Musings

This round window is high on the center section of the back side of the Ashantilly plantation house. The back side looks inland. The main entrance faces the marsh to the east.

Although I sat in a meeting all day, our hosts treated us like royalty and our setting was stunning—both of which took some of the pain away (plus, we had a productive meeting). We met in the library at Ashantilly, a plantation house north of Darien. It’s now operated by a enthusiastic team of volunteers, who have their work cut out for them—take their next big project: fixing the roof. Follow this link to get some of idea of how much roof there is, and of how many sections it has….

BTW, below the framing here is what is called tabby, which is made from a mixture of oyster shell, lime (made from roasting oyster shell), sand, and water, which is poured into forms and cured, much like concrete.

I cannot let this day pass into history without mentioning that the fine people who operate Ashantilly fed us three meals this day—all super-yummy!—including an evening oyster roast and shrimp boil. Convivial. Tasty. The best!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Ashantilly adventure

Usually, the Dusty Past I think about is not my own, unless we’re talking deep ancestry, many, many generations ago.

Today, I overheard JCB & Mom discussing this artifact, and had to fess up that I had made it aeons ago…. If you can’t tell, it’s a pincushion, but mostly it’s festooned instead with needles, including sewing-machine needles….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Velvet above-ground

Rainy rainy rainy all day until now when it’s just plain wet, drippy, and grey outside.

Inside feels almost as gloomy (“quiet, too quiet”), if drier. We need Xmas lights!

And, me? I’ve been reading about wear patterns on antlers (currently free to download—how exciting!), among other things. You see, antlers are one substance used to make stone tools, an activity which, of course, generates distinct patterns, at least theoretically, as a result of the use. Conclusion: marks on antlers from tool use can be difficult to separate from natural deer rub marks.

Meanwhile, the picture is from yesterday’s walk, of some surviving colorful leaves. Apple maybe?

BTW, anyone else tired of hearing about the blue “people” movie & from its director?

Posted at 4:46 PM | 1 Comment »

I’m still annoyed that they cut those windows into the Coke sign. This was when Fleeman’s Pharmacy morphed into a hip modern (no “e”) kinda place. Actually, the HMKP was closed for a while recently—no, not because of a biz downturn—it was a mooovie set!

Yeah, I’m annoyed even though it’s not an old Coke sign; it’s an 1982 re-creation of an older style Coke sign.

See why historic preservation issues/decisions can make your head ache!

Posted at 6:33 PM | 1 Comment »

This is the house that Vernon built.

Vernon Elvis Presley, that is.

Yup, the father of Elvis Aaron Presley.

And, we’re told, it’s the house where Elvis was born.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on The house that Vernon built

Today we crossed Oklahoma west to east. That’s a lotta miles. We came across the Panhandle to see what communities that JCB read about in Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (2005; NYTimes review by Elizabeth Royte here) look like today, something like seventy years after the Dust Bowl.

This about sums it up. Some communities we went through were doing better than others, especially as we drove farther east, but many had long-empty buildings, both commercial and residential.

Once again we crossed paths, in space if not in time, with John Steinbeck, who wrote about both Okies/the Dust Bowl people and the people of Monterey Bay (Cannery Row, 1945), where we were in late October.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Dust Bowl revisited

That picture is not just a visual texture. It’s the roof of Cave 3 at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (natural light; no flash). It took lots of smudge and smoke to get that sooty coating on the stone (although some has flaked away). Realizing this may be of little interest to you, Gentle Reader, I include a second picture.

This is a top-down view of a model of the linked rooms in this same complex, dating to the late AD 1200s. What’s especially interesting is the chain of rooms built across the inside/back (top) wall of the natural caves, and that they all have connecting doorways. This means that people in front had no way of knowing whether people were traversing the back of the cave, perhaps to heighten surprise during a ceremony viewed by an audience in the front of the cave?

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Cliff dwelling details

Most of the time we were at Casa Grande today, we were thinking about ancient times, when Hohokam farmers kept irrigated fields between and around their mounds and houses, out in the flats near Coolidge, Arizona—not quite so near to the modern town of Casa Grande. One of those quirks….

Anyway, people go to the Casa Grande ruins to see the ruins, and we did, especially the big ruin protected from the rain by a big FL Olmsted-designed roof. We also spent time gazing up at this Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), denizen of the roof, keeper of the ruins, and demographic controller of the immediate area (for selected species).

Tidbit from USPS website: “Did You Know? Casa Grande Ruins National Monument was the first cultural and prehistoric site to be protected by the United States government. It was set aside in 1892 by President Benjamin Harrison.“

Posted at 11:22 PM | Comments Off on Owl’s classy digs

On a lark (haha), we stopped and did a quick walking tour of the remains of the mission San Juan Capistrano. I didn’t notice any swallow nests, except for a display on them.

Not surprisingly, the part of the grounds that I found most interesting were the ruins and the little bits of covered archaeological excavations.

Posted at 11:05 PM | Comments Off on In ruins (swallow your tears [haha])

I know you probably heard the travel news of the day (alternately, the infrastructure deterioration problem of the day): San Francisco has another bridge closed from parts failure.

Fortunately, we didn’t plan to cross that bridge today, but we did plan to cross the Golden Gate—southbound. And this is what we encountered. Southbound lanes were squeezed to two, and the other four lanes were a flood of cars coming out of downtown. We made it just fine through the funnel of four-lanes-to-two, since out here people drive right up to the funnel before reducing lanes—smoothly and graciously—none of that get into the reduced lanes a mile back from the funnel, then frown at those who don’t also line up far from the funnel (if that makes sense).

We also wandered a bit through the decommissioned Presidio, very fascinating, but that’s a story for another day.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on The public trust…