Weekend Playlist January 20

I know I always start the talk about my weekend playlist with the fact that my musical taste is about as eclectic as my tastes in pretty much everything. I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't like to limit myself to any one type of anything. Of course sometimes deciding between flavors of ice cream or what to have for dinner and the restaurant can you make me a bit of a pain. The truth is, and I know this is an expensive way to go, but ever since I was little kid I would rather order a few things off the appetizer menu than an actual dinner anyway. Of course as an adult unless I won the lottery on the way, I tend to try to stay away from appetizer menus as much as possible. LOL

So here are the last five songs from my music library on shuffle:

September Morn, Niel Diamond

You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone, Brooks & Dunn

Grenade, Bruno Mars

Brand new me, John Michael Montgomery

Kansas City, The New Basement Tapes

I did just notice that out of 1970 songs in my library (thank you Apple music subscription) Buddy Bat, which is the name of my iPad where I put my library on shuffle for my Weekend Playlist, sometimes get stuck in the favorites mode. Last night when I started this project it seemed like every third song was either Neil Diamond or Night Ranger. Yes, I do happen to have a lot both of those artists in my library. But I970 songs and the whole catalog is on shuffle. It sounds to me like a musical mood and sometimes I just wonder how smart our smart devices have become? My Apple devices talk to each other and I swear they know as much about me as I do and if I press the right buttons I can have a conversation with Siri for a while. I'm eventually going to have to talk about that Brooks & Dunn song because it really seems Buddy Bat wants me to. But I usually write my blog on Joey, my main computer, and Joey seems to still allow me to be in charge. 😉

This week's song is Kansas City by The New Basement Tapes. I can tell you that this is one of a bunch of song lyrics Bob Dylan wrote after a car accident… Whatever. I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan but I just happen to really like this song. The lyrics of the song don't really speak to me but I enjoy the rhythm of the song the music and Kansas City makes me think about two things.

The first and only time I have ever flown into Kansas City I got to see my name on a sign with the NBC peacock on it because I was flying in for an interview with the NBC affiliate in Topeka, Kansas. The creative services director picked me up and we drove into downtown Topeka and he took me to lunch at a very nice upscale salad bar. I don't mean salad bar as in put your lettuce and all your stuff on your lettuce and take it back to your table. I mean salad bar as you look at all the different types of salads that they have choose the 3 or 4 that you would like and they put them on a plate for you. I was thinking to myself at that time, if I get this job I'm going to spend a lot of time in this restaurant. We enjoyed lunch and talked about the job and the Topeka area including the importance of how close the Kansas City Royals are.

There were a couple of things that didn't sit so well about living in Kansas. The gas prices were just a little higher than they were in Detroit and based on the value of my car it would probably cost about $600 a year for a license plate. My gas mileage wasn't that bad but for the price of the license plate tag? Yeesh! I was not giving up my only six years old Camaro to be a creative services producer in a small market. But we hadn't discussed salary yet it was still early in the day.

The next part of the day I worked very hard to keep myself from laughing, because the NBC station was smack dab in the middle of a cornfield. I mean you saw the building and the antenna and nothing but corn anyplace else. Once we walked into the station it was an incredibly modern building and in the production area it was totally state-of-the-art. It was better equipment than I worked with at the cable company and even at Tiger Stadium and it was very comparable to the production equipment where I was currently working as a video librarian. We did lots of talking about the type of commercial production that was done there. I got to meet a lot of potential coworkers they seemed like decent and very creative people. I even got to play with a couple of pieces of the equipment and recorded the voiceover while I was there. The job sounded great. The toys were fun. Downtown reminded me a lot of Royal Oak, Michigan, a city I absolutely adore. If the apartment rental in the area was decent and the pay was okay I was ready to start packing if they offered me the job.

