I was in a Scottish mood yesterday.<\/p>\n
My RSS feed reader told me that the latest episode of Scotland Introducing<\/a>, a podcast devoted to unsigned Scottish indie bands, was available. I followed that, throughout the day, by listening to Idlewild, Camera Obscura, Y’All Is Fantasy Island, and I’m probably forgetting one or two other Scottish bands.<\/p>\n Music makes the day go faster.<\/p>\n I had a fair bit to do at work yesterday. I wrote about Gundam models. It wasn’t my best work — I had a migraine, and I wanted to stab myself in the head — but it sufficed. There’s really not a lot you can say about Gundam models.<\/p>\n By late afternoon, though, I had nothing left on the plate to write. So, naturally, when I was offered the chance to leave early, I packed my things up, shut the computer down, and called it a week.<\/p>\n Though overcast, it hadn’t rained. The writer in the cubicle next to mine had said, earlier in the day, that it must have been chilly outside. I told him that it was muggy outside; temperatures in Charm City were in the mid-70s. It just looked<\/i> nasty outside. It wasn’t actually<\/i> nasty.<\/p>\n In no real rush to get home, because I had no schedule to keep, I decided to disembark the light rail at a different stop, then walk eight or ten blocks to reach the subway stop that would take me home. <\/p>\n I exited at the Centre Street stop. There’s a park there I’ve seen in passing a few times. Until I walked up the hill, I had no idea that a Revolutionary War monument stands there, three soldiers in their tricorn hats and flintlocks at the ready. A plaque described someone — a man named Howard — who had been influential in Baltimore during the war. The statues were metal, they had a stylized appearance. They reminded me of Adrian Salmon’s Doctor Who<\/i> artwork — angular, blocky, shadow, all creating a mood.<\/p>\n I walked back north, toward the subway stop, using back streets. I didn’t know, exactly, where I was going. I knew if I headed vaguely in a certain direction, I would get near to where I wanted to be.<\/p>\n I can be such<\/i> a tourist.<\/p>\n Church architecture fascinates me, and I navigated by steeples and towers. I may not be Christian, but the cultural roots still run deep, and I find myself fascinated with the look of religious buildings.<\/p>\n I saw one building that I thought, at first from a distance, was a church, perhaps an Orthodox church. Then as I approached I noticed its towers were adorned with Stars of David, and I decided it was a synagogue. It was neither. It was a Masonic temple.<\/p>\n I saw a church with flying buttresses. It seemed to me they were more for show than for support.<\/p>\n Eventually, I did have to go home. My walking tour came to an end.<\/p>\n I rewrote some of the dialogue in “THOD<\/a>“‘s first chapter yesterday. Going back and revising — except to change the name of one of the characters, who had a placeholder name of “Maxwell Edison,” who wasn’t majoring in medicine — wasn’t something I was looking to do at this<\/i> point, but I just felt the need<\/i> to rewrite that stretch of dialogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was in a Scottish mood yesterday. My RSS feed reader told me that the latest episode of Scotland Introducing, a podcast devoted to unsigned Scottish indie bands, was available. I followed that, throughout the day, by listening to Idlewild, Camera Obscura, Y’All Is Fantasy Island, and I’m probably forgetting one or two other ScottishContinue reading “On Things I Did On Friday”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[424,4093,88,690,4124,4102],"class_list":["post-2301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-baltimore","tag-life","tag-scotland","tag-thod","tag-work","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n