Unbuilding the Grace and Pearman Bridges


For Sparky and myself, curiosity drives passion which in turn fuels our life's engine. Our passion was capturing the story of both unbuilding the Grace (1929 - 2007) and Pearman (1966 - 2007) Bridges and discovering the unbuilders. It takes a lot of passion to track a project from July 2005 until April 2007 - rain, shine, hurricanes or moving to Singapore. We discovered the joy of discovery learning. Ken Canty opened the front door for us - then Steve Testa, Ponch Billingsley and Mickey Rogers opened many side doors. Below are the highlights of what we discovered, who we met and what we learned.

And a reminder from T.S. Eliot (East Coker from the Four Quartets)

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

January 13, 2007: The curiosity of many things small

The time stamp is EST - not Singapore time - I was out at 1:45 pm - but that is 12:45 am in Charleston - and maybe even Durham and Chapel Hill.

I can't let Sparky and Mickey get ahead of me. After the T-1 implosion, how was I going to top that - so I decided, in spite of the rain and drizzle, to look around the neighborhood for some small insects. I was not disappointed.

Today the weather was so-so. Maybe rain, maybe drizzle, maybe nothing - so I ventured out as far as the Queenstown MRT station - and slightly beyone. Well the virtue of sticking close to home is that you don't know what you'll find. And in this case, walking past Fair Price - there were some bushes of these orange flowering things - and there was a bee. The goal was to practice focusing. I read somewhere that it was useful to use manual focus, and then take a sequence of photos so that maybe one was focused as an old man stands steady - but actually moves about quite a bit.

Here is the bee

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This is the same little guy - just a different angle and trying to maintain good focus

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The head is not well focused here - but check out the wings

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The bee and an ant

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Same bee, same ant - but not in focus

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Better focus of the bee head

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Better focus on the bee thorax

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Poor bee focus, better ant focus

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A pink flower

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Further studies of a bee - got the focus right this time

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Thorax focus not so good

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A small improvement

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Getting better

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From the side - check out the horseshoe-like tips on the front legs

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Looking eye to eye

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From the back

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A purple flower

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A butterfly hanging upside down - and hiding

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Another flower

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An ant

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This is for Valentin Krinsky - the spiral world of inside a banana leaf

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I thought this was a red ant

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But was wrong - after getting home, I found this was a spider. So the lesson learned from today - is that maybe this type of spide likes to build web amongst the leaf stuff

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This appears as if she is now behind her web

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Here is a pretty good view of spider and web - I think she is under her web

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Yes - clearly she has moved from being on top of the web to hiding under it

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And then a small small grasshopper - just chillin' on a leaf of grass

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Look at the length of the antennae

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A better focus

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This guy - just never could get a good view of

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But the butterfly - without words with the wings partially open

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again - but wings closing

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closer

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another view

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and a pink flower

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and two ants

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and a lonely ant

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and a closer view of the lonely ant

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and ants racing around this orange plant thing

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climbing around some more

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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