Unfortunately the salary the job paid was a FEW THOUSAND dollars LESS then I was making as a video librarian and I lived in a suite in my parents home rent-free and paid just under $100 a year for tags for the plates on the Camaro. The CS director brought me back to the airport in Kansas City complementing my skills and raving about my voice and still trying to sell me on how great the area was. I did realize that that meant very good things about my standing in the finalists for this job. He even brought up that although it was more expensive for registration the gas prices were better than Detroit, which they word but I didn't say that, and the weather is better so it's better on the car. It still wasn't enough to make "I'm at creative services producer and a barista with a really great roommate who I met a day ago" very attractive. I sent an email later in the day of the next day explaining that I'd given it some thought and for financial reasons I just couldn't consider the position. But on the flight home I already needed extra peanuts because I felt so bad.

I do want to go back to Kansas City though! There are two things in Kansas City that I absolutely have to see. First off, of course, I want to see a baseball game there. The other thing that Kansas City has that no place else in the world does is Shuttlecocks! Note the capital S on Shuttlecocks. I'm not talking about stopping in a sporting goods store. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, built and installed four 18-foot badminton shuttlecocks on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, it can be done in one day but if I go to Kansas City I must see a Royals baseball game and Shuttlecocks. And I mean I've got to power wheel out there and get my picture taken just to show you how much taller than my wheelchair the shuttlecocks are.


And that's what Kansas City is to me and it's what this song makes me think about. You may get something completely different from the song. In fact it would be really weird if you didn't. It a nice song. Hope you enjoy the video.

The Art of Pain

I’ve mentioned before that I do Art Journaling as my own therapy for the times when the MS feels like it’s controlling more of my world than I can handle. It really does help too. When I'm having a meltdown, when the tears and agony of what I can’t do is taking over emotionally, I feel compelled to create. I have sat in front of the computer creating a page at 2AM because I’m so wound up I can’t sleep. I can physically feel when the page is done. It’s hard to describe but I feel the tension release and finishing a page makes me feel good. It’s kinda like taking a drug that kicks in and you instantly feel better.

I did this page last week after an hours-long meltdown when I was unable to get out of my wheelchair to pull myself into the bathroom.

I’m A Mess

Credits: Life Aint Always Beautiful by LJS Designs, Melancholy by
Connie Prince, Distressed by Created by Jill Scraps

I knew the page was complete when the tension in my neck and shoulders disappeared. It felt like a vice just lifted off them and I relaxed. Art as almost a spiritual experience sounds strange, but that really is what happens for me. It’s kinda cool.

Like I’ve said before, art journaling is personal, at least for me it is. It’s like poetry. It has great meaning to the person who creates it. It might mean something totally different to someone looking at it and that’s okay; it’s what art is about. You may read a poem or look at a work of art and get a different meaning than the artist/writer expressed, but for the viewer art is not about feeling what the artist was feeling, it’s feeling what you feel. You’re not supposed to experience the artist’s feelings, but join the artist in experiencing the work of art.

If a work doesn’t move you or have any meaning to you, it doesn’t mean it’s bad or not art. It just isn’t for you. That’s oaky too.

Now I’ll share art that I probably get a very different feel from than was intended. I also have a little smile and snicker as my blog is probably the only place you’ll ever see one of my art journal pages and a Salvador Dali painting displayed in the same place.

Dali is best known for his 1931 work, The Persistence of Memory.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931

But when I saw his painting, Woman with a Head of Roses, done in 1935, I saw my legs!

Woman with a Head of Roses, Salvador Dali, 1935

Last week I met my spasticity specialist at Cleveland Clinic. He asked me to describe what my legs feel like and I told him the Dali painting described my legs better than I can with just words. Those are my legs. The left leg feels almost dead and deformed and the right leg feels like the draped fabric represents the muscles and tendons, weak and just hanging. The weakness feels just like that.

Before anyone freaks out about the description, it represents the weakness and frustrated emotional pain; the kind of pain that comes and goes. My legs do pretty much always match the Woman with a Head of Roses description but I don’t always feel the frustration and fear of that face in the back of the painting! And when I do I create works like that one at the top of this entry to quell the powerful dark feelings.

