The Monitor Base Ball Club of Chelsea traveled to Northville to play the Eclipse Base Ball Club.
A good beard is a good beard no matter what team you play for.
Would you like to be check out the fun of a vintage base ball match? The Monitors and the Merries — Chelsea’s women’s base ball team — will both be in action in Chelsea next Saturday, August 23! The Merries will be playing after the fair parade (approximately 2:30), and the Monitors match will follow. All are welcome!
Thursday was the final Sounds & Sights of 2014. Remember when it was just starting? Two and a half months goes quickly!
All eleven Thursdays featured good weather, a marvelous run I can’t recall happening in years past. Rain? Unusually high temperatures? None of that. Every Thursday was beautiful. Some more than others — I most enjoyed the October-like chill in the air this week — but all were beautiful. What a great year for Sounds & Sights!
Stormfront was on the library lawn.
Seven Bridges was by the courthouse.
Seven Bridges had FANS.
Yes, they were all enjoying the music. You’ll just have to trust me. THEY WERE.
Chelsea football started practice this week!
The run of beautiful weather on Thursday evenings continued! Another good crowd showed up for the penultimate Sounds & Sights of 2014.
Annie & Rod Capps and Jason Dennie were on the library lawn.
One little girl was a big fan of the music.
Captain Awesome enjoyed it, too.
Cold Tone Harvest was by the courthouse.
James Muto was in the alley.
Salmagundi was on Middle.
The Shelter Dogs were at the Glazier Building.
Their audience was having fun.
Of One was at the gazebo.
The fountain is always popular.
Face painting was in the courtyard.
Skye Hilliam and Drake Morency were at the Glazier Building.
Back on the library lawn, Annie & Rod Capps and Jason Dennie were still entertaining the crowd.
Next week is the last Sounds & Sights of 2014! Come check out the fun in downtown Chelsea next Thursday evening from 6:30-8:30.
Downtown Chelsea is a fun area with restaurants, shops, the library, the Purple Rose Theatre, and…corn?
Another Thursday, yet another beautiful evening for Sounds & Sights.
Trio Tumbau and Paul Vornhagen were on the library lawn.
View was by the courthouse.
View had a very enthusiastic young audience.
One young fan was careful to protect her hearing.
The Monitor Base Ball Club of Chelsea played a home match against the Wahoos of Royal Oak.
As always, the match began with a bat toss to determine which team would bat first.
(That ball was fair just inside the third base line.)
The match was very close the whole way, but the Wahoos held the Monitors scoreless in the ninth to preserve an exciting 12-11 victory.
This is what a postgame huzzah looks like:
You may have noticed “Tallies for Charity” at the bottom of the scoreboard. The Monitors were collecting donations for Smile Train, an organization that provides cleft lip and palate surgeries to those in need around the world. After the huzzahs, the Wahoos surprised the Chelsea captain with a very generous donation.
It was a great moment.
In fact, the whole afternoon was a rousing success: a large crowd — the largest crowd yet! — showed up to cheer on the teams, the match was exciting, and a worthy cause benefited.
After the postgame photo, they gave kids a chance to hit the ball and run the bases.
Would you like to join the fun? More spectators are always welcome! The Monitors’ next home match is the afternoon of Saturday, August 23, after the fair parade. Come check it out! (The rest of the schedule is here.)
A severe storm stomped through Chelsea Sunday evening. Its effects were minimal in my area outside town, but that wasn’t the case in the city. A number of large trees went down, some of which used houses to cushion their fall. When I was driving through town, I noticed a crew hard at work dealing with one such tree:
I don’t know if you would go home, grab your camera, and head back to watch the crew work, but obviously, that’s exactly what I did. What? Leave me alone. IT’S NEWSWORTHY.
The size and position of the tree made it a more difficult job requiring heavier equipment, so they brought in a large crane to lift the tree off the house piece by piece.
All of that got lowered to the crew on the ground running the chipper.
That rather large machine made quick work of the tree.
Not once but twice while I was there, a Google Street View car drove by.
Once enough of the smaller foliage on the house was out of the way, the crew got to work on removing one of the large limbs precariously bridging the gap between the tree and the house.
As they approached the ground, they revealed the reason the tree had been susceptible to the storm: it was hollow.
With one limb on the ground, the crew began preparing to work on the second limb.
The work drew a crowd.
As the crew cleared more and more of the tree, some of the damage to the house became visible.
The house withstood the tree’s assault surprisingly well! It removed a few bricks from the chimney (as seen in the above photo), it rumpled a few shingles, and it cracked a few rafters. Despite that, the roof still kept out the rain! Let’s hear it for well-built houses.
Finally, the crew began to remove the last big limb.
With the heavy sections of the tree on the ground, the man in the bucket raked the rest of the tree off the roof.
The Sounds & Sights Festival included a classic car show. The show drew a good crowd.
The Dorkestra was providing music for the car show, and they enjoyed some audience participation.
My dad worked more than 30 years in the auto industry, and he enjoys a good classic car. He owned a Triumph a few decades ago, and thanks to a local acquaintance who had his Spitfire on display, my dad got to sit in a Triumph once again. (The Spitfire isn’t the model my dad owned, but it’s still a Triumph.)
He was pleased.
Thanks for opening your car for us, Gary!
Elsewhere in the show, we found the same model he owned a few decades ago.
It’s not often you see this on a car:
Why does a car have a watercraft registration number on it? Well, because it IS a watercraft. That’s an Amphicar, an amphibious car built in the 1960s. As the current registration sticker shows — and as the sign on the windshield stated — the owners still take it in the water! (An image search for Amphicar will turn up marvelous photos of Amphicars in and out of the water. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.)
