It says it all, really. Why use diamond if glass can be made such that an amateur canot distinguish it at all and a professional needs a microscope? Why pay exorbitant prices for rocks laboriously extracted from ground when they can be synthesised at a fracture of those costs?
It also sums up my feelings about using rare and exotic tropical hardwoods for woodwork.
It’s been a while since I put up some pictures of Macedonia – I did promise the aqueduct, and I’d hoped to pull myself together before my final trip to Skopje in June, but alas! It is July and here is the aqueduct.
First, a short background:
The Aqueduct is located in the village of Vizbegovo in the northwestern part of Skopje, about 2.5 km to the right of the Skopje-Kachanik road. It is a part of a water-supply system with a length of about 10.0-10.5km from the piping at the Lavovac spring, between the villages Gluovo and Brazda, all the way to the Upper Town of Skopje Fortress-Kale.The Skopje Aqueduct is the only aqueduct in Macedonia, and one of three largest and well preserved in the former Yugoslavia along with Diocletianus Aqueduct near Split, Croatia and Bar Aqueduct in Montenegro.
What’s interesting is that nobody seems entirely sure on when it was constructed:
Considering the period of its construction there are several hypotheses:
-during the reign of Rome (1st century), according to this theory Aqueduct has led the water to Legionary settlement Scupi
-during the reign of Byzantine Empire (reign of Emperor Justinian I), according to this theory, Aqueduct shipping water to new settlement Justiniana Prima.
-during the reign of Ottoman Empire, according to this theory Aqueduct is built in 16th century for a large number of Turkish public hamams.
Wikipedia concurs (for what it’s worth), while other sites push the Roman angle.
In numbers, we get:
The Aqueduct has 2 access ramparts, 53 pillars, 54 base vaults and 42 smaller vaults on the closed and open discharging openings above the pillars. The overall length of the Aqueduct is 387.98m, at an elevation of 279.46m of the southern rampart and 280.48m of the northern rampart, or a delevelling of 1,025m.
… which all sounds impressive enough, and the minimum of info was enough to get me interested (also considering it is reasonably close to Skopje itself, and my Lithuanian colleague and I were up for the walk – 5km in early March is quite nice).
Well, it was an interesting walk, as the straightest route goes through a military facility and thus was closed to members of the interested public, and the circuitous route has… no sidewalks along heavily trafficked roads.
This is actually on the way back, we took a slightly different route, but looking across the river Vardar, you can see the road along which we walked – up top is the militarized territory, and yeah, that road has no sidewalks. It looks quite a bit more daunting from here.
© rq, all rights reserved.
Towards the end of the walk, we got some traffic relief, as there was an older parallel road for a few hundred metres.
© rq, all rights reserved.
The aqueduct curves to the left, the gated road is the exit we would have taken had we walked straight through the militarized territory. At this point of the walk, I was quite angry with Google Maps, though I can only blame myself for searching “shortest route”.
© rq, all rights reserved.
The final piece of our route took us through one of the poorer areas in or near Skopje. Afterwards the locals told us this is not an area foreigners should walk through, but besides some rather suspicious stares and wondering faces, I didn’t feel too bothered.
© rq, all rights reserved.
And there it is in the distance, the first real glimpse of the aqueduct!
© rq, all rights reserved.
I’m going to stop there for now, because the rest is the actual bricks and mortar (very little water) and I still have to decide if the number of photos I took counts as over-abundant or not. The risk of going somewhere interesting, I suppose. :)
Early morning at the park ©voyager, all rights reserved
Tomorrow I’m going to be having my last 6 teeth removed and 2 dental implants inserted. It was supposed to be sleep surgery, but the Dr. won’t take the risk because of the combination of drugs that I take so I’ll be awake, which sucks. I will get nitrous oxide and I have some marijuana oil for before and after which the Dr. says will be fine by him. I’ve been told to expect a few bad days post-op which could mean a bad week or two factoring in my fibro. Why am I telling you all of this?
Well, Jack and I have decided to take a virtual vacation. Starting tomorrow until August 19/19 Jack’s Walk won’t be here. You’ll just have to guess what the Bubba and I are up to. Tree Tuesday will also be absent for the next 2 weeks, but Fungi Friday will be here and so will the daily books. Next week the books will feature a few of Caine’s favourite artists and I know you won’t want to miss that. Giliell will also be back from holiday next week and I know she has lots to share from her vacation in Spain. Those are all good reasons to keep tuning us in.
Jack and old, toothless me will see you soon.
Charles Joseph Weld-Blundell. Are We a Stupid People, by One of Them. London; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd., 1908.
A book of commentary about the social and moral conditions in Britain at the turn of the last century.
Cover photo via: Nemfrog
The book is available to read at The Internet Archive
Milkweed ©voyager, all rights reserved
Poor Jack didn’t get out for a walk this morning. I turned off the A/C last night and opened the windows and by this morning the house was filled with humidity. I get this weird ataxia that puts me into slow motion and makes it feel like I’m moving through jello and high humidity is one of the things that can set it off. It took me a while just to get out of bed and I couldn’t make my hands work and I was feeling very frustrated. The jello wouldn’t lift even after the A/C cleared the house. I managed to get to pool therapy at noon and that really helped a lot, but by the time I got home it was too hot for Jack to go out. I promised to take him for a nice stroll around the neighbourhood after supper, but he isn’t bothered by the missing morning outing. At least that’s what he says – maybe he’s just being kind.