And there is my relationship of art and pain, Nani and Dali.

Must See Stuff

Floor Burger by Claes Oldenburg 1962

Well, the first thing I’ll do is give you a ticket to board my train of thought. The topic last week for 52 topix was “soup.” Yes, all of you who answered my question Monday about soup may have an anonymous cameo on my scrapbook pages for last week.

After I’d finished the writing part, I wanted to add some fair use photos of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars, my number one comfort food soup since I was a kid and I still eat it today. So I figured that it should be represented on the soup pages. Then I thought soup, I love that Andy Warhol painting of soup, I should get a copy of that! Well, as one thing lead to another in my Google search, I came across Floor Burger, by Claes Oldenburg!

I love Oldenburg! But that love does not mean I’ve seen every sculpture he’s done or seen a photo of every one or even know the names of them all! It means I’m always seeing new photos, even of old works, and there is always something new to me!

The most recent Oldenburg I’ve seen in person was Torn Notebook on the campus of University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska. David and I went there on our honeymoon in August 2009. I’d wanted to see it since I read about it when it was created in 1996!

Floor Burger came up in an image search for the soup cans and I knew at a glance that it was an Oldenburg! Excited, I showed it to David as he was on the way out this morning. He smiled and asked where it was. I had just “discovered” it and told him I didn’t know. He told me to find out and we’d see if it ever fit into our travels.

Floor Burger was created in 1962 and lives in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, How cool is that? We could chase some area trains, catch a Blue Jays game during the high light one day and visit the gallery the next! I think it’s part that he knows how much I love Oldenburg’s work, but it’s also probably the only time my steak-loving man has ever seen me so excited about beef!

Around the same time he created Floor Cake

And Floor Cone

But Floor Burger is the one I like the best. Work is being done to conserve or renovate Floor Cake which is a stuffed canvas soft sculpture. To be honest, much as I love Oldenburg and ice cream, I’m less enthusiastic about Floor Cone. Not one of his better works in my opinion. It kinda strikes me more as floor carrot. Maybe if it had been chocolate ice cream…

But for right now, I’m ready to plan a second honeymoon where my hubby indulges my odd art fetish. I just know we’ll be craving hamburgers for lunch that day.


Oh, also fun that I found while surfing:

You Are Chopsticks

People see you as exotic, unusual, and even a bit intimidating. You are a difficult person to figure out. In truth, you try to live a very simple life. But most people are too frenzied to recognize the beauty of your simplicity.

What Utensil Are You?

(The Best of) Monday Mug Shot

We got back from our railfan vacation in Florida and surrounding states just this afternoon, in time to have kitty birthday cake for Baggle with the kids, turn on the ball game and for David to get ready for work after we unpacked the car. I think my pecans are still in the back seat, but the oranges and grapefruits are in the house!

I’ll tell a little more about vacation later, but just before I post the best of mug shot, I want to know, why is that when I vacation in the southeast, things rumble in California??


Monday Mug Shot
Originally posted at Yahoo on 7/30/07

Ave Maria Grotto
Cullman, Alabama

I went to Ave Maria Grotto with my Mom on our trip south for 2 weeks in 1989. I’d never been south of Florence, Kentucky before that trip, so it was full of new sights to see! It was also a great female bonding trip, lots of talk, lots of desserts and lots of shopping! That was the trip where I started to collect coffee mugs as souvenirs, with the hope that I’d eventually have a wall with mugs on it.

It was during the World Series between San Francisco and Oakland. Neither of them are one of my teams, but I had a passing interest because Brett Butler, a player I enjoyed, was on the Giants that year. After a crazy day that had us believing that Birmingham was a city that ate Yankees, spit them out and swallowed them again for fun because we kept ending up passing another “Welcome to Birmingham” sign every time we’d thought we’d gotten OUT, a fierce afternoon rain that had me thinking something had happened to my car (Only to have a mechanic laugh at me because I had “those good Yankee snow tires” throwing water on the un-crowned road at the bottom of my car) and a much later than expected arrival in Cullman after a stop at one of the chain in the new restaurant we’d discovered in Kentucky, Cracker Barrel, for diner, we didn’t even turn the TV on. We went right to sleep after checking in to the hotel. I figured I’d get the score for game three in the morning.

