Friday the somethingth
Anyone's writing can help others gauge the author's intellect, interests, and mental state. I wonder whether anybody has been quietly plotting a bar chart on my +Time blogposts for the past fifteen years, showing an obvious mental decline and waiting for The Moment to do what needs to be done?
One of the reasons I write such nonsense is to throw them off.
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From earlier, the sky darkened with a dark wide cloud passing over the Bay, now is lightening up. Little to do today, but lots to watch as the kitchen demolition folks arrive and start their work of discovery. I'm especially interested in the voids and whether some of that empty space might be captured in the renovation.
We've lived in houses while demolition and construction were going on inside, and it can drive you mad. At one Time, the kitchen floor in the Old Place was out and open to the ground for several days, not my favorite as even after we screened all the openings around the foundation there were bugs and animals under the house.
Maybe doing this kitchen nicety won't sap our energy, tap our enthusiasm, or take the rest of our lives, eh?
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Then how do I engage my Retirement Time just over a year into it? Read. Type. Study. Look up stuff online. Sit, write. Mainly sit. Walk some, though gnats invaded my eyes yesterday, so that's on hold except for walking in stores - - or sometimes the garage, not my favorite stroll. Watch water traffic coasting by 7H porch. This morning, wait for the demo team.
Oh: detective work! Still thinking about History Class Brewing Co.'s post of a building annotated "Harrison & 4th St. 1911, it occurred to me to look at the picture again. On the left side of the building there's a sidewalk with a man walking this way in the background, four young women posing for the camera, two low-spreading tree branching out, and several automobiles. There's a problem, see? 1911 was the "brass era" of automobiles, and the four cars that I can see are way later than that, therefore the picture was taken some years after 1911. Could be early to mid-nineteen-twenties.
Also, while the picture is said to be a Gulf station, I can't find a Gulf Oil sign, and the front of the building does not appear to be set up for cars to drive up to refuel. And I can't identify a gas pump anyway, not with confidence.
If the photo does indeed show a filling station at Harrison & 4th a century or so ago, it's not unlikely, with gasoline storage tanks already sunk, to be the NE corner where the Texaco station was when I was at Bay High.
There's plenty of room for discussion about where and what the building was, and when the photo was taken, nomesane?
Anyway, it's not my picture. Maybe I'll leave it alone now, unless I decide to come back and try to ID any of the cars. The first two cars may be Model T Fords, but the third car is not, it could be a different make car, but if that third car's a Ford it's not a Model T but a Model A, which is 1928 or later.
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Some years ago there was a web posting that purported to show churches across the street from each other going back and forth at each about with their street signs, about whether dogs go to heaven. It all proved a ruse when someone looked down the street and pointed out that the same car was in the same spot all those supposed weeks that the church argument was going on!
You have to look at more than just what's on the page. A person does that in Bible study. For example, dating Moses' bronze serpent. Bronze is made by melting tin and brass, a process most unlikely to have been available to Moses in the wilderness; composed long afterward, the story has Time problems that open up other questions. Does it matter? It depends on how interested you are and, if you are interested, how willing you are to have an open mind.
The ancients believed that above the earth and below the earth was all water, the earth sitting on pillars to hold it up out of the water beneath the earth, and the firmament of the blue bowl that we call sky holding back the waters above the earth. No amount of belief or fervency makes anything true.
What is Truth? IDK, discoveries are still being made.
Pax anyway.
RSF&PTL
T89&c