Here’s the final treasure — a pretty hand-painted tile — that Elizabeth and I wanted to share with you.
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January 27, 2014
January 24, 2014
The second of the three treasures that Elizabeth brought to the office for me to share with you are these two pages (two sides of a sheet, actually) showing a variety of horse breeds “reared for driving, agriculture, and sport” (the first page), and several “light and heavy types bred for road and field” (the second page).
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January 23, 2014
Jill’s sister, Elizabeth, is now on her way back to England after a brief visit here in Kentucky. She came in to the office yesterday and brought a few treasures that she’d collected and that she and I thought y’all might enjoy seeing as well.
The first is this nice old postcard (postmarked 1920) of a Caleche in Quebec, Canada.
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According to Don Berkebile’s Carriage Terminology, the Canadian version of a “Caleche” is, as clearly shown in the image, “a two-wheel, chaise-like vehicle used in Canada. It has a small seat on top of the dash for the driver, and the inside seat holds two passengers.” The term “Caleche” was also used to describe four-wheeled Barouches.
January 22, 2014
I never had a chance to post anything here yesterday, as we had a big day-long snowstorm, plus falling temperatures throughout the day, and we left the office early to get home before the roads completely froze over.
And now it’s super-duper cold again and (just like during the “polar vortex” incident), our office heat pump can’t really keep up. I’m not sure how much longer this afternoon we’ll all last at our desks in coats and hats and finger-less gloves while the heater struggles to reach the mid 60s … so I’m posting this now in case we need to skedaddle earlier than usual again today.
When I got to the Horse Park this morning, I drove around for a bit, before coming in to the office, and captured these photos of the snow. Enjoy!
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January 20, 2014
I’ll have to admit that I’d never heard of London’s Wellcome Library until this morning, when the announcement came via Twitter that the library was making more than 100,000 images available as high-resolution downloads. These represent hundreds of years of, as they say, “visual culture,” now available free of charge.
Many of the images focus on medical and scientific subjects, but I of course had to do a search for horse-drawn vehicles anyway. What the heck, right?
And I found this undated and un-captioned, but undeniably lovely, image …
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The Slower Road 