Current location:	home sweet doublewide
Current mood:	lazy

to Georgia and back; ecclesiastical and domestic architecture
Kudzu. Lots of kudzu. I saw kudzu on and off on the drive north, but around Alpharetta, near where they held the Scrabble tournament, it was ubiquitous. Big-leaved vines smothering hillsides -- it was planted to prevent erosion -- and trees and anything in its way. I saw no signs of attempts at control, but rank new growth could have covered those up.

Someday, people will be able to drive on I-75 between the southern border of Georgia and Atlanta and not encounter any road construction. I never have. I hit three traffic jams on the freeways during the whole trip, none lasting very long.

I left Georgia 400 at Roswell to get to the hotel, and hit Labor Day traffic at last -- still not that bad. Suite-ish room at the far end of the third floor, sitting-room area partly partitioned from bedroom, desk, small TV, microwave oven, mini-fridge. Shopping at Trader Joe's -- there are none in Florida -- and dinner in the room. I had some breakfast food at fast-food places this trip (avoid the bacon breakfast wrap at Burger King), but otherwise didn't eat out despite all-you-can-eat sushi at a Thai and sushi place nearby: the suppressed appetite and near-nausea from the Symlin don't go well with being a trencherman.

(The hotel room had a clean carpet. It didn't have piles of clutter everywhere. When the time came -- Monday morning -- to leave for home, I almost didn't want to go.)

Forty people at the tournament. I was seeded sixth of eight in Division 2, what with my depressed rating after Dayton, and I didn't really rise above that, finishing 10-10 before 12:30 Monday and the drive home. I'm doing something wrong. My strategy must be fundamentally flawed. Many people improve by learning to mimic the style of Scrabble-playing software, and sadly that seems to be the best way. Unlike chess or Go, Scrabble can be played better by a computer than by any human player, and using software that runs fairly quickly on a 100 MHz Pentium -- and given the full lexicon of permitted words.

I didn't see all that much of Roswell or Alpharetta. Mostly I stuck to a few main roads south of the tournament venue and east of Georgia 400. It's mostly middle- to upper-middle-class, and most of the houses and buildings look no more than twenty years old. At the lunch break on Saturday I drove to St. Brigid's, the church where I went to Mass on Sunday, and both days I had a look at the local architecture.

St. Brigid's is a modern, red-brick, Southern incarnation of the sort of the older Catholic churches I saw as a boy in Illinois: their website. They broke ground for it in 2001 after a few years of Mass celebrated in a house on the site, so it's new. The sanctuary is described as Gothic Revival -- which it more or less is, like the churches I grew up with -- but there are no internal columns, no soaring heights inside; it sits atop a huge walk-out basement built against a hillside, and the concrete staircases to the front doors take you up a full story (of course, there are also ground-floor entrances and an elevator). Sanctuary proper is cruciform, but with those angled-towards-altar pews in the arms, and a floor raked slightly downwards -- you can just tell -- towards the altar. The stained glass windows are fairly large, but mostly little rectangles of plain glass, with pictures and decorations of the usual painted stained glass a foot or two across looking rather lost -- but the old-style windows that were mostly patterns are probably just too expensive nowadays. The tabernacle is at back center of the altar -- good idea -- and although they have a Jesus On A Swing crucifix hanging above the altar, it's a rather good one. Big staircases go to a roomy choir loft. The ceiling isn't the usual cathedral ceiling of my boyhood Gothic churches, but relatively low and nearly flat, with plenty of air conditioning vents. The church holds about 1200, and the walk-out basement includes the parish hall.

There's a sort of simplified rose window over the altar, and two smaller windows a little lower and to either side. The one on the right depicts a young man in a slightly antique coat and tie, holding a sheaf of papers -- and to one side of him... I couldn't make out what. The Blessed Sacrament, I think. Who's the man? someone dear to the people who'd paid for the window? That'd be very old-school indeed. (I've toyed with the idea it might be a young John Henry Newman, but I don't think so: the papers could represent his writings, but there's not enough of a likeness, and he's not in clerical garb. The man depicted looks more like a lawyer.)

I saw plenty of needlessly steep roofs and strange dormers, and I think I'll isolate my thoughts on that in another Rant on domestic architecture.

Uneventful drive back. I stopped for groceries in Gainesville and was home by dark.