Sorry for the late post; we spent the day in Athens! Our visit to the dead people was incidental to Other Events. This cemetery is within UGA’s limits, and is a popular place for picnicking, sunning, and the like. We just took a few photos and kept going.

Without a doubt we’re in a deflationary period with few $$ available for loans. Still, some projects underway ahead of this mess are going strong, including several in and around our beloved Piedmont Park. Here, they’re pouring concrete for the revitalized natatorium* (will have wifi!), adjacent to Lake Clara Meer. Up the hill, the Bot Garden (and the Park) are getting a new parking garage that’s supposed to be quite green, vegetated and attractive (it’s still bare cement and rebar right now), although it’s been extremely controversial. And, on the edge of the park, the Piedmont Driving Club (”now in our second century”), is rebuilding a whole wing and redoing its parking area.

On a personal note, it’s windy, so I’ve been jumpy all day….

* Trivia: the TBS program “Adult Swim” was named for a sign on the door of this building, I’m told….

Many of the still-standing old houses across the countryside are empty. Many more are now gone, leaving a few tall trees and abandoned vegetation, unless the house site has been bulldozed and turned into pasture or field or pine plantation.

Serendipity dragged us out of the house to drive a triangle in the central Georgia Piedmont. We made a beeline to just west of Athens, then commenced our wander. We scrutinized the Georgia Atlas, and chose the smallest roads that we hoped were paved, since the unpaved roads are pretty dry and dusty in this drought….

We dropped south to Eastville, crossed the Apalachee River at North High Shoals (ex-textile mill town), meandered down to Bostwick, and scooted into Madison. Madison is famous for its lovely residential antebellum architecture; accounts vary on why the Union army didn’t burn the town, as they did many others, when they marched through on their way to Savannah in 1864.

From Madison, we turned west. You have your choice of four parallel routes. The newest is Interstate 20. The old highway it replaced is US-278 or the Atlanta Highway. That one superceded the Dixie Highway. The oldest road, following an Indian path, is the Hightower Road. Hightower is a corruption of the same Cherokee word that Etowah is. Additionally, it is possible the Hightower footpath followed a Late Pleistocene megamammal trail.

Hencequently, we set off along the Hightower route, but it disappears frequently. We went through Dorsey and Rutledge, through Social Circle (where we thought of Nell, whose maternal ancestors lived here, I think), and on to Jersey. I had never noticed Jersey on the map before. West of Jersey we found the historic Gum Creek Court House (they use four words), high on a well-mown hill. Then we did a little detour down and up the Haynes Creek valley (well on the sides of it), then found the Hightower Road again, and followed it over to Norris Lake. Never had heard of Norris Lake. Looks like some places here are second homes, like an old resort community with some architecture upgrades.

We crossed the Yellow River and immediately encountered sprawl, more precisely, the Georgia International Horse Park, which was built for equine and mountain biking events during the 1996 Olympics. From there we were in suburbia, and we made a beeline for home, looping around the north side of Stone Mountain.

We didn’t take many photos, but here’re a few:

* Sorry to get your hopes up, Marquis, but this isn’t about a bike race….

Quicken and iPhoto serve as a diary of sorts of our days, along with this blog. I see that two years ago I was freshly arrived in NM, trying to adjust to the elevation, and exploring the Gila Cliff dwellings.

It is totally unplanned that tonight’s menu includes brussels sprouts (those cute Brassica buds!), fresh not frozen, just as it did that day…. Thanks, Kel!

Glyph from stone set in wall of closed patio next to the tower, Palenque, Chiapas.

I love it when archaeologists get creative in inserting the past into the present.

David Stuart, a well-known Maya epigrapher, has composed “Obama” in glyphs (it’s “o-ba-ma-a”*), and you can buy t-shirts, cloth bags, or ball caps imprinted with it….

* Oh, you’re asking about the duplicate “a”? That’s explained here. Those crazy Mayas!

Four years ago this day, I first visited the Leake site, in northwest Georgia. Well, it wasn’t really my first visit (that’s another story), but my first visit after DOT got the new ROW staked out. Now a photo from this location would be in the middle of more lanes and more traffic. Oh, fun!

Sometimes what’s ordinary in your home landscape sounds rather odd to those passing through*…. I’m not singling out West Virginia here; after all, my home state has both a Hell (with a Baptist church I once watched a wedding party emerge from) and a Paradise (I once ate a fish sandwich there)….

* A quick google-check shows I’m not the only person to note the Big Ugly name…. Here’s a map of one stretch of the river used in Lenore McComas Coberly’s novel, Sarah’s Girls: A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek (2007)….

Sorry, I have no Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf pictures….

Pomfret went to a combination tantalus and electric refrigerator and procured necessities. Fox, glancing around, saw a Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf perched on a cabinet in a corner, and a large deep peach bloom on a table against the wall.

Tecumseh Fox is a lesser-known detective created by Rex Stout, and portrayed in three novels published in 1939–41. This is from the final volume, The Broken Vase. I know it’s a minor concern, but what the heck’s a tantalus?

Answer: lockable stand for liquor decanters, in which they remain visible (same root as tantalize).

And: Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf. This refers to a particular shade of deep oxblood red, produced in Chinese ceramic glazes by additions of copper oxide. The term melds the Chinese and French terms.

Later, Fox is told that this precious vessel is “a Hsuan Te.” This apparently means that it dates to the Ming dynasty, ca. 1426–1435. BTW, the “peach bloom” is another contemporaneous decoration style (I gather).

Bow down to the power of the internet…and consider whether your domicile needs a tantalus….

Detail from the Major Ridge house, aka Chieftains Museum.

I guess, given our recent experience with rehabbing our house, I’m rather sensitized to the problems of updating older structures. Actually, I guess it doesn’t really matter how old the building is, it’s simply the updating that sets it all into motion. Thankfully, we didn’t have to figure out how to cleverly electrify our house, just to rebuild what had been there….

…you may have noticed that I’ve been on the road lately. Although yesterday we returned home (yeah!)—and it is MOSTLY our Home AGAIN (double yeah!)—today I was traveling again. To Rome. Not the Italian or even the New York one, but the one in northwest Georgia, where I attended Society for Georgia Archaeology semi-annual meeting events.

There, I got stuck in the parking lot of the Chieftains Museum (also the home of Major Ridge, a prosperous Cherokee who was forced to endure the Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing/removal to lands that became Oklahoma over the winter of 1838-39*), waiting for a parade of modern wagons drawn by pairs of mules escorted by myriad riders on horseback to pass by. I estimate there were perhaps two hundred non-human critters involved in that mini-migration….

* Ridge, whose name in Cherokee was Ca-nung-da-cla-geh, was murdered by other Indians in 1839 for having signed the Treaty of New Echota (then the Cherokee Capital, in Georgia) in 1835, along with a minority of other Cherokees and without the permission of the tribal government. The treaty was an agreement by the Cherokees to leave their southern Appalachian homeland in return for monetary compensation and lands to settle out west.

PS If you’re bored with the above, perhaps you’d be interested in this NYTimes piece on worm grunting aka worm charming? BTW, the full PLoS article by Kenneth C. Catania is here….