek water fall are very common this year, but it is amazing how much snow is piled on these rocks. This looks more like some snowy mountain stream, than a creek in Delaware.

Upstream from the waterfall.

Top of the water fall.

The waterfall.


Base of the water fall.


Downstream of the waterfall.

Snow pictures #6 The trees, the trees.

Except that the heavy snow is potentially breaking all of them, the snow sticking to the trees has turned the world into a magical snow streaked wonderland. I have tried to capture some of the views, but it is more spectacular to stand under these trees or look across a clump of them, all painted white.