Ragged Mountain


Walked the trail around the lower Ragged Mountain reservoir yesterday.


Some signs of geotechnical activity.


House to be submerged?

Frosty


doing errands in the Capital City. Longing for the heyday of banking. These days it is as if a neutron bomb had been detonated, leaving the physical structures of the banks untouched but all the personnel gone. There is the bank, the money, the cubicles, but the staff has been reduced to Frosty and he is famously immobile. So the several of us waiting hatched a plan.
We unplugged Frosty.


The response was gratifying. The branch manager instantly appeared, spoke to us all. Checked on our health and that of Frosty. We laughed. We waited. The service was as expeditious as possible. We did business, left longing for the goodle days, before bank officers were replaced with inflatables, before quantitative easing, before securitization of mortgages, back back back to the days of silver coins, copper pennies, silver certificates and savings account passbooks.


(should any of you banking center types be lurking… while your boards of directors and CEO’s plundered the American economy, while we do not like you… you have great employees. Truly. Nice people to do bidness with. Hire more of them!)

closets


Somewhere along the line, people decided they needed closets. My 1890 worker house doesn’t have these nasty newfangled spaces. It has square rooms.

In North America, chests, trunks and wall-mounted pegs typically provided storage prior to World War II. Built-in wall closets were uncommon and where they did exist, they tended to be small and shallow. Following World War II, however, deeper, more generously sized closets were introduced to new housing designs, which proved to be very attractive to buyers. It has even been suggested that the closet was a major factor in peoples’ migration to the suburbs.–Wikipedia

Liriodendron tulipifera

November 2006, west lawn, Monticello
Tulip trees on the west side of Monticello.
leigh trigg and Th. Jefferson's tulip tree
This is an old tree. There is evidence it was planted April 16, 1807. I have five tulip trees to plant this weekend. This tree is 22 feet in circumference, the trees I am planting are 3/4 of an inch in circumference.
This tree affected many lives. One was my neighbor Mike Van Yahres grandfather’s. (Visit Monticello’s podcast section and search poplar for that story)
The tree was removed. Profound health issues. I am pleased that the grounds people are leaving the stump in place for awhile. It is a memorial.

See Patterson Clark’s excellent article in the Washington Post about tulip trees.