Blog Archives
The Dairy Queen
I went to college in a town that was an eight hour drive from home (In a Pinto. In a Pinto without an air conditioner. But that’s another topic). A drive that long required several restroom breaks, and small town Dairy Queens were the preferred place to stop. We’d skip the one in Post, as it was only 45 minutes away, but Sweetwater, Abilene, Eastland, Dublin, Hico, Meridian, Waco, Hearne, all the way to College Station – we knew ’em all. Of course, protocol demanded (Yes! Demanded. Protocol doesn’t “suggest.”) that we make a purchase when we stopped. So we’d get a Coke (in the vernacular, “Coke” referenced any carbonated beverage), thus ensuring yet another stop at another Dairy Queen somewhere further down the road.
But they weren’t there just for travelers. Dairy Queens were popular with residents in those little towns we drove through. The Rotary Club might meet there, or the Lions. Most teenagers worked there, and all of them hung out there. Families went there after church, or before a football game. The DQs would be decorated in the school colors, with mascot names painted on the windows. They were so much a part of town it was hard to imagine that someday they’d disappear.
Here’s an article from The Atlantic that’s got some photographs of Texas Dairy Queens.
This one, though, has gone away. It won’t return. You can tell by looking.
Earth, Texas
photographed 5.24.2013
An unfortunate name
I don’t think choosing a name that includes the word “fear” was a good idea for a hair salon, but maybe I am just being too sensitive.
Am I missing a hair-related pun? You know, something along the lines of The Hair Em, Julius Scissor Hair Design, or Hair Force One (all actual names)?
Or am I still freaking out from that one bad perm back in the 80s? (Also: is the term “bad perm” redundant? What about “bad pun”? Also redundant? Judges?)
Clovis, New Mexico
photographed 5.25.2013
Building elevations and shadows
Back when I was in architecture school (Yes! I was in architecture school!) my favorite thing to draw was shadow lines on building elevations. I loved to calculate the angle of shadows and the different shapes they’d be. The fact that this was my favorite part of architecture school explains why I went to graduate school and studied something else.
But it will also probably explain why even now – a LOT of years after architecture school – I photograph all these building elevations. And you can thank (or not, depending) Professor Ric Vrooman at Texas A&M University for making us draw shadows accurately, based on actual sun angles at actual building locations, instead of taking the easy way out and using a 30° triangle to strike shadows across our drawings. It was from him that I learned to love a nice building elevation with good shadows.
(He also made us cut our presentation boards down so they maintained the Golden Mean ratio, which was actually sort of a pain in the ass. Good with the bad, I suppose.)
Clovis, New Mexico
photographed 5.25.2013
Air Conditioning
Another town, another alley.
The thing that caught my eye here was that air conditioner and the way it broke up the rhythm of the arched, boarded doors and windows.
Which reminded me of my childhood home. It was cooled by one of these kinds of units, which work by the cooling effects of air blowing across water. We called them evaporative coolers, or evap coolers; in New Mexico they are known as swamp coolers, for reasons that escape me since the state is relatively swamp-free and anyway, these things don’t work if it’s humid outside. (I’ll let Wikipedia explain it in a lot more detail.)
When these coolers first come on, for just a minute the air smells like the first drops of a rain shower. I remember that smell, and the white-noise effect of the fan, and the way my mom always opened the window in the front bedroom just a little bit to draw the cooled air through, and how I could sit on the porch and feel that air blowing through the window screens.
Amherst, Texas
photographed 5.24.2013
