Seeing the Big U one last time…
4 minute read
April 28, 2025, 11:18 PM
Recently, I had the opportunity to travel down to Mobile, Alabama to see the SS United States before she becomes an artificial reef off of the coast of Florida. I didn’t get to see her when she left Philadelphia, so I appreciated seeing her one last time in Mobile. I’m going to make a full-on photo set about the trip, and that will come later on, but I wanted to show you some of my photos of the ship in Mobile now before it all goes in the queue for processing.
I started out shooting a bit with my DSLR, using the van that I had rented to raise myself up a little bit more than I could do otherwise.
View of the Big U from where I set myself up on Old Water Street in Mobile. This is marginally closer than one could get in Philadelphia, and the view is side-on rather than bow-on, allowing a better view of the stern from the street.
Continue reading…Relegating it to the dustbin of history…
3 minute read
April 19, 2025, 9:25 PM
So at this point, the pandemic has been over for about three years. People largely don’t wear masks anymore, social distancing is gone, those ridiculous plexiglass shields have mostly gone away, people congregate and enjoy life in large groups again, and life has largely returned to normal, as people have learned to coexist in the world with COVID-19 rather than panic at the thought of it. Make no mistake: getting COVID sucks, as I’ve experienced twice now. But it’s not something to flip out over. If you get it, you treat it, and then you move on. For me, the pandemic officially ended when Biden’s federal mask mandate for transportation was struck down by the courts. Up until then, that was the main impediment to full normalcy in my life, so with that gone, life pretty much fell back to normal for me. That is, except in healthcare settings, where it stayed weird for about another year before normalizing. I admit that one of the reasons why I refused transport to the emergency room after my accident in 2022 was because I was in no mood to deal with masks, and didn’t want to have that confrontation, especially after the way I responded to that EMT with the blood pressure reading. Even more so after we all learned that those stupid cloth masks that everyone was wearing were as effective as wearing nothing at all, i.e. we were all effectively going maskless the entire time, and we made it through just fine. That should give anyone pause about all of the various measures that were taken during that period.
Meanwhile, I’m glad that people have so successfully moved on from it. Some people worry that we’ll forget about the pandemic, but I am quite happy to help relegate it to the memory hole. Trying to forget that all of the nonsense that we were subjected to never happened is the only way for me to not continue to feel resentment for what our elected leaders, some of whom are still in office, did to us during that period. Though make no mistake, I absolutely have withheld a vote for someone for whom I otherwise would have voted as punishment over their overzealous handling of things during that period. But otherwise, letting it go into the memory hole is beneficial for moving on. And for as much of a pain in the ass that the whole two years was, I guarantee you that it ultimately winds up in the “dustbin of history”, i.e. history will have very little to say about it in the grander scheme of things, much in the same way that you never learned about the 1918 pandemic in history class.
Categories: COVID-19
The beaver rises…
4 minute read
April 9, 2025, 2:07 PM
Recently, I was placing photos for the upcoming photo set about the trip to Charleston that I made in October, which I briefly discussed in a Journal entry from late November. On the last day of that trip, I sent my drone up over the Buc-ee’s location in Florence, South Carolina, and got some aerial photos of the place where we have dropped far too much money on beaver-themed items on various trips. Then I realized something later, while I was operating the train: I had never shared the photos that I had taken of the Buc-ee’s that was going up in Mount Crawford, Virginia, which is about 30-40 minutes from where my parents live, when we went down for a quick overnight trip in February. I ran a photo of the former Texaco sign that’s located across the street (and I remember when that place was still a Texaco), but I never did anything with the Buc-ee’s shots. I admit that I’m somewhat excited about this Buc-ee’s location, because I will go by it with some regularity, unlike Crossville, Sevierville, or Florence. We will be able to hit up this Buc-ee’s just about any time that we want, plus see my parents in the process.
So here is the Buc-ee’s in Mount Crawford, photographed in the late afternoon on February 13:
View facing southwest. It appears that the store will be oriented with the food to the left and the clothing and other gifts to the right.