Moose Photography's favorite shots

Study of patterns.  Dandridge, Tennessee.  

Interesting things you see when you’re traveling.    We exchanged big waves  and bigger smiles!    That front grille sure does look just like the one on our Miata.  :)  

The Rose School in Morristown, Tennessee, was built in 1892 as the city’s first coeducational public high school.  Named after a prominent local judge, it served as a combined elementary and high school through 1916, when the high school was moved to another location.   The elementary school remained on the site until 1975.   Once the school had moved, the building was converted to a cultural center; and it was renamed the Rose Center.    

So, how do you get photos of a place with 8′ fences, gates, etc?    Easy!   You find the one place where you can grab some photos from public property.   Nothing’s more fun than a “sneak a peek”.

This place outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, is way cool!

Those are two yuuuuuuge mountains of salt.  That’s just the very ends of the long mountains of the salt; they go on for probably hundreds of yards.  They’re keeping it covered with that black membrane stuff so it’ll stay dry if it rains, mists, gets foggy, snows, or such.    It’s the salt they put on the roads to melt the snow.      

Check out the blue color of the second pile.   The photo doesn’t do it justice; it’s beautiful!  It reminds me of a mountain of cobalt blue glass.    So why, you might ask, would they need blue salt?    That took some research, but it turns out this place is out there on the cutting edge of salt technology.  

It’s not that rare blue Persian salt (from Iran).  It’s plain old regular salt with an added colorant.

Picture yourself working for the highway department on a snowy day.  The roads are all clogged up with snow and you keep getting calls from folks complaining that the salt trucks have NOT been through their neighborhood yet and “by gawd” they need to get to work “raht naoh”.      You tell them the trucks HAVE already been through there, and they tell you they’ve been watching and they “derned sure hadn’t”.    So you be polite and tell them you’ll make sure their road gets salted (which you’re already sure of since you know it was done hours ago).   And you know they’re going to call back later to holler at you some more.

Now, enter the Blue Salt.   No more calls from those folks because the blue salt shows up all over their road, and they know they weren’t missed by the salt truck drivers.   The blue color is non toxic, it doesn’t stain things, and it just goes away by itself when the snow melts.   You use the blue salt in residential areas to keep the local folks happy; and white salt, which costs about $4 a ton less, out on the main highways.   

Someone out there’s had a great idea with this stuff!