It's telling that this stone stands within sight of the capitol grounds. I'd bet only a handful of people know it's here, or that it's one of only a few remaining at the old Greenwood Cemetery.
I wrote before about this cemetery, located south of Mandan near my boyhood home. Now the city is expanding southward and encroaching upon it; in fact, the entry to it in my original post doesn't even exist now. A new water tower is being constructed nearby, and it's got a few back yards adjacent to it.
It's pretty much abandoned, although Morton County takes care of it. A few stones from the 1800s remain, but there were some pretty big surprises outside of what would seem to be the cemetery grounds. Last year, crews working on the new water tower uncovered some unmarked graves. The news reports were written to give the impression that there were only a couple, but that's not the case. There were over FORTY. Law enforcement personnel worked extra shifts to protect the site from grave robbers until the situation could be handled. This article gives a little bit of detail on that process.
This hill could tell a lot of stories if it could talk, to be sure. At this point there probably aren't any more unexpected graves, at least not any more groups of forty-two. There are, however, a few remaining stones like the one pictured above. I'd like to let the markings on it tell that story for you:
JOHN S. MANN
NOV 30, 1815 TO SEPT 22, 1891
ELIZABETH D
MAR 6, 1811 TO NOV 12, 1874
ELLA
SEPT 28, 1882 TO OCT 8, 1891
OUR DARLING
DIED SEPT 14, 1883
You can find out more about the history of this cemetery in this book at the state archives at the Heritage Center.
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( 2.9 / 161 )
I've seen a few things lately that caught my eye, and a few of them have one thing in common: they're attached to vehicles. Let's start with this bumper sticker, which made me smile.
Amen to this one. As you know, I'm a cheerleader for our men and women in military and law enforcement service. I have the opportunity to run around with my camera and post drivel on the Internet because there are people stateside and abroad willing to put their lives on the line for my safety.
As far as humor goes, I probably saved the best for last. This inventive chap found one way to haul his extension ladder on the ol' Merc: roll the windows down and strap it to the side!
I have quite the collection of oddities and cool stuff bouncing around in my cell phone, maybe I'll throw a few more up here from time to time. Even though I have my big camera with me most of the time, the cell phone cam turns out to be pretty handy when time is short.
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Bummer that I have to resize these photos and videos to 500 pixels wide, because they're really cool full size! For instance, yes, there IS a guy standing next to the hook on that crane. Someone has to guide things into place. Naturally the crew takes lots and lots and LOTS of safety precautions for their workers and innocent bystanders like me. Which reminds me, I've got a new hero: the guy running that big white crane. The precision of this crew was amazing, and when time is compressed their work on these wind turbines becomes apparent as clockwork that it is. I took some HD equipment with me from work so I could grab a time lapse video Too bad I don't have room here to show it at 1080p!
Again, that crew was amazing to watch. I wanted to applaud after they got that second unit assembled; it was in such a cramped position that the crane operator actually had to roll the crane back a little bit on its tracks! I bet that made him nervous. In any case, both of the assemblies that I watched appeared to go without a hitch, and I'm sure it's due to good planning and a talented crew. It was a real joy to be along for the ride, even at a safe distance. I stayed along the main road and chatted with the landowners whose land I was parked on. A representative from the company doing this work told me that these sites and the access roads leading to them are off limits to the public. Take note of that if you decide you want to see any of this action for yourself.
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I remember hearing a long time ago that the memorial area on each end of the new Liberty Memorial Bridge will contain a chunk of the original historic bridge in addition to the other interpretive features. This may be one of those pieces.
Each memorial area (the Bismarck one is nearing completion now) has an area that would be perfect for a piece like this, which leads me to believe that the placement of the pieces will be the "cherry on top" once the rest of the memorials are finished.
Work continues under the Bismarck side of the bridge, presumably on the park that I heard would be placed there. Just because we drive over the new bridge every day doesn't mean that it's finished. I can't wait to see what the area looks like once all the features of the bridge and its ancillary features are complete!
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( 3.1 / 112 )
I took an HD video camera and my still camera up to the wind farm north of town Thursday to capture a time lapse of some turbine assembly. Look down a couple of posts and you can see that I knew there were a few ready for the final stages of construction, so I was confident that leaving work to hang out up north would be productive. I wasn't counting on the pests, however. Here's one of the time lapse clips (roll over the bottom of the image if you don't see the playback controls):
There were little gnats or something swarming me from time to time, so early in the day I applied some insect repellent and felt confident the day would be hassle free. I hadn't counted on them swarming my cameras, however. I haven't had the opportunity to review the video time lapses I did, but the video above is my favorite time lapse from my still camera and I'm pretty ticked that it has bugs all over it.
Being in the video business, I'm no stranger to artifact removal; in fact, I did a bit of that earlier this week. I had some videos where the second camera operator poked the front of their camera into the shot a bit, and the boom operator (me, in one case) ducked the boom pole into the corner of the shot a couple of times as well. It was a hostile shooting environment, where that kind of thing happens. Anyway, I spent part of my week removing those kinds of things as well as some wire removal and even a pen that someone dropped right in the middle of the video. So removing a few bugs can't be so hard, can it?
Actually, in this case, it'll have to be a frame-by-frame job. I'll do it, but I'm not sure when. Perhaps my stubbornness and the fact that I'm really tweaked about this will step up the timetable. I have to review the HD footage tomorrow, which I shot at 1080p resolution, but I still think the sequence above is my favorite unless I find a better one in the rest of my footage. If not, I'm in for some aggressive Photoshop. After I go through the rest of my photos and the HD video I'll be posting some of it here...along with that Memorial Bridge thing I teased about earlier this week!
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( 2.9 / 244 )
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