More out and about A-town

Weekend before last in Austin (I know, I'm really behind in my blogging...excuses to follow in a later post) we saw more than the LBJ Library museum. Austin has all kinds of jewel-like little museums, too, and we hit two of these as well.

One was on campus (on the completely other side from the LBJ, as you might have seen in my last post) in the building where I went to library school too many years ago to reveal.

In the intervening decades the building has completely turned into a premier archives with a small museum. (The library school—now the School of Information—has moved up 21st street to the PCL, which we saw on our stroll across campus.) The Harry Ransom Center is a really wonderful place with amazing collections that they use to populate the first floor museum. (In addition to their permanent display of a Gutenburg Bible and the first photograph!)

The photography exhibit we saw featured items from the HRC collection and some original prints from other museums. Many of the photos, taken by Arnold Newman, were famous enough to seem familiar, but since his collection of contact sheets, papers, and artifacts, owned by the Center, was used in the exhibit, you got to see much more than just the finished products. It was really interesting.

A helpful HRC docent explained that the museum puts up a new exhibit each semester, so this is one museum that will have to be on my Austin museum list in perpetuity!

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Sunday morning, after the obligatory coffee shop breakfast, we branched out from the UT campus to a unit of the Austin Museum of Art at the lovely Laguna Gloria estate on Lake Austin.

The grounds of the house (which belonged to Alamo preservation heroine Clara Driscoll) are part of the museum and, since we were still sipping our breakfast beverages, we took in the outdoor portion of the exhibits first.

Spring was just beginning to be evident...

....and the grounds down to the lakefront provide space for some pretty big art as well as the natural beauties:

In addition to this space that's very parklike, the "front yard" of the museum building is well-landscaped, too...

[thanks to Carey for taking this lovely photo and allowing me to use it]

As you can probably tell from the photo above of the house, its interior is as much of a draw as the exhibits therein...

...but their exhibits are also pretty cool. This was one of my favorites, a whimsical bird's nest complete with potential baby birds (click on the image to see more details):

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All this art appreciation works up an appetite!

So we finished off the weekend with a delightful lunch, still on Lake Austin. (After making an executive decision to postpone visiting another museum that we'd planned to see in the afternoon. We'll make it on the  another trip.)

What a great location! (And the food's not bad, either; the photo on the left is my half of the Tubular Taco Sally and I shared.)

The Hula Hut is a multi-level, inside/outside TexMex eatery right on the lake. Lunch there was a very fun way to finish up the quick weekend, get in final visiting with the kids, and fill up the tank for the drive home.

A Texas-sized school

A quick trip to Austin last week to do some museum-ing (see news of the major museum visit over on Bridges to London) included a cross-campus walk that gave me a renewed appreciation for our state's flagship university—in both the architecture and the size categories!

Walking from the LBJ Library to the Ransom Research Center (scene of my last Wordless Wednesday post; and I'll write more about it soon) is a very good way to get exercise on a gorgeous spring day. Because UT is a very large campus, and we crossed it back and forth, without benefit of mass transportation (which I usually did not do when I was there in grad school). Whew! A good way to walk off the bar-b-que lunch we had at the Hoover's truck (see it at the left).

We started our trek already somewhat winded after a couple of engrossing hours learning about LBJ, his life and times. If you compare this shot of my son and daughter-in-law on the grounds of the Library, with the tower over their shoulders, with the one at the top of the post, you'll get something of an idea of how far we traveled on already tired legs.

And, of course, not only are the distances large, but the buildings are, too. The Perry-Castañeda Library, which was not quite finished when I graduated in 1975, is the biggest library I'd ever want to have to find a book in. We saw it on our way back to the car, and I couldn't really get the whole building into a shot:

Although the campus has grown a lot since I was there, and they have lots of very impressive new buildings, I find that my favorites are the oldies that were there long before me. Sally even works in one of these beauties when not SxSW-ing (what she was doing while Hal, Carey, and I were bettering our minds in museums). Her office window, in the Statistics Department, is marked below in red.

How cool to be working next to the prettiest structure of all, the Main Building and its iconic tower!

