Fairhaven Acts CCRC in Sykesville, MD (2/22/2022)

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

On a whim, we stopped at Fairhaven, a newer Acts affiliate in Sykesville, MD, located on a 300-acre wooded property with several nature trails. The gated community has 302 cottages, villas, and apartments for independent living, 35 assisted living suites, and 69 skilled nursing beds. It is currently undergoing major renovation, so that much of what is seen today may change.

The temporary visitor entrance

Although we had just stopped by, Mary, the Life Engagement Director, gave us a tour of the amenities.

Fireside lounge in the lobby

The cubbies are located with the mailboxes

The Bistro is for informal dining

Entrance to the main dining room

The main dining room (it will be renovated)

Half of the library, which is in the process of going digital
for checking out (the residents business center was closed)

There was a multipurpose room in use, and the auditorium was closed for renovation. Also a full-service beauty salon, open five days a week. And a "treasures" shop of second-hand items.

The swimming pool and hot tub (the residents
have been requesting pool volleyball, as well as pickleball!)

Fitness center

Under renovation is a game room that will have card tables and a billiards table.

In warmer weather, a shuffleboard court
is laid out in a central courtyard

A crowded work shop

Art gallery hall with works from outside the community

Guess what?! A ceramics studio with kilns

A sewing and needlecraft room

The art studio with adjustable desks and ergonomic chairs

One artist made a 3-D version of the symbol
for Acts 50th Anniversary, and is painting
iconic scenes of Fairhaven on the heart

Like Buckingham's Choice, Fairhaven has a
greenhouse for wintering plants

A jigsaw puzzle table, and an ATM;
there used to be a bank, but it closed

Fairhaven has a real chapel!

Inside the chapel

There appears to be enough covered parking for all the cottages

The cottages

The independent living apartment buildings, and
two cottages on the right

A parking garage for the independent living apartments!

The villas

We are not sure where OakBridge Terrace or
WillowBrooke Court are located

The fenced-in garden was twice as large as at Granite Farms

There is a three-hole golf-course (we see two greens here)

Interesting to note in the Fairhaven community newsletter, there is a model train layout started by a now-deceased resident, for which they are seeking a group to evaluate and plan for its future.

The closest hospital, Springfield Hospital Center, is 1.5 miles/5 minutes away. BWI/Baltimore Washington International Airport is 29.5 miles/40 minutes away. Fairhaven is 30.8 miles/one hour from Erich, and 29.2 miles/45 min from Dylan & Pete, all on back roads.

Roanoke, VA (2/20/2022)

Sunday, February 20, 2022

We visited the world's largest free-standing illuminated man-made star:

The Roanoke Star (1949 as a seasonal
holiday decoration, by Roy C Kinsey of
Kinsey Sign Co and his sons)

The Star is located on Mill Mountain of the Blue Ridge Mountains,
overlooking the city of Roanoke, VA (KSS)

Every night the three concentric stars are illuminated
by neon tubing

The Roanoke Star Overlook view with downtown Roanoke and the eastern front
of the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians across the Shenandoah Valley

Our timing did not allow us to visit the Taubman Museum of Art
in Roanoke, but we had to take a look at the building
(2006-2008, by Randall Stout), with an undulating roofline
to reflect the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the 77-foot
glass peak of the atrium recalling a point of the Roanoke Star

Lunch was at a local café in Marshall, VA

After noting this sign with the outdated motto of Superman,
we were not surprised to see a Trump campaign sign inside
(the patty melts were decent, though)

We continued to our hotel in Rockville, MD, in preparation for visiting Erich and Laura, and Dylan, Pete, and Arya, with various animal pets, tomorrow.

Knoxville Museum of Art (2/19/2022)

Saturday, February 19, 2022
We are completing our "round trip" by heading east then north, with a midday stop at the Knoxville Museum of Art, another reciprocal museum through Tyler Arboretum membership, but free anyway.

