Monthly Junk Roundup Episode 1

Mentioned I wanted to do this over on the BlueSky, so now I'm actually gonna write this. This post is a roundup of all the random stuff I saw and went to this month. All stuff that isn't enough for a full blog post and I wasn't quick-witted enough to tap out as a 'microblog' in the moment

there were a few more of these than expected, sorry.

After my time exploring downtown Lake Wales, I made my way up to the Bok Tower Gardens. In the 1920s a retired magazine editor by the name of Edward William Bok purchased the land that would become the gardens, then an 'arid sandhill', and transformed it into a large botanical garden, crowning it with a 205 feet tall art deco bell tower. The property is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and still open to the public, albeit behind a slightly steep $20 admission. I'm not really mad at it, they got staff to pay and a lot of ground to maintain, but it's a factor. I really wanted to explore more of this, but shortly after I arrived I realized I was a lot more tired than I thought. Fatigue was hitting me like a pile of bricks, probably the last echoes of a nasty cold I thought I had shaken earlier in the week, and a lot of my time was spent relaxing on various benches, which I admit is not a bad way to spend time in a botanical garden.

Getting to the photos above, these bird tiles are sprinkled across the whole gardens, with these two right outside the entrance. They're quite endearing, in their way. Our second photo is from the grounds behind the tower itself, looking out from the hill over the softly rolling groves and suburban plots of Polk County. Nowhere in Florida is truly mountainous, but Polk County is often hillier than you'd expect, and in it's more rural areas it really feels like the Northeast sometimes. While sitting here I talked a bit with a guy who was also taking in the view, he was apparently making his way around the US photographing and videoing various places, mostly churches. He talked a bit about some of the churches in NYC he'd been too, and a few closer to home in Florida, and he told me he was making his way to Kissimmee tomorrow. He seemed like a nice guy, never got his name or what he did for a living, though he was wearing a Walmart employee shirt. I don't know what's more likely- that someone who works at Walmart has enough spare cash to travel from NYC to Florida photographing churches, or that someone who has that money to travel would be wearing random Walmart shirts. Wasn't a cheap camera, either. Anyways.

The last photo is just of a pond, in front of the tower if I remember right. The giant lily pads are beautiful, and with the palm trees surrounding it really does feel like a different part of the world.

While I didn't get any great photos of the whole tower, I did break out my Canon to get some decent closeups of the sculptures and mosaics that decorate the tower. Somewhat weathered over the years, they're all still pretty strikingly beautiful. I'd love to get something made out of pink marble, some day. This is specifically etowah marble, but there's a few varieties from quarries around the South. 

Last weekend I went with my dad to see a Van Halen cover band called Completely Unchained at Daytona Beach's 1936-vintage bandshell. The bandshell is a really nice little piece of New Deal architecture, and it makes a striking comparison alongside the more modern hotel towers and shopping centers that surround it. 

Let's knock out a little bit of carspotting, shall we? Florida's lack of frame-eating road salt and older population means it's rich soil for finding more interesting cars, compared to more northern states. For a broad net of 'interesting', at least, I'm easily amused.

To start with, we have a Nissan Cube Krom, a higher spec trim on what's normally a pretty budget vehicle; your dollars bought you some shinier wheels and redesigned trim, with an itty bitty spoiler on the hatch. After that is a more conventionally interesting retired Cadillac hearse; while I'm sure a few of these remain in service in rural areas, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers plate makes me pretty sure this one's no longer a commercial vehicle. Speaking of working vehicles, this rusty Ford in a wonderful yellow-orange is still putting in hours on the edge of downtown Lake Wales. I also spotted this older Buick; not exceptionally rare in these parts, but as they pass to 2nd and 3rd owners, clean ones get less and less common.

Hopping to the Bok Tower Gardens parking lot, we spot a Pontiac G6 and a Subaru Baja, which are both great examples of mid 2000s automotive styling. The Baja is the stronger of the two; it's sport styling screams 2000s, and I wish this style had stuck more in modern 'small' pickups. Both are also in pretty good shape; rarer for the late gen Pontiacs, which are entering the shitbox rotation to replace their venerable Grand Am forebearers. To end off, we have a pair of Scion hatcbacks- the wonderful rectangular toaster that is the Scion xB, and the more workaday basic hatchback that is the xA, both spotted in the same parking lot a few spaces apart. I nearly bought an xB when I was shopping last year, and sometimes I do regret opting for the Vibe over the Toaster. Not that much, though. The xA isn't much to talk about; but it is from a dead marquee, so that's something. 

