Honey and I took a tour of Planterra's Conservatory today along with the Master Gardener Society of Oakland County. Planterra is a local company whose core mission is to lease plants to businesses for lobby beautification and the like. When you see impressive live trees and plants in atriums of office buildings, a company like Planterra is involved. They also are expanding into a retail business and rent the facility for weddings and other events. You can see some of their work on their website. Click on the "Project Portfolio" tab along the top of the page.
Here founder and Chairman Larry Pliska explains some details of his business. One business practice he mentioned was when a plant begins to look shabby at the client's business, he will bring it back to his beautiful greenhouse to return it to good health.
Larry told us about his high tech greenhouse. It has a weather station that automatically sets vents and shades, as the weather changes, to maintain the desired environment.
Larry proudly shows off his living wall composed of various succulents and impressive stag horn ferns.
Larry calls this greenhouse a conservatory because it houses many of his own plants from an earlier greenhouse some of which are as much as 100 years old.
Each May the company holds a banana split party when these bananas ripen.
The new greenhouse is only about a year old. It was manufactured in Belgium.
The following photos show some of the surroundings and are posted without comment.
Arnold has a habit of "getting into trouble" to get my attention. He is so comical that I mostly allow it. He has taken to getting behind the PC monitor. At times he claws at papers which, thanks to my "housekeeping" skills, are plentiful.
The photo above show some of the damage done to my trumpet vine by squirrels in winters past. This year I decided to bribe them as shown in the photo below.
Touring California's wine country 3 years ago, we stopped in at Clos du Bois Winery . We liked their wines and so joined their wine club. We get a shipment of 12 bottles each May and November. We usually skip the May shipment but keep the November one because of the holidays. Today our shipment arrived. I knew they required an adult to sign for the package but I was surprised by the other condition I marked with a red arrow in this photo.
The back of our property slopes upward quite abruptly. Honey has been bothered by this for years because all we can grow there is grass. So, this year we contracted with Soulliere Decorative Stone, Inc. to terrace part of the slope. We chose the sunny half of the yard.
Being autumn, the time to plant bulbs, Honey ordered a couple hundred crocus, tulip, hyacinth, and daffodil bulbs. Having been warned by Honey's brother that the squirrels will really enjoy digging these up and adding them to their larder, I set out on a triple-threat defense.
Firstly, I sprayed all the bulbs with Squirrel Stopper. This contains rosemary oil, mint oil, cinnamon oil, and putrescent whole egg solids. Despite the presence of the last ingredient, this makes the bulbs smell really nice to humans and not so good to squirrels.
Secondly, after planting the bulbs, I sprinkled a medicated foot powder on top of the soil. It is important to use medicated foot powder because it contains menthol, eucalyptus oil, and peppermint oil. That made the whole area smell like a Halls Mentholyptus cough drop.
Thirdly, I applied some coyote urine left over from a battle with racoons in my attic a number of years ago.
How does it work? So far so good. I finished the bulb protection project about 24 hours ago and, while there are squirrels in the back yard, they are not spending any time in the new terraced garden.
From time to time, in our day-in/day-out lives, stuff happens, that, at first glance, seem spooky or mysterious. Most often they turn out to be due to quite explainable phenomena. One of these events happened to me this week.
My 92 year old mother-in-law was being readied for heart bypass surgery. They would not permit her to wear her wedding ring in the operating room so she gave it to my wife for safekeeping. A few days later my wife cannot find it. It has been an anxious week and this upped the tension level.
She seemed to recall putting the ring in her coin purse but she could not find it there. Frazzled, she dumped the purse on the kitchen table and searched everything but found no ring. She remembered throwing out some tissues so all the trash was searched. Still no ring.
Being a retired engineer, I have been known to be “overly thorough”. I have actually been called anal-retentive at times. Sometimes this trait comes in handy.
I decided to carefully look through the coin purse. The photo shows what I saw. Can you see the ring?
[ Click coins to embigenate ]
The other examples of these everyday mysteries that I can recall are more technical.
One day many years ago while walking to my car after work, I heard a strange sound coming from the engine area of my friend’s car. I noticed a pile of shredded rubber under the front of the engine. It turned out that some unknown electrical fault caused the DC generator (this was before the days when alternators were used) to become a DC motor. The turning generator drive pulley shredded the rubber drive belt.
This last example may be hard to visualize but let’s give it a go.
I once owned a car in which I had added an air conditioner. In other words, it did not come with “factory air”. Such add-ons do not get the testing rigor of production automotive systems so glitches were not unexpected. One day the A/C failed and I traced the problem to a failed power switching relay. Examining the failed relay, I could not see a problem visually but voltage measured on the input terminal was not present on the other side of a riveted connection. How could there be an open circuit in a securely riveted connection? Hint: the relay base, where the terminal was riveted, was plastic.
The overheated terminal caused the plastic base to locally melt. Plastic flowed around the rivet and completely insulated it from the electrical terminal. When it cooled and the plastic solidified, current could not flow but the connection appeared firm to the casual observer.
I have always been interested in making movies. I bought my first movie camera when I was 15 years old. My first production was called, “The Scratched Corpse or Don’t Eat Crackers in Your Bed”.
Ten years later I am newly married and living in El Paso, Texas. With two incomes, there was money “burning a hole in my pocket”. My new father-in-law, a camera buff, helped me buy my dream movie camera, the classic Bolex H-16.
To me, the Bolex looked like a movie camera should look. It was big, heavy, black and chrome and had a 3-lens turret like this picture. My camera was “previously owned” and came with an optional big, heavy electric drive (normally, the camera operated from a wind-up spring motor). I only used the electric drive once when I took these clips of President Johnson. He visited El Paso in October 1967 for a ceremony returning some land to Mexico. That small parcel of land had become separated due to the meanders of the Rio Grande.
[ See all my YouTube videos by Googling "youtube rwanat42" ]
It is astounding to compare that old film camera to today’s easy-to-use video devices.
Perhaps the biggest difference is production cost. A 50 foot roll of 16mm film for that camera cost $10 and processing was $5. Since each 50 foot roll yielded only about 3 minutes of movie, that movie cost $5 per minute in 1967 dollars! Compare that to $0 for today’s digital methods.
How about weight. Did I mention the camera was big and heavy? The optional electric drive system included a leather case for carrying the batteries over your shoulder. It required 6 lantern batteries for 11 pounds right there. My wife can take video with her 1.3 ounce iPod nano.
The old Bolex did not have a through-the-lens viewfinder. The aperture had to be set manually using a hand-held light meter. There was no zoom lens. To change lenses the turret had to be rotated to change between normal, wide-angle, and telephoto lenses. There was no auto focus system. Focus was by estimating distance to the subject. And it took silent movies and editing 16mm film is done by cutting and pasting pieces of film.
Wow. The comparison is stark. I would not want to go back. On the plus side, one could take “professional” movies with the Bolex. Movies made for the theater use 35mm film but movies made for TV used 16mm. There was at least one commercially-released film made using 16mm film: The Endless Summer, 1966.
For the truly geeky, this video shows how to load the film in the Bolex.
