Just before noon, I sent out a “Happy Holidays, and thanks for being our customer this past year!” email for one of my clients. Each and every person on the list had done the double opt-in thing (checked “please send me occasional announcements” when ordering, and then were sent an email with a link they had to click to confirm that they had really asked for the announcements). I just checked the mailing stats … and one person has unsubscribed. From a “Happy Holidays!” email. For some reason, that just strikes me as sad …
Monthly Archive for December, 2006
Technorati Tags: photos, photographs, photography, Walnut Street Bridge, Chattanooga, Chattanooga TN, Tennessee River
Once again, here we have more photos from our 2005 Texas road trip. While we were in Houston, we journeyed out to a (very) small town … Serbin, TX … population 37. Serbin happens to be where my wife’s maternal grandfather was born. Mr. Groeschel (greh-shul) is Wendish (or Sorbian). In 1854, a group of Wends left eastern Germany and settled in what is now Serbin in order to preserve their language and culture. There, they founded St. Paul Lutheran Church, which was the first Missouri Synod Lutheran church in all of Texas.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the folks at St. Paul were at odds over the language issue, and eventually there was a split, and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church was set up just down the road … close enough that children from each church could throw rocks across the cemetery at each other. (I believe St. Peter’s was founded after St. Paul decided to abandon worship services in Sorbian … but I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask my wife when she is awake. She is the fount of all historical knowledge about the Wends in Serbin.)
The St. Paul building itself is what is commonly called a “painted church” … the interiors of these churches are decorated in a very ornate manner, despite the relatively simple manner of construction. Inside of St. Paul, for instance, many columns are painted to look as if they were made of marble.
Yes, that’s the pulpit up over the altar … on the same level as the balcony. It’s the tallest pulpit in the state of Texas.
I love the stenciled stuff on the ceilings …
There are several cast iron tombstones in the cemetary. Mr. Groeschel told me that they mark the oldest graves there. Unfortunately, all of them are in poor condition, much like this one here.
My grandfather-in-law, Leonard Groeschel, standing next to the font where he was Baptized.
Update: My wife tells me I’m all mixed up (as usual). St. Peter’s Lutheran Church was started because some folks in the area wanted services in German instead of Sorbian, and St. Paul refused to do this.
Technorati Tags: photos, photographs, photography, Sorbs, Wends, Serbin, Serbin TX, Lutheran, LCMS, Missouri Synod
Yes, ladies and gentlemen … I have been tagged by Chad W. Smith, Minister of Propaganda of ChattaMac: the Chattanooga Mac Users Group.
I’m supposed to reveal five things you probably don’t know about me (yes, I know … some of you already know this, but I don’t know that I can do this for everybody) … so here goes:- The first car I owned (ie, picked out and purchased myself) was a 1987 Pontiac Fiero GT. I had wanted a Fiero GT since I was in high school, and bought it over the objections of pretty much anybody who knew me and was breathing. Just as they all predicted, it broke down pretty much on a bi-monthly basis. Despite all the trouble, I loved that car, and it was a blast to drive and own. I sold it just before I got married, and I routinely kick myself for doing so, especially when I see one driving around town.
- I survived (without being injured at all) being rear-ended by a loaded semi that was going 30 mph faster than me while on the Beltline (I-440) in Raleigh, NC in 1994. I called my father (who worked about 2 miles away from where the accident happened) and he came to pick me up. He says that if he hadn’t talked to me before he came, and had seen the car first, he wouldn’t have believed that I had survived.
- When I was in elementary school, I routinely got in trouble for selling stuff to other kids. In first grade, I swiped some kind of book catalogs that we were given routinely from the trash can, and was selling them for 10 cents each. In the third and fourth grade, I was buying items from the school store and selling them at a 10-15 cent markup. Later on, I sold cotton candy that I made at home. Seems the school system didn’t appreciate my entrepreneurial spirit, and put the kibosh on my activities often. Of course, I kept trying, because I was making money and I could buy ice cream at lunch.
- When I worked at McDonald’s in Lousiburg, NC in high school, the head manager called me “Stud Muffin.” She did so often, and sometimes quite loudly. There’s nothing quite like being summoned from mopping the lobby by a middle-aged woman who yells “Yoo-hoo! Stud Muffin! You have a customer up front!”
- Every now and then I find myself in an odd mood and listen to disco stuff like “You Dropped a Bomb on Me”, “Stayin’ Alive” and Eighties stuff like “Beat It”, “Smooth Criminal”, and “Cruel Summer”. I also listen to Hank Williams, Sr, even though my wife hates it when I do so.
- (Bonus Round!) The last time I did something like this (it was over email, actually), my girlfriend started cheating on me and then dumped me a few weeks later. I didn’t listen to disco then, so I don’t think that was the reason …
- Jeff Pulver >>
- Steve Garfield >>
- Steve Woolf >>
- Rick Rey >>
- Michael Ambs >>
- Amanda Congdon >>
- Jason Calacanis >>
- C.K. Sample >>
- Chris Finke >>
- Derek van Vliet >>
- Stacy Doss
I’ve set up and uploaded the first few photos to the “Chattanooga at Night” gallery. Took me a little longer than I expected to get the watermarks on the images done in a way I liked. Enjoy!
Technorati Tags: photos, photographs, photography, TennBridge, Tennessee River, Chattanooga, Chattanooga TN, historic bridges
I happened across the web site that TDOT has set up for the dissemination of news about the Market Street Bridge project this morning. Said web site has a scanned copy of an article from the News-Free Press from 1985 discussing the bridge’s history. What I find most interesting is that the article opens by noting that TDOT had recently decreed that the bridge would need to be replaced. Apparently, Chattanooga residents didn’t like that idea, and here, twenty years down the road, the bridge is being renovated so that it can (hopefully) serve us for another eighty years or so.
I’m glad sanity prevailed and we still have the bridge with us. Not only is it cool and beautiful … it has significant historical value. I only hope that we will see the value in other historical truss bridges in this state, like the Marion Memorial Bridge, and save them as well …
Read More: Chief John Ross ‘Bascule’ Bridge Regarded As Unique Landmark
Technorati Tags: Chattanooga, Chattanooga TN, Market Street Bridge, historic bridges, Tennessee River, TDOT
I’ve finally done it … I’ve deleted the vast majority of my photo galleries and I’m ready to start over from (nearly) scratch. I did leave two galleries … photos of Soren (the cat) and The Corner (ice cream shop). My first new gallery will be “Chattanooga at Night” (as I mentioned previously) … and it should be appearing in the next few days. It might even show up before morning if I’m still buzzing on coffee in an hour …
I just started poking around at my photos from the weekend again … and found a few that I was really happy with. I love the color in this one!
Yes, it’s been a while since I posted a few pictures for you. Hope this meets your needs for a while. You know who you are …
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