Month: March 2019

Update: Mar 27, 2019

Posted on by Annie

After a pretty slow February and March as far as traveling around goes, I’ve now picked up the pace, heading to a weekend retreat up in northern Virginia. Friday, I said goodbye to Birmingham, home of good food, an old friend and a new one, and photographic opportunities, and headed up the road a few hours to Huntsville. My Alabama explorations are almost done now. Huntsville has been on my radar since I started vagabonding, mainly because an old running buddy and his wife live there. I missed them last fall when I changed plans so we met up this…

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Sunday Serenity: Break

Posted on by Annie

It’s been a difficult few months for me, seeing so much pain and sorrow in civil rights exhibits and reading more of the same in histories, biographies, and in essays and books. I’ve immersed myself in hard truths about our country, our history, and, in the end, about myself and my white privilege and inherent racism. It’s work I needed to do and work I need to continue doing. As Fannie Lou Hamer stated, Nobody is free until everybody is free. I realized yesterday, though, that I need to take a break and do something different to balance things out….

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Southern Tour: Sloss Furnaces

Posted on by Annie

It’s hard to separate the terrible labor history of Sloss Furnaces from the sheer beauty of photographing old things, but that’s how I’m going to do it here. Today’s post is all about how old things have their own kind of beauty. As Neil Young said, rust never sleeps. These hot blast stoves, six in total at the installation, heated air before it went into the furnaces. This gear at the base of one of the hot blast stoves fascinated me, from the colors to the grit of the decaying metal. The base of the hot blast stoves, where the…

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Tuskegee Airmen NHS

Posted on by Annie

I probably would not have known anything about the Tuskegee Airmen if my dad hadn’t had a lifelong fascination with all things aeronautical. He talked them up enough over the years that I knew the basics: an all-black squadron of pilots and support personnel in WWII who fought and died same as the whites they were segregated from by law and custom. My dad being in the Army Air Corps (non-combatant) at the same time must have known of them from way back, but I don’t know if he had even the slightest of interactions with them. When I pulled…

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Update: Mar 20, 2019

Posted on by Annie

It’s been a busy week, although I’ve just gone from Montgomery to Birmingham, a two-hour drive. I’ve never been to any part of Alabama before, so it’s been an exploration month for me. First, time out for fun: P!nk in concert was a blast! Yes, that is her in the spotlight, flying upside down and all over the arena, and singing while she did it! My first arena rock concert in years and well worth the effort to make it up to Birmingham in time for the start. For a complete change of pace, I hit up the Birmingham Museum…

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