Tag Archives: Grand Tour

Art and Culture, Writing

A Grand Tour

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Imbolc                             Waning Wild Moon

I took folks on a Grand Tour at the MIA this afternoon, seeing objects from the historical period 1600-1850.  I expanded the Grand Tour idea and took it beyond the confines of Italy and France to include North America, Africa and Asia.  The folks on the tour, five, Allison and four women together, and I traveled the world in a little over an hour.

One of the women, an ICU nurse at Southdale, said of Lucretia, she looks she’s trying to stabilize herself.  This from a person who sees people in extremis every day at work.  I’m inclined to believe now that Lucretia is stabilizing herself.  This same woman, a practical woman of science and data, she described herself this way, has a son who has begun to study the Middle Ages.  She seemed a bit puzzled by his choice and wondered about just what the Middle Ages were.  Allison gave the group a pitch about bringing in friends for tours and she wondered about organizing a tour of medieval art, to learn more about what her son had chosen to study.

The tour at 1 o’clock breaks up the day though and I got a late nap and didn’t get on the treadmill until 6 pm.  The writing this  morning was fine, but the time was too short.  When I  write I like to have a clear morning and time for a nap in the afternoon.  Not so today.  I’m now over 50,000 words into the new novel, which should be about midway.  Revision and changes along the way could change that of course.

Art and Culture, Dogs, GeekWorld

The Grand Tour

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

Met the Grout Doctor today.  Turns out he wears a yellow weatherproof  jacket, very new jeans and rubber duckies.  Allan came by to give us an estimate on what it would take to rehabilitate some aching tiles and bring that new installation gleam back to the steam bath.  More than I’d imagined, but less than we were willing to pay, so Allan will return on Thursday to get started.  Gonna give the whole shebang an acid bath.  Sounds very Hannibal Lecter to me.

Fiddled with the new Panasonic camera we got today, too.  The number of things it can do amaze me.  It can focus on an object and then retain focus on that object as it moves.  How can it do that?  If you turn a little switch, it will shoot HD quality video using any of the settings it has for still photography.  How can do it that?  The twelve megapixels it shoots my buddy Jim Johnson tells me is just at the minimal range of what magazines expect in photos.  Well, at least the camera’s good enough for the pro mags.  I haven’t shot any images with it yet.  I want to devote a day or so to using all the various gadgets, learn how it performs.

Also put together an 8 object tour for next Friday, the public tour  Highlights:  Art from 1600-1850.  My theme is the Grand Tour, which was popular in that time frame.  In my Grand Tour though we will visit all but the Australian continent, while retaining the traditional focus on European art of France, Italy and the Low Countries.  I’ve begun to use the new Grove Dictionary of Art.  It has depth and breadth.  It taught me today about the Grand Tour and the various phases through which it passed before finally dying out as the middle-class began to travel more.  Just wasn’t the same with all those shopkeepers in the Uffizi.

Put in more words to the Unmaking.  I’m close to the middle, maybe a bit passed it.  We’ll see how it is after I finish and it sits on the shelf for a while.  Then I’ll have a better view of it.  Right now it’s so close to me, I can’t tell anything.

And Vega came inside limping tonight.  Limping makes us take deep breaths, because it can mean the onset of cancer, has meant the onset of cancer in at least three of our dogs.  On the other hand it might be an injury.  We hope.