Puttering in the Study

Merry Christmas from the Smiths

We are finishing up a very enjoyable Christmas at the Smith home in Marshall, and I wanted to share a couple of pictures - the first of my mother with her grandchildren, and the second with her three kids. 

Grayson's Boy Scout Troop at the Old Harrison County Courthouse

Grayson's Troop 550 from Trinity spent the morning attending a Harrison County Commissioners' Court meeting in the historic Harrison County Courthouse this morning.  We took this photo on the steps in the rotunda afterwards.  Was very proud of our boys, who are spending the week working on merit badges.  Yesterday they spent the morning in our offices at the Hub working on the Citizenship in the Community badge.

Merry Christmas - from our starship to yours

Louis W. Kariel, Sr. flagpole back up at the Hub

Passersby might have noticed one last exterior change to the Hub recently, and that is the installation of the new flagpole on the 111 side.  As with everything else associated with this building, there's a story:

When we first inspected the roof of the building, we found a rusted old flagpole on the backside of the 111 side parapet.  We know from the building's history that the parapet was rebuilt and raised in 1928 when Louis Kariel Sr. moved the shoe store to 111 from 113, where it had been since his uncle Mose Weisman opened it in 1897.  And photos such as this from the late 1910s don't show it, so physical and photographic evidence makes clear that the flagpole dates from after 1928.   The bolt holding it up had either been loosened to allow it to rotate down to the left  (where you can see it in this photo under the arrow), or it had simply fallen over - we don't know which. 

Now the other interesting thing about this picture is what it shows across the street - the old First National Bank building built around the same time has a flagpole behind its parapet as well - it actually has one on both the Houston and Austin sides of the building.  And so does Old City Hall on the square behind it, as shown in this old postcard - and again, built around the same time.  Even Louis Sr.'s dad's store - the Marcus Kariel Clothing Store down the street from the Hub had a center-roof flagpole, as you can see in this picture (it is the large two-story building on the other side of Logan & Whaley in the 1910's picture, and so did the old Marshall National Bank building, flying a whopper in this photo.

So the physical evidence indicated that there was at one time a flagpole over the store, and it dated from after 1928, i.e. the time period when Mr. Kariel, Sr. ran the store, and was part of a tradition of local businesses (as well as civic buildings) of having flagpoles, including on this block of East Austin.

Louis W. Kariel, Sr., the second owner of the Hub Shoe Store, was a veteran of World War I (and a major in the Texas State Guard in World War II), and served as chairman of the Marshall city commission of Marshall from 1935 to 1947.  He wasn't a merchant by training, he was actually trained as a chemist at the University of Texas in Austin (graduated in 1917) and worked for several sugar companies before returning to Marshall in 1924 to help care for his mother, Hub owner Mose Weisman's sister — at which point he and another man bought the store from their uncle. Four years later Mr. Kariel bought out his partner and ran the store until 1969 when he handed the reins over to Louis, Jr.  (naturally he kept coming in to work for a few more decades). 

My guess from what I've read about Mr. Kariel is that his attitude about flags was a little like mine - if I'm going to have a building, by God it's going to have a flagpole on it.

It took several months looking for just the right product, but we eventually found a flagpole that screwed into the back side of a parapet, and a solar-powered flagpole light to light Old Glory at night time.  I have to admit that it's not the most visible flag downtown, but it brings the 111 building one step closer to what it probably looked like during the 1940's when Mr. Kariel ran the store and waited for Louis Junior to quit fooling around at the University of Texas and in the Navy and come on back and help out with the store.

So if you're visiting the Hub and you see some pictures of a distinguished looking older gentleman in dark glasses, that's who it is - the Hub's second owner and proud UT graduate and veteran, Louis W. Kariel, Sr.  The guy who put the flagpole on the building.

Jamie's swearing-in for fifth term as county treasurer set for January 3, 2011

As the attached shows, Jamie will be sworn in for her fifth term as Harrison County Treasurer on January 3, 2011 at 10 am in the Harrison County Court at Law courtroom, on the first floor of the Harrison County Courthouse.

Please join us for punch and cookies (I assume) and the always-entertaining family photo as the boys hold the Bible for Jamie to take the oath again.  Here is four years ago ...

Hub update - 113 side complete (more or less) & kids' room finished

I can never say it is totally complete because there's always something else to be done, but the 113 side, which has our offices, is about as complete as it is going to get, now that the kids' room upstairs is furnished.  But I did want to include this panoramic view of the 113 side as it originally appeared as the Hub Shoe Store in about 1908, then last October the day we bought the building, and currently.

We are still decorating the 113 side, which primarily means covering the roof of the conference room with foliage (for some reason I feel like it needs to look like a Victorian greenhouse up there) and waiting on the boys to stop by and decorate their room up in back with posters and drawings.  But the ladder is done , the counters are in , and the rug is down.

Technology, technology, technology... part 1 - Entertainment changes at the house

I have a little time this morning to putter while Jamie sleeps after a late night with supper club last night. I am sitting in the study continuing to be amazed at the things that technology will do, and am taking notes on posts I want to do over the next few days about the the new programs and devices I am using.  This morning I thought I'd mention some of the recent things we're using primarily for entertainment, which are changes from what we've had since moving into the new house.

