There’s a story here, but I’m not sure what it is. Spotted this in the parking lot of a busy oversized grocery store just north of the perimeter.

Two coats (suit jackets?) and another garment hanging in a tree. There was a fellow in the middle vehicle. No vehicles around the trio/tree/garments.

So, was he hoping they’d dry?

Was he advertising tailoring services?

Were they for sale?

Or…?

I stayed with the catch-up/indoorsy theme today, so I’m grabbing this from yesterday. So mellow I felt looking at this fern glade.

Sigh.

What does it mean when you’re headed for the hardware store for the second time in two days, and you see light like this above?

A) Time to buy a new mill bastard file?

B) That fresh-cut hardware cloth will poke holes in your finger?

C) The hardware people will remember you from yesterday?

D) Rain clouds will come late in the afternoon, but you won’t get rained on?

E) All of the above.

In all fairness, this was yesterday’s sunset.

I’m happy to avoid the Reinhart-Rogoff mess (can YOU use a spreadsheet program correctly?)(and…PK’s take on it), but I got sucked into my own life’s version of “check all details numerous times” on an assortment of themes today.

Question: if there was no architectural barrier to it, if you were planning a two-story house with the bedrooms upstairs, would you put the washer-drier upstairs?

See, I’m thinking details all day. Disparate details, but still details.

I think this was just east of Amarillo.

I wonder if construction were beginning now if this architectural form would be used for local grain storage depots across the Great Plains.

Of all things! I just checked The Great WikiPee, and apparently the English word silo derives from the Greek word for a grain storage pit. Apparently, also, groups of silos and associated buildings, etc., are termed by their function: grain elevators. The architecture signals the shift from shipping grain in bags to in bulk, which changed dramatically in 1843, when the first mechanical complex was opened in Buffalo. Yes. Not on the Plains.

14th Street RR crossing, Bessemer, with Red Mountain in the background.

Bessemer, Alabama, may have been a mining and population center for decades, but now the resource is largely exhausted. As a bedroom community of Birmingham, there’s still plenty of traffic to get stopped by a passing cargo train.

US 82 bridge across the Mississippi River, between Lake Village, Arkansas, and Greenville, Mississippi. Lake Village is built on the bank of a huge arc-lake that’s a cut-off bend of the river. This is the Miss Delta.

We motored east today. And motored some more.

The topic of discussion, introduced by The Guru, was: if you (however artificially) divide southern North America into east and west, where is the division? Based not on political boundaries, but on the landscape….

We both agreed we were “east” by the time we crossed the Mississippi. I argued that solo trees with the first branch high off the ground was a big part of that to me, so that when we left the scrub behind I became receptive to the “east” designation. (Skipping, of course, the big trees of the Far West….)

Nothing like making a typical post-coffee morning excursion off the limited-access in arid eastern New Mexico and finding a “Wha???”—in this case, a COTA bus, all shiny in the desert sun.

The C stands for Columbus. As in Ohio. The Guru spoke with the driver, who said it was a brand-new bus he was driving from the factory to its new home in Ohio.

Not a runaway….

This storage area, just below the ceiling at Cliff Palace, could only be reached through houses in half of the architectural complex. Thus, the contents were controlled/secret. Why? Because it mattered so very much….

At Mesa Verde, the Ancestral/Ancient Puebloan* peoples abandoned their mesa-top and cliff dwellings in the late 1200s long before the Spanish arrived. They were small-statured people, in the 5-2 to 5-4 range. I’m figuring a big part of that was restricted calories. Sure, a pound of piñon nuts is something like 5K calories, but the rest of the dietary assortment is pretty low fat and the carb loads had to be, um, light, everything considered (like the calories it would take to navigate up and down cliff-faces…).

Speaking of food management, we enjoyed a lovely organic Nero d’Avila from Sicily that we found at the Log Cabin liquor store in Mancos—a pleasant surprise.

* More PC to use Ancestral/Ancient Puebloan rather than Anasazi….

Spider Rock, home of Spider Grandmother/Woman, creator of the world to Puebloan peoples. In White-folk traditions, this is a 750-foot sandstone double-spire.

The light in the desert. Geeze. You venture out early to catch oblique lighting. You wait through the heat of the day when the more direct light flattens the viewscape. Then, in late day, the light gives its gift to photographers and painters once again.