Perseverance

Last week NASA & JPL landed the Perseverance rover on Mars. I don't know why, but it seemed like there was a lot more attention paid to it than previous landings. Of course, like all the others, it's going to find evidence of life on Mars.

The landing went off without a hitch. While it was supposed to be live webcast, all they showed was computer generated graphics, and frankly, I've seen better on video games!!! Several minutes after the landing (which was, of course, several minutes behind already, because of the signal lag) Perseverance sent back it's first picture from the surface. In black & white. What is this, the 70's??? Cool that they pulled it off, and it's supposed to do some neat tricks while it's there, but the whole event was rather underwhelming.

Anyway, we all know Mars is the red planet, so I took it on myself to colorize the first picture!!! Fixed it for ya, NASA!!! Your welcome!!!

Slinging Cement

There's always something to do around the house!!! The front stairs had quite a bit of rotted out wood, and I hired a guy to rebuild it towards the end of last year. I had ideas on how to do it myself, but getting the materials here was proving to be difficult, so I hired a guy. He did a pretty bad job, in my opinion.

I painted them, and was doing a lot of patching of the surrounding walls and such. A year or more back, someone had dumped a couple of cans of paint across the street for some reason, and one of them was porch paint that very nearly matched the color that was on there!!! Anyway, at the bottom of the steps there was a section of the cement walkway that was pretty badly cracked, so I tried my hand at patching it up.

Came out pretty decent!!! Time will tell how well it holds up.

The reason I had concrete around is that I have a good amount of old, broken up sidewalk, that used to be stacked up for hillside reenforcement that have since been replaced with block retaining wall. I had the idea of setting them next to the walkway to widen it out, and reduce the amount of lawn area. Turns out it's tedious, time consuming work, but it's coming along, and I'm getting a little better at masonry!!!

On the other end, underneath the stairs was raw earth. I had considered cementing the whole area under there, but reading up on it it seems like it's better keeping the earth so it can vent. Instead, I decided to get a bunch of cement blocks and lay them down to make something of a floor in there.

Came out decent enough, and I like the way the shadows came out in the picture!!!