While I've gotten a lot better at reducing my thrift purchases, I still make the circuit of the local stores pretty frequently, and make occasional pickups. I found two of these TDK "video libraries", intended for camcorder-sized mini tapes, at the Goodwill Bins in Orlando. I saw them and was immediately struck by trinket shelf possibility, illustrated here with a selection from my collection. In our second photo, a surprising find for a suburban American Goodwill: a vintage Japanese market model kit. It's a small kit for a GX-89 from the anime sci-fi classic Space Battleship Yamato, and can't be much newer than that show's 1974 premiere. The mysterious, slightly unfocused black cuboid in the 3rd photo is a Boxee Box, an early Linux-based set top box, hailing from 2010 and discontinued only 2 years later. Fairly useless now, though you could still play files off connected storage or the network if you really wanted. 

Our last two pieces are both vintage- a wonderfully nonplussed Garfield, who even had his original tag, until it fell off shortly after purchase. But I'm not a reseller, so I don't care. The second photo is a vintage blender with some pleasing typography; the blender mug is weirdly slim though, isn't it?

The local model train show was also this month- notified, as always, by an automated email from a Yahoo address and pointing to a dead website. one day I expect to roll up to an empty field, but so far I've found trains every time. I didn't actually pick up many model trains- I've been slimming my collection, and limiting acquisitions as a result. but I did find some great magazines. The first one is an amazing slice of 2000s American paranoia, though even today you can talk to most passenger rail photographers and find stories of being told off by station staff for reasons of national security. The latter cover is just comedic from a modern angle- I don't think VIA is as bad as Amtrak for timetables, but the prospect of going to Canada for impeccable service is a little humorous to me.

Inside, there's even more fascinating tidbits- from an advertisement for new Chinese steam engines^[1] delivered direct to San Francisco or New York City, to high speed Amtrak diesels that never were, to Canadian research trips to Scandinavia. If you ever see old issues of railroad magazines around and have an interest in trains, I highly recommend you pick up whatever ones look interesting, and crack em open. They're often chock full of fascinating tidbits that never made it to the internet (or are buried in obscure corners).

Okay, let's toss the themes to wrap this up, let's just go bullet points:

• This box of foam circles was the packing material for a car radio I purchased from Japan; my only thought is this individual buyer had access to an excess of foam circle offcuts for some reason, but its still odd. Effective though, and I guess thats all that counts.
• We move on to my trip to Lake Wales; in Yeehaw Junction, in between the newer centers, stands a BP with a Krispy Krunchy Chicken. This counter serves great chicken and potato wedges, and as a triple bonus, the store had glass bottle real sugar Frostie root beer.
• these killdeer popped up near my work one day; they were cute. I initially mistook them for very lost sandpipers.
• I've never had the displeasure of describing a license plate as 'peeled' before, but this bus changed that. I initially thought it was a manufacturing error, but a friend told me modern plates aren't painted, more so wrapped, which would facilitate a total 'paint' loss like this.
• My local Walmart has strapped a skeleton to their automated floor scrubber for the Halloween season. These things move at a fair clip, it was surprisingly awkward to get a photo of. 
• Florida has a lot of absolutely wonderful mailboxes, and this tile mosaic of the clouds, seagulls, and sea turtles is an amazing example. If I keep up with my morning walks I might be able to collate a post worth of these.
• Finally, a cat. Feral cats are actually pretty rare in my part of town (probably because all the woods were torn down for houses...), but I spooked this beautiful Saimese cat one day while going out to chill on the patio.

[1] - China built steam locomotives into the 1990s, with the last of them not being fully retired until January 15th, 2024 (not a typo). A handful were built new for American tourist railroads in the late 1980s through early 1990s, including one SY Class that currently resides at the bottom of the Indian Ocean after the ship carrying it was sunk by a typhoon.