The dirty tracks (2)

Today was a pleasant day weather-wise, although it was raining during the morning. As I predicted in yesterday's post, the dirt on the road from the nearby construction came back (or never even went away to begin with):

I wonder how far the expansion of the school is from completion now.

The dirty tracks

For the past three months, a local primary school has been undergoing expansion. Naturally, this has led to construction vehicles becoming a common sight down the main road out of our neighbourhood. The construction area itself is dirty, so when those vehicles go back onto the road...

...they leave dirt prints behind them. While this part of the road doesn't look particularly dirty, it is because it's about a hundred yards from the school and by the time vehicles reach it, most of the dirt has come off the tyres. It's the entrance to the school that looks a mess, or at least it did until it rained today. The new-found cleanliness won't last for long, however: the construction is still ongoing and the dirt will return once the rain stops or it'll become mud before then (or already is).

The ice webs

The cold weather has given me the opportunity to photograph these frost-covered spider webs on our shed:

I think these webs are magnificent; I'm pleased to have been able get pictures of them.

One World Trade Center

It may not be complete yet, but the One World Trade Center in New York City has surpassed the height of the Empire State Building and is well on its way to overtaking the Willis Tower (originally Sears Tower) in Chicago through pinnacle height and thus, on to becoming the tallest building in the United States. At completion, the One World Trade Center will be 1776 feet in height, a nod to the year of American independence.

Obviously I know the tragic circumstances for why this building has come into existence, but even so I find the One World Trade Center to be an impressive structure. I am a fan of this "glass-like" skyscrapers and think that the skyline of New York City will be improved when this one has been fully constructed.

With completion estimated to be in the summer or fall of 2013, It is good that the tower is coming close to the end of its construction. I look forward to seeing real pictures of a completed One World Trade Center instead of computer generated renderings of it, but more importantly, it will be great to see the skyline of the city restored.

A picture of "The City"

Back in June, I wrote about "The City", a city we built out of rocks, bricks, metals, and other materials, and was situated at the front of our house in Oregon for a time. Here is a picture of it:

This was the city in its earlier days: the metal poles and some of the more broken bricks were removed not long after this image was taken. The tallest tower on the left was moved to where the long metal pole in the middle is located in the picture; in addition to being moved it was subsequently "upgraded", and at one point stood at over four feet in height. Various other buildings were also added, but unfortunately, the only pictures we have of the city in its later days are all on photographic paper and have not yet been scanned for digital storage.

"The City"

A little over nine years ago, my brother and I built something we called "The City". The City was a "city" we built in front of our house in Oregon out of rocks, bricks, and loose metals scattered around our property (and sometimes from our neighbors' lands too, though in those cases, it was only the junked bricks and metals we collected: no one minded as it got some garbage off their properties).

Originally, it was constructed from a handful of small rocks and stones, but we soon decided to search for bigger materials to build the city with. It also wasn't a "city"...my brother and I were building a town each to begin with. However, within a day of starting, we had merged our two small towns into a full city, and from the materials we had collected we had made "skyscrapers" (well, two-to-four feet high skyscrapers!) There was even a large piece of quartz that we moved on our yard to place near the heart of The City.

We were pleased by our creation, and people who saw it tended to like it. One of our neighbors was an artist, and The City impressed him: he even copied us and made similar things in his own yard. The lizards used The City as a place to hide out, the birds visited it to collect bugs to eat, and the hummingbirds used the tallest tower in the city as a place to perch so that they could defend the hummingbird feeder more easily. It was a success it its own little way!

The City lasted for about fourteen months before it was decided that it was best to have it taken down. Overall, its existence was a double-benefit as it not only looked good while it was intact, but since my brother and I had collected bricks and metals to build it, it cleared a lot of junk from both our property and a couple of others.