Articles by Bo Mackison

Brown or Yellow?

Buy Lyrica Without Prescription As a first or second grader, I would have been highly concerned that some adult made a serious mistake when painting the sign on the school bus. Surely big people who can spell all those hard words and then paint them on buses know the difference between the colors brown and yellow?

Tramadol For Sale Online Life is not always as it seems – especially when you are six.

https://www.appliquecafeblog.com/tees/ But even when you are a big people, too!

Anything for a Distraction

Purchase Valium Online Thanks to Amuirin at Stop and Wander for the meme nomination. I’ll play along, since I haven’t done anything for the last four days, except clean my house in preparation for the soon-to-be Thanksgiving festivities. And I’m a little desperate for any distraction.

Order Soma 350Mg Online (Here are the rules, in case you’ve been in another galaxy for the last decade and don’t know what a meme is: Players start with 7 random facts about themselves. Those tagged should post these rules and then post 7 random facts. Players should tag 7 other people and notify them that they’ve been tagged.)

https://www.parolacce.org/sposami_stupido/ Hmm. Okay, I can do the random facts part.

go site 1. I’ll start with a Thanksgiving fact. I haven’t hosted Thanksgiving for 30 years. That was the last time I was ever asked to cook the T-day bird. I was a novice in the holiday kitchen then, and left the packet of giblets in the turkey cavity to combine with the undercooked stuffing, and I made the only vegetable casserole I knew how to bake – the (in)famous green bean-mushroom soup-fried onion rings from a can combo. Pathetic.

Purchase Xanax Without Prescription 2. This year I volunteered for the job, figuring everyone had finally forgotten about 1978. They had, and they all accepted the invitation. I know a lot more about cooking for a crowd this time around. A crowd of 16 to be exact. But that doesn’t really matter, because I’m handing chef responsibilities over to my husband.

3. When I was in high school, I marched in a Color Guard. We traveled all over the East and Midwest. When we marched in the Cherry Blossom Parade in DC, we met then President Richard Nixon. (Yeah, he was the prez!) We presented him with a gift – a baseball style cap with the patch of the color guard sewn on it. I did the sewing, and in a moment of anticipated fame, I stuck my personalized card under the patch. Obviously done in the hopes that on a future day I could visit the Presidential Library and admire the cap in person. Obviously, that day will never transpire.

4. I grew up in a four-generation home. Not only did my parents get to tell me what to do, my grandparents and my great-grandmother also got in their two shakes of advice, for whatever it was worth. I was also taught the ways of their worlds. By the time I was 13, I could garden, sew, knit, tat, embroidery, darn a sock, crochet, and pull taffy. I, however, did not learn how to make a Thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately. (See # 1 if you’ve already forgotten why.)

5. When I was a student living in Chicago, I went to a Led Zeppelin concert. Our tickets were in the third row from the ceiling in Chicago Stadium. That was the night I discovered I have a moderate degree of acrophobia. That’s fear of heights in plain English.

6. I took four years of Latin in high school. I can decline Latin nouns and verbs with ease, but I cannot speak any language other than English. I have since tried taking other language courses, and my brain has thus far refused to master even basic phrases if not written in Latin or English. I deeply regret this.

7. I’m an introvert and don’t pass on tags.

So, no tagging, though if you want to play, feel free. I break chain letters and refuse to follow recipes, too. But I do make a mean green bean casserole.

Skeleton Barn

Drafty Barn

Drafty Barn © 2008 Bo Mackison

A land without ruins is a land without memories – a land without memories is a land without history.
~ Abraham Joseph Ryan


Mountain Bluebird

Bluebird on the Grasslands

Mountain Bluebird in Great Sand Dunes National Pk ©2008 Bo Mackison

This male Mountain Bluebird seemed to be admiring the setting sun as it dropped below the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado in mid-October. The mountain bluebird is one of three bluebird species in the United States–the other two are the Eastern Bluebird and the Western Bluebird–but the only one to be all blue instead of having a brownish underbelly.  The females of all the species are more difficult to identify, as they lack the blue intensity of the male, and tend to be an overall grayish-blue.

The Mountain Bluebird is found throughout the western parts of the States, usually west of the Rockies. This guy was perched only a few hundred yards from the nearest peaks, the Sangre de Cristo Range.

Pretty little guy, isn’t he? He’s the first Mountain Bluebird I’ve ever seen.

Finding Jewels Along the Way

On our recent travels to the Southwest, we spent two days driving west from Wisconsin to our first destination, and then two days driving east from our last destination back to the Midwest. We had much ground to cover–over 2200 miles–on those four days, and we were traveling on Interstates, something that neither of us particularly enjoy.

We didn’t want to squander four days of our two week vacation doing nothing but driving, so I researched our route before we left our home. Perhaps Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas don’t have a lot of well-known places to visit, but there is always something interesting to see if you are willing to look. And I found quite a few treasures that gave us an hour’s diversion from the monotony of the road.

Jewel Box Bank

Jewel Box Bank © 2008 Bo Mackison

Our first treasure literally was a jewel. We stopped at Grinnell, Iowa, which was just a few miles off I-80, to see the Merchant’s Bank, one in a series of architect Louis Sullivan’s Jewel Box Banks. Though Sullivan is most famously known as the “Father of skyscrapers”, he also left a legacy of these small banks, eight in all, dotting the Midwest.

Drat that car, but I wanted a photo of the front exterior showcasing the rose window medallion, and the car came with the exterior shot.

The window is designed with overlapping circles and squares that are in encased in terracotta ornamentation.

Terracotta Griffin

Terracotta Griffin © 2008 Bo Mackison

Griffins originally flanked both sides of the bank’s entrance, built vandals destroyed the East Griffin in 2006.  The terracotta and stained glass were a significant part of Sullivan’s designs.

Terracotta Griffin

Terracotta Griffin © 2008 Bo Mackison

When the bank opened on January 1, 1915, the townspeople of Grinnell were nearly unanimous in their approval. One citizen observed, “It sure looks nothing like Grinnell.”

Although that’s not entirely true. Grinnell, a small farming community, has an astounding number of buildings designed by well-known architects.

I think the building is best summed up by a newspaper journalist who wrote for the Grinnell Herald and was allowed a sneak preview prior to the grand opening for his article. He wrote:

“Go back to the north end and turn around to the south.  Raise the eyes above the partitions and brickwork and catch the massive simplicity of the long beams along the ceiling: study the windowed colored by Millet and its mosaic replica below which surrounds the clock with face of gold.  Raise the eyes still higher to the skylight…  If you are in just the right mood in time you can hear the dash of the waters over Niagara Falls, listen to the winds that sweep across the prairies of the West, see the blue that hovers over the land of the azure sky and understand something of what Sullivan meant when he talked about the genius of America.”