Musings

The lichens and mosses are very happy to soak up our winter rains.

We walked to the Saturday organic farmer’s market (with real farmers, even if they use hydroponics and greenhouses) this morning, and I lost count of the houses we passed with “for sale” signs in front of them….

The common technical term for this kind of market is the (weekly—or similar; periodicity varies) periodic market. They concentrate marketing, and are perfect if the vendors or buyers have to invest considerable travel time to reach the marketplace. Traditional market systems feature periodic markets, which allow vendors to be part-time or small-scale. In areas where most market activity is conducted at periodic markets, the market day rotates among major communities/market locations across a region.

Personally, I think periodic markets are pretty darned interesting when you think about their origins and development…. Bunching up trading is advantageous in multiple ways: e.g., it’s easier to tax by spatially and temporally bunching market activities, it’s safer for participants, it frees everyone for non-market activities (especially production) on the intervening days, it allows different communities to have markets with no simultaneous competitor in the immediate area.

* Apologies; this refers to the Mother Goose nursery rhyme: “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig…“.

Posted at 5:13 PM | Comments Off on We didn’t buy a pig*

Happy Boxing Day!

Wikipedia says the Boxing Day tradition of the wealthy giving gifts to those below them on the social scale (and the Brits are SO aware of this relationship) has its antecedents in the Roman Saturnalia, which also happened in December and featured social role reversals.

Posted at 6:22 AM | 1 Comment »

I couldn’t help it. Yesterday I mentioned the Currituck lighthouse toward the northern part of the Outer Banks. Tada! Here it is.

The compound’s only open for the high season, so we could only scrutinize it from the street. It seems somewhat far inland now; I don’t know if the shore has moved away from it since it was built.

Posted at 5:32 PM | 3 Comments »

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.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

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….

Posted at 4:49 PM | Comments Off on Pouring concrete

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….

Posted at 7:31 PM | 5 Comments »

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!

Posted at 2:07 PM | 1 Comment »

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!

Posted at 5:27 PM | Comments Off on Past meets present

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!

Posted at 7:11 PM | Comments Off on 4 yrs ago

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)….

Posted at 5:47 PM | 4 Comments »