Springfield, OH photos

The Westcott House visit

This is the first photo that I took of the house, standing on the corner of Main Street and Greenmount Avenue. Main Street features several large, impressive homes that Lynda and I enjoyed while driving to the Westcott House.

We drove past the house on our first attempt to find it because I was expecting a larger house. The house is still an obvious Wright Prairie Style home, but it is not as rectangularly wide on this face as the other Prairie Style home I have visited. The property lot is deep going back, but not wide on the side facing Main Street.

The large planter urn that is featured in the middle of this picture is notable for being the largest such urn that Wright ever used in a private residence of his design. He did use similar large urns in his Imperial Hotel design in Japan made around this time. More on this topic later.

Here is another view of the "front" of the house--the side facing Main Street. You can see the two large urns that I mentioned before. And you can get a good sense of the Prairie Style home--long, rectangular, flat-roofed, sort of stacked.

I wish this picture gave you a better sense of the red awning that comes out of the front wall of the house. The red awning that you can see above the windows is connected to the house with rods that run back into the wall. On these rods, other red swags are draped. These drapes are mechanized to be remotely opened when people are out on the patio sitting area. The drapes form several soft, u-shaped folds that provide a nice shaded effect. The patio can be reached from two doors, one on the right side that leads from the reception room. The door on the left leads into the dining room. The windows on the second floor are the bedrooms for Mr. and Mrs. Westcott.

This is the long colonnade wall the runs from the back of the house, along Greenmount Avenue. It connects the kitchen area of the house to the old carriage house/car garage. Now that outbuilding is the gift shop. On the other side of the wall is the back yard and small garden.

You can see the smaller planter urns on this wall that are more typical of Wright's designs. You can also get a hint of the growing influence of Japanese architectural designs on Wright's style. The Westcott house was built in 1904.

The house was in extremely bad shape when it was bought by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy and the Westcott House Organization. (You can see a very short video that shows some of the house's decrepitude here.) The building had been cut up into apartments for several decades. One of the tour docents now used to live in one of the apartments. It took five years and almost $6 million to restore the house to its current state.

I would have taken more pictures, but they don't let you photograph inside. But you should make the short drive and see it for yourself.

Cotton pictures #3

(#63)


(#66)

Cotton pictures #2

(#55)


(#60)


(#62)

Cotton pictures #1

(#50)


(#51)


(#52)


(#53)

box cover

Fall 2006

Bippity Boppity Boo Book

front page

1 and 2

3 and 4

5 and 6

7 and 8

9 and 10

11 and 12

13 and 14

end page

More of Sarah's art

another map

the homies

pilgrims progress

and bears

map

Polyhidrosis: (n): excessive secretion of perspiration. EXAMPLE--One familiiar health club problem is the fellow with a bad case of polyhidrosis who has yet to discover the communal benefits of wiping the equipment after using it.

See . . . I told you!

The canyon is pretty big. You can tell because I have provided some helpful perspective in this image. (Yep, those are people on that rock ourcropping.)
The canyon is SO big, you might be tempted to call it Grand. (You may do so if you wish.)


Sarah battled the immense size of the canyon by using binoculars, which, I am told, made it easier to see fine details far off in the distance. And, as I have tried to indicate prior to now, binoculars are helpful when confronted with a natural phenomenon as phenomenally vast as the canyon.

When confronted with something so enormous, all you can do is stand tall and face it with a resolute mind and face.


"Can you spell vast, Sarah? V-A-S-T. Good. I knew that you could."

Scenes from a rest area

Kids, after all, are kids. That often means their tiny little bladders can't take the hard slog of road miles like the adults can. That often translates into frequent stops. So, take advantage of it.
If you find yourself stuck between places, trying to get from somewhere not so interesting and attempting to get somewhere that is much more interesting, then take cute pictures of cute girls when you get the chance. (Especially if they enjoy posing.)

Yes, there are many wonderous things that you can find at a roadside rest area. Not all of them are cute kids. Some of them are of a decidedly different nature.

Like informative plackards that honor obscure but vitally important highway engineers! Yep, I guess this dude would have figured prominently in my dissertation . . . if I had ever gotten around to writing it, huh?

Departure temperature

Welcome to Arizona eastlanders!

Here, as you can see (in the hellhole that is Phoenix) it is 96 degrees at 8 o'clock in the morning.

Here, we are departing our Phoenix hotel and heading several thousand feet into the air to visit that wonderous natural formation, the Grand Canyon.

You might have heard of it; it's a pretty large hole in the ground. Opinions are mixed about how the hole got there and what exactly caused it to form. But, I'm here to tell you that it exists. I even took pictures of it, which I will show you shortly.

Tombstone, AZ

Wedding night and beyond

The wedding took place in the early evening, in a botanical garden in FBs old neighborhood--the same neighborhood that the previous day's rehearsal dinner was held in.

The chairs overlooked a small hillside that gave a nice vista to the gardens below. Everything was in bloom and very pretty.






We all sat very somberly and serenely as people tend to do at weddings. It wouldn't do to act like a fool or something during a most important moment in a friends life. (That sort of thing only happens in movies, I reckon.) But once the wedding was over, the fun and merriment could begin. After wandering through the receiving line and wishing the happy couple all good things, we headed downhill into the shade (mercifully!) to get refreshing drinks and wander the botanical garden grounds while dinner was being set up.





See . . . dignified! That's how you act at weddings!




















During my perusal of the rose garden portion of the botanical grounds, it seems that Jack snapped my picture from afar. He immediately termed these my "JFK photos" and I have to agree. I purposefully changed the images to black and white to make them seem more portentous, but I think you can imagine me in the Oval Office (or the Rose Garden I suppose), drinking a whiskey sour (or something) and deciding how best to teach those commies a nuclear lesson they wouldn't soon forget.

Anyway . . . there was a nice dinner, interesting conversations with Spec's and FB's old friends and much dancing and merriment. Since I am not a dancer by trade or by nature, I didn't participate that much in this phase of the evening. Spec (bless him) drug me out there for one dance, but I mostly left it to the more skilled, the more enthusiastic, etc. I really couldn't afford to sweat through my shirt and suit coat much more. It was rather humid that evening.

Just trust me that we all had a good time. I didn't take pictures of the reception . . . sorry.

The next day, before we hit the road back to C-town, we stopped to have brunch with those that remained. It was a nice, relaxed atmosphere back in Chestnutt Hill, talking a bit more with everyone and preparing to say our goodbyes.

For me, it was a nice step out of my normal husband, parent routine. I am extremely grateful to Lynda for allowing me to go and spending the whole of a holiday weekend without me.

And thanks of course go to Jack, Cordelia, and Raisinette for their companionship, driving skills, music, and everything else that made it a fun trip there and back again.


Final thanks and best wishes for many, many happy years together go to FuzzyBlu and Spec who invited me and put on a great weekend.