On my way home, I decided to stop at an abandoned industrial scale that looked interesting to me:

Front of Building

Rear of Building

Overgrowth

Inside: "Scales Closed Forever! Thank You For 9 yrs.
Joe, Rose"

A Nearby Train

Since I’m supposed to be off today, I only worked half a day. So, with a few hours to kill, I decided to take a drive down old Hempstead Highway. I noticed the highway has a lot of rundown buildings that looked like they were left over from the 70s and 80s and thought I’d check them out:

At the Car Wash

Car Ash

The Machine

Waiting room looks like it’s waiting for customers

The BBQ Place

Interesting abandoned structure

Menu is intact; trays sit just inside of the window

The Barber’s Strip

Barbershop on the corner. Note the intact Barber pole

Inside the Barber Shop. Note the filled spray-bottle

Whatever this used to be, it’s now a fern garden

At the End of the Road

Hempstead Highway ends just after Beltway 8. At the end of the road the highway becomes particularly junky. However, the wisteria vines add just a hint of color to an otherwise dreary scene. To me, it looked like nature was feebly trying to rebel against the litter:

Yesterday I saw something I’ve not seen in years:

You know, I even have one of those silver-head 101 KLOL t-shirts in the back of my closet. After Clearchanel bought it, didn’t they turn 101 into a Tajano station?

I spotted this old house today. I pass by it all the time, but I’ve just never seen it before today:

This old house is located just inside the loop on the West side close to I-10. The place even has a 1980-era car parked in the drive.

Did you know that there’s a ghost town just a few hundred feet from downtown Houston? Well, neither did I. Carolyn and I were out riding bikes today and we road near downtown and came across an area of old (as in, turn of the last century) abandoned buildings. Some of the structures were obviously built in the 20s and 30s, but several were well over 100 year old.

I later found out that what we were seeing was what remains of Freedman’s Town. Freedman’s Town, (AKA, the Fourth Ward) was Houston’s Harlem in the 1920s. The town was settled by freed slaves in the 1800s and was very prosperous until the town fell into disarray as the “Houston Harlem” socialites got older. By the 1970s, Freedman’s Town had become a ghetto. In the 1990s, a gentrification effort was undertaken and most of the original Freedman’s Town structures were bulldozed… but a few buildings remain and here they are:

I think this old schoolhouse is amazing! I hope that it doesn’t wind up bulldozed. So many of the structures seem to be awaiting the demolition team. I’m sure as soon as they are gone, developers will waste no time building more of the partial board monstrosities that have sprung up all across what was once Freedman’s Town.

Carolyn and I decided to go to on of the old cemeteries on Galveston. What follows are some pictures I took while we were there:

- Carolyn sitting on a tombstone.

- A close-up of grave moss

Below are some pics I took of the gravyard…

- This is a statue of Jesus and baby… with their heads cut off.

- This was interesting… yet disturbing. Yes, those are very large snales.

The graveyard had many of these aboveground mausoleums. This one was quite interesting:

- Walking up to it.

- On the side of it

- A close-up of the weeds that are growing out of the concrete roof.

… This is the back. There was a hole where a window was at one time. I wanted to know what was inside these things…

… So, I walked up to it, and stuck my arms and camera all the way in and took a few pics:

And… this is inside the  mausoleum next to the one above:

I got the above pics because there was a space wide enough to stick my camera into to get some shots.

Carolyn and I went out to Bear Creak park on Sunday. It was the first day that I really felt like myself again. While we were out I got a few interesting shots:

You can see more at my TH album HERE.

As I said in my last blog, I can feel the anticipation building as I move closer to next month and dealing with the 3 separate grants + moving + programmatic setup(s). I decided that I would get out of Houston and go camping for a couple of days. You know, I think it’s been more than 20 years since I’ve been camping : /

On my way to the campgrounds, I ran across some creepy places… so you know I had to stop and take pictures!

First, I found a cool abandoned motor lodge:

‘

And, I had to peek inside…

I was amazed to find that one closet was full of 1960s/70s era clothes:

Here’s the Motel sign. I wish I could make out the name,

Then I found an abandoned house. This one looked too rickety to risk going in though:

So, here’s some pics of the campground:

Here’s me at the campfire:

Warming up my feet:

Oh yah, almost I forgot. I ran across what seemed to be an old family graveyard while I was out. So, you know I had to check that out:

I liked this name: Hudson Oliphint.

