today being the 8th of january and hope to finsd all you well. i am doing ok , and the day was unseasonably mild. we have been having a warm winter, but really nothing out of ordinary. seems like all you do is keep looking over your shoulder as you know the ugly side of winter can come at you in a moments notice. ohio.
       above is the rooster oil painting i did and is pretty well finished . going to do a weathered board frame around it and hang in kitchen as i  always wanted one.  the other pic is of my grandpa as he was working for the forestry service i believe around 1962. he was a foreman and the other guy is ron whipkey , his boss and soil engineer responsible for testing. they worked on the property adjacent to ours . we lived on a fairly good size farm in tuscarawas county in ohio, and grandpa only had to drive up a farm road to work. we would occasionally visit him at work and then it seemed i was there all the time when i was really young.
there was different projects they did there. and will attempt over the next couple blogs to tell a story . complete with drawings of an incident that happened there when i was young. in this pic above they were measuring water as it percolated through brown forest soil under simulated rains. this was called a weir and it was dug into hill by hand. being careful to make sure the soil was undisturbed on the uphill side. then they would string piping through the woods and set up spray bars and create an artificial rain in middle of sunshine streaming through the trees. creating rainbows as you looked up through the mist into the sun. in the middle of this rain was an instrument called a tensionometer which measured the water tension of the soil. and these had to be read at different intervals. you would don a raincoat and head into the mist. at five years they had taught  me how to count and was reading tensionometers  as well as watching artificial rains and measuring water. what an opportunity for a young child to grow up in the shade of those adults. couldnt wait till i was in first grade.
       since it was my first real job. i was paid by one of the engineers for my work as he was passing out paychecks one day to other employees and he said he had something for me. and sure enough he opened up the tailgate of his push button chrysler and there was a mountain of day old cupcakes. best paycheck i ever had. i wasnt expecting it and it was something we never got as although we lived on a farm we were to say the least poor, as my real dad had taken off and left us with nothing. cupcakes looked really good to me then. imagine the us government hirng a kid 5 years old and paying him with cup cakes. back in the good ole days, when you could do that.