The conference I attended included, as part of the registration cost, a group tour of Graceland on the first evening we were there. I’ve never been an Elvis fan, but I was curious about the place, and it was no additional cost, so I went.
Graceland seems to consist of 2 parts. There is the mansion itself, with its grounds and other buildings, and across the road, where all the parking is, there are a couple of restaurants, Elvis’ car museum (he owned a number of vehicles), and at least 6 different gift shops (each selling a different theme of memorabilia, e.g. music-related stuff, movie-related, etc.). When we actually went to tour the mansion, we rode across the street in shuttle buses (even though it would have been a 3-minute walk). Each person was issued an audio player with the tour guide recording on it.
Here are the gates to the estate, seen from near the gift shops across the road:
The front of the mansion, with attendant lion statues:
No flash was allowed for photography inside the place, so some of my pictures are dark and/or blurry.
Here is the front parlor/music room:
The stairway (the public isn’t allowed up to the second floor):
The dining room:
The kitchen, which looks like a lot of 70’s-era kitchens, really:
From there, the tour went into the basement, where things got a bit weirder. Here is Elvis’ TV room:
Note the mirrored ceiling:
The room is all done in yellow and navy blue, and it has 3 TVs because Elvis wanted to be like Lyndon Johnson, who purportedly watched all 3 networks at the same time when he was president.
Just after that, we saw the pool room, in which the walls and ceiling were decorated with many, many yards of fabric:
We then ascended to the “jungle room”, at the back of the house:
This wall has water trickling down through the stones:
We then went outside to visit some other buildings. Here’s the back of the mansion:
The bulk of exhibits of Elvis’ stuff is in the Trophy Building. This includes a gold lame suit (I don’t remember when or where he wore it):
All of his gold and platinum records hang here:
Here are items of clothing from some of his concerts:
Just before I left the building, there was this interesting painting:
We then proceeded to the former racquetball court, which held more memorabilia:
especially more jumpsuits:
After that was the shrine where he and his family are buried.
Here’s the King’s grave itself, followed by his mother, father, and grandmother:
The King is watched over by the King of Kings:
And thus conlcuded my visit to Graceland. Parts of it were more garish than I’d expected, but parts looked like almost any other American home from the period. It was certainly an eclectic mix.
Next post: a different King.
A few weeks ago we discovered, quite by accident, that a robin had a nest in a bush by our front porch. The baby birds were pretty old at that point, though still being fed by their mother. I took some pictures, trying to intimidate them as little as possible.
There were 3 of them in the nest, though you can only see 2 of them in these pictures:
The mama was watching me from a safe distance:
I discovered that we could see them through a living room window, and they didn’t see us, so they’d be more lively (and the mother would come to feed them). Unfortunately, taking pictures through the window didn’t work so well.
About a week after the photos were taken, I found the nest empty. I’m guessing they all learned to fly and went about growing up.
There were 2 very tall trees in the front yard of the place we live. It’s a duplex, and our landlord lives in the other half. We were surprised when she let us know in December that those great trees were going to be taken down. I thought it unfortunate that we’d lose the shade of the trees, both on the house itself and on our car in the driveway, but the landlord said they were quite hollow and might drop large branches or worse in a heavy wind.
I decided to document the process of taking them down. At least, I took pictures of the stages of the removal – I was never around when the actual work was being done.
The crew began in mid-January, and did much of the work in a 2-week period. I don’t have a pic of the trees before they started, but here are pictures after the first day of work:
They mainly stripped branches off of one of the trees, and piled some of those branches on the curb for later pickup.
Here are the remaining branches on the other tree, which was mostly untouched at this time:
They came back 2 days after that, taking some branches from that tree, and removing a bunch of trunk from the other tree.
The pieces of trunk were piled on the curb, and you could see just how hollow it had been:
There also started to be a lot of sawdust covering the lawn and snow:
When they next came back, the cut off the upper trunks of the right-hand tree.
There had been fresh snow by that point.
After that, they picked up those logs, and didn’t come back until early March. For a while, we thought they might leave the bare trunks standing, but they finished the job over 2 days. Here’s how the place looks now:
The sawdust got partially cleaned up, but also used to help fill and cover over the holes where the stumps were removed:
 
This is a catching up post, as the pictures contained herein were taken a week ago (or more, in some cases). After the Thursday snowstorm where I did the time-lapse video, we got just as much snow in another storm that Sunday (12/16). On Monday morning I took some pictures around the house.
First, though, I have some pictures from before those storms, when there was just a little snow on the ground. We had a visitor in the backyard, who looked like a young’un to me:
It is certainly much smaller than possums I’m used to – though I suppose that they could just grow them smaller here in New England than in the Midwest.
Here are pictures of the snow on our street the day after the second storm, after most of it had been shoveled and such:
Here is the car for height comparison:
We also had some wicked long (like I said, this is New England) icicles on the house. The most artistic picture I took of them adorns the beginning of this post, but here are more pics that show the size better:
The last few days have been warmer – above freezing each afternoon – so a lot of melting has taken place. We heard crashing sounds last night, which seemed to be ice and snow falling in large chunks from the roof. Nevertheless, there’s so much snow on the ground that all the melting has still left things white for xmas.
Our Prius hit a milestone this past Wednesday. Not literally, thankfully (do we even have stones to mark miles anywhere in the US?), but our car now has six digits on the odometer. It rolled 100K while I was on the way to work, and I stopped to take pics before:
and after:
We’ve had the car not quite six years, but I don’t know whether that’s a lot of use or not that much compared with other people. It is interesting to reach this mark now, because I’ve been looking into ways to use the car less, which largely is based on using my bike more. Part of that is trying to ride my bike in cold weather, which I’ve never attempted to do in the past. This week, though, I plan to ride to work at least once, when the temperature will be 40 or less. More details later.
 I don’t usually propagate these memes myself (and aren’t memes supposed to be self-propagating?), but I thought this was fun. I like the alliterative aspect.
I got this from Matt Quirk’s blog. The person he got it from has a name beginning with ‘S’, so I put down different answers from hers:
Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the following…They MUST be real places, names, things…NOTHING made up! If you can’t think of anything, skip it. Try to use different answers if the person in front of you had the same 1st initial. You CAN’T use your name for the boy/girl name question.
Your name: Sean
Famous music artist/group: Skinny Puppy
3 letter word: Soy
Color: Sienna
Gift/present: Socks
Vehicle: Sedan
TV show: Sesame Street
Country: Somalia
Boy’s name: Stanley
Girl’s name: Sharon
Alcoholic beverage: Schnapps
Occupation: Sawyer
Monster: Sulley
Game: Scrabble
Flower: Spiderwort
Celebrity: Scott Shaw
Food: Salmon
Something found in a kitchen: Sink
Reason for being late: Slept late
Something you shout: SPOON!
Took another online quiz today. Here is my result:
What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net
Midland. The Midland (please don’t confuse with “Midwest”) itself is the neutral zone between the North and South. But just because you have a Midland accent doesn’t mean you’re from there. Since it is considered a neutral, default, “non-regional” accent you could easily be from someplace without its own accent, like Florida, or a big city in the South like Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta.
Take this quiz now – it’s easy!
I find this interesting, given that I’m from Michigan. I wonder what’s different about my accent from whichever one Michigan is in (I could only get a list of other answers, without the description, so I don’t know if MI is considered Northern or North Central).