Osso, it'd be a nice full-circle for me. I was helped to ABQ 15 years ago. It'd be fun to help you in return.
by the way, a cool chaco site with a link to a animation of the sun-daggers:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/chaco/flash.html
LittleK, you are an absolute doll. We'll see how things pan out. My actual move won't be for a few months - lot of things to line up - though I am finally in gear. I have been the Grand Aquisitor, and am into present deaquisition mode.
Trips to the Salvation Army (they take books), to St. Vincent's (they take clothes, kitchen stuff), Target (I am packing a lot in plastic boxes so I can see what the hell is in them - I've grown to despise miserable cardboard boxes from my last move), trips to work where I've packed all my landarch binders bla bla blah. Tradsies re our work computer and scanner and printer and photocopier and drafting table and fax machine yadda yadda. Time for a drink.
yikes, take the time for a drink.....
One good thing, our studio and gallery are next door to an art framer. Their trash is a wonderful source of big cardboard boxes, say, mat board size - good for packing paintings. Urg, I am stripping some canvasses off the stretchers and rolling them. Have some of my work up now for way low prices, something I don't ordinarily do. No bites, except for three, including my favorite, which I marked up another six hundred since I almost prefer not to sell it. But no money in hand from that yet, just a serious maybe.
Oh, it's hopeless, I should start an osso moving thread and leave Chaco in peace. But, I am not quite ready to do that thread (have to be in the mood...).
Oh, and I nabbed a great bit of styrofoam packing from the art framer trash - perfect for ceramic stuff....
(Osso, the busy bee, when she isn't fooling around on a2k.)
On Chaco, littleK, that is a great weblink...
Sun dagger very cool, even if it doesn't quite work any more. Love those things, those patient people watching the sky at night.
Read about some old crazy monarch (or emir, or whatever) in what's now Uzbekistan who wasn't into the usual horses-and-axes-and-palaces thing and built a big observatory out on the plain, with huge minaret-like markers on a platform that could be rotated like a huge lazy susan. Made some amazing observations for his day, apparently, but didn't have any success in getting the word out.
Then his neighbors knocked over his place while he was away and somebody or other deposed him. The usual stuff...
Miss K, amazing link, I love it, the last time I was there (before this past week) it had snowed the night before but it was a brilliant sunny morning with 2 to 4 inches of snow everwhere. I was the only one around and I just wandered among the stoneworks agog.
Hmmmm.... have I said, today, that I love the SW?
Pdog - that guy sounds cool. So, he was deposed, was he killed?
I'll have to go look in the book...
Oh, that sounds completely terrific.
<that re Chaco with light snow>
Pdog - don't bother! I was just curious.
>crossing fingers<
i can be there next week... :-)
I will take some wonderful landscape photos.
The dude was Ulugbek, grandson of Timur, or "Timur the Lame," or "Tamburlaine" (sp?), who was a right bastard.
Quote:With amazing exactness made the calculation of the length of star year, which by Ulugbek's calculation is equal to 365 days 6 hours 10 minutes 8 seconds. Actual length of star year by modern data is 365 days 6 hours 9 minutes 9,6 seconds. Thus the mistake is only less that one minute.
http://www.advantour.com/uzbekistan/samarkand/observatory.htm
From "Chasing the Sea" (Tom Bissell) (mildly recommended):
Quote:Undoubtedly catching a whif of weakness from the Astronomer King, a leader more inclined to study eclipses while composing verse than to fight, Uzbeks raided Smarkand in 1449, destroying Ulugbek's beloved porcelain tower and incinerating his art and book collection. Ulugbek was in Herat at the time of the ransacking, but upon his return to Samarkand his response proved so tepid that his own court, which included his thieving and conniving sun, Abdul Latif, whose release from prison Ulugbek has recently secured, turned against him. ... Loyalists sent their king on a pilgrimage to Mecca, which they hoped would clear Ulugbek's head and restore him in the eyes of his enemies. But mercenaries dispatched by Abdul Latif met Ulugbek in a village a few miles outside of Samarkand and beheaded him. ... Abdul Latif was himself murdered only six months later by one of Ulugbek's faithful servants, his head exhibited upon the madrasa named for his father. Thus the Timurids' empire began its distintegrating decline, thanks in no small part to the Uzbeks who now inexpicably claim them.
Sorry for the longer-than-expected digression...
Wanna go to NM...
Cheese, Ulugbek was probably very depressed....
patiodog wrote:Wanna go to NM...
Like reading about it, but the thought of all that dry heat, and no great lake or ocean scares me. Really.
dry heat good. wet heat bad. great lakes make wet heat. grrrr.
dys lives/loves dry heat. Meeting the Dys is worth the pain.
Well, ehBeth, I relate to that. I have thought of myself as claustrophobic if inland of an ocean, never mind lakes or rivers, oceans. The Pacific is in my veins. However, we all know how gaga I became over italy and its history, and I never noticed when I was there if I was near the Tyrennian sea or the Adriatic, which I mostly wasn't.
I move to Abq not least because of the complex strata of history - I am already engaged in it. I know I will always crave CA by the water. Eureka is, in its way, a jewel of a place to live. But I will visit the Pacific, perhaps more readily financially than I visit LA and SD and SF, and pals there, now. But you are spot on, ehBeth, that is an underlying fright for me.
