Since moving away from my home town of Little Compton, Rhode Island, I have taken a more serious interest in its history dating as far back as the 1600s. I particularly enjoy looking over old pictures from the 1800s and early 1900s. One old photo that I have shows a doctor with a black medical bag standing aside his horse and buggy on the town commons. I’ve always wondered what sort of tools and medications were in that bag at that particular moment. How would he have treated a diabetic patient in the 1890s?

In 2007, I got a chance to begin a project that has been on the back burner for far too long: reshooting the images that were taken so long ago by standing literally in the same footprints left by those photographers of old.

With dozens, if not hundreds, of old pictures to replicate, there is no question that this is a time consuming endeavor, and I barely scratched the surface of it in the limited hours I spent in New England this year. Hopefully 2008 will provide me with slightly more opportunity to push a bit further into my little venture. In the meantime, here are a few of the first rough drafts from my “Then and Now” project.

A view from the Commons, with the United Congregational Church entrance on the right.

Gray's, the oldest continually operating, family-run, general store in the nation.

The First Baptist Church, still in use today.

Happy New Year, everybody. 

This year, the American Association of Diabetes Educators held its Annual Meeting in August in St. Louis. NancyTW and I were in that city for a few days in July, and I wrote a review of our experiences that was published on another website a week or so before the AADE meeting and before GDAT!! started at the end of the summer. I won’t reprint the article now, but here's a look back at a few pictures from our time in the Gateway City.

Kiener Plaza.

St. Louis Historical Old Courthouse, where Dred and Harriet Scott sued for freedom.

Second floor courtroom similar to where the Dred Scott case began.  The original Dred Scott room on the ground floor was sectioned into several smaller rooms with load-bearing walls that were needed to correct some of the building’s structural issues. 

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas.  NancyTW & I certainly did, and we got to visit with both of our families over the last three days.  Thank all of you who passed along your greetings. 

Here is the second installment of pictures from our trip to the Phoenix Zoo last summer.  The first shots are some of the 36 different handcrafted animals on the zoo's Endangered Species Carousel.  I'm sure you will agree that the colors and craftsmanship are truly outstanding.

Eagle talons.

Great Horned Owl.

Burrowing Owl.

Prarie Dog.

Merry Christmas everyone.

First, I want to wish our great friend Donna at Donnabetes a very happy birthday today. To borrow (and slightly annihilate) an old Irish saying, “May the Blog O’Sphere always be too small to hold all your O’C friends.”

On our second trip to Arizona back in June, NancyTW and I stuck around the Phoenix/Scottsdale area for a couple of days. The highlight of our excursion was a visit to the Phoenix Zoo. Here are a few pictures of the residents there.

Ring-tailed Lemur.

Galapagos Tortoise.

Hungry Galapagos Tortoise.

Reticulated Giraffe.

Swimming Otter.

Curious Otter.

Distracted Otter.

Grevy Zebra.

Nature.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Tonight I won’t be writing much because there is a small mountain of crass commercialism that needs wrapping mere feet from where I sit, so consider this the blogospheric version of “Let’s go to the video tape.” Only I’ll use pictures, because I’m generally ten years behind the curve where technology is involved.

Earlier I may have mentioned the two trips we took to Arizona this year. Why would anybody go to the same place twice in the same year?, you ask. Well, Nancy was out there on business, and it made sense for me to fly out and join her when she finished the jobs. So in April we plotted our own triangular course that took us from Phoenix/Scottsdale to Kingman, eastward to the Petrified Forest, and back down to Phoenix. Along the way, we detoured up to the Hoover Dam, stayed overnight in Kingman, stopped for a look in the town of Ashfork, strolled through a volcanic crater, examined some ancient Kayenta Anasazi ruins, explored what’s left of the ghost town of Two Guns, walked on the rim of Meteor Crater, stood on a corner in Winslow, spent a night in a wigwam in Holbrook, hoofed it in the Petrified Forest, drove through the Blue Mesa badlands, absorbed the colors of the Painted Desert, and read some of the 650 various images that make up the petroglyphs carved into Newspaper Rock.

Whew. If I had known we were doing so much out there, I’d have been more tired. But, I didn’t know. We just kept driving and looking for things to do, and it worked out very well. I don’t remember having any sugar problems, but I do remember testing in some very strange places, like an abandoned mountain lion pen in Two Guns, and of course in that tee pee.

So here are a few images from this particular trip.

Hoover Dam

Ancient Ruins

Two Guns attraction from years gone by.

The rim of Meteor Crater

It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford . . .

Wigwam Motel, Holbrook.

Petrified Forest

Ancient Petroglyphs at "Newspaper Rock"

This weekend I was looking over some of the pictures I took throughout the course of 2007, trying to select a few of them to post before the New Year.

I may have mentioned once before that whenever NancyTW and I are in a new city, we try to spend at least a little time visiting the local zoo. In July, we were at the St. Louis Zoo when my sugar dropped below freezing and forced us to have lunch a little earlier than usual. The Zoo has a goodly number of places to eat, but the menu board of the one we were near was too utterly complex for me to understand in my hypoglycemic state. So Nancy did the ordering for both of us while I sat on a bench, eating glucose tablets. Later, I learned that the complicated menu actually listed only about five simple choices, consisting mostly of burgers, dogs, and Budweiser. Again, Nancy to the rescue.

About a month before that, I shot this image of some prairie dogs at the Phoenix Zoo. It was quite hot, and they seemed intent on sitting around, finding ways to cool off, and looking cute.

Two months earlier, we had done a self-guided tour of Arizona, starting in the Scottsdale area and driving up to Kingman, then staying at a number of towns on historic Rt. 66 until we eventually turned south again four or five days later to get back to Phoenix.

You find some interesting places when you’re out in the middle of nowhere.