Wanna Buy a Castle?

St. Donat's Castle, where I worked in Wales, had been in the same family for hundreds of years. It sat empty for a while and was purchased by William Randolph Hearst in the early 1900's. He bought a bunch of other buildings and glommed them onto the edges of St. Donat's. He used the castle as a hide-away for his mistress, and had a phone line installed in the summer house below, so she could get calls from Hollywood. He only visited the castle a few times.
Fonmon Castle, up the road from St. Donat's, belonged to a friend, and her family has lived there for hundreds of years. Her brother is the hereditary peer and does all sorts of things to keep the place in the family and out of the hands of the tax man.


Caerphilly Castle, the second largest castle in the UK, after Windsor, was always a big favourite of mine. It was nine miles exactly from our house, and I would drive over on summer evenings and walk around the perimeter of the castle and its two moats.
Even Cardiff had two castles, a twelfth century one and a Victorian-era one, both ringed with a Victorian-era stone wall with all sorts of animals climbing their way over it. I should post the rest of these guys sometime...The entire country of Wales was encircled with an Iron Ring of Castles to keep the English out from the land side and the Celts out from the sea side. So every where you go, there are castle ruins - around every corner, along the coast, peeping out of the woods.
There are three castles currently for sale in the UK, but none are in Wales. One's a ruin in Scotland, but the heritage trust will help you rebuild it. One was home to Catherine Parr, but it's really a semi-detached house, so you'd have to share it. The third has eight bedrooms, so you could have loads of friends over for the weekend.I'd rather have any one of these than almost any one of Damien Hirst's pieces, which just sold for £70.5 million! Which one do you like the most?

100k

I am expecting my 100,000th visitor sometime this afternoon. If I have your e-mail address, or can figure out who you are, I will send you a special prize!

Update: Visitor no. 100,000 stopped by at about 3:43 this afternoon from a Road Runner account. I am very humbled by each and every one of you taking the time from your day to visit my blog. Thank you so much! xoxo

Books on Sunday

After a fun adventure this morning, and then lunch with my mother, I made it to the Book Thing, which has neither heat or air conditioning. This is noted because it was in the upper 90's today, with matching humidity, and I could only stand being in the Book Thing for about 10 minutes.

Within moments of arriving, I found the large-format Ladies Home Journal Book of Interior Decoration, circa 1954. In addition to traditional rooms, this book features "modern" rooms, which we now term as mid-century modern. One of the illustrations I liked was a grouping of traditional textiles framed in embroidery hoops, a la Purl Soho. The endpapers on this book were wonderful, too. They are an oak leaf and acorn pattern.

Another fun book is Nature Illuminated, Flora and Fauna from the Court of Emperor Rudolf, II from the J. Paul Getty Museum. The introduction gives the history of these works, and the illustrations are remarkable, for being more than 400 years old.

The prize today is the book of London and its Museums, in all of its 1970's glory, short skirts and bad haircuts! I should be able to pick up a tip or two from this little book. House, is that you?

Hmmmmm?

Good Wishes

I hope that you will join me in sending good thoughts to our friends along the Cote de Texas. It sounds like they will need all the luck they can get.

The London Antiques Guide

In preparation for my trip next month, I've been looking through some of the books I have about London. One of the books I bought when I first moved to the UK and was working in London was The London Antiques Guide, which is one of the books I've featured on my sidebar.

I used to get up bright and early and go to the antique markets before work, as I didn't have to be there until about 9:30 a.m. Portobello Road is perhaps the best-known of the markets, but there are others including Spitalfields, Bermondsey, Covent Garden, Greenwich and St. James's.

From the London Antiques Guide's website, it looks like they might have different versions for the American and British markets. I have the UK version. The book is divided, street-by-street and style-by-style and also includes auction houses and antiques fairs and markets. One of the big fairs I liked was the one at Alexandra Palace, also known as Ally Pally. It's held several times a year, but not when I will be there.

