Bucket trucks

Taken several weeks ago, this photo shows three city bucket trucks working on the electrical lines near St. Augustine School. How could I not take a picture of that?

Fall decorations

We are quickly moving toward Christmas decorations, and some people are already there. But before we get there, let us pause and take a last look at Fall decorations.
The Historical Society has had their fall window display up for several weeks.

Brown's Garden shop had a very attractive fall display up recently, but now it is gone, replaced by Christmas.

 The Melville Street construction signs seem a lot like fall decorations.

The discarded pumpkins from Halloween are sometimes more interesting on the street than they were on the porch.

One other fall decoration--from a fan of Colt football.

Last year I did a number of posts on Christmas decorations. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) This year I will try to avoid the topic.

About gutters

On Nov 8 I noticed some kind of guides for installing the gutters on Melville Street. I did not know what the purpose of these guides were--I expected that the construction workers would have to install forms and I thought the guides might be there to help position the forms.

On Nov 11 workers were installing the gutters. They did not use any forms at all. Rather they had a gutter machine. It ate concrete from a concrete truck, and it extruded finished gutters. Since the gutters did not sag and lose their shape, the concrete must have been very stiff when it was still wet.

 

Below is a picture from another angle. You can see the gutter being extruded in the lower left. The guides that the workers had installed earlier must tell the machine exactly where it is supposed to be going.

A bunch of workmen were busy smoothing the concrete.

 

If you know more about modern ways of forming concrete, feel free to share what you know.

My guess is that something very similar was happening when the new runways were installed at the airport, and that the machine there was just a much bigger version of the gutter machine.

Why we do not burn leaves in Rensselaer

This has been a familiar site around Rensselaer lately, but now they should be almost finished.

Ladybugs

Are you still finding ladybugs an nuisance? We are. I thought this picture of an apple that a squirrel had gnawed on shows why they are a problem.