Long time, no bloggy. Hmmm.
Went to our traditional Thanksgiving trip; Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Iowa with the extended Mineart family. Almost everyone was there – something like 48 family members all in the same house at the same time. Yep. I took lots of photos; most from the trip are up on Flickr.
While we were there, we drove out to Eldon, Iowa to see the little house from the famous Grant Woods painting American Gothic, and took photos of us in front of the house. (Obviously, you can see one of them a few posts down.) I’ve been wanting to do that for years. The house is designated an historic landmark owned by the state of Iowa, and this year the state opened a visitor’s center/museum near the house so you can find out more about the painting and get help getting your picture taken. The proceeds from the center help pay for the maintenance of the house, which is nice. And the volunteers there are pretty fun-loving and enjoy tongue-in-cheek parodies of the painting.
A few years back, I read “American Gothic : The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece” so I knew a lot of the background of the painting, but the museum was really interesting, and it makes me want to go back and read it again. Strangely, I know I wrote a review of the book for my blog, but it’s not coming up in my searches. Hmmm.
Speaking of Flickr and photographs, I finished uploading all of the digital photos I have to Flickr. I still have a lot of captioning and tagging to do, but they are in sets in roughly chronological order going backwards to September, 2000 when I bought my first digital camera. I also need to pull significant events into sets, as well, and then embed galleries throughout my site. I have some of that done, but not nearly enough. I had quite a nostalgic time going through all my old photos. And a bit of a sad time, too, coming across photos of our friend Joe. I have more of him I haven’t added to that set, but I stopped hunting for them after awhile because it made me too unhappy. I’ll have to complete that task later.