That was October 17, 1989 and of course, the next morning, there was no score. Just eye witness accounts about the earthquake, horrific shots from the pancaked highway bridge and a few sound bites from the Candlestick Park, which was evacuated and the World Series put on hold pending a structural inspection of the ball park after search and rescue efforts were complete. The news from San Francisco made it a late start to the day for us, but somehow going to a Catholic Shrine for our first stop of the touring day had become quite appropriate.

Ave Maria Grotto, in Cullman, Alabama is the work of a Benedictine Monk in the early 20th century. It is places of spiritual significance and world landmarks done in miniature sculptures in an outdoor garden setting near to the Abbey Brother Zoetti called home. Now, that’s a switch from my usual attraction to larger-than-life sculptures, but it was an incredible place! The detail in the tiny sculptures just brought the far-off places to enchanted life! If I get back to that part of Alabama, I definitely want to go again...just no earthquakes this time!

Goals and Projects for 2010

Christmas Eve Breakfast Still Life

Isn’t the photo cool? The photo isn’t all breakfast. Just one slice with coffee, but the full sliced quarter of the Panetonne looked better for the picture! That is a sample for my Project 365 in 2010. More about that later! I cut the huge Panetonne my Dad got me into quarters and wrapped up the other three to freeze. I’m the only one in our house who eats it, but the Panetonne brings back such sweet memories of Noni and the fact that she always made a special effort to find the ones without the candied oranges for Mom and me. It’s also quite tasty as a mildly sweet breakfast bread to the portion of my taste buds that are authentic San Marinese and a rather large and filling slice is only 310 calories!

This week’s Photoblog Wednesday was the final photo of Patch 365. No, we didn’t choose to go out to celebrate our first anniversary the night before for that reason, but it was a neat byproduct of the scheduling! So the book starts with our first married photo and ends with us celebrating our first anniversary with 52 weekly pages and some pretty cool extras in between. No, I’m far from done scrapping it. I have each week’s photos in a folder wi0th the notes for captioning them so I have the facts and memories recorded to catch up the scrapping as I can. But I think it’s going to be a pretty cool book to have on our coffee table recording the special days and the things that made the ordinary days special of our first married year!

I decided that I’d do a selfish project 365 this year and try something fun and a little artsy just for me. Now, I really do believe that scrapbooking is selfish, but in a giving way. It’s sort of like the great painters. They can be called selfish because they created works for their own fulfillment, their expression of what was inside of them. It just so happened that the beauty and emotion of their efforts touched many people and that beauty became a treasure and the mark, the legacy they left to the world. Isn’t a scrapbook the same thing? A well-done scrapbook is a beautiful piece of expressive art that becomes a cherished treasure to those with whom it’s shared. So for 2010, my Project 365 will be a special to me book when it’s done. If many years down the line it becomes a special look at me or a fun book for anyone else to look at, bonus! But the project is all for my own expression and nothing else, just for fun for me.

2010 will be my year of Java 365. I’m going to take a picture of coffee every day. It will most often be my coffee, but I’m not limiting myself to that, it could also be ambient shots of coffee shops or another Sapp Brothers water tower, something like that. It will usually be my coffee, but not just a photo of the cup – that would get boring. I’m going to set up still life presentations with the coffee, with a sweet roll or other accompaniment. I took a picture on the steam train trip we went on in October of my coffee on the window sill, obviously on a train with the countryside in the background, I’ll probably do holiday accents for the holiday coffee pics. I’m just going to have some fun with it.



