Hello everybody and welcome back to my Weekly Flickr.
It still continues to be spring only chronologically, very cold and windy this morning. The forecast called for possible snow showers and while I saw a few flakes I’m grateful that nothing became of it.
I’m sitting here waiting for my plumber to arrive. I was having breakfast Wednesday morning when I heard noise from the basement and when I went downstairs I was greeted by steam coming out of the boiler and a pool of water on the floor. This took place at 4AM so I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it aside from stand there gawking, feeling like a ninny, until the hour got to be a little more reasonable. I waited until 5:50 AM and called my plumber, much to my chagrin I woke him up, but he said he would come to take a look and showed up after a little while.
Something in the mechanism on the boiler was clogged which caused the pressure to build, hence the steam and the leaking out of the water. He took it out, cleaned it, and put it back in. He checked to make sure the tank wasn’t cracked which was a concern. My boiler is 25 years old and the hot water heater is 17 years old; we discussed replacements and agreed that he would replace the boiler in the summer when they’re less expensive and it won’t matter if it’s shut down for a few days. For the last several years he’s mentioned that it’s time to replace the hot water heater as their life span is generally considered to be ten to twelve years so I’ve been living on borrowed time for a while. Of course he always laughs and says that his is just as old. I’ve been considering it but the fact that it appears solid has always made me procrastinate. But the next night I dreamed about the hot water heater going and flooding the basement and it haunted me all that day so I called and made an appointment for a new one.
My fear of flooding the basement is real. I have a large part of my collection in the basement, all of it paper, so it would be a real catastrophe if the tank ever burst. The hot water heater holds forty gallons of water and if it cracks, as the water leaks out, it will refill just as if I was taking a shower. So if it cracked right after I left one morning it would flood water out all day, for 11 hours, thousands of gallons of water. A nightmare to say the least. The boiler only holds ten gallons and when the water runs out there’s no automatic feed. And once the water runs out the boiler has an emergency switch which shuts it down. Even though the heaters usually fail slowly with you noticing a little water it’s not unheard of to have them just crack and that’s the scenario I want to avoid. The joys of home ownership.
This morning I wandered up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw two minor exhibits. First was, The Plains Indians; Artists of Earth and Sky. This was native American arts and crafts, more crafts than arts though. It was filled with coats, dresses, robes and hides made from buffalo skins, as well as paintings on the skins. There were also head dresses that were probably one of the few things the movies accurately portrayed. There were pipes and carvings and other items of day to day life. It was interesting to see but not really something I can get overly excited about. What was most interesting to me about the exhibit was that so many of the items caem from European collections. But in thinking about it that shouldn’t surprise me, the Europeans have always been fascinated by our Native Americans and the Old West. There was a German writer in the 19th Century, Karl May, who wrote many novels about the Old West, his recurring characters were Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. What was fascinating about the books is that he never visited most of the places he was depicting in these novels. I have a friend who grew up in Hungary and he told me about reading May when he was a child. This is a link to the Met website showing the objects in the exhibit.
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/objects?exhibitionId=%7b254A181E-CA25-4BC9-B15A-A167688D711B%7d&rpp=60&pg=1 After the Indian show I walked over to the drawings corridor where the current group was recently installed. The Met has thousands of drawings, etchings and engravings and can only put a small amount on view so they rotate what’s up every several months. The starting section had a theme of horses and men, beginning with Picasso’s The Watering Hole, gouache on tan paperboard, depicting boys washing and watering their horses. It was the basis for a larger painting which he never did and it showed an early usage of his boy leading a horse image. This is a link
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/483414 Continuing along there were several Toulouse Lautrec’s, Degas and John Singer Sargent and a wonderful drawing by Theodore Gericault, Two Draft Horses with Sleeping Driver.
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/337192 Also a very nice Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, in the museum it is referred to as Horse Attended by An Oriental Groom but when I went looking for it I found it under the name Landscape with a Horse Held by a Page
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/459754 The rest of the exhibit had some names I’m unfamiliar with but several things by artists I do know that struck me as very nice. An engraving by Jean Etienne Liotard, Self Portrait. I’ve mentioned Liotard before as being someone I discovered at a wonderful exhibit at the Frick where there were numerous portrayals of Empress Maria Theresa, the mother of Marie Antoinette, and her family. One a wonderful small drawing of Marie as a child. This is the self portrait from the exhibit.
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/334135?rpp=30&pg=1&ft=liotard+self+portrait&pos=2 A woodcut by Lucas Cranach, The Stag Hunt
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/383708 And finally a very sweet drawing by John Linnell, a British artist of the 19th Century, Portrait of a Mother and Child. A pencil drawing augmented by just a bit of color on their lips. Sentimental but charming to me.
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/671454 And that’s that. Let’s see what’s happening in our world now.
Andy G.
framed
https://www.flickr.com/photos/knessia/16570474906 Tartan Skir.: Three (2015)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pollygraphix/16613877085 I am back , happy hour realness
https://www.flickr.com/photos/49254983%40N00/16567737632 Reluctant Cross-Dresser !
https://www.flickr.com/photos/116315009@N08/16841538496 IMG_1371s
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruwoldtm/16444320708 Mirror Skirt
https://www.flickr.com/photos/silverhalogenide/16605298915 Looks like a good obedient boy
https://www.flickr.com/photos/51886658%40N04/15048108817/in/pool- Tracey is sitting pretty
https://www.flickr.com/photos/frillyknicks/16431782287 Florentina Satin Sissy Maid
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_e-cd/16638989525Sissy
https://www.flickr.com/photos/26984420%40N08/16048099434 Debbie's February
https://www.flickr.com/photos/saralegs/16444463337 Party Queen
https://www.flickr.com/photos/124114562%40N08/16512272620
Betty's Pub 20.1
Topic: Well it's definitely cold so I think we'll start the Winter Flickr now (Read 32591 times)
