July 2019

POTD: The Old Home Place

The Old Home Place
Bozeman, Montana
2019

In my commentary to the POTDs I will sometimes refer to our “mountain house” or our “cabin” or maybe even just our house, but it occurred to me that that doesn’t mean anything to a lot of you. So here’s a shot of the place. We designed and built it ourselves starting in 1982 and lived there full time for a number of years in two different stretches before and after jobs elsewhere. Eventually I got tired of clearing snow in the winter (always at least a half mile of road, sometimes as much as 1.5 miles depending on who else was working on the road down below us). Now we have a house in town as well.

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POTD: Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher
County Mayo
Ireland
2019

I suppose church builders who put large windows in sanctuaries do so in part with the intent of inspiring the congregation with the flood of light. But they also offer a good place for those less attentive folks in the crowd to focus their daydreams.

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POTD: A Life of Contrasts

A Life of Contrasts
County Mayo, Ireland
2019

The ruins of abbeys and priories that we visited are largely roofless, giving the false impression that such places were well lit back in the day. But a visit to one with some roofs still intact or restored quickly dispels that notion. With the exception of a few smaller rooms with a single window and the large common areas such as sanctuaries that often have a number of large windows, it was dark in those rooms! As the interior lighting in that day would only have consisted of candles and fires in fireplaces, life must have been a stark contrast between the bright days outside the buildings and the darkness of time spent indoors.

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POTD: Parts Room

Parts Room
County Mayo, Ireland
2019

Many of the ruins we visited in Ireland are under the care of the government and most of those ruins had a “spare parts” room that was gated off where they piled all the miscellaneous pieces of graves, walls, and other features that had been lying about the place when it was tidied up for the public to visit. That they were put away for safe keeping suggests that there is at least a theoretical (i.e., non-funded) interest in eventually restoring the place a bit.

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POTD: The Universal Plant

The Universal Plant
County Mayo
Ireland
2019

The agave does not grow everywhere but I don’t know that I’ve traveled anywhere there is a moderate to warm or hot climate that does not sport some agave plants, either in neighborhood landscaping or formal gardens or greenhouses. That ubiquity is o.k. by me as I have yet to tire photographing them.

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