As 2010 starts, I have 4 major goals I’m working on for the year. The first one is, of course, school! Spring semester starts January 8 and this term I’m taking an XHTML class, which is the first Network Security class. It’s a prerequisite to moist of the security certificate classes and a suggested prerequisite to the intro security class, which is part of the Networking certificate. In the fall, I’ll take the second Microsoft Server class, but rather than doubling up this semester, I’m going embark of major project number two, which is getting myself exam-ready for Network+ certification. I have a couple practice exams and I figure I’ll start with using one to really study and sign up to take the official exam when I can get a passing score with no notes or internet on the other. This will definitely keep me out of trouble and off the streets! I don’t like to be on the streets when it snows anyway!

Project number 3 is a recommitment to Wife 1500. I did not gain from Wedding day to first anniversary, but I didn’t lose much either. Like I’ve said before, it was an emotionally rough last half of the year, but there will always be challenges in life and I can’t allow myself to make them worse by using them as an excuse not to take care of myself. I’ve asked David to do a couple things to support me on this. First is not to skip dessert because I’m not sharing the same dessert. I’m lucky that he shares my taste for Jello as a lighter dessert, but if at the end of the day I don’t have adequate calories left for a piece of cake and/or ice cream, I want him to have it if he wants it. The surest way for me to not stick with my eating plan is if he’s not having things he wants because of it. He should NEVER feel bad if he’s having a brownie with ice cream when I’m having three strawberries with a tablespoon of chocolate!

The second thing he agreed to try to remember to do is recognize that if I’m eating something out of a bag or box and it’s not a measured portion in a bowl for a snack, something’s wrong and he should ask me about it. Even if I don’t want to talk about what’s bugging me, and in fact, I may not even realize that something is bugging me, it will call my attention to the bad-for-me habit and I’ll effect an immediate change in it!

My last major goal for 2010 is a scrapbooking goal. I am in 2007 in my scrapbooks. I am going to do a minimum layout a day to work on catching up. I start a new book at the beginning of the year, so I’m going to scrap 2010 in the now while I’m catching up the other three years. 365 layouts may not catch up three years if I do the minimum, but it will make a big dent! I average about 150 pages per year in my books. If I can start 2011 having made significant ground on the years that need caught up without adding another year to those files, it will make for a much more pleasant start!

So those are my ambitious plans for the first year of the new decade. Do you do goals or resolutions? What are some of your lofty plans? Hey, that’s probably a good first layout for 2010!

Monday Mug Shot

Nebraska

Honeymoon Hot Spot!

Nebraska was one of the new states for me on our honeymoon. I’ve wanted to see Nebraska for a long time with almost as much passion as I wanted to see Iowa!

We made the most of our day in Nebraska which included a baseball game and getting a picture of a police car in Wahoo Nebraska. There’s just something kinda cool and worth a giggle every time I see the photo of the police car that says “Wahoo Police.”

Of course, I showed photos from our day in Nebraska while we were gone. There was the coffee tower in Omaha, a water tower that I was working on convincing David was not just shaped like a giant coffee pot, but was full of coffee! He still laughs when I bring it up like he doesn’t believe me!

In Lincoln, Nebraska, we saw Torn Notebook, a fantastic larger-than-life sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen. I had wanted to see that sculpture for many years and wasn’t at all disappointed. I have loved Oldenburg’s work since I was introduced to it in high school humanities class. I can now add Torn Notebook to my collection of photos of his work that I’ve taken myself, which includes Free Stamp in Cleveland, Bat Column and Chicago and Plantoir in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I think maybe one of the cooler highlights of the Nebraska part of the trip was that it was a turning point for our baseball luck! The Omaha Royals were the first home team we saw win and it was our FIFTH game! The Royals beat the Oklahoma City Red Hawks, 1-0. I love a good pitchers duel!

