unsettled weather

das leben ist eine ewige wiederentdeckung --- i've always thought of that as goethe, but maybe not --- whatever --- 

 

rebuilding a city

the purge of useless items from my personal effects has been an excellent exercise and i've now turned attention to what were over 16,000 digital images that i've taken over the last twelve years, all unsorted beyond being dumped into monthly folder --- i'm down to 11,500 unsorted images --- i hope that i will have a decent chronicle of the spectacular re-construction of midtown that i have witnessed over the last twelve years

missing moon

 we were hoping to observe the rising of the thunder moon, the name i think most appropriate for july --- but clouds --- the moon was purty great last night

flowers make you forget

a warm, semi-humid, but very pleasant visit to the atl bot gdn this morning --- the pink bananas were excellent --- tried out the garden restaurant for brunch, which was quite serviceable, imho

more stuff

my decennial purge is mostly complete --- perhaps 10 cubic feet of stuff out of the house, half of it paper, and most of it entirely worthless, even to me --- there were a few things, however, of which i wish i had taken better care --- the entire exercise has enhanced my understanding of why people feel compelled to write memoirs

Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day
I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away

unfocused

books i have started in the last few months but not yet completed:

Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc, Hugh Aldersley-Williams

First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective, Peter Bellwood

Middlemarch, George Eliot

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648, Mark Greenhouse

Berlin: Portrait of a City through the Centuries, Rory Maclean

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, Marc Morris

The Village: Four Hundred Years of Beats and Bohemian, Radicals, and Rogues, John Strausburg

The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization, Daniel K. Richter

The Worlds the Shawnee Made: Migration and Violence in Early America, Stephen Warren

the oncidium alliance

this little unit over my desk started opening yesterday --- i will be getting whiffs of chocolate off it for the next few weeks --- meanwhile big urnge is done and i chopped the mealy bug infested stem this morning---

and the aliens continue to show --- one stem is winding down on the unit in the living room, but there's already another sprouting --- in addition, its twin in the office has two stems on the way as well, one of which will probably open next week --- these two plants ensure that i am almost never without blossoms

"in small things forgotten"

this little image of some poor nameless child was part of the debris i've been sifting through -- less than 1" diameter, made for a locket, which is now missing --- he's probably a distant lee cousin, ca. 1880, and maybe i will be able to match him to someone when i get around to sorting a big box of lee family images --- the whole exercise has made me think of deetz's in small things forgotten: an archaeology of early american life

i am no longer the rent man

we closed on the sale of 3578 e main st in college park this afternoon --- it remains an excellent house, but what a glorious release it is to be out from under it, especially since my name was the only one on the mortgage --- it was, and will remain, the last of my rental property

the new owner was the first to look at it when it went on the market in early spring but his then-agent discouraged him --- came back later, without agent, and here we are --- he seems to be the best and will not be an absentee landlord, but will live there and am purty sure he will do right by the house --- if i were his age, i would be jazzed about it too

the purge, cont'd

sorted out little stuff today --- including a nice gold coin and the smallest piece of scrimshaw that angela ever did --- wound up with all the small detritus of my life quarantined in two boxes that slide up under my bed --- four boxes of paper files are now three --- a large amount of paper and whatnot is left to be recycled --- douglet is happy to carry off anything i give him --- and i can luxuriate in the reduced size of my collection of extraneous stuff 

redecorating the big room

 the orchids worked for a while and the muniz worked for a while but basically i was tired of looking at it and grandma lee so i went back to the original sparse look

stuff

got a late start on the road race this morning on account of the mexican food last night ---

but the rest of the day allowed me to assemble some four boxes of stuff to be de-accessioned forthwith --- very satisfying --- and surprisingly easy to toss such things as my tablets from the first grade in 1955

the contents of the box there, which included all the stuff my ma had saved from my grammar and high school days, has been culled down to the envelope in the foreground --- i did the same thing with a box of my dead brother's stuff, also with a provenance to ma

quite a few of these, given to my ma by her sister for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, but ma didn't really like them so most of them are in their original package 

washington with the safety patrols in 1962

too much paint

we checked out some of the painted walls that are part of the "outer space project" --- some of it is good, some of it not so much --- the "living walls" of previous years had better art --- the city's efforts to control the content, after baptist outcry in 2015, is not helpful and is probably the reason living walls is going to buford highway this fall

notwithstanding the art, such as it is, there are a number of historic brick buildings that have not benefited from all the paint

more paint

more painted walls is not gonna fix summerhill, and whatever GSU does to gentrify the area, generations of poor people for which the neighborhood was home won't benefit --- they've been crapped on for the sake of professional sports since the 1960s, in spite of unrealized promises of "urban renewal"