The artist and his, ah, friend

J.M. Flagg (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

You just never know what’s going to show up in the weekly batch of flickr uploads from the Library of Congress. The photo above is from this Friday’s bundle of 1910s images–it’s one of three photos depicting noted illustrator James Montgomery Flagg and his life-sized doll. She doesn’t wear clothes, except a big plumed hat.  In one picture, they’re posed holding cigarettes.  Huh.

Flagg (1877-1960) is best known for creating the image on the original “I Want You” Uncle Sam poster.

Equinox Sunset with Palms

Equinox Sunset with Palms, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

This is for Lisa C. At Polka Dot Cottage, she invited friends to post photos taken on the Fall Equinox (today). Now, they were supposed to be evocative of the coming season, but that’s mighty hard to do in a place full of palm trees! So I took a photo of those, against the sky at dusk. Our part of town is laid out so that east-west streets line up with the sunset on the equinox–so a few minutes earlier, this photo would have been impossible, because the sun would have been dazzling the whole street, face-on.

Oh–and we have a lot of overhead powerlines in our neighborhood. It’s a city, eh? Nice suburbs with no powerlines are pretty and all, but I wouldn’t really like living in them, myself.

Great-great-grandmothers

I’ve been scanning some old family photo albums that recently came into my care.  These are two of my great-great-grandmothers, Marion Glencross Bryden and Emma L. Boyer Marsh:

Marion Glencross Bryden of PA

Emma Louise Boyer Marsh, of NJ

Like a lot of nineteenth-century kids, neither woman grew up knowing her own mother.  Marion’s mother Helen Brown died at age 25, just three years after she arrived in America from Scotland.  And Emma’s mother, Elizabeth White Boyer, died in England, in childbirth (her tenth, at least).  Emma and her siblings crossed the Atlantic together, from teenagers down to three little girls and a baby (Emma was one of the little girls–she stayed close to the others, Lida and Alice, though they were raised in different homes upon arrival).

The picture of Emma is probably from the 1880s, from the context of other photos in the same album; the picture of Marion is taken very late in life, in the 1910s, by Emma’s son, E. Roy Marsh.

Gelato in memoriam

Gelato in memoriam, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

Went out for ice cream (well, gelato) with the kids, to mark the passing of my grandmother today. She was a big ice cream fan, to the end, and it seemed like the right way to spend the afternoon. Rest in peace, Weesie.

McWay Falls

McWay Falls, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

We’re home from our trip, which included a stop to see the lovely McWay Falls in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, above. Much of the park (including the wheeled access) was damaged by the recent fires and closed to visitors, but the cove and falls were still visible from the terraces on a sunny July morning. Son woke up to his 13th birthday in a dorm suite at SFSU, and we had little chocolate lava cakes to celebrate; he got a new toy, and a t-shirt from a friend at the same conference.

The conference went fine, it was great to see old friends and meet folks I’ve “known” online for years. But I still get intensely bored with the format of conferences (sitting and listening and sitting and listening some more). As a not-so-young independent scholar, I’m not really in synch with the young academics who are there mostly to network and talk about tenure and funding and this and that, so I don’t have a lot to chat about. It was a very small conference, so there was no book display to offer refuge, either.

Also, I ran out of yarn before I ran out of need for yarn.  That’s not the conference organizers’ fault, though.

I acquired, uh, ten used CDs on the trip–but spent less than $20 total, in three shops (Amoeba, Boo Boo Records in SLO, and Streetlights in Santa Cruz).  If you’re ever in the neighborhood near the SF Amoeba Music store, the New Ganges vegetarian Indian restaurant is friendly (if maybe too insistent about suggestions), on a quiet street, and makes some mighty fine takeout (but there’s no wheelchair access I noticed, so heads up there).  And we were so ridiculously happy with our Afghan lunch from Khyber Pass in Santa Cruz that I have to mention them too.

Mosaic Meme

Mosaic Meme, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

Lisa posted this one, and Hannah, and a few others that I’ve seen, so I guess it’s time to figure out the BHL Mosaic Maker once and for all….

1. What is your first name?  (heh, yeah, that’s always an easy one for me)
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?  (all that comes up is football, which tells you everything)
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?*
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.*

*Um, celebrity crush didn’t come through–which is fine. And my flickr name is just my name–the closest the search engine could get was “pilchards,” and a lot of pics of cats–no way cats belong in my meme mosaic.

Okay, learned something new, now back to unpacking and doing something more productive, like listening to podcasts while cleaning up….