(no subject)

After leaving Posi's place on the Friday morning last, the two of us hit a string of thrift stores. We're both thrift store junkies, and we made some good finds. I found a piece of luggage to replace my rolling cart that broke a wheel on my last trip to Chicago, a nice LowePro bag for my second camera, a book for my sweetie lisagems, and other stuff. As for Posi, he picked up a Sigma zoom lens in a bag with some 35mm film for $5. And it fits his camera! Shortly after congratulating each other on the deal though, we found it it doesn't work. After consulting the internet, it probably needs to have a control chip swapped out to work with new newer Canon DSLR bodies that we have. It's old enough that Sigma doesn't do the work anymore. Posi was unconcerned, and plans to do it himself. Told you he was a hardware hacker.

We headed west out of town, stopping for Polish buffet for lunch. Oh man have I missed Polish buffet. Pirogi and blintzes and latke, oh my! (Incientally, why do blintzes form a plural with an 's' while pirogi and latke don't?)

Thence it was westward again, following a fairly arbitrary path toward our destination, the motel Posi had booked in Dubuque, Iowa by way of Savanna. After our first stop to photograph the turkeys I posted pictures of before, our second stop was to take some shots of an abandoned one-room school house that I later learned, after googling the names of the streets at the nearby intersection, was in the small village of Riddot, population 164. I can't help but want to stop and spend some time with abandoned buildings when I see them. I wish I could get to know this one a little better. There's not much out on the internet to tell more than the building itself did; that it was in school district number 5, that it was built in 1871, and that it hasn't been used in quite a long time.

I hope asakiyume gets to see them before she leaves for Timor-Leste!


District 5 School House - Ridott, Illinois

Copyright Stormdog 2013


( Come a little closer.... )

(no subject)

I finished a rough draft of my report on the Montgomery Cabin Site and emailed it my professor for comments. This is a huge relief, and I feel like my long-scattered brain is coming back to me.

I've felt a little too excited to get to bed. I have a deep need to actively appreciate and use some of my own time. I ended up catching up with folks online a bit, then listening to music and doing some picture editing. You'll have seen the one-room schoolhouse shots in my last post.

A while back, I downloaded a big chunk of Woody Guthrie's music to listen to, and hadn't had time to listen to it. I feel very satisfied at having downloaded some of his work, given that in regard to "This Land is Your Land," he wrote:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

A company called Ludlow Music claims to own the copyright to "This Land Is Your Land." I hope the absurdity of this position in the context of Guthrie's intent is clear.

Anyway, I started listening to some of Woody's music in earnest for the first time tonight and was a bit moved by it. I think my emotional response comes more from seeing the music as a window into a historical period that's been much romanticized (partly through the work of Mr. Guthrie I suppose!) but which was really a rough time. It also gave birth to some amazing public service projects through organizations like the WPA, and government funding of artists (again, like Mr. Guthrie). I very much enjoyed listening to "Oregon Trail" and thinking about it's social and historical context.

Then I listened to "Roll On Columbia" and I was struck by a bolt out of the blue. I thought of the amazing engineering feat that is the Grand Coulee Dam, and all the river work done on the Columbia, which made me think of visiting a Mississippi lock and dam last weekend. I thought of the shuttle Columbia and Diana Gallagher's "Fly, Columbia!", performed by Leslie Fish on Minus Ten and Counting before that terrible day in 2003. I thought of the way the astronauts aboard her were pioneers in some ways like the Okies who were fleeing the Dust Bowl, giving up something they knew for something new and dangerous. This isn't a perfect analogy of course; the Okies had much less choice, and were fleeing rather than exploring. Too, some of the things Guthrie glorifies in "Roll On Columbia" are not things to be proud of; conflict with Native Americans, and their displacement by the dam reservoir. At the same time, it makes me think of the great idealism with which science and technology and engineering sometimes seem able to fix anything. Even though they never live up to that promise, they still do grand, positive, beautiful things sometimes.

Meh, I'm getting too tired to attempt eloquence.

Anyway, my car's name will be Columbia. It's an homage to many things, both good and bad, because you can't have one without the other. May we find new trails together.

The first two songs I play on the way to Chicago tomorrow have been chosen for me. *smiles*

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Here's a picture for the day before I crash into bed.

This is how I usually wear my hair for school. I was often doing it while driving, too, to keep it off my back and from being damaged by rubbing between me and the seat. I should get back in that habit.

This hair stick was a gift from a dear friend of mine in Michigan, red_ceilidh.


Hair Stick - Pic-a-day 1 August 2013

Copyright Stormdog 2013

(no subject)

I was too excited about feeling like I had a little time to myself again to go to bed at a reasonable hour last night. But I got up early this morning anyway to take advantage of the day.

I started by cleaning my car out thoroughly. I removed the seats, vacuumed, washed the dashboard and instrument panel, and cleaned out the glove box. I moved stuff like my three plush cetaceans and fuzzy dice over from Percy. I have a wind chime given to me by a former sweetie that I want to move too, but I haven't figured out where to put it yet.

I had a lunch of chicken alfredo pizza, then drove to the Wadsworth Pick N Pull to procure a replacment driver's seat. I checked out about a dozen Luminas and Monte Carlos with potentially compatible seats, looking for the cleanest one. I ended up going with the first one I looked at. The seat only cost me about $40. Looking at the receipt later, I think they may have charged me for a cheaper bucket seat instead of a bench seat which should have been about $10 more. Oops. It's a different color from the rest, but I don't care. It's another story to tell.

I started swapping the seat in in the parking lot, but an employee told me that car work, no matter how quick or minor, can't be done in their parking lot. So I popped my soon-to-be front seat into the back seat and drove off to Evanston. I'm still getting a back-ache from that broken seat, so I'll do the swap as soon as I get back to Kenosha. Or maybe even before, if tomorrow in Danae's parking lot seems like a good idea.

Tonight, I helped Danae get ready for her housewarming tomorrow, and I think I'm going to get to bed. I also spent a while trying to figure out how to make an animated GIF using a few shots I took of the car cleaning process. I finally figured it out, then realized that Flickr doesn't support animated GIFs. I guess I'll figure out what to do with it another time. It's getting late, and I'm really worn out. Tomorrow, I'll probably end up doing more reading on environmental sustainability of farmers markets before people arrive in the afternoon.

*yawns*

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Back in Evanston - Pic-a-day 2 August 2013

Copyright Stormdog 2013