Harry's House

A bit of history that you may have not known about!

The 33rd President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, moved into the White House in 1945. To his surprise and dismay, the house had serious problems. Not only was it drafty and creaky, it was downright unsafe. Chandeliers in the house were observed swaying for no apparent reason, and floors moved underneath people’s feet when stepped on.All of the above resulted in a structural investigation being conducted on the building, revealing haphazard retrofitting, fire hazards and a second floor that was on the verge  of collapsing. What’s more is that the White House’s foundations were sinking, walls were peeling  away and disused water and gas pipes were weighing down the building and making it unsustainable. The situation was so bad that, in June 1948, one of the legs ofFirst Daughter Margaret Truman’s piano  fell right through a floorboard of her second-floor sitting room.  This event, along with others, made the Presidential family and its aides realize that serious measures were required to save the historic building.

May 17, 1950: Bulldozers move earth around inside the gutted shell of the White House

In 1949, Congress approved a $5.4 million Project to gut the building in its entirety, replacing its  interior while retaining its historic facade. Architects, engineers, and workers toiled for the next 22 months, trying to figure out how to remove   unstable structural elements while somehow ensuring the exterior of the building remained intact. All of the construction equipment used on the site had to be carried inside in pieces, then re-assembled before being used in order to prevent exterior damage. The first and second floors were replaced, while several expansions and basement levels were added, including a bomb shelter that was capable of withstanding a nuclear attack. President Truman and his family returned to reside in the White House in 1952, with a small ceremony marking the occasion. The First Family received a gold key to its newly-refurbished residence.

January 3, 1950: A second floor corridor.

January 19, 1950: The East Room.

February 6, 1950: View from the servants' dining room.

February 10, 1950: Workers dismantle a bathtub.

February 14, 1950: Workers gut a lower corridor.

February 20, 1950: The Blue Room.

February 23, 1950: Workers remove the main staircase.

March 1, 1950: The east wall of the state dining room.

March 9, 1950: Men stand in the second floor Oval Study above the Blue Room.

Unknown date in 1950.

Unknown date in 1950.

February 27, 1950: A crane lifts a 40-foot beam towards a second-floor window while workers  load debris onto a truck.

November 6, 1950: Workers lay concrete ceilings for basement rooms below the northeast corner  of the White House.

January 23, 1951: The Lincoln Room.

June 21, 1951: The East Room.

November 21, 1951: The state dining room.

January 4, 1952: Workers install new steps on the South Portico.

February 16, 1952: The South Portico with scaffolding removed.

July 19, 1951: Workers inside massive ventilation ducts in the basement of the White House.

December 4, 1951: A third floor corridor.

January 23, 1952: The state dining room.

March 24, 1952: Library of Congress employees place books on the shelves of the West Sitting  Room.

March 27, 1952: President Harry S. Truman and First Lady Bess Truman return to the White  House after the renovation.

All Images are Copyright © The National Archives. Content Source: Mashable

For the complete history of the White House, please visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House

Today's funny :o)

Spring?

Can it be far off??

Geese heading North!

 ( Up the volume and you can hear them)

Sap running out of the tree:

 The first fly - it was big!

 Warm, but breezy:

Green!!!!!

Ha - we'll probably get a snowstorm this week!

:o)

Easy Listening for a Sunday Afternoon

Vaughn Monroe

Dream a little dream of me.

Stars shining bright above you,
Light breezes seem to whisper,
"I love you."

Birds singing in the sycamore trees,
Dream a little dream of me.
Say "nighty night" and kiss me.
Just hold me tight and tell me
You'll miss me.
While I'm alone and blue as can be,
Dream a little dream of me.

Stars fading but I linger on dear,
Still craving your kiss.
I'm longing to linger 'til dawn dear
Just saying this;
"sweet dreams 'til sunbeams find you.
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you.
But in your dreams whatever they be,
Dream a little dream of me."
Orchestra plays the chorus

"sweet dreams 'til sunbeams find you.
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you.

But in your dreams whatever they be,
Dream a little dream of me."

Darling, dream a little dream of me!

