A long overdue hello to my virtual passengers.  With another big roadtrip just a week away, I thought I’d touch base and make sure I remembered how to log in and post to this blog.  Yes, I’ll be posting here nightly as the dogs and I head South for a month.  I got Sparkle checked out this week and spent close to $1,000 for new front & rear brakes, a tune-up, etc.  So hopefully this will be  a safe and trouble-free trip.

I’ve been toying with a new blog approach for awhile now.  Not that I’m ready for a big commitment but I would like to post now and then from home base when I come upon something I consider noteworthy or fascinating.  To me anyway.  I have a few ideas and will post them between now & the trip.  These little quickie posts will probably be mostly links to other sites that I hope you find interesting.

First item of this “series”.  Last August in Chicago, I came up this nice building feature & posted it here at the blog:

Well, one bit of info led to another as things often do when you’re surfing the ‘net.  Turns out, this is a partially obliterated Stege Brewery logo.  And part of a phenomenon known as “tied houses”.  The Schlitz Brewery was the most prolific producer of these and there are still lots of really nice examples remaining.  The Forgotten Chicago website has a fascinating, photo-rich discussion of them here:
http://forgottenchicago.com/features/chicago-architecture/tied-houses/

There are also lots of nice photos of these Schlitz buildings at Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=schlitz%20building&w=all