Categories
General Travel

Blast from the Past – Jeff and Larry in August 1999

Kath and I were in NYC in August 1999, preparing to fly down to South Africa for a month. Jeff and Katy put us up for the night, and I snapped this photo of Jeff and Larry after a long day of work.

I love the matching shoulder bag straps…

Categories
General Travel

Blast from the Past – truk and kath in Istanbul, 1997

I’m wrapping up a personal project of digitizing all of my photos, mostly going back to scanning the negatives, and in these dark days of winter, I thought I would share a few of the better ones that I’ve come across.

The photo above was taken on our honeymoon in August 1997, while we were in Istanbul. I think it is the Ayasofya Mosque behind us, and beyond that, the Bosphorus Strait. (Click on the photo for a higher resolution version.)

Categories
General Technology

The Love Shack Is a Little Old Place

It is now pretty easy to pick out our house from space.

Love Shack

My mom tipped me off to this. The satellite imagery in Google Maps for my neighborhood was updated sometime in the past few weeks. For the longest time, we only had images from 2004, and now, they appear to be updated to early-2007.

Slightly before that time, I had to do some roof repairs on a flat area of my roof. I had a bit of extra tar when I was through, so I put it to use to beam some goodwill to space. I was hoping that the various satellites would pick it up, and now, finally, my favorite mapping site has caught up. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we had our roof redone a year or so after this image was made, so our next roof pic is likely to be more boring.

Click here to check it out on Google Maps

Categories
General

The NY Times Discovers Indie Memphis

I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but the NY Times has an article on their site that basically hits most of the cool spots around midtown Memphis.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/travel/31next.html

Some choice quotes from the article:

  • The Cove has “a New Orleans style and a nautical theme, with a mast extending over the bar, peeling paint (there’s a lot of peeling paint in Memphis), ragged booths (ditto) and kitschy murals of sailors. The menu includes oysters and Cafe du Monde coffee; movies along the lines of “Brazil” play in lieu of sports.”
  • “To flip through the bins of seven-inches at Shangri-La or Goner Records is to feel the weight of Southern, which is to say American, musical history, gospel to blues to soul.”
  • Ernestine & Hazel’s was “once a dry goods store, for decades it operated openly as a brothel on the second floor; the namesake owners were first cousins whose husbands were cozy with the muckety-mucks at Stax and the local law enforcement, according to legend.”
  • “Indie Memphis has its own community icons, chief among them Shirley Williams, who has been serving drinks at the Lamplighter bar for nearly 40 years. The Lamp, as locals call it, is another Midtown dive. Opened since 1932, it is the city’s oldest continuously operating bar and has lately found its grungy slice of fame as the site of music videos for the likes of Cat Power.”
  • “‘We’re the real deal,’ Archie Turner said as he packed up his keyboard at 4 a.m. at Wild Bill’s, a dive bar, barbecue spot and soul joint that is one of the area’s most belovedly ragged destinations.”

Damn. I think they pretty much nailed it. Does anyone else have some suggestions for spots they missed?

Categories
Travel

The Benziger Family Winery

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Kath and I are waiting for our tractor tour to start at the beautiful Benziger Family Winery, located just outside Glen Ellen, California.

The winery focuses on growing grapes and fermenting them in a biodiverse way, and the entire farm is constructed so that the sum of the flora and fauna is greater than its parts.

I’d bet the wine is pretty tasty, too. We will get to sample some after the tour.

Categories
Travel

Walking the Coast at East Bay

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Happy New Year!

Along the east side of San Francisco Bay, artists make large art pieces out of the trash that washes up.