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If you get that deal at your grocery store where, when you buy groceries you add up points toward a gas discount, do it:
Our fortunes from dinner tonight. One of these was mine, but you’ll have to guess:
From a weekend 30-mile bike ride:
We pet-sat yesterday afternoon. He’ll be much bigger by the next time we see him:
If you need us, Allie and I are busy watching the Tour:
I was in the RTV building today and wandered by some great built-in display cases. The history of the program and fair amount of the gear that makes up the business was there. Like this Hitachi FP-3030, from 1976, for example.
It was a smaller camera for its day, but it also did some genius stuff on the inside. I won’t bore you with the details, but it created a more efficient signal which, among other things, allowed black and white televisions to receive color broadcasts and formed normal black and white pictures. It would also allow a color TV to take a black and white broadcast as well as a color picture during color transmission. Remember, this is the 1970s and color TV had just reached 50 percent household penetration, so this would have been important for a lot of homes. Also, this camera cost just under $20,000 in today’s money.
A magnetic tape recorder/dictation machine from Webster-Chicago:
I don’t know anything about this device, but the company dates back to 1914 and they started selling ancestors of this recorder in the early 1940s. At a time when high tech was still very expensive, and not even a term, Webster-Chicago sold more than 40,000 “electronic memory” units in 1947 and 1948 alone. There is an Electronic Memory unit on display, too, but glare on the display glass ruined the pictures. Webster-Chicago started declining in the 1950s with new magnetic tape technology prevailing over the old wire recorders, and when foreign recorders entered the American marketplace, that was pretty much it for the old company.
Friends, please meet the most handsome figure on the lot, the RCA-77:
The 77 was released in 1945, but it just oozed 1930s style and incredible sound quality. Ribbon microphones, like this one, are always popular, and this RCA product creates some great tones. It was the standard through the 1950s and you’ll still see them in use in studios today.
If you see one for less than a couple grand, buy it, because the seller doesn’t understand the marketplace.
Seems they paint all of the traffic signal controller cabinets here. All of them are different. Each seems to have been done, or inspired, by a particular elementary class or some other youth group. Found this one this morning, which is particularly eye-catching:
Better than all of them being just a regular flat gray, I suppose.
While on the way from here to there I walked through the Eskenazi Art Museum today, mostly because it is fun to say and they have the air conditioning going full blast. Also, the place is huge. This is the foyer:
ince its establishment in 1941, the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art has grown from a small university teaching collection into one of the foremost university art museums in the country. Today, the Eskenazi Museum of Art’s internationally acclaimed collection, ranging from ancient gold jewelry and African masks to paintings by Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, includes over 45,000 objects representing nearly every art-producing culture throughout history.
So that’s two giant museums we’ve discovered, but not attended, so far. And this one just down the road from everything, which is nice.
My folks came to town to see the new place this weekend. My step-father helped us build out our attic. We added about 100 square feet of storage space, which will be great for storing decorations and clothes and whatnot. Took us a part of one afternoon and, before long, we had the traditional ceremony of passing the first item, a pair of exterior Christmas trees, through the doorway and into a corner.
We also took them sight-seeing, and lingered in places like this:
For lunch on Sunday we went to Dat’s, a local Cajun-esque place. It is a delightful mixture of rundown and homey and the food is pretty good. The company is better. How often do you get to eat with Dean Martin?
There’s also this little cookie store in town, one of those things you probably couldn’t do anywhere but a college town. It is in an old house with uneven floors and a desperate need of dusting and a coat of paint. But! You can get cookies! Delicious, custom-ordered cookies. And they have a flowchart to help you out:
What we ordered:
Anyway, the folks were great. Lovely to have them visit. We made them to promise to come back when we knew more about the place ourselves, so we could give a proper tour. And, also, the next time they are here, we won’t build things. But my step-father loves to build things.
The Yankee and I had a nice short little ride this evening. Around the curve and down the hill we go:
There she is, ahead of me as always:
And this was right before we literally ran out of road. It became a strange ride, really. Usually you just go out and have a nice time and then come home. This time we got lost, the paved road turned into gravel. Another road turned into a closed road. Riding your bike isn’t usually frustrating, but it can be bemusing. And also, terribly attractive:
Allie stayed home while we were on our ride:
