Thursday, July 29, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Woke up to a real live fairy tale this morning
There is a Japanese garden nearby. I had to test a used camera so Sara and I got up at sunrise and went over to take a few pictures. It was serene, aesthetic, timeless.
Friday, July 23, 2010
My baby Graflex
Click to see larger image.
I got this camera for $60 on eBay recently. Out of curiousity, I looked up the original price in the 1916 Graflex catalog, and it was $88. I looked up a conversion for 1916 dollars to 2010 dollars, and found that $88 in 1916 would be about $1600 in 2010! Then I converted 2010 $60 to 1916 $ and it came up as about $2.80. I think I got a deal, but I will tell you later when I get the first photos out of this cuddly little dude.
It has Morroccan leather on a Mahogany wood frame and box. I am in the midst of lots of information swirls about it on various sites and in email, and have stopped just short of giving it a name as a member of the family.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Spicer Castle is actually a Tudor Manse B&B run by the Lawsons.
There are no Spicers or Castles involved in the retreat on Green Lake, in Kandyohi county. But the place was an excellent July 4th weekend retreat for us this year.
The amenities
Dinner came with a view of Green Lake that was threatened by storm, an empty threat that yielded several picturesque light effects and no thunder or lightning.
In his Bed and Breakfast Beatitudes
This wasn't a bad one, as far as Victorian foofiness and floral excess goes.
Hubert Humphery gives a piece of paper to an 80 year old woman, and the houri plays
The watercolor is not badly done. It shows signs of European training in the mastery of light effect, the canonical pose, the gesture of the delicate hand rendered effortlessly as a result of hundreds of hours of atelier time imitating the plaster casts of classic figures. It was painted by one of the women of the Spicer clan in central Minnesota. The artist, in fact, had lived in the very house in which the painting is hung, and in which we are to spend the night. Humphery is handing over something to the woman, Jessie Spicer.
Spicer Castle hostess points out highlights of her paint job last year
Mary didn't just help us settle in to our B&B suite. She had painted the walls herself the year before. Here she draws our attention to a particularly nice restoration of the surface. She is standing in the octagonal tower in Jessie's room, named to honor the daughter of family patriarch John Spicer.
A threat to Kandyohi from darkest Africa
Check your boat, and don't loan your dead weights and lift benches to any strange molluscs.
Kandyohi County Railroad moments
The coke cars feeding the maw of the power plant,
pulled by the Burlington and Santa Fe engine.
The 95 foot-long locomotive with eight drive wheels and 57,000 lbs of tractive force to pull hundreds of passengers on the Empire Builder across the Rockies, and
The 7-foot long 5-wheel Grandpa special with a 12 volt battery to pull a passenger chair with a princess of the Phillipines.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Serene Selene
The Moon. I took this photo from my front step on the 28th of June. A Nikon D90 with an inexpensive Opteka 800 mirror reflex lens, mounted on a video tripod which made the tracking motions easier as the moon moved through the sky. I remember the first time I saw the Moon through a telescope. It changed my life. Being able to see the craters and mares (seas) in such detail gave me an out-of-body experience. It was ugly and fascinating, something truly alien yet so familiar that I could not remember a time of consciousness when I didn't know of, and watch for, the Moon. You wonder how our mythologies would have been affected if archaic people's could see the true color and texture of the Moon's surface.
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