suns along the Mohawk

– looking for the 2012 Valentine Flamingo posting? go here.

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– 21st Annual Stockade Sidewalk Sale –

Perfectly sunny early-June weather, and lots of friendly neighbors, made my walk around the Stockade delightful for the 2011 version of our neighborhood-wide sidewalk sale.  The slideshow below has a couple dozen photos taken at random this morning.   Many thanks to Diane DeMeo for all her hard work organizing the event.

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Let me know with an email or a Comment, if you’d like a jpg. version of any of the photographs in the Slideshow.

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Somehow,  I resisted bringing the Briber’s Birthday Bear home . . .

– click to see our 2009 and 2010 Sidewalk Sale postings –

St. George‘s celebrated the Feast Day of its namesake patron saint, George the Martyr, yesterday (April 23) with a Patronal Festival that included a traditional Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans ceremony.

The Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans 

“Kirk” is a Scottish word meaning church as a noun and “bring to church” as a verb.  According to The Capitol Scot [Washington, D.C.] website, in an essay called Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans Ceremony, “Clan representatives carry lengths (or flags) of tartans forward to the altar rail and the Chaplain says a few words about the Scottish heritage and gives a blessing.”  According to the Scottish Tartan Museum, having annual Kirkin’ ceremonies is apparently a wholly American-Scottish tradition that started in New York City in the early 1940s. But the rite harkens back to the days of the Act of Proscription, when wearing a kilt was banned, and Highlanders would hide pieces of tartan and bring them to church for a secret blessing.

  When the procession started, I was at the wrong end of N. Ferry St., at the Indian, so quite a few of my initial photos feature the backs and backsides of the marchers.  Eventually, I got a bit closer and got some faces.   I hope you enjoy the slideshow of a Stockade and Scottish tradition that added some color to a gray-cloud morning.

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– Symon gets a shiny new Ride: a $43,000 GMC Acadia Denali crossover vehicle –

General Motors’ truck-SUV division GMC sent a film crew to the Stockade early on May 3, 2011.  Thanks to a posting at Don Rittner’s Times Union weblog titled “What do The Onrust Project and General Motors Corporation have in Common?” (May 11, 2011), I’ve learned more details to share, along with a few photos I took on May 3rd.

Shooting on Front St. at N. Church, the film crew was making a short documentary about the replica ship Onrust as part of a Community Projects program that will feature GMC vehicles in five “real-life community service projects” for their 2012 catalog and retailing efforts.   Don is rightly proud of the Onrust project’s selection for the program, and his posting has the story, plus lots of links to relevant GMC materials.  You can also read about the program at GMC Community Projects page on Facebook.

In a press release, GMC explains:

Read More…

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– mulched and ready for action – 11 A.M. –

– mulch mound – 9 A.M. –

– mulch mound – 10:45 A.M. –

  The Stockade’s annual Clean-up & Planting Day in Riverside Park morphed into a single-focused project this year:  laying down a thick carpet of mulch beneath every piece of equipment in the Park’s children’s playground as protective ground-cover.  After a campaign by Stockade resident Tom Hodgkins to make the playground safer, the Stockade Association decided to purchase a mountain of mulch from the County, which was delivered to the end of North Street on Friday, May 13, 2011.

In the slideshow below, you can see about 30 photos depicting many aspects of this morning’s mulching project — from the giant, intimidating mulch mound at 9 AM, to the arrival of members of the Union College crew team and SCCC athletic program, plus many neighbors with rakes, shovels, gloves and wheelbarrels, and the amazing disappearing mound (10:45 AM), to relaxing college kids after their hard labors, Hodgkins’ kids working and charming us all (as usual), and consumption of pizza to cap the event. As always, Jennifer Wells and Carol DeLaMater worked extra hard, along with Tom Hodgkins, to organize the project and keep things rolling.  The college students were indispensable, as were several of our neighbors.  Thanks to all those who helped and to the Stockade Association for funding and feeding the event.

The Gallery at the  bottom of this posting has each of the   photos from the Slideshow. Click on the image for a larger version.

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Click here for our posting about the 2010  spring clean-up and planting day in Riverside Park.

 For a bonus dose of the event’s three extra-cute children, see “Clifford and the Hodgkins Kids.”

. Click on an image in the Gallery below for a larger version of the photo.

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   If you can get them to slow down a litle and look at the camera, it’s almost impossible to take a bad shot of the three children of Tom and Weiwei Hodgkins.  As a large pile of mulch was spread today under the playground equipment at Riverside Park, brothers Tianning and Hainuo worked and played hard all morning, and little sister Xiwen (“Concetta”) observed serenely and charmed the crowd.

They star in the following slideshow along with Clifford the Big Red Dog.  Hainuo sees his big brother on Clifford and decides to join him.  I did a lot of smiling.

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– You can see more of the Hodgkins kids and our coverage of the big mulch project in our next posting, “Riverside playground mulched for safety.”  –