ROY X CONE contest, 1.1.11 - 2.1.12

[robbie]

Roy, where the hell are your gloves? You're gonna burn your hands off brandin' calfs without any gloves.

haha, jk... good stuff!

[roy6]

Ha- not branding.

[ThinFinn]

The Roys continue to wear in, but nothing much new going on around here.

love it!...

calling dr.house: where are you (and your Roy's!) ???

[The Clerk]

Roy6, great shot. Mikech lovin the road runner sweat shirt and the brush. TG good bit of crop rotation.

[The Clerk]

And Mr S, need to spread, but great shirt. Goes really well with the roys

[dkatz]

Yeah, what are you doing to that little doggie, Roy?

Today my ROYs are doing some planning.

Today through 25 April looks something like this:

3,546 km (2,203 miles)

Kampala

Masaka, Central/West (visiting Homegirl - 3 days)

Kampala

Hoima, West (observing another project in the field - 2 days)

Kampala

Mbarara, West (stakeholder meetings, pretesting and preparation for the end-line survey of my project - 2 days)

Kampala

Arua, North/West Nile (stakeholder meetings, pretesting and preparation for the end-line survey - 3 days)

Kampala

Mbale, East (stakeholder meetings, pretesting and preparation for the end-line survey - 2 days)

Kampala

Mukono, Central (stakeholder meetings, pretesting and preparation for the end-line survey - 2 days)

Kampala

Lake Bunyonyi, West (quality time with Homegirl for Easter at my favorite spot in Uganda - 4 days)

Kampala

Hoo boy.

[Denton]

Ha- not branding.

I believe he's making a gelding... or whatever the cattle equivalent is

[Sansome1877]

I believe he's making a gelding... or whatever the cattle equivalent is

I think he is turning a bull into a steer?

[Denton]

^ that's the one

[Joseph Hill]

Even landlubbers gots to harvest oysters...

Awesome shirt too.

[cash]

Roy6, you are making good use of that timemachine.

I spent about 10 years, off and on, as a gravedigger. I still like strolling through cemeteries when I need a little time to think. A herd of mule deer winter inside the cemetery by my house. The young ones are ridiculously mangy by this point of the year. Also, the deer are hungry and as tired of winter as I am. This makes them very docile. One can get very close to them at this point. With the grass starting to grow, though, they'll be jumpy and flighty again soon.

Took the boy up a canyon to look for owls. Here he is walking around waiting for it to get dark. No birds spotted on this trip, unfortunately.

USN

Cotton duck anorak

Maglite

ROY x Cone

Boots

[Rivet Head]

Damn, that is some crazy photo shoppin' Roy!

[The Clerk]

Anyone who can post over a thousand times on here's got enough time to learn some photoshop skills.

I on the other hand spend my time hanging out on street corners... in my 'Andy Capp' hat and ROYS of course

[robbie]

aforementioned pics

a few days before wash

just prior to wash

damn spaghetti sauce, ruined my hopes of making it to 5 months before a machine wash.

post wash:

don't really like how I ended up with that weird line on the right leg

some close ups

I don't regret washing them, cause there was crap all over them and they smelled like ass... but I wish they wouldn't have gotten to that point so soon.

[pomata]

did you turn them inside out before washing?

I love how the blue popped out with the wash. nice denim

[robbie]

i washed them right side out.

[zissou]

Nice colors, robbie.

I learned the hard way to not machine wash right side out. It left a crease in one leg of my MFSCs and faded it.

[lostinthesupermarket]

Robbie those are looking great already. Will be back to rep you.

I've been up to my eyeballs of late and haven't posted in a while but I continue to wear the Roys and I have a couple of posts backed up that I wilI try and get up over the next while.

I also haven't been able to follow the thread too closely so I'm looking forward to seeing what I missed and hopefully I will be allowed to spread some rep around.

Here's the first of 'em.

We went to Killruddery House

where they have a silent film festival every year. Apparently about 90% of silent movies are no longer extant and they continue to disappear. Crazy to think that this stuff can just vanish like that, but there you are. The festival is aimed at making people more aware of this era of cinema ( pre 1927).

On the way there I discovered I had forgotten my camera.....gaaaaaaaaaaaaaah....phone pics it will have to be then.

The place was lit quite atmospherically.

The first night there was a little reception to launch the festival. It was held in the orangery. This building:

A terrible fit pic by the door:

It was pretty cold and it wasn't heated, but luckily there was mulled wine, so we all stood around listening to this lady and others, with our coats on:

Then we all went upstairs and piled into the library to watch some films

Obviously I couldn't get pics after this point 'cos the lights went down, but the nights programme was based on the work of the Kalem movie company of NYC from 1910-1920.

In those days the industry had not yet moved to Hollywood and New York was movie town. Kalem was one of the bigger players and their specialty was movies shot on location. Many of the other companies only shot on sound stages and theatrical type sets so this was a selling point.'

