Archive for the 'Photos' Category

Submitted by a reader:

Center section of a quilt on display two Saturdays ago at QuiltFest, in Boerne, Texas.

Update: Bigger version here.

On display yesterday in Boerne, Texas – at the Haupstrasse Quiltfest – a celebration of a unique American art.

This weekend the Brown Line of the CTA is shut down as they replace the next section of the Wells Street bridge. It is a big deal when they shut down the Brown Line since thousands of passengers ride that line each workday. This is the second shutdown of the Brown Line as part of this project. Since it was a beautiful Saturday I walked to the construction site to take photos with my Pentax K-01 recommended by Jonathan (who has far better photographic skills).

This view is looking East – you can see the new section that they will weld onto the bridge on a barge and it has a lighter coloration.

This view is looking North from the south side of the river. They have the portion of the old bridge that they plan to cut away “on blocks” on a barge.

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Last weekend we set out from the marina at a local park, shortly before sunset. The weather was good with a 2/3 moon that provided plenty of light. A breeze kept the bugs down.

We entered an upscale residential canal and stopped for a bite.

[More photos below the break.]

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I am feeding these fine examples of the new Wisconsin Ibis that we have been selectively breeding to handle the frigid northern winters. Our new aviary on the farm is coming along quite nicely.

Not only is Tom’s Diner the background for Seinfeld, it inspired the Suzanne Vega song “Tom’s Diner”. More importantly, the remix version of “Tom’s Diner” was called “The Mother of the MP3” because the guy that made the compression format used this song and worked on it over and over to use MP3 to build a faithful version of the sound.

This guy looks like he needs a bigger truck…

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Seen on a recent visit to Grand Cayman Island. These things are running around all over the place there, as well as lots and lots of chickens (more on that to come).

(Original photo is here.)

I have seen worse on ‘There I Fixed It’ - but never in real life, until now. Spotted on a black Honda Accord in my neighborhood. All points for creative thinking … but door hardware?! Really???!!!

Margaret Soltan’s husband was searching for his grandmother’s name on Google, and found her in a 1908 portrait, which is now in the National Museum at Warsaw.

The post reminded me of a post from a couple of months ago by Bookworm, about finding a book in which  her grandmother’s friends at her finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, wrote her farewell letters when she graduated and moved back to Belgium in 1913:

As befitted a young woman of her class back in the day before WWI began, my grandmother was multilingual, so the messages in her book were in French, German, Dutch, and English.  The young ladies all included their home addresses — in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, America, Scotland, England, Wales, Romania, and Persia (Tehran).  Each inscription was written in beautiful copperplate and the girls all drew exquisite little flags reflecting each girl’s country of origin.

Since I, unlike my grandmother (and my parents), am not multilingual, I was able to read only the inscriptions from my grandmother’s English-speaking friends.  I have no word for how charming these little missives were.  An American girl wrote about the irony that she and my grandmother hated each other at first sight, only to become close friends by the end of their time together.  An English girl wrote about the “jolly good times” they had going to concerts with “modern” music consisting of one note, played so low no one could hear it.  Another girl wrote about the disappointment of endless dinners consisting of macaroni and disappointingly watery “chocolate creme.”

And Bookworm’s post, when I first read it, reminded me of a passage in the memoirs of British general Edward Spears, close friend of Churchill and emissary to France during the campaign of 1940. Spears had grown up in France, and in the 1960s he returned to the house he had lived in. There, he found a picnic basket filled with his grandmother’s old letters:

The next letters I opened dropped me back two generations into a land of other people’s memories but with an occasional sharp glint as they recalled things I had heard of as a child. They were the letters of a poor sick young woman written to her absent husband whilst she was immobilised awaiting her first and only child, my mother.

I never imagined my grandmother other than I had known her, white haired, stout, and dignified. The picture painted in these letters of a girl frantic with loneliness and longing, exasperated at the threat of a miscarriage which kept her lying on her back, begging her husband to come to her, all told in the reserved language of that day, filled me with a kind of fond protective amusement. It was so unexpected. Time, so long imprisoned in these boxes, was revealing itself in an entirely new guise, oscillating quite regardless of years from one generation to the next or back again–more, it was taking me, an elderly man in the 1960s, and leading me back to the year 1864, there to watch over, with infinite tenderness, a young woman I had never known, my grandmother as a young wife…

Another time-travel experience, albeit of a less directly personal nature than the above three ventures back in time, can be found in this set of photographs: 1910–The Summer of our Content.

Among the recipes in the box is one for dandelion wine.
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God bless the new Pope. Michael Potemra notes that St. Francis of Assisi was called to rebuild the Church. May his namesake repair what needs repairing.

On the subject of St. Francis, I highly recommend G.K. Chesterton’s short, entertaining and insightful life of St. Francis. (There is a nice edition which also has Chesterton’s short biography of Thomas Aquinas.)