Author: Joe

Flowers

By popular (or at least frequent) demand I’m posting pictures from my back yard to show off the flowers. These are all since I got back from Florida, but most if not all are from before I got Dash shaved.

First, a picture of Dash interfering with the natural processes of nature (there was a bee):
Dash interfering

I’m not certain what those yellow flowers are, but they seem to open in the late evening. I’m not sure if it’s because they don’t like the heat of the middle of the day or if they’re just nocturnal. Here’s another picture of them from back in June:
Big Yellow flowers

My hollyhocks have grown big enough that they were blocking the hummingbird feeder (which was never particularly popular based on how little of the food was consumed), so that’s taken down until I decide if I’m going to move the post now that the plants are in the way or just tie the plants back.
Hollyhocks

The climbing rose also is finally in bloom:
Climbing Rose

I have no idea what these are, but they look pretty interesting when they’re blooming (the rest of the time they’re just green and grow like weeds):
Odd Yellow flowers

These did really well last year, but I didn’t see many blooms and now the plant isn’t doing so well.
Yellow and Red flowers

Thankfully these survived me pulling up a bunch of lilac sprouts (which were coming up all around this plant):
Purple bell flowers

Shaved Dash

I took Dash in to the vet today for a dental cleaning and to get a lion cut for summer.

The teeth cleaning apparently went well, though Dash hasn’t been much inclined to let me see into his mouth. They had to pull an incisor that he’d fractured, but the only follow-up instruction for that was to dampen the dry cat food to soften it for him and even that was qualified by a warning that cats don’t really chew with their front teeth so he might not be interested. I tried that, but he apparently wasn’t hurting enough to care – he ate a few pieces of damp food then went right on to the dry food in the other bowl. Talore on the other hand seems to prefer the damp food. The general follow-up task I got is to give him twice-daily doses of an oral antibacterial solution. So far I’ve managed to give him a little over half of one dose and I have no idea how I’m going to pin him down to give him more. I suspect I’ll be wrapping him in a towel to hold him still.

The lion cut seems to be helping immensely in terms of him not being overheated. When I first brought him in he walked over to the air vent to lay down on it like usual, then decided that wasn’t comfortable any more. He’s been rather more active than he was before the hair cut, so I’m deeming it a success in terms of making him more comfortable for summer.

The issue now is that Talore is convinced I brought home a completely different cat and that he doesn’t belong here.
Lion Cut
This is the closest Talore has willingly gone to Dash, and that’s only because he was distracted by food so she could sneak up on him to sniff at him. I suspect he still smells like the vet, and I’m really hoping that once that smell wears off she’ll accept him again. For now she’s just growling when he gets close and swatting him if he ignores that, but since he’s comfortable around her (despite the opposite not currently being true) he’s walked right up and tried to rub on her several times. This picture was taken before Talore decided she liked the dampened cat food and started defending it…

Before and after pictures:
Before 1After 1

Before 2After 2

They also trimmed his claws, which isn’t something I’m at all used to. Now when I pick him up he can’t latch onto the carpet, and I can even hold him for more than a few seconds without him clawing his way free because his claws are so dull now I can ignore them (helpful when trying to medicate him). Since she’s being so hostile I trimmed Talore’s front claws too, though she didn’t want to sit still so I didn’t get them nearly as well blunted as the vet did for Dash.

Stennis Space Center

On the way back from Florida (driving to my parents house in Texas) we stopped by Stennis Space Center. Stennis is where they test fire rocket engines, so the big highlight (as far as I was concerned) was the bus tour of the facility that drives you by the different test stands.

First off, outside the visitor center they’ve got an F-1 engine (five of these powered the first stage of the Saturn V).
F-1 sideF-1 Nozzle

The visitor center didn’t have much to offer, but they did have a wall of mission patches. I took pictures of the patches of the two shuttle flights I saw launch.
STS-70 PatchSTS-78 Patch

After we loitered in the visitor center for quite a while we finally managed to get onto the bus tour. Shortly after entering the facility gates we were driven past the old visitor center (the current one is a few miles south). On the top of that building was a tower, on which was Wernher von Braun’s observation deck: the tower was tall enough to see over the trees, so all the test stands would be visible (at a distance) from the comfort of an air conditioned building.

Stennis Test Stands
In that picture, from left to right (background, foreground, background) are test stands A-3, A-2, and A-1. Identification between A-2 and A-1 is a guess based on pictures/info from wikipedia, but I’m pretty confident I have it right. I’m sure the tour guide told us, but I wasn’t paying particularly close attention. Anyway, wikipedia tells me A-3 is to test under high-altitude/vaccuum conditions, and A-1 and A-2 are Appollo-era stands: A-1 for testing the second stage of the Saturn V and A-2 for something unspecified (but it’s currently repurposed for testing the J-2X).

B-1/B-2 Test Stand
This test stand is behind and to the right of where the last picture was taken. It’s the B-1/B-2 test stand, which was where the full Saturn V first stage was tested.

While my phone works fine for general pictures (especially things that are close), I really could have used something with a zoom on it for taking pictures at Stennis. I have a point-and-shoot somewhere, but the image quality on it was pretty bad and it has a habit of taking terrible pictures when the battry is low. At some point I’ll need to get a decent camera.