It is a lovely tower, but, at least for Texans of a certain age, it has a rather sinister side to its ambiance.When I started grad school in 1973, Austin folks were still a bit self-conscious about 1966's horrifying mass shooting. And it hasn't been forgotten yet; at a photo exhibit at the LBJ Library, we'd just seen this Life magazine cover:

The glass with the bullet hole in it was a storefront a block or two away. What a dramatic photograph! 

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Back to the happier present, I couldn't have a post about how big UT is without some comments on the most gargantuan structure of all on the campus. As you probably know, the school isn't only renowned for its academic and research excellence. 

They have a football team, too.

And we walked right by the gi-normous Memorial Stadium both coming and going. Now, it's got its architecturally attractive elements; it looks a lot nicer than it did in my day, for sure. I like the handsome brickwork on what I assume (never having been inside) are the stairwells:

But, my goodness, what a behemoth of a structure!

One good thing I can say for it is that, given that practically every window in a building these days has a corporate name, this stadium just honors a long-time coach (Darrell Royal), not a corporate benefactor.

However, that hasn't stopped them from naming parts of the place. Wouldn't it be nice to be so rich you could have a gate named for you?!

Although, again to give credit where it's due, I absolutely loved the name of what I assume is the training facility/infirmary:

Only in Texas, I think, would you have a building named for two guys named "Doc" and "Tex"!

Wordless Wednesday: Not graffiti

It's spring!

potential peaches

baby plums—already?!

?????????????

I wish I could share the fragrance of these beauties with you

A grey day

My last Wordless Wednesday post being something of a hint, the weather for last weekend's paddle on the Guadalupe River started off, at least, somewhat monochromatically.

Although, to be honest, it was not quite as monochromatic as these photos show. What happened is that while I was waiting for the shuttle cars to return to the put in, I discovered a new setting on my camera—"film grain."

I had quite a good time seeing the river environment under cloudy skies through this setting...

cypress roots are always photogenic, with any setting

the view looking up from my seat on the roots

the IH-10 bridge at Comfort

Although for the first half of our outing the sky was almost this gray, the sun did eventually, intermittently, peep through. And in spite of the relatively low river flow (49 cfs) our small group had a lot of fun. 

The low water makes the run a great practice exercise in looking for the deepest channel. And you can never go wrong following our dear leader Joline through a rapid or a stretch of shoals. She always seems to find the best line:

Henry is pretty good at finding a line, too, but you have to realize that the line he's looking for might not be the safest route, but rather the most exciting. Which is not what I'm usually after.

At this rapid, though, there fortunately wasn't a high-adrenaline choice...

We took out at the very nice James Kiehl Park, where I spotted a baby redbud in bloom. You definitely need a full color setting when you try to capture these fleeting beauties...

Not far from the park is the little town of Waring, but their Country Store, which we know serves terrific burgers, wasn't open, as you can see here:

But fortunately the Welfare Cafe (named for the town where you find it, not the social program) operates with longer hours and we had a delicious dinner. The food was great and the obligatory nostalgic artifacts wall was fun to look at while you wait for your order...

...not to mention their lovely "back yard," where it would be really cool to have a special event...

...and where there are also plenty of nostalgic artifacts, some of which just beg to be shot with special settings...

More glimpses through the windows

I don't want to leave the impression from my previous post that my bus route to work is lined on both sides with old mansions.

Actually the more common residence size is much smaller, but many of these houses are also quite charming...

There are also a lot of apartments and other multi-family housing, some of which are really handsome:

(Of course, there are a lot more houses and apartments that are definitely not charming or handsome, but since I prefer to accentuate the positive, I didn't take pictures of these.)

And there are all kinds of other sites. From double-decker freeways...

(this particular bus really needed to have its windows washed)

...to public art...

The grand street entrance art above is right across from the avenue's eponymous lake (a few pictures of which I have shown you. These were taken from the other side of the lake; It's somewhat ironic that the best views of Woodlawn Lake are not obtainable from Woodlawn Avenue).

(this blurry view was the best I could get of the lake from the bus window)

And, to finish up, there's even a religious shrine, at least almost. This unassuming little house offers a lovely ceramic (I think that's the medium) representation of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You see other pictures of her all over town, but few are this attractive (left click and you can get a slightly better view of it, the best I could do from the bus window).

Wordless Wednesday: an experiment