The Westlake Pirates

That's the boat, as seen by Windows Live Local, a new service by Microsoft that's meant to compete with Google Maps and Google Earth. The marina image in Google Maps (see the above link) is at least three years old, given the condition of Westlake and the parking lot, both of which were reconstructed by the city in 2004, and Google Earth uses the same images, so in both regards they're not as good.

The Live Local image shown above is much more recent, since we're in it. By the looks of the marina, it was taken last summer, perhaps in June. You can see the whole image here and wander around. It defaults to a more distant zoom, so click the big building image at top left to zoom in to the highest resolution. The one thing Live Local lacks is high-resolution images outside of major metropolitan areas, so Google's got them beat in that regard, even though the zoom on LL is a lot better (and more recent!) where it exists.

This at least explains some of those mysterious helicopters we saw hovering around town last summer...

Posted by Steve at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, delivery day passed without an entry (sorry!) but we haven't forgotten about you!

Year two kicked off with some excitement as we purchased a kayak! You can probably see it in the lower right of the webcam image - it's the red thing lashed to the upper rails. It's been out for a quick spin in the marina, but neither of us has braved the open lake yet to see just how good we are at keeping upright.

Meanwhile, on the construction side of things, progress continues as well! The final things on the bedroom to-do list are falling one by one. There are shiny new bookshelves against the closet wall, and nice hemlock molding around the ceiling, making that room look much like the front room does with wooden ribs. All that remains is a bit of molding around the port window and everything will be done.

One sticking point (pun intended) for a long time were the doors. There are wheels on the bottom of each door that are supposed to facilitate rolling them open and closed, but all three doors dragged unpleasantly for some time. The weather was finally nice enough to take the doors off for a while, put some screening up to keep the cats inside, and take a look at them. It's amazing what a little WD-40 and grease will do, and now they glide to and fro with the lightest of touches, just like they did thirty one years ago!

On all of this (and more, no doubt) Kristin has lots of photographs and lovely prose ready and waiting, so be sure to check back again very soon.

Posted by Steve at 3:51 PM | Permalink