I love when I run across folksy epitaphs: “No pains, no griets, no anxious fear, can reach our loved one sleeping here.”

So, it was really, really nice to run way for a couple of days. My first day kinda sucked because the people next to me were incapable of shutting the hell up! They brought a baby (who wouldn’t shut up crying), a dog (that wouldn’t shut up barking), 3 teens (who played music and wouldn’t shut up) and to top it off, their parents were kinda pathetic. The father would ask the kids to do something and when they wouldn’t, the mother would screech and scream at them – at which point they would screech and scream and the mother and the mother would loudly bemoan the fact that she didn’t have 3 abortions and then the teens would go back to what they were (loudly) doing. They didn’t shut up until 11.

When it got dark, I took my telescope and drove down to the edge of the water to do some stargazing. The sky was kinda hazy, so I wasn’t able to get a good look at Jupiter. However, since the moon wasn’t full, I was able to take a really close look at the surface of the moon (I didn’t have a moon filter). I could sit looking at the moon for hours and hours!

Anyway, my neighbors packed up Monday and I was left with nothing but peace and quite. Ah… it was so nice! I hiked for several miles and basically did a lot of communing with nature. My tent roof is mesh without the rain covering, so I was able to lay in my bed and gaze up at the trees and stars. It was all so beautiful, I started to weep. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to spend this much time with nature; I feel as if my batteries were recharged!

I had to take off earlier than I wanted to since I had a 3 PM appointment with the Havens Center representative at the Path of Tea. I had lunch from the Field of Greens and before my appointment, Rudy What’s-His-Name (I think he’s a coach of something in Houston) came in for a business meeting. I thought I’d get a pic cus’ I thought that it would be funny to have the big bad coach of a pro sports team getting a pic (even if it is a horrid post-camping photo) with a tranny

This is a little piece of an actual photo taken by Hubble and released to the public by NASA on Jan. 5th.

Yah, that’s all “whatever” you say? What is SO COOL about this photo is that this is a photo of the dark part of the sky. If you look at your fingernail and take 1/10th of its size and use that measurement when you look at the darkest part of the night sky – the dark part that looks like there is absolutly nothing there – this is what you’d find: 7,500 galaxies:

Click here for the actual picture – the above is just a little piece of the actual photo.

When you look this deep into space, we are viewing the past… Some of the galaxies in that photo (the red ones) are from just after the “Big Bang”. What you see in the photo is the actual creation of the universe as we know it. It is like looking at the mind of god (in a completely pantheistic way, of course).

<rant> When I hear people say that a god used magic to poof everything into existence so that human life could only exist on this one little planet so that he could reveal himself to a remote, primitive and illiterate desert dwelling people (instead of an advance civilianization like China or Greece) – I want to pull out my hair. That attitude seems to miss that beauty, magnificence and sacred (again meant in a completely pantheistic way) truth of the fleeting immensity of it all. When I look at this stuff, I feel… well, I almost feel rapture.  As Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”</rant>

Anyway, this is a land breaking photo – kinda like the photo we took of the creation of the universe a few years ago by the COBE and WMAP satellites. It gives us a better understanding of the process of assembling galaxies.

I noticed a couple of stupid signs this week and I thought I’d share…

“Save Money Live Better Stop Sinning Live 4 Jesus” - Because you too can find yourself spending your afternoons standing in the middle a busy Houston road,  waving incoherent signs at people.

Religion tuned this poor man into a walking bumper sticker, unable to understand that his time would be better spent with his family, volunteering at a shelter, hospice or hospital.

“Houston Center for Photography Center” - The Center for Redundancy Center

As I was heading out the door yesterday morning, I was greeted by that little squirrel that hangs out near my porch. I thought she might be hungry, so I went back inside to get some bird seed to put out. I keep the feeder under the stairs on the other side of my porch wall. I walked over to the feeder and filled it… with this squirrel at my heels. I walked back into my apartment without a look back because I thought the squirrel would be eating about then. After putting up the seed, I turned around to see:

Apparently, she followed me back inside.

I was able to get right up to her. Anyway, this squirrel followed me out the door and across the parking lot, to my car and only scampered away when I got inside of my car.

Well, I thought it was kind of strange. Carolyn insisted that I give it a name, so I picked Doris… Actually, her full name would be “Doris The Squirrel.” Gowd I am so dorky.