Last night as I was driving home with my wife and daughter, we passed the lighthouse during the rise of a full moon. It was spectacular! Our first order Fresnel lens was lit while the light from the moon behind sparkled through the windows of the lens room. I raced home (1 mile south of the tower) to get my camera and came back to snap a few shots. I have a brand new Nikon [...]
The Space Shuttle Atlantis will be coming home this week. Todays landing was cancelled due to the low pressure system spinning off our coast. They will have another chance tomorrow and Saturday to land at the Cape. Yesterday I spent the day down at Kennedy Space Center Vistor Complex for a Florida Attractions Association board meeting. After the meeting Steve Geis, Operations Director for the complex, took us over to the Shuttle Launch Experience and [...]
It was an interesting Friday at the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum. Jenny Lynn, our head educator, came in period dress from the 1760’s as a lady pirate for the lightouse summer camp. I shot a picture of her in front of the swivel gun from the shipwreck “Industry” (on display in our museum), the first British supply sloop to come down the coast from the northern colonies to outfit the British garrison when they [...]
OK. We arrived at Hawks Cay Resort in the Florida Keys for the 2007 Florida Attractions Association Conference Tuesday night. Registration was on Wednesday and things started rolling from there. […]
Last week our quarterly maintenance was due on the rotation mechanism. Every three months we put jacks under the flash panels, pull the friction rollers, inspect everything, and put it all back together again. What made this session more fun was that it was the first time that we had guest keepers here and they got to get their hands dirty and do some real lighthouse keeping. Corey and Angela were not at all shy. [...]
Last Saturday was our biggest event of the year, Lighthouse Festival. I spent months planning it as I have for the past three years. This year I handed off the leadership portion to two of our very capable staff members since I was going to be gone to Tallahassee the weekend prior. I asked them to finish up planning and oversight of the event, and run it the day of. It turns out this was [...]
It is Saturday, March 10, 2007. I decided to slow cook a beef brisket. I have been grilling for a long time and one of my favorite meals is good mesquite smoked brisket. I don’t have a smoker and you have to smoke brisket for a long time at low temps. I can’t control the temp on my grill like I would like to, and it would get too hot for a brisket. The only [...]
OK, so I am a couple of days late posting this week. I have been swamped. Ran up to Jacksonville on Friday to get the liquor license for lighthouse festival on March 17th. It is always an ordeal because you have to get a bunch of signatures from the city zoning office, the internal revenue service in Jax, and you have to have it notarized. Then you set up an appointment with the licensing agency [...]
I feel like I’ve been running a lot and getting nothing done, so I took a climb up the lighthouse this morning to check on things. I go up once a day anyway, but usually in the afternoon. Spending time in the tower always helps me focus and quiet down. It really is remarkable. Once in the rotation room, I listen to the hum of the motor to see if anything is amiss. No problems [...]
A traveling exhibit arrived at the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum yesterday. It is about the S.S. United States, the largest and fastest luxury liner ever built in the U.S. It is a wonderful maritime exhibit for our lighthouse. But for me it is something totally different. Having been born in 1957, I am a Mouseketeer from way back. Sunday night with the “Wonderful World of Color†(later “Wonderful World of Disneyâ€) was the best [...]