At the Hop!

Bruce Channel

Hey! Baby!

By Bruce Channel

Hey, hey hey baby!
I want to know if you'll be my girl
Hey, hey hey baby!
I want to know if you'll be my girl

When I saw you walking down the street
I said that's a kind of girl I'd like to meet
She's so pretty, Lord she's fine
I'm gonna make her mine all mine

Hey, hey hey baby!
I want to know if you'll be my girl

When you turned and walked away
That's when I want to say
C'mon baby, give me a whirl
I want to know if you'll be my girl

Hey, hey hey baby!
I want to know if you'll be my girl

When you turned and walked away
That's when I want to say
C'mon baby, give me a whirl
I want to know if you'll be my girl

Hey, hey hey baby!
I want to know if you'll be my girl
Hey, hey hey hey hey, baby
C'mon, baby now

Update for FNS

Attention all Steamers!

Go take a gander at this over at Terry's trains:


jterryt.blogspot.com


Hint:

:o)

Friday Night Steam

Tonight, we're off to Ireland to see some good old fashioned steam engines!

Enjoy!

 

For more information on this wonderful place and learn about some of these beauties, please visit:

http://www.markhamgrangesteammuseum.co.uk/

Today's funny :o)

Late Wednesday night we had super bad thunderstorms with high winds and plenty of rain that washed all the snow away.

This is what it sound like right before the lights went out:

Part of the driveway was washed out:

 Hubby worked hard shoveling the mud. This is the last couple of shovel fulls.

When picking up branches in the front, I discovered we have a big mole problem.

  

 

 There were tunnels everywhere! 

 This is the only tree we could see that was damaged:

 The top of  it snapped off - it didn't hit the wires.

We were lucky. This time!

:o)

Ever see a Potoo??

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Potoos
Northern potoo
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Caprimulgiformes
Family:	Nyctibiidae Bonaparte, 1853
Genus:	Nyctibius Vieillot, 1816
Species
See text.
Global range (In red)

Potoos (family Nyctibiidae) are a group of near passerine birds related to the nightjars and frogmouths. They are sometimes called poor-me-ones, after their haunting calls. There are seven species in one genus, Nyctibius, in tropical Central and South America.
These are nocturnal insectivores which lack the bristles around the mouth found in the true nightjars. They hunt from a perch like a shrike or flycatcher. During the day they perch upright on tree stumps, camouflaged to look like part of the stump. The single spotted egg is laid directly on the top of a stump.

Evolution and taxonomy

Paraprefica major fossil

The potoos are today an exclusively New World family, but they apparently had a much more widespread distribution in the past. Fossil remains of potoos dating from the Oligocene and Eocene have been found in France and Germany. A complete skeleton of the genus Paraprefica has been found in Messel, Germany. It had skull and leg features similar to those of modern potoos, suggesting that it may be an early close relative of the modern potoos. Because the only fossils other than these ancient ones that have been found are recent ones of extant species, it is unknown if the family once had a global distribution which has contracted, or if the distribution of the family was originally restricted to the Old World and has shifted to the New World^.
A 1996 study of the mitochondrial DNA of the potoos supported the monophyly of the family although it did not support the previous assumption that it was closely related to the oilbirds.^. The study also found a great deal of genetic divergence between the species, suggesting that these species are themselves very old. The level of divergence is the highest of any genus of birds, being more typical of the divergence between genera or even families. This raises the possibility that there are several cryptic species to be discovered. For example the northern potoo was for a long time considered to be the same species as the common potoo, but the two species have now been separated on the basis of their calls. In spite of this there is no morphological way to separate the two species.

Morphology

The potoos are a highly conservative family in appearance, with all the species closely resembling one another; species accounts in ornithological literature remark on their unusual appearance.^.Potoos range from 21–58 cm in length. They resemble upright sitting nightjars, a closely related order (Caprimulgiformes). They also resemble the frogmouths of Australasia, that are stockier and have much heavier bills. They have proportionally large heads for their body size and long wings and tails. The large head is dominated by a massive broad bill and enormous eyes. In the treatment of the family in the Handbook of the Birds of the World, Cohn-Haft describes the potoos as little more than a flying mouth and eyes. The bill, while large and broad, is also short, barely projecting past the face. It is delicate, but has a unique "tooth" on the cutting edge of the upper mandible that may assist in foraging. Unlike the closely related nightjars, the potoos lack rictal bristles around the mouth. The legs and feet are weak and used only for perching.

