Thursday, October 9, 2014

As Sam and I were on our morning walk, I found a floor heater that had been thrown out.  I thought I should at least take a look at it to see if it could be repaired.  When it was opened, I found two parts that were clearly bad.  All of the smoke had leaked out of a capacitor and that had damaged a 1-watt resistor next to it.  We have the same model heater with a failed processor.  I had simply bypassed the relays on it, so it would still provide heat.  This meant I had ready access to a lot of spare parts.  

"Smoke leaked out of a capacitor" is apparently an insider electronics quip.  OK, I get it.

After replacing the two bad parts, the heater was again fully functional! This is where the need to minimize (because of limited RV space) and the urge to retain stuff (because it might be useful later) creates problems.  For now, I guess we will just make room for two heaters.  

Moab has been having its annual Plein Air Art Festival (Plein Air is French for "open air") so we walked around town for the afternoon.

The portico on the side (with the roof deck) would make a great place to park the motorhome.  Just need to transplant it into the north Georgia mountains.

At the recreation center, we saw a lot of people leaving with blank (event registered) canvases.  One of them stopped to pet Sam, so I had to ask.  The downtown Quick Draw competition was just starting. Each artist was to create their painting and bring it back by 7:00 pm (about 3 hours) for judging and display, and ultimately, to be sold.

Around town, there were artists everywhere.  They all seemed to be enjoying themselves and were open to conversation as they worked. There were 114 people participating in the Quick Draw and there were just as many different perspectives on the town in their compositions.

This was Wanda Mumm, under the UV shade.  I could not believe what she created (see Oct. 10) in only three hours.

The streets were crawling with artists.  How cool is that?

***Spoiler Alert*** This is Paul Bergquist and this will become the winning painting.

The clouds looked promising, so we headed back to Arches National Park to try to catch some nice sunset landscapes.  I think the lighting, clouds and scenery came together for some very nice vistas.  

I tried straight exposures, in-camera HDR and manual, 5 exposure HDR brackets.  The manual HDR pictures below were, by far, the best representation of the sunset lighting.