Hidden Gems

Last week, we were on our way into an office building when we spotted two giraffes. Giraffes??

E is a little less than six feet tall, so you can gauge how tall the statues are. According to one of the tenants in the building, the building's owner saw these on his travels in another country, fell in love with them, bought them, and shipped them to the United States. We are grateful he installed them where lots of people can enjoy them. 

Unexpected art is always a treat!

New Light Fixture

Several months ago, we started looking for a new light fixture for our front porch. We wanted to have a fixture on only one side of the front door, and we couldn't find anything which would look good as a single fixture. After doing a bit of searching on the internet we found Turtle On A Rock Studio, which is the home of Laura Armstrong, a terrific metal artist located in Texas. Laura worked with us to get exactly what we wanted. 

The fixture is 27 inches high, 7 inches wide, and 4 inches deep. It's made of steel and has our house number on it. Laura included all the wiring needed to install it, along with a set of clear installation instructions. There's a fitted cap on top and a bug screen on the bottom. She gave us the option of using whatever kind of glass we wanted and we chose to use stained glass. The glass is mostly shades of green with some purple swirls which don't show in the pictures you see here. Even though I can't manage to get a decent photo of it, you get the idea, right? Honest to goodness it looks great. At night, when the lights are shining through the stained glass, it's beautiful. 

Even if you aren't in the market for a light fixture, you might want to take a look at Laura's website which shows you more of her work. (No disclaimer needed. The only interest we have in Turtle On A Rock Studio is our interest in promoting art!)

Train Travel Art

I recently bought a used book and inside was a 3x5-inch yellow and green envelope which held two reservation tickets for a passenger who traveled by train in early March 1954. The drawings on the front and the reverse of the envelope are terrific. The front shows a lineup of trains in North Western's 400 Streamliner Fleet.

The reverse shows a map of the Chicago and North Western System. If you enlarge the map, you can see things like the carvings on Mount Rushmore, the geyser of Old Faithful at Yellowstone, and a dairy cow in Madison, Wisconsin. (These two photos are both of the reverse of the envelope, but the second one is a little bit more of a closeup and is in black and blue instead of yellow and green.) 

I love how the railroad took such care to reproduce these clever drawings on something which it probably expected people to throw away once they finished their travels.

The reservations show the passenger went from Martinsburg, West Virginia to Chicago, Illinois, on the B&O Railroad, and from Chicago to Ames, Iowa on the North Western Railroad.

The book also contained a Police Traffic Bureau Warning issued to the train passenger in Des Moines Iowa in September 1954, for being parked at 4:13 p.m. in a place which didn't allow parking between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. The warning said it was not a summons to appear in court.  Rather, it "is extended to you as a COURTESY and also gives us an opportunity to say HELLO and WELCOME." The capital letters are in the original.