Working Pictures: July 2017

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Health Care Rally, Hartford, 7/29/17

Hartford, Connecticut

There was a health care support rally Saturday morning, sponsored by several organizations, at the Capital Building in Hartford, CT. The idea was for people to send in pictures, digital files of snapshots of people who need healthcare, as in, everyone. They printed them out on letter size paper and set up half a dozen clotheslines with the 700+ submitted pictures. Then they got volunteers from the crowd of several hundred who had showed up to pick up the lines and display the pictures. A strong wind made this complicated, but everyone adapted.

Both of the state's senators showed up to address the crowd. Chris Murphy is speaking in this picture. State representatives were there as well, along with speakers from the organizers. Senator Blumenthal, stretching his talk a bit because Murphy was stuck in traffic, emphasized that the fight is only engaged, the war not won. Also, both made obligatory salutes in their remarks to John McCain for his vote, and then each stated firmly that the real heroines of killing the "skinny repeal" were the two Republican women senators, from Alaska and Maine, who had held out steadfastly against it all along, joined only at the last minute by Mr. McCain. Good point. More to follow when I do a close edit of the pictures.

The Y

Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Central Vacuum

Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Friday, July 28, 2017

Rain Gardens

Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Bringing in the Hay, 7/27/17

New Boston, New York

Corn and hay. Plenty of weeds at the edge of the side road to New Boston. These are probably feeder crops, and the cash crop is likely beef cattle, grazing somewhere else further from state route 22. They'll be getting the hay and corn later. It was fascinating to watch the tractor scooping up the harrowed hay and shooting it into the big straight body trucks (there were three of those trucks working in rotation, driving the loads back down south on 22). The equipment is old. I didn't get a close look at the combine, but the trucks were in the 20-40 year-old range, putting a lot of diesel particulate into the air as they strained out of the valley onto the highway. The precision with which the trucks held position with the output of hay was a little amazing. Maybe they were using GPS and cameras mounted on the spray arm, feeding back into the control cabins—or maybe these guys have just been doing it this way for decades, and know how to get it right.

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