Something A Little Different

The picture below is the United Methodist Church in downtown St. Pete. Nothing is truly old down here, since this area is fairly new as far as towns go. The church was built in 1926 and they spend quite a little fortune in stained glass windows. I noticed an ad for a tour of the windows every Wednesday morning, which included a rather large rendition of DaVinci's The Last Supper, and it was free, so why not? I thought stain glass pictures would be difficult to take, but it wasn't.

It wasn't a large crowd, only 4 of us, but they were chatty so I didn't have to be. The windows today are on either side of the chapel. The ones to the right get the morning sun, the ones to the left, the afternoon. They have been valued at over a million dollars and are protected on the outside by lexan. They have not been cleaned in decades.

I like stained glass and not so surprisingly, I learned quite a bit about the making and designing of panes. First, stained glass is not smooth like your kitchen window. Stained glass is manhandled during the process, kind of like icing a cake to make the colors lighter/darker, richer, etc.

In most classic stained glass religious windows, Christ is wearing white for purity, or red, for the blood he sacrificed. These windows represent the chronological life of Christ.

John the Baptist is baptising Christ and using a sea shell, another recurrent feature in many windows. The shell represents an "eternal" element.

The sheep represent the meek and passive, while the evergreen in the back is another symbol of the eternal.

The windows themselves are reproductions of famous European windows. These were made by a company in Ohio. Imagine the shipping necessary to get these from there to Florida in the 20's.

The golden medallion halo was a popular Medieval painting feature.

I thought my camera did a pretty good job of capturing the lights and colors of the windows.

The lily becomes a theme in many depictions and we again, see the evergreen on the hillside, as Christ emerges from the burial cave.

This one really caught my eyes mostly because of the blues and yellows. It is a very striking color pattern. Tomorrow we will be seeing the Last Supper and talking a bit about its design. Its pretty fascinating stuff so be here to join in. Class dismissed.

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Flashback Friday

Class, Or Lack Thereof The Dwight Vice gravestone in Oquawka, Illinois. I bring this old chestnut out every so often just to remind me that class is classless. Dwight Vice was killed in his home near Oquawka in 2001. It was one of those things that can generate crime: two guys thought Dwight had a lot of money stashed at home because of his pot-selling sideline to supplement his fishing job. Not really one of those big drug deals gone-bad things. Marijuana was, according to the trial, about the only stuff Dwight sold. But these two guys barge into the house and killed Dwight and attempted to kill his 11 year old kid, Darryl, before they took off with what money they could find. His son, now 23, was stabbed in the back and left for dead. He survived and is wheelchair bound and has undergone several surgeries to repair his wounds. He will be paralyzed for life. None of this is pleasant. Reading the facts of the murder and attempted murder are most unpleasant

Summer Swim

It's Monday and the start of another work week. Except for me. I have the week off because the parents of my daycare charges are taking the week off, too. This is one of those wordless posts I love on Mondays so I can put my laziness in full view of loyal readers. These pics need no words. Why muddy the waters? They were taken at the pool at Sinkhole Estates aka Death Valley. The nice thing about this pool is it is heated in winter. If one must find positives in one's situation, I suppose that is one. But, please, no more.

Florida Air Museum - Part 3

Welcome back to a pretty neat tour of the Florida Air Museum in Lakeland Florida. There's a lot to see and a couple of the old Geezer Gold Wing guys are already sitting down instead of walking around looking at the exhibits. That's John who is wore out and making a call to his wife. In all honesty, John was pretty well bushed before the ride. He told me his daughter's family was down from one of the Carolina's with the grand kids and he must have played with them too much. He's about to take off on his own and head for home, but he's going to miss a couple of neat things out on Hangar A. But, before we walk over there, we have lots yet to see here. If you saw The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Howard Hughes, you'll remember that he went up in a plane during the filming of one of his movies to prove a point about flying. He crashed trying to execute a roll and this is a picture of the plane he crashed. Note the propeller

Existing In BFE

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