Musings

We crossed into GA over the steel bridge in McCaysville, which we’d never traversed before. Even with a quick stop at TJs, we were home with the car unloaded before noon. Yippee!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Re-entering GA

Today’s chore list took us downtown. What a pointy capitol building!

Plz forgive if I got the capital/capitol spelling(s) incorrect. Hurts my head to sort those two out!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Capital idea

“Hurry! Quick”—that’s what I was thinking as I grabbed for Blue (the point and shoot), when we came upon this monstrosity. I thought that even before I wondered what it was.

Crenelated towers with fat cylinders nestled among them. The area is called Mount Airy. Turns out these are water tanks (view from above). And donchaknow, gravity is your friend when you’re piping water hither and yon. Including in Ohio.

Posted at 11:01 PM | 2 Comments »

We toured the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill this afternoon, shepherded by historic preservation consultant Bamby Ray (for real; well, she really goes by that—her “real” name is Muriel). The remaining buildings of the mill complex are now residential, and, despite the intervention of fire and tornado, have been capably rebuilt.

This view is east-southeast from a roof of one of the large mill buildings, through the two towers of the steam power generation complex, to its neighbor, the Oakland Cemetery.

It’s difficult to pick one picture to represent the many lovely views we had of the mill complex….

Posted at 7:53 PM | Comments Off on Historic prezz-err-vay-shun

We sure aren’t ready for snow here (oooh, Colorado), but we did have some precip—after I took this shot around noon. I love when the leaves are down yet still are fluffy and colorful. Is it okay to describe dry leaves as fluffy?—you know what I mean—they’re not matted by rain yet. The difference by tomorrow morning will be…noticable.

Read a bit about the Northern and Southern Iroquois—umhm, Haudenosaunee—today….

Posted at 8:31 PM | Comments Off on Just say Haudenosaunee three times fast

I’ve never excavated foundation walls in this density before, and I’ve certainly never seen them color coded as to age.

Posted at 9:32 PM | 3 Comments »

I’m definitely not up on the architectural detail in Catholic houses of worship so I don’t know the “proper” name of this feature, but I did enjoy this bird on the ceiling of the rooflet over the altar in this cathedral. Out front is a statue of the original patron, and the pigeon atop his head loved his perch (coo-coo) and did not take flight for the whole five minutes we spent in front of the façade.

Ah, wandering along links in WikiPee, I discovered that the rooflet is a baldachin, Italian baldacchino. There’s one in St. Peter’s (Rome), and this building was meant to imitate that one, hence this copied detail mimicking the Bernini original there. Enough; I will probably forget this in a few days….

Posted at 5:37 PM | 1 Comment »

I just love dioramas. And I really love dioramas made by one person in their own vision.

Kudos, G!

I remember being spellbound as a kid each time I was taken to the museum at MSU as I examined the detail in their dioramas. I particularly remember one of the square in the Aztec version of downtown Mexico City (that is, Tenochtitlán) and of a small family of deer in a tropical forest somewhere that had leaf-cutter ants traipsing along the spine of a tree’s buttress-root. In fact, when I encountered leaf-cutter ants in the wild, maybe for the first time—and it was many years later—I watched and watched.

A diorama had come to life!

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

Archaeologists can spend a lot of time with fragments. How they have fractured tells you something about the material they’re composed of and how they broke.

These are Corelle, pieces of the rim of a 2-quart serving bowl in Winter Frost White (the web maintains), although they look a bit blue here.

Corelle is a tempered glass, and I’ve never before seen glass break into elongated shark’s teeth.

Posted at 2:42 PM | Comments Off on Distempered glass

Spent at least half the day and most of my daily allotment of alert brain cells on the 2011 articles in Cliodynamics, the journal discussing the intersection between mathematical analysis and history (mostly).

Then I took more of those sun-dried tomatoes I mentioned yesterday and made some sloppy joes, of course not like your mom made, if she was a Midwestern cook from my childhood. And it wasn’t just the sun-dried tomatoes.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Wide ranging Tuesday