Spring Cleaning . . .

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Hello... My name is Owen, and I'm a recovering blogaholic. :-)
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I've been taking a break from blogging as Spring Cleaning is in progress, and it has been occupying whole days of going through all the various rats nests that have been accumulating in and around the house, to clear out the dead brush to help let the living things breathe and grow. Today it took me all afternoon to clean out the eight large, deep drawers in my big old wood desk. Large piles of stuff went to the recycling bins. I've lightened my load, and am smiling for it.
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All this cleaning has been giving me considerable food for thought. Putting me in touch with certain things again which had been laying forgotten, or fallow if you will. I'm realizing I need to make some adjustments in my life. The blogging for one thing. This blog now has over 1100 postings in it. It has become my War & Peace. My life story can be found in it. My heart has been poured out in it. Massive amounts of time have been spent composing it, and then following through answering comments, and getting out to visit as often and as many as possible of other wonderful blogs encountered along the blogging highways and byways.
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It's time for me to slow down a little bit in regard to all that. The Magic Lantern Show will continue, but perhaps at a slower pace than previously. The house cleaning of late has shown me that there are numerous books around me that I haven't read yet. And I love to read. Have been doing a lot more reading recently than I have since blogging monopolized large amounts of my life over three years ago. My guitar has been languishing in the living room corner, neglected. It is time to change that. I need to spend more time out with the camera, and less time in front of the PC. My writing, other than composing paragraphs for the blog, has gone to the dogs. There are a poem or three rattling their bones in the back of my head, I need to start sitting down again and scribbling on paper, tinkering with bits of the loose verses I've written so much of in years past, and from which I, if no one else, derive some considerable pleasure. Time to take care of myself perhaps a little better. Time to spend more time with la Grenouille. Less burning the midnight oil leaving just one more comment in a comment box, and more time sleeping. I've had some health issues over the winter which I won't bore you with, but they have served as a wake up call. I need to adjust certain perspectives and priorities, spend more time more in touch with the real, the immediate, and less time in the virtual realms of cyberspace.
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So, I shan't disappear from the blogosphere, which is a vibrant community I've come to love and respect and admire, but I shall be a bit less present than previously. The Spring Cleaning has a ways to go still. The vegetable garden will be wanting to be planted soon. La Grenouille wants new flower beds prepared along parts of the yard. There's a bird house that needs mending.
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Now, it's time for what I set out to blog about today, which was not the above series of reflections which simply happened spontaneously, but about a wonderful exposition at the Grand Palais in Paris which ended in February, of large works of map-making sculptures from the 17th and 18th centuries. Applied architectural modelling of entire cities and the landscapes around them done by artisans of the highest artistic levels, producing dumbfounding results with the raw materials they had available at the time, which we might consider rather crude and basic today.

Some of these works can be seen all year round in the rather unknown Museum of Plans and Reliefs which is housed in Paris in les Invalides, on an upper floor, which is one of the greatest hidden treasures in Paris, imho. They were made for military purposes, to help strategists better understand the defensive requirements of key areas. I stumbled on the Museum in les Invalides by chance many years ago, and still have the guide book from my first visit there, which was  published in 1981, the cover of which is scanned for the first image here. After seeing some of the "plans" in the museum, I was inspired to go see some of the places in situ, like the beautiful city of Briancon in the French Alps. Some of the displays that were on exhibit at the Grand Palais cannot be seen in the permanent museum, because they are simply too big for the rooms there. The model of the city of Brest takes up over 60 square meters of floor space, or roughly 645 square feet.
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I'd like to thank Peter, of the excellent blog Peter's Paris , who clued me in to the exposition at the Grand Palais with the piece linked to here at the end of January. I had just enough time to slip down there and see it before it was over.
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The second image here is also scanned from the guidebook, and gives a more precise idea of the extraordinary level of detail used in making these models. Each window, each chimney, each roof, each door is exquisitely visible with startling realism. I hope no one will mind me borrowing the cover image and this one picture, in the intention of encouraging you to go visit the museum in les Invalides the next time you are in Paris, and where you pick up your own copy of a book.
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The following images I took on my visit to the expo in February, just a few weeks back now. Enjoy. And do go see the Museum of Plans and Reliefs the next time you have an hour or two to kill in Paris, it is well worth a visit.
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These were samples of some of the materials used to make the models.
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Now I'm off to clean out the attic. :-) See you soon.
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