Blogger’s Night Off Part 2

Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 384

Oak Alley Plantation, an antebellum Mississippi River mansion in Vacherie, LA. From an old slide of mine I scanned. The slide was so dusty that the only way to make a presentable image was to run PSP’s dark scratch removal tool which made the image look painted, so I just enhanced that thought with a Paint Engine filter.

or I May *Write* A Post Again Someday…
This office will be closed for any Star Wars that may break out.

Maria’s Mexican for dinner. Chicken Fajitas for one split two ways. Extra tortillas. Two waters to drink.
Saw this sign near the ballpark in downtown Greenville on Saturday.

So late, I’m well past being fashionable. I’m pathetically late. I signed up for a Flickr account.
I’ve started by loading some of the Post Office photos and I got a little less than half uploaded today.
I really like the mapping feature, but it is for all your photos, so maybe I’ll just keep this account limited to SC Post Offices… Explore Brian the Red’s geotagged photos on a Map
Turns out that this thing (Flickr!) is so popular that there is a group set up for just about every type of photograph, including one for pictures of Post Offices. There are 135 members with 1304 photos in the group.
I’ve even added a little Flickr! thing in the sidebar.
We went to a local book fair yesterday and picked up some used books. I snagged a couple of Spenser hardcovers for $4 a piece and a couple of early paperbacks with some retro cool cover artwork. The quote below is from one of the hardcovers, School Days, and sometimes I feel just like Spenser does.
“Why would the parents want to discourage an attempt to find their son innocent of multiple murder charges?”
Don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know shit,” Rita said, “do you?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s okay, I’m used to it.”
When I get into the paperbacks I’ll scan the cover of one. I’ve compared the Spenser books to potato chips here before, but with this week’s eating pleasure, maybe I should compare them to a box of Girl Scout Cookies: They are extremely tasty with no redeeming nutritional value and once you start eating a box you just can’t stop until they are gone. Which is exactly what happened to a box of Samoas today.
I’ve uploaded yesterday’ post Office pictures to the gallery. Look for Barnwell, Fairfax, Olar, Sycamore, Ulmer and Williston.
This morning we hit our favorite downtown breakfast spot for a veggie quesadilla, a breakfast parfait (granola on the bottom, vanilla yogurt in the middle and hot blueberries in syrup on top) with a low fat raspberry bran muffin for a kicker washed down with a bottled water.
Today’s high didn’t make it into the 60’s and tonight’s low will be around 30, but I’ thinking this is the last of the “cold” weather around here for this winter. Next week we will be in the low 70’s almost every day. Some of the Bradford Pears are starting to bloom and the dogwood next to our house has buds. Even though we tried hard to talk ourselves out of it because of the chilly temps, we still ended up spending an hour or so walking in Hitchcock Woods. The weather didn’t scare a lot of people off either, we probably spotted more folks enjoying the woods this afternoon than we have in the past 6 or 7 times total.
Taste of America with Mark DeCarlo on the Travel Channel in is my old home town, New Britain, CT talking Kielbasa. He said that the city is affectionately called Little Poland because of the large Polish population, we just called it New Britski when growing up, but I guess that would have not been very politically correct for 2007 & TV. I like to refer to New Britain as the “Ex Hardware Capital of the World.” What attracted all those Polish folks to the town in the first place was the plethora of jobs at all the factories that made locks, bearings, hinges, tools, etc. It is the “Ex” because all the factories are closed down as the manufacturing jobs moved south. The only company that still has any presence in town is Stanley Tools, but they only have white collar jobs left at their World HQ. You can get a brief glimpse of Broad St, NB, CT by watching the repeat of this episode at 11:00PM tonight or at 2:00PM on Saturday afternoon.
The skies have been very interesting around here lately, which means spring can’t be too far away. Also for the first time in a couple weeks we were near the average (low sixties) for us this time a year instead of 10 degrees below it. I’ve got my fingers crossed that this heralds the end of winter for us. For the next 10 days we will be 5-10 degrees above normal temps. Sunday calls for rain, but Saturday looks very promising for a Post Office photo expedition.
I meant to put this link in my post the other day about draftsmen: MUSEUM of OBSOLETE DRAFTING TECHNOLOGY.