Yard Yellow

The tulips think that it's Spring. This is the weekend that the yard work must begin. The first of a long season that will require much cleaning and care outside.

On the Banks of the beautiful East River NYC
This is a transplant.


















Always liked this shot. Hard to believe this was almost a year ago. A hot afternoon and the sun was going down. What's not to love about being in NYC.

The Black Cats Run for Cover










This all started the other day, when I had to go to the big city for a meeting.

I had dropped my camera out of my backpack, and didn't know when it happened. So I get up in the morning, back in Muccabull Springs, and it was raining very hard, and it had been raining for hours. So I went into my backpack for the camera, cause I was going to go outside and take some pictures. But it wasn't there, cause it was laying under a table in a dark room in the corner of a big important looking building over 150 miles away. Of course I didn't know that, so I had to go on the hunt for about 60 hours, or until it was found four days later.

So anyway, I was going to miss this great photo op because I had lost my camera. So I borrowed one, and took this during the storm. It's Akien.

Skinny Tires

These tires are great, especially for mounting on the hood, since you have to look over the top of it.
























This is not a BB Photo, but the scanned image of the catalog cover.
So the parts catalog showed up and lo and behold it's the same high quality and carefully crafted publication it's been since inception. If the inventory is on hand, it's a simply amazing resource. If you have always wanted a Rover, and wondered about the experince, this is probably the best place in the world to start. Order a copy of the catalog, it will be a collectors item one day. With this book, a good map, and some imagination, you can travel to almost anywhere on the globe, and well prepared, breakdowns and repairs in the field become part of the fun!















This is the view I remember from the operators seat in the cabin, with the larger tires fitted.

This one is not mine either.

Spring

Spring

-Bah Humbug- Bleak and Gray














This has been the view out the front window. You'll see it is so soggy and wet that the Big "M" up on the hill, the one that stands prowdly for Muccabull Springs, has slid down the hill and turned itself over into a W. It's green and looks like the mold has begun to take over.

Trout Fishing in America


I snatched this out of the stream as it went by the other day. Now I don't know what to do with it.

"... held a patent on the term "tomatoketchup."

Kathleen Pflueger, Porcelain Fan, Dies at 90
Published: April 5, 2006

Kathleen Powers Pflueger, owner of one of the world's great collections of 18th-century porcelain and 16th- and 17-century faience, a form of earthenware, died on March 30 surrounded by her pieces in the Park Avenue apartment that she had designed to house them. She was 90.

Her death was confirmed by her nephew Donald H. Dewey.

Mrs. Pflueger, who was known as Kiyi (pronounced kai-yai), was born into a family that counted among its ancestors early settlers of Manhattan, Rhode Island and Martha's Vineyard.

She was drawn into the rarefied world of porcelain by her husband, Edward M. Pflueger, who had begun collecting it in the 1930's. They married in 1943. Mr. Pflueger had immigrated to the United States from Germany to establish an American base for Bayer A.G., the pharmaceutical company. He was chairman and president of the company in New York until 1975. Mrs. Pflueger became his partner in assembling collections of more than 700 pieces.

A turning point in their collaboration came in 1949, when they acquired the Otto Blohm porcelain collection, one of the finest in the world.

"The Pfluegers collected for more than 40 years and formed an absolutely superb collection of French faience and German porcelain and faience," said Anne Little Poulet, director of the Frick Collection. She came to know the Pfluegers when she led the department of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Ms. Poulet, who traveled with the couple to shows and auctions, helped persuade them to donate 377 pieces to the Boston museum. Mr. Pflueger agreed to do so on his wife's death. He died in 1997 at the age of 91. The rest of the collection will remain with the family, Ms. Poulet said.

Tracey Albainy, senior curator of decorative arts and sculpture in the museum's European art department, declined to disclose the collection's estimated value.

The collection is particularly admired for the quality of its porcelains from the Japanese Palace in Dresden, Germany. In the early 1700's, the palace was a getaway for Augustus II, known as Augustus the Strong, who was King of Poland and an elector of Saxony and who built the palace specifically for his collection.

The Pfluegers also acquired an impressive number of porcelain figures modeled on commedia dell'arte, the Italian comic theater.

In 1993 Christie's auction house published two books showing the Pflueger collection.

Most of their acquisitions were housed in the spacious Park Avenue apartment that Mrs. Pflueger had designed for them.

But some went to their country home, Kiyiwana Farm, a 1,000-acre property in Dutchess County. The farm has five houses, stables and barns, and a red tea house, all largely designed by Mrs. Pflueger. Formal terraced gardens feature 18th- and 19th-century statuary.

In Manhattan, Mrs. Pflueger was a founder of the Winter Antiques Show, established in 1954 to aid the East Side House Settlement, on whose board she served from 1947 to 1991. Modeled on the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair in London, it became, and remains, one of the premiere antiques shows in Manhattan. Mrs. Pflueger was also on the arts committee of the China Institute and helped design and establish a gallery there.

Mr. Dewey, her nephew, said that Mrs. Pflueger had been a firm believer in the importance of genealogy. Her father was descended from early New York settlers; her mother, from colonizers of Martha's Vineyard and Newport, R.I. One of her grandfathers became a parks commissioner in New York; another held a patent on the term "tomatoketchup."

She belonged to a raft of organizations with lofty pedigrees in American society, among them the Colonial Dames of America, the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, the Hereditary Order of Descendants of Colonial Governors and the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America.

Kathleen Isabel Powers was born on Oct. 4, 1915, the fifth of eight children of Harry Lord Powers and Elizabeth Robinson Hazard at Shrewsbury Manor, their agricultural and equestrian estate in Shrewsbury, N.J. She lived there until she was a teenager, when she was sent to school in Paris. As a young woman, she worked as an interior designer. "Like a lot of people in the Depression," Mr. Dewey said, "she was left with all the trappings, but not much money."

She is survived by a sister, Patricia Hazard Powers Frech, of Manhattan.

Its Always a RUSH in the City of Paved Streets
March















This is pretty typical of the last month in these parts. This was what the RUSH looked like at 10:32 AM on 3/8/06, so you can see the kind of GROWTH we've had during the recent goldRUSH. This is one of the photo's I sent to the movie guy in NYC.

Tonight it's raining, and the rivers are rising. Given the snowpack in the mountains, a warm drenching could bring on some misery. I see it's flooding again in Fargo.