DirecTV Whole-Home viewing

This is what Jamie and I have been waiting for ever since we moved into the new house six and a half years ago and got our first DVR - a way to watch recorded programs anywhere in the house.  DirecTV called this multi-room viewing when they upgraded our circa 2004 receivers, but in short, we went from one HD receiver/recorder (which we got about a year ago primarily so I could watch Giada de Laurentis in HD on Food Network) and three standard receivers, to the same receiver/recorder with three HD receivers which were able to access and play the content on the DVR from anywhere in the house.  What this meant was that we now had the ability watch HD in the study and in our bedroom (and in Grayson's room once he got a hand-me down HD TV).  The became a more pressing need recently because the boys started spending a lot of time playing Wii on the TV in the living room/den so we couldn't watch our programs - plus it's getting harder to watch anything in there because the boys tend to play in there and they make it impossible to hear the TV.  It also meant it was time to get a larger TV for the study (which got Grayson my old one) and a big TV for our bedroom, but now we can watch Castle or Hawaii Five-O upstairs late at night when we want, or in the study in the evenings while the boys are playing on the Wii.

Internet TV

This one was a fluke.  I was in Walmart last weekend and decided that with prices so low it was time to upgrade the DVD player in the den to a Bluray player.  But when I started looking, I saw that the Sony BDP-S570 had Internet access via Ethernet or wi-fi, so I decided to get this one for the study and move the older player to the den.  Boy was that a good decision!

I have not been impressed with "Internet TV" since my experience with it has been limited to what the Ethernet-connected Samsung Internet@TV monitors in the conference rooms at the Hub do.  They're difficult to program, and the services are slow (hard to believe when I have a fiber optic connection) and hard to access.  By contrast, the Sony Blu-ray set itself up, found the house's wi-fi no problem and immediately (it starts up far faster than any other Blu-ray player I have ever used) presented me with a variety of video and audio options.  I couldn't get Hulu to work and wasn't interest in renting movies (via Netflix or otherwise) at the time, but I was interested in TV - I have been wanting to watch the first two seasons of Castle, but why buy the seasons on DVD since they surely ought to be available somehow in HD?  Well sure enough, Amazon Video On Demand came to my rescue.  All I had to do was set a code and it allowed me to order shows or movies on my account.  And there it was ... Castle seasons 1-3 in HD, at 99 cents a pop.  I skimmed the listings in movies under sci-fi - and there were over three hundred, including movies I've been wanting to see for thirty years and haven't had time for.  I can rent in SD, sometimes in HD, and best of all, I can often buy at half of what buying a DVD would cost.  (I still haven't rented anything because I can rarely tell whether I can get a movie watched in the next 24 or 48 hours, so I suspect I'll be using it primarily to buy movies - not rent).

So I buy the first episode on Castle in glorious HD, and it's now in the cloud, ready to download and play whenever I want, and wherever I want.  For kicks I watched part of one episode at the office the other night, and it downloads and plays just fine on the computer monitor as well.  Same with the iPad except that Apple doesn't permit the Flash software to work, so while the browser comes up, the episodes can't download and play.  I am getting the episodes I want in HD at about half the price of buying them on DVD - in standard definition, and then being restricted to playing them only on something with a DVD drive if I have them with me.

There are a lot of other web TV channels, some of which deal with technology or gaming or sports and Parker especially liked looking at the ones about video games, but nothing I got too enthused about.

The other service I've started using on the TV is another cloud-based one, and that's Pandora, which is a Internet radio application.  It lets you set your own stations based on artists you like (I started with Jude Cole, Pat Metheny and Sting) and then plays music by those artists and others like it.  The Jude Cole channel has been great - the first four songs it played I really liked three (the fourth I already knew) and they were by artists I'd never listened to or even thought about.  So I started scrambling to take notes on these artists and I may download an album or two in the near future from these guys - who's I'd never even thought about before.  And if I don't like the song, I just hit forward and it goes to a new one.  What a concept!

But this has changed what I do in my leisure time ever since - even though I can now watch TV in HD in the study, and even watch what's recorded on the DVR, I find myself going to the study and sitting down and either going to Amazon to download episodes I like or to Pandora to browse through some interesting music.  These sorts of services are starting to be built into TVs, but even if the TV doesn't have it, they can be accessed by web-enabled DVD players like this, by computers, and by TVs with HD streaming players (so I might buy one of the latter for the bedroom TV).

Anyway, I highly recommend the whole concept of whole-house DVR access, and - especially - Internet TV. Finally.

Drood - Dan Simmons

I just finished listening to this on audiobook and I'm not sure what to think about it.  It was well written and the narration by Simon Prebble is masterful.  The book is a fictional memoir by Charles Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins and presents a possible mystery to explain the origins of Dickens' unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 

Interesting story but a poor ending.  But it might get me to look into some of Collins' books.

Agora - Alejandro Amenábar

I saw this movie at Walmart last week as well and picked it up because since I had done a lot of reading about Alexandria in preparation to seeing it with Jamie four years ago (plus half of the "archaeology porn" books out there take place in Alexandria, from Steve Berry and James Rollins to ... others I can't recall.  I call it "AP" because it's a mystery/thriller where there's just gratuitous use of archaeological treasures for titillation purposes.  I can't remember how many times somebody's found the long-lost tomb of Alexander the Great, and every time I get this sick thrill from it.  I just feel so ashamed...)

Back to the movie.  It looked like they had put a lot of effort into recreating ancient Alexandria, between that and Rachel Weisz, who appears as the philosopher Hypatia, I thought it looked like something I'd like.  The story is based on historical fact - there were tremendous riots in the city in the late 4th century as religious factions (Christians, Jews and pagans) fought each other in the streets, and Hypatia was a real historical character.  I enjoyed the movie and appreciated the effort that went into it, but the mixture of a dramatic story with the scientific and specifically astronomical interests Hypatia had was for me a poor fit. 

Grayson's Sri Lankan meal

Grayson chose Sri Lanka as his country for this year's World Bazaar (largely because Father Denzil is from there) and he and Father D yesterday prepared his dish, a shrimp with vegetables and fried rice, which looks delicious!