Musings

Best part of this for me: the barber pole. Well, and the building’s painted accents.

Several glancing blows, spatially, with our pasts and futures….

Finally, home!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Eyebrow building

I’ve been reading about a huge range of life cycles and species relationships in David George Haskell’s wonderful The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (2012). More than I’ve ever realized before, I now understand how animals can be viewed as the way plants and micro-beasts get things done that they couldn’t do alone. And all sorts of patterns are incorporated into a complex whole. And how that whole might be is likely to be misunderstood if you view it from the perspective of the mammalian world. Consider this (p. 134):

Without exception, reproduction in animals and plants involves sex cells that come in two distinct forms: large and well-provisioned cells—eggs—or small and mobile cells, sperm. But fungi show us that this duality is not the only possible arrangement. Fungal mating types can number in the thousands.

Yikes.

I dealt with another wee system today. Yesterday afternoon I made a small fire in the wood stove, just to get the house temp higher in the 60s, and, despite having good dry fuel, it just wouldn’t draw. Highly probable problems: blockage in the chimney (hope not), poor incoming air flow. Decided to explore the latter today, hoping for a solution there. Indeed.

Second bit of evidence: ash bucket in outhouse, aka the little house in the lilacs, is almost empty.

Yup. Emptied ash from the stove this morning, filling the bucket and opening the airflow through the bottom of the stove. All systems ready for the next fire and next, um, personal outdoor meditation in the wee special activity area structure.

NOTE: special thanks to Soliel the alpaca for commenting yesterday on “her” post…. Read more about Soliel and her barnyard buddies here.

Posted at 4:51 PM | 1 Comment »

See the dome of the tower at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta tucked in there? Never been, but I often find my eye is drawn to it….

Mostly, it seems to me, we get rain that’s a blanket across the region. Sometimes a broad strip of rain moves through. What we had today is rarer, just a few tiny storm cells. We drove from a not-rain area, across a not-rain area, and arrived at a just-rained area, on our trek to a small, fun get-together. We heard the hard rain stayed for just a minute, and was followed/preceeded by just a few minutes of sprinkles. No precip while we socialized, but a few sprinkles—enough to get the pollen off the windshield—as we headed back. Then, no-rain all the rest of the way.

Or maybe it’s that the broader rain areas are more winter and the small cells are more summer? Meaning we’re in the rain version of the transitional season?

Anyway, the skies cleared incompletely, and the sun after-glow gave us a gorgeous skyline view.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Glowing heavens

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.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Sentinels of the Plains

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….)

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on What’s the speed limit?

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….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

We explored history in assorted ways when we did the walking tour at El Morro, which is a sandstone formation known for its carved inscriptions that began with ancient native peoples and hosts additions well into the twentieth century. Coolest stop: the kiva in the small excavated area of the Atsinna pueblo ruin atop the landform. Maybe a dozen rooms are on view, but reports say there are something like 875 rooms. That’s a lot of construction! It’s dated to something like AD 1300….

Posted at 9:25 PM | Comments Off on Readable past

We saw lots of rain, then sunshine.

We saw scanty Krumholtz-ed trees, then open pasture, then scrub.

We strolled past Santa Fe’s Cathedral Basilica and dined across the side-street.

We are so lucky.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Fenced-in Catholicism

I was too tied up and boring today to even walk, let alone create a fresh/fun foto for this space.

Instead, I give you an interior view of the Sears, Roebuck building we toured the other Tuesday.

This is a view to the west, and the windows look north onto Ponce. The floor is original. Workers had to remove six layers* of carpeting, we were told, to reveal similar maple strip flooring on a lower “shopping” level.

The pillars are original and the floor above is poured concrete. Boards were used to hold the wet concrete, then removed, leaving the stripes you see in the ceiling.

To ensure that the dust created by construction doesn’t wreck the now-exposed wood floors, the developer bought a wood-floor zamboni, and the floors are cleaned frequently.

* Can you imagine the amount of trapped yuck in that much carpeting? Ick.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Interior stratigraphy

View WSW from Beltline bridge over North Avenue (33.77110,-84.36391).

No reason WikiPee doesn’t have this right, so this nightclub used to be an excelsior mill. I had only a nebulous idea what excelsior is, and finally looked it up. Wood wool. Little fine curls of timber. So, it was a factory for reducing trees to fluff.

Strange what repurposing can make (historical) bedfellows….

Note how the strange weather “cut off” the tops of the downtown buildings—this was soon after the rain stopped….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on More de-manufacturing along the BeltLine