With the exchange rate so bad for Americans going to London, I will mostly be looking. Even though I still have a UK bank account. I don't want to deplete it!

Cocktails on the Porch

This evening, despite the threat of rain, we had cocktails on the porch at work for our board of directors and some generous donors. The chairman of the board commented to me on how much he liked the blue ceiling, which you can just barely see below. I wanted to make the evening festive, but not spend a lot of our donors' money (we want as much of their gift as possible to help the kids we care for), so I went to Target. They have a line of paper goods by designer Isabelle de Borchgrave and I found some in great Mediterranean colours, which would look great with the stone walls of the house. I was very impressed with the quality of these simple items, the most expensive of which was no more than $6.00. I also bought some beautiful sunflowers, which worked brilliantly with the paper goods. All in all, a very good evening and hopefully, we'll get some nice donations!

Beyond Limits @ Chatsworth House

Mark Quinn - Planet

What could be more fun than an incredible sculpture exhibition at a stately home in England? If that appeals to you, then get yourself over to Chatsworth House (home of the Duke & Duchess of Devonshire, above) and see Beyond Limits, a selling exhibit of modern and contemporary sculptures, co-sponsored by Sotheby's.

Zaha Hadid - Kloris

The last time this was held, they sold nearly all of the 22 sculptures. The exhibition runs from September 9 until November 2, 2008.

Claude Lalanne - Pomme de New York 2006

Hmmmm... I will be there then!

American Love by Robert Indiana

Images: Guardian UK

The Aftermath

Of course, today, just after Hanna blew through, is about as gorgeous day as you could imagine. The humidity's half of what it was yesterday, the sky's a clear blue and the temps are in the low 70's. This is a bee in my garden on my mint plants.

I went to a posh dinner party last night and on the way, I stopped to take some photos along the Harbour. Between the bands of the storm, we'd get brief periods of brilliant sun, and then you'd see black clouds in the distance.

The docks where I took these pictures is at the end of the street where I lived for 10 years. I used to catch the water-taxi to work from here. The big ship on the left has come in from South America to deliver raw sugar to the Domino Sugar refinery. You can sometimes smell the molasses from processing the sugar, and the building's so large that it blocks the wind when we're sailing. We call it the Domino Effect.

You can see what a beautiful day it is here in Baltimore today and if you click the picture, you should be able to see a short video of the fly-over before the Ravens' game.

Thanks for all of your good wishes during the storm and your commiseration that we didn't have the Pigtown Festival yesterday.

Hanna Update

The Pigtown Festival is still going on as planned, despite the dire forecast. My neighbour Jen and I decided to bail out. Most of my things are paper-based and with the humidity hovering around 97%, it will all be ruined. We also don't think that people will be strolling by, admiring our goods and spending their money!

It's just raining a little now, but we got about a quarter-inch overnight with the early bands of the storm. However, they're predicting that the weather will deteriorate as the day goes on. But, as with hurricanes, the weather tomorrow will be wonderful!

Here's the satellite image from about 9:00 this morning:You can see the eye right on the North Carolina/Virginia border.

Hanna, Hanna Go Away

After spending much of the summer preparing for tomorrow's Pigtown Festival, it looks like it's going to be a wash-out. The forecast here in Baltimore is calling for 3-5 inches of rain and 40 mph winds throughout the day, and power outages all around. At lunch today, I saw trucks from the local gas & electric company driving around.
The skies are begining to cloud and there's been a steady breeze all day today. You can see on the image above from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that the clouds are over Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay. Hanna's a huge storm, with high winds expected as far out as 300 miles from the eye.
I've been through more hurricanes than I can count, here on the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic Coast. They all have names that resonate with people here - Isabel, which put several feet of water into downtown Baltimore and our architectural salvage warehouse; Hurricane David, which I remember because I was at the beach by myself and Agnes, a rare early June storm which made entire towns along the Patapsco River disappear.

Hanna's being closely followed by Ike, which will probably ruin the cocktail party we're having at work on our porch on Tuesday.