Tag: houston

Such sweetness at my feet

In the room formerly known as the “Home Office” and now known as the study/guest room, are two dog crates. Margot and Guinness love their crates and gladly sleep in them IF their people are nearby. But now that I’ve moved my office back to the Nook, where there isn’t room for crates, the dogs have conveyed that a Houston winter, mild though it may be, is not the best time for sleeping on a new ceramic tile floor.

A trip to Arne’s and now all is well:

Dandelion!

Tuesday night I had to go on a small adventure (details will be provided in some future LJ post). I’d already picked a destination, but after talking to Lindsey, I changed my mind.

I’ve mentioned the dandelion fountain on LJ before. Though I’ve admired it for many years and I always point it out to visitors, I’ve never actually stopped and seen the fountain up close and personal. Lindsey suggested it as the ideal spot for what I needed, so off I went. Tom and the girls went with me, because Tom’s always ready for adventure that doesn’t involve anyone losing a kidney.

Close up, I love the fountain even more. I think that being remembered with a fountain and a little park area would be a nice legacy*.

Margot and Guinness had a great time, and everyone arrived home with their kidneys intact.

*Edit: Of course, he also built a huge corporation and has a Houston performing arts center named for him, too.

Button Sunday

These buttons are very much like a larger collection of buttons from 1960-1970 that I saw today at the Menil Collection’s exhibit Lessons From Below: Otabenga Jones & Associates. The exhibit presents “African-Americans creating their own sense of identity, drawing on historical civil-rights and black-power images of the 1960s, socially conscious hip-hop of the 1980s, and contemporary black culture.

“For this project, the group searched through the Menil’s ‘treasure rooms’ and other storage and archival areas to create a hybrid exhibition-classroom-performance piece. The material on view include[s] masks, headdresses, and figures from the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and other African nations; sketches from Ellsworth Kelly’s massive ‘Tablet’; slave-trade documents; a bronze bust of Paul Robeson; a Joseph Cornell box; a Surrealist landscape by Yves Tanguy; Andy Warhol’s silkscreened portrait of Chairman Mao; lapel buttons commemorating political and sports figures; photographs, including selections from Emil Cadoo’s ‘Harlem’ series and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s portrait of Malcom X; memorial memorabilia honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Walter de Maria’s stainless steel ‘High Energy Bar’; and maps of Africa” among other items.

I’ve mentioned before that the Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel are two of my favorite places in Houston.


I was at the Rothko Chapel today while they were preparing for this event. It was quite stirring to hear their voices practice their chanting while I was visiting my beloved paintings. No photography is allowed inside either the chapel or the museum, but I’ve included photos of the area behind a cut.

click here for photos

Photo Friday, No. 69

Current Photo Friday theme: Strength.


On a corner in Houston where the areas of Montrose and the Museum District meet, this live oak is what my friend James calls “Tree of Trees.” Today as I shot it, a group of tourists passed by, and I heard one say, “All of these are gone from Ocean Springs now, but that’s okay. We’ll just start over. The trees will be back.”

Featured in Three Fortunes in One Cookie, Ocean Springs is one of the beautiful small towns on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. But he’s right, and I admire his stoicism.

There’s strength in enduring, strength in rebuilding, and strength to be learned from these majestic live oaks.