Lights in the Darkness

On Saturday (7-10) I thought it would be nice to take Amy out for the afternoon. Nothing fancy or expensive, just some old fashioned Indy exploration. Sometimes I like to look for interesting places that I've passed by a hundred times but never seem to find the actual time to visit. The Morris-Butler House Museum is one of those types of places.



The house was built between 1864-65 in the Old Northside Historic District of Indianapolis. It's a block or two west of College & 13th. There are tours scheduled every hour. The cost is $5 per adult. Amy & I were the only ones on the tour.

The Morris-Butler museum had been restored as close to its original state as possible and it was quite beautiful. However, one of the rules was that photography was ok, using a flash was not. I didn't have a tripod, and it was pretty dark in there so I was bummed that I wasn't going to get any interesting photos...


But then I saw the first of many beautiful hand painted or etched glass encasements for the lighting and thought it could be fun to do a little series of these colorful beacons in the dark Victorian mansion.



In 1964, the house was nearly destroyed to make way for I-70 when Eli Lilly intervened in and provided funding for restoration. Apparently he grew up a block or two away from the house and had known the Butlers and was quite fond of the building.



The house was then open to the public in 1969. The Indiana Landmarks Society staffs the house for tours and hosts events and art galleries. Hoosier Salon has a gallery in the basement.


We spent about an hour there walking and chatting with the tour guide about life back then, and had a really great time. It may have been one of the more memorable ten bucks I spent this summer (aside from cliff diving)





After the house tour, we continued down to the Mass Ave. district which ended up being a really great time too. I'll maybe blog about that in the near future if I find the time.

Noblenight

Got a little bit restless the other night and decided to snap some night time photos of Noblesville, Indiana.

It was a good time.

Click on the photos to see full size.

Alley & Main

Ghost Walkers

Dali-esque

Death's Door

Hardware on the Square

Blur

Syd's Bar - Fine Foods

Stars Stripes Stars

Syd's Too

Go Jump Off A Cliff...

You'll be glad you did.

So this event actually occurred a few weeks ago from today (6/24/10), but it was so much fun that I need to put it in the blog for a documentary of the summer of 2010.

I'm talking about cliff diving at White Rocks aka Triples in St. Paul Indiana. St. Paul is a little town of about 1000 people that's located on the border of Shelbyville and Decatur counties.

Here's a shot of the downtown. This is the post office/liquor store.

White Rock is an old quarry that filled up with water. There are three diving platforms, a 10, 20 and 30 footer, a zip line, and a rope swing. You get to sign your life away on a waiver in the case that something catastrophic happens...danger always makes things seem more fun.

Zip Line

Roll call was Amy, myself, Aaron, Luke, Tessa, Dustin from the Burgh, Nick C., a guy named Scotty, a guy named Cunningham and his girl, and that was it more or less. We packed our coolers (Amy and I went way overboard) with food and drink, spread out some blankets and proceeded to get that special kind of sunburn that you can only get with sun and water.

Amy never learned how to swim properly, and that was going to be a problem since there is no place in the quarry you can stand on your own two feet. We decided that the life vest "diaper" style would be the best option for us. If you've never done this, just put your legs in the place where your arms are supposed to be buckle the vest around your waist and hop in! You bob like a cork with your head and shoulders above the water. It's not comely on the land, but is is pure slacker heaven on a lake or quarry. Check out the photo...I don't know that guy, but Amy would never let me take picture of her like that. I don't blame her, I wouldn't want one of me either.

Well there was plenty of swimming and diving and eating and hacky-sacking. As we were playing some guy said "Hey, 1998 just called and said that hacky sack wasn't even cool back then".

Hilarious.

The highlight of the trip for me though was Amy mustering up the courage to jump off of one of the diving platforms. This was awesome because when we first got into the water, I had to practically pry her off of the pier so we could actually swim. That's my girl!

I hope to get out there once more before summer is over. You should come.

Auto Ornamentation

I live in a very quaint little town called Noblesville which is about 25 miles from the very center of the city of Indianapolis. After living here for several years, it sometimes seems as though the old downtown hasn't changed over the last one hundred years or so (even though the surrounding area is being developed at a rapid rate).

There are train tracks that cut right down the middle of a main street which are actually used by a passenger train that runs throughout the summer. There's an old fashioned ice cream shop, a hardware store that sells things that you can't get anymore, there's a sketchy bar with the worlds largest shuffleboard table and a pinball game, a few antique stores, and some great restaurants.

And then there is a grand old courthouse/clock tower a la "Back to the Future" standing in the middle of it all. Sometimes I feel like I'm living on the set of Mayberry RFD or maybe like I'm in the middle of a Mellencamp song if that's even possible.

To further corroborate the anachronistic look and feel of Noblesville, a fleet of classic cars drive to the old courthouse square faithfully every Saturday throughout the summer. The owners of the cars usually pop open the trunks and the hoods in order to let casual strollers admire the design, handiwork, restoration prowess, mechanical marvelry, and the overall beauty of their classic automobiles. Personally I've really never been the mechanical handy type, and know absolutely nothing about car repair/maintenance, but I just can't seem to get over the design of these great cars. Heck, I don't even remember the make or models of most of the cars, but I do have at least a hundred snapshots of some of the fantastic details of these classics. The cars themselves are a work of art. I thought I'd share a few of my favorite pics.

So if you ever find yourself in Noblesville on a Saturday evening, make sure you head over to the courthouse square for a little peak at some old fashioned living. And make sure you come look for me, I'm about a block and a half away from it all and love to have company.




Click on the photos if you'd like to see them full size.

Crappy Lappy

I've loved the sound of a pedal steel for years. Always a bit mystified by the instrument. There are so many levers and switches, strings, pedals, weird tunings etc. that I think I was a bit intimidated.

The instrument is not just for country music either. One of my most favorite surprises was to hear some pedal steel on a Bad Religion (punk) song. I can also recall hearing some great work on a Cake record (alternative rock) a while back.

Anyway, I finally talked my good friend Brandon into digging his out from underneath his pool table which was blocked by a sea of guitar cases. I've know him for about three years and been to his place to jam too many times to count, but he never got out the ol' Showbud Pedal Steel. To much to mess around with to get it out and set up I guess. I've asked him about it on and off, but to no avail.

Well for some reason I brought it up again and his fiance, Brooke, said "Get it out!" and I said "Yeah! do that!" And he kind of sounded like he was maybe possibly thinking about it (but not really). After about five minutes of dawdling Brooke said "Get it out!" and I said "Yeah! do that!" once again and then the magic happened. We pulled it out and put it together and plugged it in.

Man, oh man. What an amazing instrument. I thought that the accordion was complicated. It's got nothin on the pedal steel. I felt like a moron trying to play it. However, I got inspired and decided to take one of my junker guitars and turn it into a poor man's lap steel. I got the fancy nut that you slip over the top of the original nut and the Shubb Pearse brand SP2 slide. I suppose that I'm hoping that I'll take some baby steps on a lap and work my way up to a pedal someday.

I've never really taken to playing bottleneck slide style, but I think I might really like the lap style. So here are a few pics of the stuff I bought and a video of my poor skills as a first day lap player.

First Post

Here it is, my first blog post. Why am I blogging? Well, two reasons I suppose. My lovely wife Amy put the bug in my ear to blog (she recently started her own with a much cooler name than mine). Secondly I have a notoriously bad memory, and I need an additional storage facility.

I hope to document the past, present and future on a regular basis, complete with photos, audio & video. We'll see though. I'm pretty sure I'll be enthusiastic at first and then forget about it after a while. I'm kind of like that. Dinner calls...