It was a game time sky pregnant with rain, we feared LOTS of rain, but the rain managed to only stay impending through the game. We felt Ike it was us and five other fans. I think the team’s last place finish and the weather kept many fans away from the park on that night. They did strike out the Coca-Cola Strike Out batter, good for a free coke for everyone. We did collect real cokes for that. David was miffed that he caught one of the Hebrew National squishy balls and the balls were NOT good for turning in for a hot-dog. They shot a hot-dog and a bunch of balls into the crown. Bad promotion. Don’t include the squishy balls for something called the hot-dog toss unless they are good for turning in at the concession stand for a hot-dog!

The pitchers duel made for a quick game that helped stave off the rain too. But that did mean that we didn’t have time for late-innings ice cream! Since we made plans for dessert every day on our honeymoon, that meant we had to make a stop on the way back to the hotel. We got Blue Bunny ice cream treats at the same C-Store where I got this mug.

All in all, Nebraska is a very cool state that I’ll enjoy visiting again!

Photoblog Wednesday

Water Tower Mecca
Omaha, Nebraska

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David spotted this one first and just KNEW that we need to stop so I could get a pic! It was lunch time, so we stopped at Sapp Brothers Cafe for lunch, where I explained to him that the tower was filled with coffee and the chill from the air conditioner was the water, er, coffee tower calling the java faithful to drink of its nectar!

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Photoblog 2

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Torn Notebook

by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen
Lincoln, Nebraska

I have wanted to go to the main campus of University of Nebraska to see Torn Notebook ever since I saw the sketch for the sculpture! As we walked around snapping pictures (I downloaded 15 of this sculpture) a student passed by and gave us a look. David said, “Bet we’re not the first ones here taking pictures of this.”

She smiled and agreed, we were not the first at all!

Have an Art!

It’s such a sunny and bright day in the TOL today! Beautiful days make me think of beautiful things.

I saw some great art online by Liudmila Kondakova. Born and educated in Russia and now living in the US, she’s done some great paintings of Paris! She has a very classic style. look at her paintings and I’m sure my Mom would have loved her work! I like the rich colors in her paintings. Yeah, funny huh? An artist Mom and I would have agreed on? But, there is enough classic on the impressionist side and great color combinations. Her work would have appealed to us both! She’s definitely worth checking out!

Photoblog Wednesday

Always Time for Breakfast
Phantastic Phils
Punxsutawney, PA
May 16, 2009

Monday Mug Shot

Punxsutawney, PA

Reminiscent of the loved movie with Bill Murray, there’s a little bit of Groundhog Day, every day, in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.

David and I ventured into Punxsutawney on our trip East. We were of cur, looking for trains, and we did get a few really good shots catching the Buffalo and Pittsburgh when the sun peaked between the clouds. But the charm of the day in Punxsutawney was, the charm of the day in Punxsutawney was, the charm of the day in Punxsutawney was, the charm of the day in Punxsutawney was, the charm of the day in Punxsutawney was, the charm of the day in Punxsutawney was ….

And they say I have no pop-culture…

The charm of the day in Punxsutawney was the street art groundhogs!

The street art has been making big cites and small towns alike tourist attractions since Chicago did Cows on Parade in 1999. 300 Fiberglass cows were scattered all over the city, sponsored by local businesses who commissioned local artists to put their creativity to work decorating the cows. Then at the end of the year the cows were auctioned for charity. So it’s been repeated in other places with fiberglass “canvases” many with local appeal. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was given a formal citation grating pardon for starting the great Chicago fire of 1871. There were three styles of pigs at The Big Pig Gig in Cincinnati a year later, including a flying pig. I saw the thoroughbreds in Lexington, Kentucky, featuring the common to these art collections puns, including my favorite of those, Mr. Ad, a horse made of a collage of advertising! The New Ewe Review, in wool industry famous, Rochester, Michigan, included a Sheep in the form of another famous product of Rochester, Madonna!