These photos were sent in by one of our readers, VBFF, and I absolutely love them. I am very much missing my east coast beach this year and these pictures gave me a great big smile. Sand + water + driftwood = happiness. Thanks!
©VBFF, all rights reserved
©VBFF, all rights reserved
Charles G.D. Roberts. Illustrations by Charles Livingstone Bull. Binding designed by Amy Sacker. Boston, L.C. Page and Company, 1902.
via: The Internet Archive
Actually, I’m looking for the opposite in advice, but now I’m reminded of this book (cover illustration here, for some reason doesn’t show up at the link), which was a regular childhood read – less for the text (which, if I remember, was quite sensible), more for the illustrations, which contained a lot of shenanigans and annoyed parents.
Anyway, I was going to make a request to the readership here on ideas on travelling by car in Finland with three children and a tent, but I’ve been outvoted, and it looks like we’re going to try for Poland (the Tatra Mountains, to be precise!) sometime in August. It’s much farther but also much cheaper (so I’ve been explained to).
But what the hell, I’m curious now and I still want some answers for future planning: what is worth seeing in Finland? How might you plan a(n affordable) trip with a timeline of 3 – 4 days? With a small flock of children that need (a) entertainment (castles, animals, food and such are good) and (b) activity (anything that can be climbed is a bonus, this category includes trees, mountains, large rocks, etc.)? Google insists on showing me All the Interesting Things and I don’t have a good grasp of distance and travel time way up North.
(Also any advice on Poland is great, too, although we have a few experts available on location here.)
Not the Tatra Mountains, obviously. © rq, all rights reserved.
(The thematic choice, obviously.)
Going in circles ©voyager, all rights reserved
The weather’s turned hot and humid again so Jack and I are back to early morning walks and let’s just say that early morning is not my best time. Jack doesn’t care about the time, though, so I decided the river was a good choice because Jack can frolic and I can sit and drink coffee and watch him. That’s what I call win – win. The water was a bit muddy, but Jack came out smelling fine(ish) and the towels were wet, but not dirty so he didn’t even need a hosing down at home. That’s a win – win – win. Not bad for dishwasher of a day.
When watering my citruses today, a movement caught my eye in one of the bowls. A tiny black parasitic wasp in a struggle with a spider twice its size. I did not have my camera with me and of course, I could not go and get it, so I snapped at least a few pictures with my phone. I assume the wasp has won and laid the spider aside for afters because it has left it lay there all limp and motionless, danced around a bit and then left.
Pictures below the fold – content warning spiders and predation.
Mary Knight Potter. The Art of the Vatican; being a brief history of the place, and an account of the principal art treasures within its walls. Boston. L.C. Page & company, 1903.
via: The Internet Archive
Lofty has sent us the happiest little flowers I’ve ever seen.
Winter is also the time for some of our eucalyptus to flower. Most do it way up in the sky and usually you only know by the carpet of spent pale yellow flowers on the ground underneath the tree. This one however (a street tree) offered its flowers at eye level for my camera to snap at. The size of the flowers is around 25mm or 1″ long.
Eucalyptus Flowers, ©Lofty, all rights reserved
I really wish my first customer has chosen a knife with simpler geometry. For future projects of this kind, I will have to make some more attachments for my belt grinder, because it is woefully inadequate for the concave false edge. I messed that up several times already and quite a few times I got frightened that I will have to start all over again. Whether I manage to correct the slight flaws that are in there remains to be seen, my guess would be no. It will cut alright, but it won’t be perfect no matter what I do. Grrr.
This weekend I have spent with grinding as much time as I could – approx 4 hours each day. More is not possible, at least not for me. Grinding on belt grinder is for me very mentally tiring, because I have to concentrate a lot more than I had to when grinding manually. Because whilst grinding on the belt grinder is quicker, it is also possible to make mistakes quicker.
At this point, I should be finished with polishing, but I am unfortunately not even halfway through. Mainly I have myself to blame for this. If you remember, when writing about the kitchen knives I mentioned that after the first grind with the magnetic jig I went back to freehand in order to be able to alternate the angle of attack to get a flatter and more even grind. Well, I forgot to do that with these two knives and I ground them both up to 120 grit ceramic belt on the jig. The result was ever so slightly wavy grind that I had to correct now that the blades are hardened. So I had to start all over at 40 grit and work my way up, sweating profusely whenever my hand slipped slightly. But at least one thing is clear now – whatever misgivings I had about the blades being perhaps not hardened properly, I do not have them anymore. They are extremely hard and tough to grind, which is why it took me so long to get to 150 grit today, which is the point at which I had to call it quits.
Still a long way to go. © Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I estimate I will need about ten more hours overall, on and off the belt grinder, before I can call these two blades finished. That means at least one more weekend. At least. It also means more than double the time that I think it should have taken me. When I am done with this and with the kitchen knives, I will probably make a batch of these blades as an exercise, I must get the muscle memory and experience and know-how to do a proper job in a reasonable time, I cannot dick around with one blade for months on end anymore.
