Some Random Pictures Not Previously Made Fun Of

Charlie played African drums at Hogle Zoo.

 

 Grace and Alice got in on the gig, too.  Everyone chose a drum suited to their size.

 

 For Mother's Day, Terisa got a tower o' chocolate. Amongst other swag.

 

Shifting gears, here is the coral pool at Baltimore's aquarium.  Well stocked, well cared for aquarium.

Yes, that's a real shark.  And so is the fish in the tank.

Fort McHenry was cool, even in the rain. In the plan view, it is star-shaped.  If you remember your history, it was the assault on Fort McHenry that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the star-spangled banner.  The assault took place on a stormy day (and night), just like this.

 

The fort's cannons couldn't really reach the ships in the harbor, which were about 2 miles out.  And you really couldn't see more than a few dozen yards in this rain.

This is what they would have seen. Fog.  Still, they kept firing and making it so the ships couldn't advance up the river to support the troops waiting to attack Baltimore.   So the attack never happened and Baltimore was saved.

 Fort McHenry was mobbed by grade school field trips.  Mobbed is not too strong a word.

 

I found this tomb, though my own fascination with him was limited to a few months early in junior high school when I read all of his gruesome and grotesque stuff obsessively.  But he was definitely an odd dude.

After seeing the grave, I thought I would walk over to the house he was living in when he died.  It was in a bit of a sketchy neighborhood. I didn't stay long.  

Not sure where this spelling comes from.

The Orioles were my favorite team when I was about 8. I'm not sure why, except I wrote a report on the Eastern Oriole about that time. Cause or effect?  Anyway, the field at Camden Park is beautiful.  The game, what we could see of it between the fans in motion all around us, was kind of slow, going to the Os 1-0 on a 7th inning homer.

 I stopped in to see this drunkfest in a park.  99 booze concessions, 2 food concessions.  And I felt very old in this crowd.

 The Baltimore and Ohio RR museum had this collection of watches.  If you were a railroad man, you had to have an accurate timepiece, though you had to buy it yourself.

The first real engine was this vertical boiler engine called Tom Thumb.  Fun fact:  the B&O railroad was the first in the US, and ended up pioneering just about everything about railroads. In fact, it was the B&O RR where stationary (civil) engineering split off of mechanical engineering.

Other fun fact: it was a train about like this that went through Ogden late one night (?) that helped inspire me to become a mechanical engineer. Air planes and space ships helped too.