Monday, 18 January 2010
Sunshine plus special holiday equals busy Piedmont Park. Even though you don’t see anyone in this shot!
I’ve never seen this building open, but I think, at least at one time, it was a welcome center. We also walked up to the main gates on the west side of the park, which usually front a too-busy street. Today, however, the driving traffic was moderate and tolerable.
Monday, 14 December 2009
View of South Fork Peachtree Creek through the woods, Morningside Nature Preserve, just after the dedication this morning.
It was pretty low-key participation, but JCB and I attended the dedication of Atlanta’s newest park, the Morningside Nature Preserve.
For being pretty darned foggy, the weather was reasonably cooperative—it wasn’t raining.
Most of the people there seemed to have participated in the making of the Preserve. There were also a few people who lived nearby.
Then: us.
John maintains that a likely journalist showed up late, but I didn’t notice.
Advance head’s-up: There’ll be a Weekly Ponder on Friday on thesga.org about this—but not until 5 am Eastern on the 18th….
Saturday, 12 December 2009
We did get out for a loop through Piedmont Park, and saw more activity than I had thought we’d encounter, given the cold and gloomy weather.
We saw what must have been a photography class mustering by the lake, almost twenty people with cameras, and some even with suitcases of gear. They seemed a bit disorganized.
We encountered a few exercisers, mostly solos, the mid-day crowd, I guess, who are different than the early- and late-day folks.
The dog-walker count was down, but still present.
For your visual pleasure, here’s a photo of what must have been a practice(?), in the outfield of one of the baseball diamonds in the active oval. Too cold for shirts and skins, so the guys went with the obvious. I loved this moment, when the football, otherwise the focus of the action, sat there abandoned and ignored.
Speaking of attention, I must now wrangle another triple batch of bourbon balls, and roll ’em a little smaller this time….
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Ran across a technical article about Yellowstone geology, especially how the caldera-hotspot has moved across the earth’s surface (from our point of view) over time. Here’s a WikiP image of it, and here’s a bit of a discussion of it….
All this seems a bit trivial, as I also have been thinking about Nancy and her partners, speed-making a movie over this weekend; technical name: challenge film-making…. It seems to me that a big part of the process is figuring how much you can arrange ahead of time—and doing it!, to leave time for the important parts that can’t be put off. Anyway, if her group’s film wins, it goes to Cannes for screening!
Sunday, 22 November 2009
It’s rainy out there this morning, with precip expected to continue into the evening, albeit at decreasing intensity.
I’m up early, or rather at my winter normal of 5-5:30 am (no matter when I go to sleep, oddly and unfortunately). I’d rather have more sleep in these dark hours, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Anyway, absent walkable weather (for a while), and with time on my hands (for a bit), I thought I’d break my pattern and blog early. Very early!
And, to bring sunlight to the day, I select this photo from earlier this week: the new outdoor pool at Piedmont Park (which seems nearly overfilled from recent rainfall). It’s part of the renovations there along with the new parking garage and gardens installed by the ATL Bot Garden. While this hardscaping etc. provides interesting new visual scapes, I also hear that the ABG now turns away local garden/plant groups they used to let use their meeting rooms, which seems a poorly conceived management trend.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
I admit it; this photo’s from yesterday.
Today, it’s too overcast for this scene to be the least bit dramatic…bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) on the banks of Lake Clara Meer.
Friday, 13 November 2009
Yeah, you can’t tell if you just see the photo….
This one: sunrise!
Monday, 9 November 2009
Out in the desert flats, the horizon is wide. Even in a city.
We made it to Santa Fe* in time to lunch at the highly recommended The Shed. Nothing pretentious, despite the James Beard award posted in the waiting area. And we did wait; the place was mobbed. But the dining area is a series of small spaces, including in an outdoor patio, so while you dine you don’t feel like you’re in a large restaurant (nice!). We had some enchiladas and some carne adovada, all very yum. With the sides, the lunch orders were substantial, so we only wanted a modest sandwich for dinner.
Heading east, we pondered staying in Roy, but the town was just too desolate, and the hotel was right out of the 50s, and not the best of the 50s either. Roy is doing far better than Yates, however. Yates is on the NM state highway map, and even has a sign posted on the road at the east and west ends of town. But “town” it isn’t. Ghost town, yes. Now, it’s a bend in the road with one ranch house and outbuildings. No lights on when we went by at dusk plus a few minutes. Couldn’t tell if the house was abandoned, but there was a looming combine parked out by the road, as if it was for sale.
Even after sunset, we pushed generally eastward. The vegetation and landscape shifted dramatically as we motored beyond Las Vegas (the NM one). We saw pronghorns everywhere in the dying light for a while when we were near the mountains, and then just cattle. Or maybe only the beeves showed up in the dying light. We watched the horizon become a simple dividing line between the blues and greys (along with a few orange-reds from the absent sun) of the sky with the greenish dry yellows of the grasslands. This, after all, is the Great Plains!
* Santa Fe is so fun to photograph that it’s not uncommon for photographers to take pictures of other photographers, simply because they’re part of the landscape.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
If you can marshall the resources (and time), please visit Casitas de Gila, and leave your cares behind.
The place is exceptional, the owners lovely, and the time you spend here will be incomparable.
Guaranteed.
The amenities are superb. I especially recommend the walking trails, the hammock under the cottonwoods down by the river, bird/deer/horse-watching, and the hot-tub.
We are enjoying some stress-free downtime, getting caught up in some ways, and escaping in others.
I am reading a Dan Brown-imitator (or so it seems to me), a crypto-novel written by Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza called The Gaudí Key in English (translated from the Spanish La Clave Gaudí by Lisa Dillman; originally published in 2007).
Like Brown’s books, the writing’s, well, not the best. The Gaudí characters have many parallels with the bunch in The Da Vinci Code, including the sweet young thing and her male helper. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far my reaction’s about the same as to Brown’s books. Eeeh. Still, it’s a reasonable downtime read, given my selection!
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Short version: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument—cool place!
The reality is that since the property kisses the US-Mexico border for miles, many of the coolest places are off-limits. Sadly.
So, in the interests of attempted perkiness, let’s keep to the upbeat stuff. Like the organ pipe cacti. Each one is a large multi-armed mini-forest. Yet, my eye kept being drawn to the saguaros looming above all the other plants, and to the various cholla species, dense with spined branches, as well as the ocotillos and palo verdes, all liberally sprinkled among the ubiquitous, uh, uh…(forgot name—see how much I was looking out the window rather than studying the handouts!).
