Lowcountry Dog Park Tour: John McCants Veterans Park Dog Park

This is the first new addition to my Lowcountry Dog Park Tour since 2016. After we moved the closest dog park was at Wannamaker County Park, which was a bit of a drive. The dogs were getting older, slowing down some, and also got a fenced-in back yard, so trips to the dog park became less important. After the dogs died, there really wasn’t much reason to visit dog parks anymore.

This weekend, I’m dog-sitting Cooper. A perfect excuse to go visit a dog park! A couple years ago Goose Creek opened up a new park, John McCants Veterans Park, with a fenced in dog park. If it had opened a few years earlier, dog park trips probably would have made it back into the routine. Cooper and I decided to go check it out.

Getting to the dog park is pretty easy. It’s just off a major road and a short drive down a residential street. Two parking lots on either side of the street provide plenty of parking for people using the park itself, or the dog park. The dog park is a fenced off area off in a corner of the park.

The dog park at John McCants Veterans Park
The dog park at John McCants Veterans Park

The dog park has a standard dog lock set up with an outer gate and two inside gates for the large and small dog areas. A water fountain provides water for dogs and people. A poop bag dispenser is provided in case you forget to bring some along. Bathrooms for people are in a picnic shelter just across the field from the dog park.

Dog lock entry gates. Inside the front gate are two entry gates for a large dog area and a small dog area.
Dog lock entry gates

This is a new park, so there’s not much in the way of shade for people. Some small trees provide a bit of shade for the benches. It will be a few years before they get big enough to provide more shade.

There are some agility type fixtures on both sides for dogs to play with and play on. There aren’t any tennis balls or other toys (yet), so you’ll have to bring your own.

Each side has a couple of largish hills, one of which has two tunnels going through them. Good for running through, or maybe a nice shady spot for dogs to rest in.

There are also a couple of fake boulders. I don’t know if they’re hiding or covering up something, or just another feature for dogs to pee on.

A fake rock for dogs to pee on.
A fake rock for dogs to pee on.

It’s a pretty good sized dog park, but since it’s split up into a small and large dog area, it’s effectively two small dog parks. Personally I think separating large and small dogs at a dog park is unnecessary and ends up wasting a lot of perfectly good dog park space. At all the split dog parks I’ve been to over the years, all the dogs regardless of size end up in the same space anyway leaving the other half empty.

For people who like trains, it’s a good place to watch them go by.

There was a lot less activity at the park than I expected for a Saturday morning. Cooper and I were the only ones at the dog park today, so I don’t know how busy the dog park gets. There were a few other people and kids in the play area of the park though.

Here’s a Google map for the dog park.

Bulbs in unexpected places

A few weeks ago, the stove top light bulb in our microwave burned out. A trip to the local big box hardware store yielded a bulb that looked like it would work, but turned out to be too long to fit.

Connie was putting some stuff into a drawer of her mom’s sewing machine table, and I noticed there was a light bulb in the drawer. It was still in the original packaging and unopened. I stared at it a bit, and she knew exactly what I was thinking. Looked about the same size as the microwave bulb. Got the old light bulb to compare, and they were pretty much the same size.

Put the bulb into the microwave and it worked perfectly!

Talk about a serendipitous find. Never know where you’ll end up finding something you need.

Connie says, “Thanks, Mom!”

Building raised beds

After a year in containers, it’s time to put some of the plants we got last year into the ground.

After making some plans, changing some plans, getting suggestions from friends, we decided to try the raised bed route so I built some boxes. Gardener Scott has some great YouTube videos covering raised bed gardening.

A trip to the nearby big box home improvement store (and a call to the wife after I discovered the boards I just bought wouldn’t all fit into the car) got me what I needed to build two 8 foot x 4 foot boxes for the raised beds.

Two wooden boxes on the lawn to be used for raised bed gardening

We’ll dig up the grass down to the “dirt” (heavy clay stuff) underneath and fill up the boxes with other dirt that the plants will hopefully like. Haven’t figured out where the new dirt is coming from yet. It will either be lots and lots of bags and several trips from the nearby big box hardware store, or maybe get a few cubic yards of dirt dumped on the driveway from somewhere.

The plan is to eventually have six raised bed boxes (three on either side of the tree). Four of them we’ll use for the blueberry and raspberry plants that are in pots right now. The other two we’ll use to try our hand at growing some veggies.

Teaching file: Mammography artifact

This artifact showed up at one of our mammography sites when the daily artifact evaluation was being performed.

On the left is the full artifact evaluation image. On the right is the cropped in view of the artifact. Try to guess what’s going on.

Continue reading “Teaching file: Mammography artifact”

New tablet

For an upcoming trip, I decided I needed a new tablet to replace the old Transformer Prime. After all this time, the battery doesn’t hold much of a charge anymore, and it’s become really slow and difficult to use.

This time, I wanted something that I could use for reading my growing e-book collection without all the distractions of extra apps on an Android or iOS tablet. I also wanted something that was e-paper/e-ink based. Looked at the Amazon Kindle tablets, but I felt they were too small. I finally settled on the reMarkable tablet.

I’ve been using it for about a week now, and it’s a pretty slick device. It’s a fairly open device which lends itself pretty well to hacking on and customizing. On the other hand, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also not hard to brick. There’s a whole ecosystem of software, “paper” templates, and splash screens created by other reMarkable tablet users. There’s a wiki to collect a lot of those projects and information in one place.

I had a new mammography unit to acceptance test today, so naturally I took an x-ray image of the reMarkable.

X-ray image of the reMarkable 2 tablet. 1404x1872 pixel PNG suitable for using with the Remarkable 2.
X-ray image of the reMarkable 2 tablet. 1404×1872 pixel PNG suitable for using with the reMarkable 2.

Turning it into power-off and sleep splash screens for the reMarkable was pretty easy. Resize the image to 1404×1872 pixels, save it as an appropriately named PNG file, and copy it over to the Remarkable. Reboot and the new splash screens were there.

reMarkable tablet with an x-ray of the tablet as the power-off splash screen

The Remarkable also fits nicely into the leather sleeve I bought for the Transformer Prime.

I’ve loaded it up with EPUB books and I already have a few ideas for some paper templates to create. I’m going to enjoy using this tablet.

Update: Oh, I forgot the pen! The reMarkable Marker looks pretty simple inside. Tough to tell, but at the tip is a coil of wire and a few other bits that help to inform the digitizer in the Remarkable where the tip of the pen is. The other solid dense objects I think are the magnets used to clip the Marker to the side of the reMarkable.

reMarkable Marker pen x-ray. 1404x1872 pixel PNG suitable for using with the Remarkable 2.
reMarkable Marker pen x-ray. 1404×1872 pixel PNG suitable for using with the reMarkable 2.

Another update: Embiggened versions of the reMarkable and reMarkable Marker.