Drive-By Shooter Gets Out

I was so tickled with the way my last drive-by shots came out, that I felt I needed to do a few more. The old tobacco barns that were once so vital to this area's economic growth, are now mostly defunct and crumbling. What was once a major weighing station for tobacco leaf is now a burgeoning suburb of the capital city, and its rural roots are rapidly being swept away.

Even though I'm no fan of tobacco, its still sad to see a rural area stripped almost completely of its cultural and historical heritage, and rolled over with concrete and asphalt.

I shot this barn from across the street, from a grove of old oak trees. There must have been an old house here at one time, but all that remains is the protective ring of ancient trees that once surrounded it.

I believe that the field behind the oaks is still being plowed and sowed - there were sweet potatoes runts left behind last fall, after the harvest, that some of the poor but thrifty went out and collected. Not exactly like Ruth and Naomi, gleaning wheat in the Old Testament, but it still had a certain timelessness to it (and lest you think I stand upon some wealthy and remote pedestal, let me assure you that I ate a few of those gleaned sweet potatoes - my brother knows where to go for all the leftover field pickings, and usually has plenty to share.)

I had to go back and get out of the car to take this one, but its such a cool old building, that I felt it needed to be revisited properly. Coming around to the front and shooting the side angle put it in a different light and made it look like a completely different place.

Can I just say how much I love to take pictures with a digital camera? The immediacy of the results helps me to learn what I'm doing wrong and fix it, instead of taking the 15 rolls I've accrued over the year in to be developed, and then not knowing what I did to make everything look so blurry, and dark, but hating that I've spent hundreds of dollars on crappy pictures.

I love this house! It overlooks the pond I took a picture of last week and is just a beautiful house. I actually did get out of the car and climbed up the hill to get a better shot - luckily they don't shoot trespassers - at least they didn't shoot me, but maybe no one was home, so I got off lucky.

I have been told by my favorite house historian (Hi George!) that this house is a classic example of Georgian architecture. In his words, "oh my God that's Georgian; yeah, those chimneys, the hip roof and oooooooh the symmetry!....yeah that's Georgian...ooooh I love it!....you see how that roof goes flat and the chimney's on the corners....ooooh-ahhhhhh....!"When I asked him how old he thought it was he said "no way it was built in the 1880s - 1780's maybe but not 1880's..."

Aren't the steps going up to the front so cool? If I lived here, I would have to play dress-up a lot. "War, war, war! Fiddley Dee! If I hear the word War one more time, I'm going to go right in the house." (Oh shush! You know you would be playing Scarlett O'Hara too if you lived in this house!)

Okay, so now you should have a better idea of why I hate to see the 'burbs come creeping and infiltrating, and ruining my beautiful little town. I have focused on showing you this, rather than bore you with the details of my defunct heating/cooling system, and the hoops we will be jumping through to obtain a new system, or the even more stressful (if you can believe it) situation of absolutley HATING my son's fourth grade teacher, at the same time we're trying not to make his life any more hellish than it is already, by going all Outraged Parent on her.

Why not get all up in her Kool-aid, you might ask? Well, its because my own mother did that kind of thing, presumably to help me, but it made life much harder, because then my teacher punished me for the crap my mom pulled. We have our first conference with her (the fourth grade teacher, not my mom!) this week (Wednesday), and we're trying to go into it as serenely as possible. Depending on how it goes, I may be having a "Come To Jesus" meeting with the principal later (Please bear in mind that in five years of school I have never asked for a conference with the principal, so if I have to go there, I obviously think things are pretty bad) (Gack! it makes my stomach hurt just think of having to deal with this..."person" - I won't smudge up my blog, calling her what I WANT to call her, but you can play along with me; just go through the alphabet and think of something nasty to call someone for every possible letter! Ready, Set, Go!