Time To Paint The Garage...

I am working on preparation for painting the kitchen walls, sparkling and sanding the walls, and priming them.  While standing around cooking some meat on the barbecue I happened to look over at the garage window and the shingles.  Yikes!  The garage is beginning to look like one of those abandoned farm houses that I am so fond of photographing!  More work in store for me!

The Tile is Done!

For those of you who have been following my photographs of the new countertops which have been installed our kitchen, we have now had new white tile installed.  The result is just stunning!  The work is so beautifully done!  It was funny, after the new quartz countertops were installed, the kitchen didn't look all that different.  It took the installation of the tile to make it look like a new kitchen!  Now to paint the walls.

Post-Industrial Landscape

Guess where we went for an ice cream cone after dinner.  As I got out of the car I first saw the colors in the sky and then I noticed the McDonald's sign and at the same time I saw the utility pole with the power lines.  I just liked the combination of all those elements.  Then I started trying to think of a title for the shot.  The words "post-industrial" came to me for no reason, which is strange because I have no idea what that term means.  So I come home and look the term up, and get this:  "In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy."  So it's about hamburgers instead of heavy machinery!  I mean, where did that idea come to me?  The human brain is magic!

7000 miles

When I took the buyout in March of 2008, the photo department had a going away party for me and one other staffer who was leaving at the same time.  We had dinner at a hamburger joint with a great turnout of people, which was really nice.  They took up a collection, and the other staffer and I each were presented with a card and $168.  That amount was just enough for me to buy these bicycle shoes and I thought  they were a good choice as I would be reminded each day that I rode, that I was no longer working.  They are getting pretty beat up these days, but they still work.  I have an odometer on my bike, and I passed a milestone of 7000 miles of cycling with these shoes the other day!  Wow!

Subway Art Tour

I went to Manhattan today because I was invited by Stan and Ann to accompany them on a Subway Art Tour.  Most of the people in the group were the same people who attended the Noguchi Museum, and they are a group of some docents at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  So I rode the new Second Avenue Subway for the first time, and our tour included four of the new stations on the new line.  This first photograph of the group is taken in front of a self-portrait of artist Chuck Close, done as a mosaic.

Here is another Chuck Close portrait of a woman, done in mosaic.

And this is a portrait of Lou Reed, done with ceramic tiles that have been created from a photograph.

And this is our guide, Phil, and one of the artworks in a different subway station.

Men At Work

We have had our new countertops for several weeks now, and today the tile guys showed up to begin installing the tiles on the wall behind the counters.  I liked this shot because the workman brought his own cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee with him to the job.  In the shot below, Ken, the other workman is using a sponge to clean up some of the tile adhesive.  What's interesting is that this is Italian tile, and it doesn't come with the little nubbins along the edges to create the correct spacing, which American made tile does.  So they install the tile, doing the spacing by eye, and then use these little tiny wedges to keep the tiles in place after they have been pressed into the adhesive.

Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters

This story started out as a picture I took of a hole in the ground over in the next town, and I explained that there had been talk of building a park on the spot, but it was not to be.  Then I showed you a photograph of steel being erected on the site after they poured a foundation.  As I passed by the other day, they were erecting trusses for the roof of the building.  I snapped a quick photo at a red light, because I loved all the angles present in the photograph.  The title, by the way, is the title of a novella by J. D. Salinger.