to my son hardy

dear hardy,

           My lad i have to say that this day the 6th of October in the year of seventeen thousand seven hundred and seventy seven of our lord served to be a magnificent day for great Britain. i wish you where there but i understand your mother wishes you to continue you studies at The University of Aberdeen but boy what a world you are missing.
          In this new world the savage Yankees sought to trap us in a narrow part of our Hudson river. to execute what the Greeks did in the battle of Thermopylae. THEY ARE FOOLS why not make a wooden horse or better yet a wooden ass like the Greeks and sail it up the river. these Americans are just rubbish. they sought to hold our royal navy at bay with a chain that would be followed up with a battery of cannon fire coming from fort Montgomery and fort Clinton. This is how they hoped to stop our numbers, laughable! they knew we had better discipline, weapons and a sound Strategy the Yankees thought this old story book strategy would be enough to stop the whole of great britans power od how they where wrong.
soon after the first volley of cannon our lieutenant col. Mungo Campbell  took pity on the yanks and called a truce and proclaimed or rather requested that the "patriots" to surrender and no further harm would come to them. the bloody savage idiots thought they where funny by replying if the British surrender that we would be promised good treatment. this understandably made Lt. Col. Campbell very furious and a another cannon volley ensued.
   Very soon after Campbell him self led us in to a land battle. i past by him and his face was red, i have never seen a man so filled with anger, passion and honor for his country.i hope you become like him when you are older perhaps. he lived his life a true Englishmen and died like one too, fighting and dying for his king. god bless great Britain.
    this battle lasted in till dark, again the American found a way to make this easier for us! by not completing there bloody fort! how can you have a sound battlement with it only half way done. These yanks are by far the most idiotic people i have come to see in my life. With our bayonets bloody uniforms covered  in human bile our bayonets bloody we pushed the idiots off the fort.
   it was simple the Americans where over whelmed by great Britain sheer numbers with British, American loyalist and Hessian soldiers the Americans never stood a chance. once we had captured  the forts we burned what was left and tore down what we could not burn. the Americans who where smart surrendered and where sent to the sugar house prisons in new york.
that is my tale of war for you my son i have seen many things i hope to share them with you. maybe one day you will write a book about it. who knows .

with much love your father
god save the king

the dutch in the bronx

How the Bronx got it's name because of the Dutch!  The white man who first came to it and bought it was Jonas Bronck.  The whole country was "Bronck's Farm".

I thought looking for some still existing Dutch stuff would be easy but it wasn't, alot of stuff was burned down in the 1970s.  I was looking so hard that I actually went to a BOOK!  I looked and looked and finally found a church called the Fordham Manor Reformed Protestant Dutch Church.  It is located at 2705 Reservoir Avenue near Kingsbridge Road.

It was built in 1628 but it was destroyed during the Revolutionary War and rebuilt in1801.
Now it looks nowhere near as good as it used to. The end.

Trip upstate to Grandma's

I went upstate near the town of Monticello in this UFO infested area where my grandmother lives.  Her house is in the middle of the woods in a seemingly untouched forest.  The area was teeming with life.

A really tall tree near a creek.  I was shocked by how tall this tree was.  Reminded me of how tiny I am!

The amount of life in this area is supported by the ponds and rivers.  The flowers seem to clustered in the wet areas.  This combination attracts a lot of unique insects.

Butterfly money shot.  I found these lovers near the pond.

bike ride

i went for a bike ride and found this mute swan . it was floating around in Tibbetts brook park. this swan was a bully to the smaller geese. i saw it there before i think it could be domesticated because i never see it fly nor with any one else so maybe the park department put him there and cut his flight feathers for the season. 

i have a video i hope this uploads every time i try blogger just crashes.
this was fun i like playing Steve Irwin in new york. 

Ian Garcia's super quest!!!!!

This is a view of the Bronx River from a bridge.  This walk through the park was super cool!  But I kept getting attacked by bugs so alot of my pictures are rushed because I'm fighting something off of me.  But I loved it despite the swarms of insects, it's a cool way to get from one end to the other.

This is sand that seemed to come out of nowhere.  I think it's from when the river overflowed after the hurricane and this was the new bottom of the river.  Plants were also covered in sand from the river so this was really deep.  The park is still healing from the hurricane and it shows.  I think most of the mosquitoes were probably born in deep still puddles that peppered the park.

    

This photo was taken from underneath a highway.  After reading the park's idea for restoration, I thought it would be hard to get this river clean with a highway right above.  The amount of garbage in this river is saddening but the Bronx is a really weird place.  For example, after I walked down here there was a fire pit and someone walked away from the lit fire, not even thinking to put it out.  That's a regular day here.  I got a video of it but the pictures took long enough to upload.  The speed of the current here was crazy too, watching the garbage zoom by like cars on a freeway felt very unnatural and alienating