Ligia and I wish all of you a Wonderful and Merry Christmas! Should you happen to celebrate something else, then Happy Holidays to you and yours!
These are photos I’ve taken in the province of Transilvania, during the past several days, after a beautiful early winter snowfall blanketed most of Romania.
If you’d like to see Christmas photos from past years, here are my posts from 2007 and 2006.
The weather’s been really odd in Romania this past week or so. After meteorologists announced a long, warm autumn, the weather turned unseasonably cold — terribly cold — for October. It snowed up to 10 cm or more some places, and where I live, we had hail the size of small pebbles — in October, mind you! I for one have never seen this kind of strange weather this early in the year, not even when I lived in Vermont (NE US) during my college years. For comparison purposes, the first snowfall I saw in the Washington, DC area last year (in 2008) was on November 22.
I recorded a short video clip of the hailstorm as it fell last week, and also took some photos. Thank goodness the hail was soft, because it would have damaged cars and crops otherwise.
Hailstorm, Medias, Romania — see it on YouTube
As I drove home from work yesterday, a light snowfall started coming down. I took out my mobile phone and recorded this video clip. I was at the Georgetown Rd exit off I-495, in Bethesda, MD.
See this video on blip.tv or SmugMug.
If I am to be accurate, I should say it’s not the first snowfall of the season, but the second. It is, however, the first I managed to capture on video. We had another brief snowfall earlier in the week, which, much like this one, melted upon contact and didn’t even wet the ground.
I see that others are getting much more snow [via], but given what they have to go through, I’ll take my little snowfall over this dangerous winter morning any day:
The Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse is the oldest surviving screw-pile lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay. It was built in 1856 (before the Civil War), and installed at the mouth of the Patapsco River, where it marked the shoal known as Seven Foot Knoll for 133 years. We visited it during our recent trip to Baltimore.
The lighthouse used an innovative design called the screw-pile, which looks like a large-scale, big-head drill bit. The screw-pile is also described as a “system of cast-iron pilings with corkscrew-like bases”. It eliminated the need for underwater masonry foundations, which were (and still are) hard to build on muddy bottoms. The screw-piles could be screwed into the sea-bottom, and a construction developed on top of them.
The Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse was the second screw-pile lighthouse on Chesapeake Bay, and was used from 1856 until 1987, although keepers lived in it only until 1949, when it was automated. By the second half of the 1960s, the lighthouse started to show serious signs of aging, and it was thankfully moved to the Inner Harbor in 1988.
From 1856 until 1919, keepers lived in the lighthouse along with their families, but life was very hard in the lighthouse, particularly in the winter, when ice sheets threatened to topple it. Over the years, various pilings and rock barriers were put up to protect the lighthouse from the ice and from ships in distress who might bump into it, but it was the ice that posed the biggest problem, which was never quite solved. Every single winter, families lived in immediate peril there, and even had to be evacuated a few times as the lighthouse bent precariously in the face of advancing ice sheets. From 1919 until 1948, the Coast Guard recognized the hazardous nature of the lighthouse work, and allowed keepers to work in pairs, with each receiving 8 days of shore leave per month.
There’s a courageous event recorded on August 21, 1933, when Keeper Thomas J. Steinhise risked his life to rescue the crew of a sinking tugboat named Point Breeze. There was a terrible storm that night, with fifteen-foot seas and 90-mph winds, and yet Thomas Steinhise fired up his small motor boat and navigated in the direction of distress whistles to save the lives of five crewmen. He was awarded the Silver Lifesaving Medal for his heroic deed.
After the lighthouse was moved to the Inner Harbor in 1988, the Coast Guard donated it to Baltimore City, and in 1990, a lighthouse restoration project, completed with grants and the aid of volunteers, was completed. In 1997, the lighthouse became part of the Baltimore Maritime Museum.
The lighthouse’s current location is more clearly seen in these two photos taken from the top of the World Trade Center in Baltimore. I’m sorry for the poor quality of the photos, but I had to shoot through the thick (and dirty) glass of the visitor center at the top.
I count myself blessed for living where I live. Our community is a beautiful place, and even though it’s in the middle of a city, surrounded by major roads, great care has been taken in its planning and maintenance over the years. It feels more like a park than a residential community, and the fact that we’re bordered by forests on either side helps a lot. We have an open view of the horizon that looks out toward Rock Creek Park, and as a result, I get to see a lot of beautiful skies. Here are a few recent photos taken right from our terrace.
I couldn’t believe how beautiful these clouds were. They look hand-painted, don’t they?
A recent dusk featured a gorgeous light show that painted the clouds in all sorts of hues.
We had a full moon last week, and I “captured” it.
These two buildings are quite far apart, yet the long focal range compresses the distance between them, making them look as if they’re superimposed.
Planes often fly above. We get plenty of supersonic jets and military aircraft, since we’re very close to Washington, DC. Sometimes we also get these planes. I think they’re doing aerial photography that later makes it onto Google Maps.
Lots of Canadian geese choose to winter in our area. I see them in the nearly frozen water, swimming along as if it’s summer. I don’t know how they do it. I guess it’s warmer than Canada, but still… These three geese (one of them is obscured by the tree) were flying in to bed for the night.
This is my week 4 submission for the 2008 Community Challenge.
Raoul Pop 