The eyes are large, even larger than those of nightjars. As in many species of nocturnal birds, they reflect the light of flashlights. Their eyes, which could be conspicuous to potential predators during the day, have unusual slits in the lids, which allow potoos to sense movement even when their eyes are closed. Their plumage is cryptic, helping them blend into the branches on which they spend their days.

Habitat and distribution

The potoos have a Neotropical distribution.^[3] They range from Mexico to Argentina, with the greatest diversity occurring in the Amazon Basin, which holds five species. They are found in every Central and South American country except Chile. They also occur on three Caribbean islands: Jamaica, Hispaniola and Tobago. The potoos are generally highly sedentary, although there are occasional reports of vagrants, particularly species that have travelled on ships. All species occur in humid forests, although a few species also occur in drier forests.

Behavior

Common potoo camouflaged on a stump

The potoos are highly nocturnal and generally do not fly during the day. They spend the day perched on branches with the eyes half closed. With their cryptic plumage they resemble stumps, and should they detect potential danger they adopt a "freeze" position which even more closely resembles a broken branch. The transition between perching and the freeze position is gradual and hardly perceptible to the observer.
The English zoologist Hugh Cott, describing Nyctibius griseus as "this wonderful bird", writes that it^.

habitually selects the top of an upright stump as a receptacle for its egg, which usually occupies a small hollow just, and only just, large enough to contain it... the stump selected had thrown up a new leader just below the point of fracture... and the birds sat facing this in such a way that when viewed from behind they came into line and blended with the grey stem.

— Hugh Cott

Potoos feed at dusk and at night on flying insects. Their typical foraging technique is to perch on a branch and occasionally fly out in the manner of a flycatcher in order to snatch a passing insect. They occasionally fly to vegetation to glean an insect off it before returning to their perch, but they do not attempt to obtain prey from the ground. Beetles form a large part of their diet, but they also take moths, grasshoppers and termites. One northern potoo was found with a small bird in its stomach as well. Having caught an insect, potoos swallow it whole without beating or crushing it.

Potoos are monogamous breeders and both parents share responsibilities for incubating the egg and raising the chick. The family does not construct a nest of any kind, instead laying the single egg on a depression in a branch or at the top of a rotten stump. The egg is white with purple-brown spots. One parent, often the male, incubates the egg during the day, then the duties are shared during the night. Changeovers to relieve incubating parents and feed chicks are infrequent to minimise attention to the nest, as potoos are entirely reliant on camouflage to protect themselves and their nesting site from predators. The chick hatches about one month after laying and the nestling phase is two months, a considerable length of time for a landbird. The plumage of nestling potoos is white and once they are too large to hide under their parents they adopt the same freeze position as their parents, resembling clumps of fungus.

Mobbing behavior has also been observed among common potoos. (Nyctibius griseus). Avian mobbing is a widespread behavior in which an individual or a group of birds deliberately confronts a potential predator. Mobbing birds crowd around the predator, approaching and retreating, sometimes even chasing and attacking the predator. They also emit loud repeated calls, which generally attract additional birds of other species to join the mobbing.

The behaviors described above, suggest that common potoos adopt different defensive strategies depending upon circumstances. For a lone potoo, or brooding adult with an active predator close to the nest, the best course to avoid detection is to remain motionless and rely on camouflage. In the case of more distant, localized threat, however, the risks resulting from very gradual movement by an adult are exceeded by the less cryptic nesting. Nocturnal predators rely less on vision for locating prey therefore a different strategy may be required at night.

Today's funny :o)

Critters on the loose

These went right through the run fence:

So hard to tell what critter made these - the snow had turned to slush

 A better pic of them:

 I know these are from a bunny:

 The hunter:

:o)