They shot in a bunch of places around the world including Ireland, where they made the first fiction movie that had ever been filmed here in 1910, using the local landscape as the sets and local people as extras.

I was amazed how easy it was to watch this stuff...the fact that they were shot on location and used real events such as market days in towns as a backdrop made them much more naturalistic than previous silent movies I had seen. It was also really interesting to see how people here lived ( and what they wore) back then.

[lostinthesupermarket]

A couple of days later we went to a Magic Lantern show which was also part of the festival.

This was the precursor to the movies and is a little hard to explain. It's a bit like a slide show except that some of the slides have moving parts and there is also a narrator and live musical accompaniment.

The show that we went to used an original Magic Lantern and original slides.

It looked like this:

Quite an impressive bit of kit. All brass, wood and ground glass lenses. Must weigh quite a bit.

Apparently they had to use a limelight to illuminate the slides in the days

before electricity. This basically involves directing a blowtorch at a cylinder of quicklime and was the preferred form of theatrical lighting back in those days. Sounds fairly dicey to me.

The slides were also pretty interesting. These were all original and many had double layers and moving parts. They guy who was working the lantern told me that they were very delicate at this point and he has to

do repairs to them after almost every show

Again photography wasn't allowed during the show, but they started out by giving us a run through of the early history of the Magic Lantern (it was invented in the 17th century) during which I tried taking a photo of Punch of Punch and Judy fame (screen left) which turned out quite psychedelic:

We then moved on to an actual Magic Lantern show as was, scripted by George R. Sims

the Victorian journalist, author and social reformer. it was set in the slums of London and there was a strong moral flavour to the presentation. Everyone died,especially the good, the weak and the innocent. I guess the idea was that you would leave the theater pissed off at the way the world was. Weirdly, at one stage they brought the lights up half-way and we had to sing along with some sort of "Knees Up Mother Brown" type number.

I guess the Music Hall was still popular in them days. Cinema would soon put an end to all that!

[mikecch]

^ Thanks for the interesting info. and pics!

[Dr_Heech]

^ Thanks for the interesting info. and pics!

^^seconded. Great post !

.

[ThisSunday]

Great posts everyone. Here's an update. The light kept changing because of the clouds

[zissou]

Great post, LITS. There's a Magic Lantern Theatre not too far from where I grew up in Connecticut. I'm always stumped by the moving slides. It must have something to do with the two lenses, but I've never seen one up close.

Happy three months everyone! I've been wearing the hell out of these every day, even during renovation work (often under my Key overalls when I'm doing nasty jobs). The more wear these jeans get, the more I wonder just what they'll look like at the one year mark...

More photos to come tomorrow...

[robbie]

is that a snuff tin I spy in the front pocket? I am assuming not, but its round so it piqued my interest.

good work, looks as though they're really starting to crock especially in the lap.

[roy6]

Alright zissou! Those should be grail by the one year mark.

[Dr_Heech]

@ThisSunday and Zissou.

Cant rep at mo, but awesome, awesome, awesome !!

.

[mikecch]

Great evo on this page!

Today was my first Roy-less day for a while - the jeans went in for a 5 minute hot-soak:

Water turned a shade of yellow after 30 seconds, ewwww.

[dkatz]

zissou, the lap is amazing!

[zissou]

is that a snuff tin I spy in the front pocket? I am assuming not, but its round so it piqued my interest.

Nah, it's my typical tin of Burt's Bees, which I think usually makes people think I'm carrying jimmy hats in my pocket all the time. Thanks for the comments and +rep everyone.

From the weekend...

Always have to start the weekend right with a trip to the bakery.

As I deemed it time to wash the Roys, we spent the rest of the morning making some old fashioned laundry detergent- just what I imagine the old miners used to use Borax (since 1891), Arm & Hammer washing soda (since 1874), and Fels Naptha (since 1873)

Start by grating one third of the bar of Fels Naptha. i used gloves, since it is supposed to be a skin irritant :\

Add 6 cups water and heat and stir until dissolved.

Then add one-half cup each of the Borax and Washing Soda, and stir until dissolved. Remove from heat.

Pour 4 cups of cold water into a bucket and add the detergent mixture while stirring.

Then add one gallon and 6 cups of water and stir. If you let it sit overnight, it will for the most part turn into a gel. It basically looks like I poured milk into lemonade and it curdled.

[zissou]

I tested it on a couple loads of laundry (1/2 cup per load), and they all came out smelling clean, but not perfumey at all. You really don't get much in the way of suds with this detergent, but I have to say that my Roys feel super clean- much cleaner than when I use Woolite Dark. The water turned a nice shade of indigo brown. I always hand wash right side out, and then wear while damp. The creases settle right back in where they were...

Sundays with my daughter always start with pancakes and maple syrup.

Among other things, we set out to start laying a laminate floor in the hall.

Sad to cover such beautiful linoleum, eh?