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March 28, 2015

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Excursion 31 (5/24/2014)

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Excursion 31, Part 1 (The Rules of Rusticity)

Sadly, a large part of my life has consisted of impatiently lusting after some material object, driven by an ever increasing desire to have it, only to experience great disappointment and letdown upon finally obtaining—usually at great cost or effort—said object itself.   Even when the item lived up to its allure, the wait—that damnable, endless wait—was torture.  I remember as a kid in the early 1980s when I did my first mail order.  I ordered the wargame Pearl Harbor from Wargames West in Albuquerque.  UPS only took a few days to deliver from Albuquerque to El Paso, but it seemed like an eternity to me and every time I heard a vehicle coming down the street I would rush to the door to look for the UPS truck.

Sadly, decades later I have not changed a bit.  So when camera lensmaker Tamron announced an upcoming new lens, I was hooked.

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March 14, 2015

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Excursion 30 (5/13/2014)

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Excursion 30 (Rider on the Storm)

In mid-May 2014 I had to travel to Chicago for work.  I brought my camera with me so that, on the way home, I might be able to take a few photographs once I crossed back into Ohio.  As I actually did so, I found myself in front of a major spring storm heading east from Indiana into Ohio.  I wasn’t storm-chasing—the storm was chasing me.  As I drove home, this game me some nice opportunities to turn around and take some photographs of the oncoming storm.  Which I now present to you.

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March 1, 2015

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Excursion 27 (2/22/2014)

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Excursion 27, Part 3 (Home through the Hills)

It is a shame that Appalachian Ohioans cannot replicate some of the successes that West Virginians have had bringing federal money to help their struggling state.  But the problem is that all of West Virginia lies in Appalachia, while only part of Ohio does.  None of the power centers of Ohio, all urban or suburban, are in Appalachia; the region does not have the population to have political clout nor money to purchase politicians’ attention.  With no real economy, plus underfunded and under-attended schools, the region cannot attract money from the state of Ohio, to say nothing of the federal government.  The region is a fairly equal mix of “red” and “blue” counties, but neither party pays attention to them, Republicans because they care nothing for the poor and Democrats because they know and care little about the rural white poor.

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February 28, 2015

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Excursion 27 (2/22/2014)

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Excursion 27, Part 1: (Return to Mud House Mansion)

It was February 2014.  Cold and brisk, but the weather was fine and it looked like a nice day to take an excursion.  I decided to do something I had been hankering to do for quite a while, which was to return to Mud House Mansion.  I had discovered this fascinating old building located a bit east of Lancaster only the month before, so the landscape (barren, winter) would look pretty much the same, but what I wanted to do was to get there very early in the morning and get some good pictures of the mansion during the pre-dawn and dawn minutes, the so-called “golden hour” of photography.  Well, the plans of mice and men oft gang agley and my exquisite timing was ruined completely when a woman driving a jeep mounted with a battering ram rear-ended by Pilot in downtown Lancaster.  She had a grill guard on the front of Jeep (designed to protect vehicles from deer and such hitting the front of the car), but it was one that protruded well in front of the vehicle and that steel frame ploughed into the back of my SUV, caving in the rear door and doing about $7,000 or so worth of damage.  So much for golden hour.

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February 21, 2015

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Excursion 26 (2/14/2014)

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Excursion 26, Part 1 (Vortacular)

Unearthed Ohio is active again, after some time off for questionable behavior.  Unlike most blogs, where inactivity for an extended time portends doom, the extended hibernation here was deliberate.  Much of my free time this past year was spent working with a designer and a developer to create a new version of my other website, then I had to import and convert the old content, then catch up, and, well, it was a monumental undertaking.  I had to put Unearthed Ohio to the side—though I never stopped the actual photography.  Now I can catch up a bit.  With this blog entry, I present photographs from a trip I took in mid-February 2014, deep in the heart of the Polar Vortex.  As I write this intro, however, I seem to be deep in the heart of Polar Vortex 2:  Electric Boogaloo.  Two very nasty winters in a row.  The one advantage that a winter offers is winter landscapes and last year I took the opportunity of a recent snowfall to do some experimentation with snowy photography, which I present to you herewith.

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May 18, 2014

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Excursion 25 (1-14-2014)

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Excursion 25, Part 1 (Mud House Mansion)

In which our intrepid hero chances upon the manse macabre…

A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara, who wasted away.
D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh.

Those are the first few lines of the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book consisting of 26 different children meeting untimely ends.  The Tinies are the work of Edward Gorey, a rather amazing author and artist, whose distinctive visual style was a sort of goth Edwardiana.  I first encountered Gorey in high school and fell in love with his dark wit and unique artistic style.

Little did I know that a bit more than 30 years after I discovered Gorey that I would encounter a mansion that looked as if it came right out of one of his books.

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May 11, 2014

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Excursion 24 (12/25/2013)

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Excursion 24, Part 2 (The Merry Mannequins of Cambridge)

In which our intrepid hero gets in touch with his inner Victorian…

For many people, the Christmas season is rather depressing, but I must confess that I typically am filled with good cheer during that time of year, even though I am not Christian.  There is just something to the Christmas season for me, a period in which—in theory, at least—there really is “good will towards man” and with the gift-giving, people often do make an attempt to be thoughtful to others.  As a result, I am very pro-Christmas, even if from a secular viewpoint.  On this Christmas day, I found several examples of this seasonal “good will” that made me think the world wasn’t really all bad.

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May 8, 2014

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Excursion 23 (11/29/2013)

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Excursion 23, Part 3 (The Ghosts of Lake Erie)

In which our intrepid hero visits a ruined castle of glass…

Let me pick up where I left off, and show the final part of my excursion in late November 2013 north to Lake Erie and east to the environs of Cleveland.  As I drove east along the shores of Lake Erie—or as close as I could get to the shores—I came an amazing site, east of Sandusky and Huron:  a huge, overgrown ruin of a greenhouse complex.

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April 27, 2014

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Excursion 22 (11/9/2013)

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Excursion 22, Part 2 (Shacks of Yore, Galore)

In which our intrepid hero gets to dwell on dwellings…

Are you a home orphan?  By that, I don’t mean homeless, but do you no longer have ties to the home in which you grew up?   Some of us can easily go back to the home of our youths, because other relatives, typically parents, may still live there.  You can revisit your old room, for example.  But not me.  My parents sold my childhood home in 1988 or so, the year I graduated from college and moved to Ohio.

I grew up in a house on 2624 Hawick, El Paso, Texas.  This was a subdivision with streets named on Irish themes built in the late 1950s.  My house was built in 1959.   It was a tiny house, three bedrooms but only around 1,000 square feet or so.  My mother was from El Paso, my father from Pennsylvania.  They lived in Pennsylvania after getting married but in 1970 they moved back to El Paso.  I was four years old.  We stayed at my grandparents’ house until my parents bought the home on Hawick.

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April 27, 2014

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Excursion 22 (11/9/2013)

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Excursion 22, Part 1 (Relics of the Dead)

In which our intrepid hero looks at the past and the passed…

Death comes to us all in the end, but you never know how news of the deaths of others will affect you.  Although I mourned their passing, the actual deaths of neither of my maternal grandparents caused me true sorrow, because in both cases, the circumstances of their passing meant that death, when it came, was something of a blessing.  The relief of their suffering outweighed the sorrow of their absence.

The circumstances of death thus play a large role in how deaths affects us.

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