Phantastic Phils, giant fiberglass replicas of the weather forecaster that made the city famous Punxsutawney Phil, made their debut with Philage, the only groundhog that wears a top hat, on Groundhog ay 2004. One by one more groundhog started appearing in the streets decorated by artists from around the state of Pennsylvania. This display doesn’t appear to be going anywhere! There are currently 32 groundhogs in the city streets, including a few that are being repaired or repainted to go back on display.

David and I got a brochure when I got this mug, and a pair of groundhog socks, at the Chamber of Commerce Groundhog gift shop. The brochure included a map to all of the groundhogs and we set out scoping the city streets for them. We photographed 22 of them!

It was a fun half day during our trip. Yes, a little more sun for the trains would have been nice, but we might not have had the fun of groundhog hunting! It’s something we both enjoyed and would love to see the rest of the groundhogs with more sun for trains too.

We’d definitely make that trip again, again, again, again, again, again, again…..

Things I NEED To See

(Note - there are non-commercial links for more information in this post!)

I love giant art! I really think that’s where my water tower fascination comes from. I grew up marveling at “The Big Tire” on I-94 in metro Detroit and always loved seeing the giant Paul Bunion and Babe when we traveled in the upper peninsula. I was also always awestruck, still am, when I see the giant crucifix in Indian River, Michigan.

As an adult I’ve seen several Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen sculptures and I really love those as well as the worlds largest baseball bat in Louisville, Kentucky and the baseball water tower at Knights Stadium in Charlotte North Carolina, well, the stadium is actually in Fort Mill South Carolina. There are many of these awesome landmarks I’ve seen, but so many more on my list!


I need to see several things in Minnesota.


I must see Claes Oldenburg’s Spoonbridge, a fountain sculpture in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

I’m also getting information on the worlds largest ball of twine in Darwin, MN for our planned honeymoonish trip this summer.


What’s that in the background?? A giant ball of twine and a water tower too!!!

The worlds largest ear of corn in Rochester Minnesota IS a water tower!!


More Oldenburg in Kansas City Missouri , a giant Shuttlecock at the Kansas City museum of art!

Also in Missouri, an 8-Ball water tower in Tipton!


In Illinois, the world’s largest catsup bottle is a water tower!

Another water tower in Iowa!

The world’s largest coffee pot!!

And of course, there are the fruit water towers, the peach in Grafton SC and the watermelon in Luling TX!



BUT

Hawaii has lost a little now...

Even though I never knew about this water tower, it’s one of those things that just hits me hard. The pineapple water tower at the Dole cannery is gone! :(


There are other things “on my list” but these are some of the top ones.

Do you have any larger-than-life icons in your neck of the woods? I’d love to hear about them!

Find some other world’s largest stuff here: What’s Large Where in the US

Check out the store! You can get starter kits to make you own “world’s largest ball of something!” Yanno, with the short hair now, I wonder what the worlds largest ball of hair scrunchies is like.

Art Gallery Cyber-Field Trip!

If you appreciate fine art, and really, of one type or another, everyone does, you really need to check out this site! Paragon Fine Art has some wonderful works by a selection of contemporary artists. From the steamy, sexy works of Tomasz Rut, to the panoramas of Kerry Hallman, to the Dali-ish look of Glen Tarnowski, there is something for every taste.

I find the works of Sergey Smirov to be especially appealing. Smirnov (1953-2006) was a Russian painter, whose pride of his heritage definitely shows in his work. His portraits are greatly influenced by the “parsuna” style, which evolved in Russian art from the late 16th Century to the 18th Century. The paintings show the slightly flattened faces of a style moving into naturalism from the old icon art. When I looked at the gallery of his work the first thing I felt was the richness of tone that I love so much in the Italian Masters from the Renaissance, then just a general appreciation for the facial styles. I have a favorite Smirnov portrait too! Tchaikovsy, who was one of the first composers I really loved, has a portrait that looks like it’s Shakespeare on the wall behind his piano!

Take a moment, or a few, to visit Paragon Fine Art! It’s a nice trip to the gallery, from the comfort of your own home!