Hurricane news won't stop

And more bad things from hurricane Irene:

Wilmington, VT is destroyed: link with many photos
We have passed through here several times, it was a cute lovely town.

Just went to our supermarket, which was without power for two days and the workers are now emptying out ALL persihables.  Tons of icecream, all fish, meat, lots of cheeses, frozen pizza, it all goes to landfills now.  Shelves are naked, including lettuce and produce. It was interesting what was left.  Eggs were OK, and milk, and vaccuum packed cheeses.  Bacon was OK, but not much of the yougurt...

Saw a new road sign on the way home, from our police department:
FLOODED ROAD
TURN AROUND
DON'T DROWN

(sorry, didn't have my camera, it would have been worth many photos)

Signs of the times

It is amazing how much a sign can tell you about everything from the time period when it originated, who it was/is aimed for, who was selling something, and how it was/is sold.  Just see here:


Whole pig sign seen in a small neighborhood shop window in New York City that still have not been pushed out by the supermarkets.  But, this sign is not from this store, but from a store that closed and now the sign is an antique item used to attract customers.  Mr Hodges is probably long gone, only his sign lives on.  Fantastic handmade tin sign, don't you think?


Ugly sign in neon, very designed, and very fancy.  It just oozes dollars. Overdesigned to a fault.  I bet the prices here at Chelsea Wine Vault in NYC are four to ten times the prices at Trader Joe's.


Now this sign is REAL, not just a design job.  A food establishment, Miller's Pub, in Chicago, with an old neon sign and the traditional letters in the white box.  Straight to the point, effective, and historic, and some people probably think it is very ugly.  But it is not over-designed and doesn't try to look like something it is not. This just oozes tradition and good food feeling. (Smelt is a kind of small fish, you eat them whole.)


This is my favorite kind of sign.  It is new, but made with old methods, and cleanly and clearly states what this is about. Somebody took the care to design it, and it is simply beautiful. You want buffalo meat, just come here!  (Readington Buffalo Farm, NJ)

Have you ever wondered why it is called DE-SIGN?  Like undoing signs?  Is a designer someone that unconstructs old signs into something new?  I wonder how the words sign and design really started.

Chicago memory, part 1 - Norwegian adventures

In the taxi van at the airport and on my way to downtown Chicago, a Norwegian couple enter the van, with the man furiously angry at his wife because she had no small dollar bills available as a tip to the guy carrying their luggage.  I turned around, said, in Swedish - "you can pay later, he is our driver ", and the man cheered up and the wife smiled. Then the man said - "I know, I get so angry and frustrated when I shouldn't" - in Norwegian of course.

They had just landed after a long trip from Stockholm and the next day a rental car would be dropped off at their hotel for their 14-day trip driving old Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Route 66 is the old classic route across America that many people drove in the 1950s... it is lined with classic but rundown hotels, scenery, and has become popular in recent years as something to do on vacation, apparently especially in the Nordic countries, said the Norwegian, who also said the REAL way to do it was on a Harley-Davidson, but he was too old for that. Plus he had no license for a motorcycle, he told me regretfully.

But first, the retired man informed me, "there will be spare ribs for dinner! American ribs, yeah!". He continued "all food is good in America", and "we are going to drive and drink Jack Daniels".  When I asked how far they had to drive he said -" I don't know, but I think 14 days is enough". I hope they are having fun and I hope they save the Jack Daniels for the evenings. They were a funny couple, the kind that made you laugh all the time, and I wonder what the other passengers were thinking hearing the Swedish and Norwegian languages mixing in the van. God tur, Norwegians!

Alternative uses...

ski fence, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

We have a saying in our family in Swedish that is something like: "All ways are good except the bad ones", implying that there are many ways of doing things, and some things just don't work out the way you thought. Here is an innovative new way of using broken skis as a fence in Colorado. The photo is from Idaho Springs in the Rockies, a place that is also home to the Argo Gold Mine and the Argo Tunnel. We stopped by the mine and admired the old rusty machines and restored mining building through the locked fence. More photos of Argo here.  It is amazing how much old history is visible in the Rockies.  Here there are no vines (grapes, rosebushes, briars, etc.) that are covering up the old buildings, and the dry air preserves both wood and metal much longer than the eastern and southern humid summers.  There are also a lot less people, more space, so a metal nail that was dropped 80 years ago, might still be laying on the side of the road. 

Roadtripping...part 1: New Jersey

In the last couple of weeks we (or I) have made some road trips to drop and pick up kids in Binghamton, New York State (4.5 hours away), go to a conference in Providence, Rhode Island, or visit great little places here in New Jersey.  The photos from these trips are on my Flickr photostream, but here are some highlights:


Willowwood Arboretum is a public park in New Jersey, an old estate founded by two gardening brothers in the early 1900s. They and their hired gardener filled their large property with cultivated plants, including many Asian ones that had never before been cultivated in North America. It is a gorgeous place, with formal and informal gardens as well as woods, meadows, and whimsical and Japanese sculptures. And it is free! you can tell they have the whole property deer-fenced, just look at those tall flowers.  In my garden those plants would be chewed off 20 cm from the ground. We walked from Willowwood to the neighboring estate Bamboo Brook which has just been restored. It is a gorgeous little mansion on a hill with ponds, streams, terraces, and rock walls, surrounded by tall trees in the forest. Of course the day we were here it started to rain for the first time in 6 weeks, so I don't have many photos, but you can see some here.

(The red flower is a funky begonia.)

On the way to Willowwood I found this 'homemade' road sign - what do you think, is it a warning for attacking T's?

No way out, no way in...

What were they thinking? This must be the end of the world.  Really.