Sculpture in BFE

Kickham Boiler and Engineering is in north St. Louis next to a truck stop. The business has a sparse and expansive lawn in the middle of which is a welded-eggish sculpture.

So, here is a little public art in the middle of nowhere.  

Car Show

While driving around the other day we came across a car show. Car lust isn't really my thing, so we didn't go in, but there is no denying that  pretty cars are pretty. Besides, there were plenty of high end sports cars in the streets.

There was also a free demonstration in the streets where two cars turned tight synchronized doughnuts. How does one even acquire that skill set? The result was a lot of smoke and eight ruined tires. The black debris in the bottom two photos is tire dust. 

I do have to be a fuddy-duddy and question the safety of this event. Were these orange plastic barriers between the cars and the audience filled with water? If not, that's not much of a margin of error. This is a recipe for catastrophe. 

Half Street

This must be an old sign. There is a Half Street in St. Louis but it begins a few blocks north of this sign and is all of two-blocks long. This picture was taken in a parking lot off Manchester Avenue and as far as I can tell there is no connection between it and the current boundaries of Half Street. In any case, the sign is fitting on the side of the two-toned building that is visually split in half. 

Super Ellen

On Super Bowl Sunday I was at work running an isothermal titration calorimetry experiment. It's one of those experiments that you set it and forget, but you don't really forget it because something will surely go wrong if you do. There was a lot of down time though so I took a walk around the maze of buildings make up the Wash U medical campus. I figured since there weren't too many people around I wouldn't look too suspicious swiping my ID badge to see which doors I could open and which ones I could not.

I found I was able to get all the way to the top floor of the Women's Infectious Disease Research Center without getting tackled by security.  I'm assuming the  people that do research in the center are 'real' doctors because their digs are so much nicer than us lowly biochemistry Ph.D.'s. They had wood floors, glass-walled conference rooms and tastefully garish plastic furniture. Also, they had a view.

This view is looking down into the Ellen S. Clark Hope Plaza. During warmer times this is a circular infinity pool with lily pads and circular stage shown here in the lower right-hand corner. Iced over as it was, the pool looked alien from my point of view. I thought this would work best in high contrast black and white but decided to keep the woman in red to give a feeling of scale. 

Of note, I didn't know the name of this monument when I wrote this post. I searched Google for Wash U infinity pool and Google auto-typed infinity poop. That is a much less attractive monument. 

Yellow Outhouse

Bleh, I like the composition of this photo but the color lacks oomph and I wish the edges were sharper. Perhaps I'll return in the spring when the grass is greener.

Still,  there is something satisfying about partitioning the field of view into distinct blocks of color. Not bad for a yellowing lawn and a nondescript crapper. 

Stalking Arch

On our Sunday drive we decided to meander up an industrial corridor that runs by the river through North St. Louis. One of our stops during our meander was behind Al's Restaurant on Biddle Street so that Katie could photograph the Ashley Street Light and Power Building. That building is one of my favorites, but I wasn't interested in it as a subject that day, so I wandered the parking lot looking for something else to to shoot. Not seeing much  I continued wandering off the lot and down a steep knoll. When I turned around the arch was peeking at me. Clever girl, it's hard to escape the gaze of the arch in this town. 

McCree Avenue Black and White

This picture is everything that I was afraid of when I decided to make a daily commitment to this blog. I have stared at it several times and have nothing to say about it. 

If I cannot generate anything to say, what am I doing here?

True, I could dump the image and move onto the next one in my queue but that is not in the spirit of my current intentions.

I should be able to make a substantive comment about any photo I consider posting.

Here it goes, this is a building that caught my eye on McRee Avenue. The light was good. 

Nailed it.