Knoxville Museum of Art (founded 1961) is now located
overlooking the site of the 1982 World's Fair, as
seen by the view of the Sunsphere on the right

The museum is housed in the Clayton Building (1990,
by Edward Larrabee Barnes) that is sheathed in locally-
quarried pink Tennessee marble (KSS)

The main exhibition: Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collections of Jordan D Schnitzer and His Family Foundation:

Self Portraits (2006, by Hung Liu) left top: Official Portraits:
Citizen, left bottom: Official Portraits: Immigrant,
and right: Official Portraits: Proletarian (KSS)

Crossing the River: Chasing (2003, by Hung Liu) )KSS)

I am Large, I Contain Multitudes (2009, by Dinh Q Lê); the
title comes from the Walt Whitman poem, Song of Myself (KSS)

I am Large, I Contain Multitudes closeup
of the mirrors and doodads

Mistaken Identities (2005, by Roger Shimomura) from left
to right: For Hatate Family, For Masso Mori, and 
For Dorothea Lange (KSS)

Mistaken Identities: for Dorothea Lange is
one of Roger Shimomura's ukiyo-e style
adaptations of photographs from the WWII
Japanese internment camps that were
censored and kept hidden from the public; here
the internees wore name tags like luggage tags

Aggregation 10 #2 (2010, by Kwang Young Chun) is
made up of tiny parcels wrapped in book pages, like the
packages in which apothecaries sold herbal medicines
when Chun was a child in East Asia

Aggregation 10 #2 detail shows layers of the past
like fossils in stratified rocks

Tiny Rooms and Tender Promises (2016, by
Jacob Hashimoto), "a whimsical chaos"

The Cross (1997, by Dinh Q Lê)
combines Buddhism with Christianity

Downstairs in the Great Hall is the installation called Cycle of Life: Within the Power of Dreams and the Wonder of Infinity (2009-2014, by local artist Richard Jolley). It is one of the largest figurative glass-and-steel assemblages in the world, and required an infrastructure strong enough to support the weight.

Metaphysical, serpentine strands of pale blue spheres
helps represent the heavens

Primordial is a moonlit forest of poplars, indigenous to
East Tennesee, Emergence of man and woman, and
Flight representing the path to adulthood

Universe in the heavens is a constellation

fronted by another Metaphyiscal in the heavens, there is
Desire signifying the generative force of life,
The Tree of Life, and Contemplation represents
the introspection of the final stages of life

General view of The Cycle of Life (KSS)

Exhibit: Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream: Based on a photo of an empty column in Birr, a town in Ireland, where a statue of the Duke of Cumberland (who defeated the Scots at Culloden in 1746) was toppled in 1915 when the Irish were asserting their independence from England. In 2021, the town of Birr invited collage artists from 11 countries to use the photo to imagine a monument that reflects a world where all people enjoy safety, security, well-being and dignity. One example:

Leap of Faith (2021, by Danielle Cole
of Canada) as a tribute to women

Exhibit: Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass:

Trophy (2000, by William Morris, who
was formerly the chief glassblower for
Dale Chihuly) (KSS)

Untitled (1981, by Dalibor Tichý) with
extremely delicate tendrils

Thorne Miniature Rooms (1930s-1940s, by
Mrs James Ward Thorne): English Dining Room
of the late 18C (KSS)

Victorian Parlor (c 1850)

View of the site of the 1982 World's Fair from the museum

Third floor exhibit: Currents: Recent Art from East Tennessee and Beyond:

Green Picture in My Meadow (1971, by Jim Dine) (KSS)

Siting (2003, by Charlotta Westergren), the artist is known
for using non-traditional materials and here she presents
a view of an icy landscape inspired by her Nordic heritage

Siting detail shows the use of large sequins

Cajón Desastre (2018, by Antonio Santin) is an
oil on canvas trompe l'oeil/illusion of three
dimensions, of an unrolled carpet

Cajón Desastre detail shows the oil paint looks like
masses of colored threads

Third floor exhibit: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in East Tennessee:

Smoky Mountains, Tennessee (1938, by Fritzi Brod
of Czechoslovakia, who immigrated to the United States
in 1924) reflects European modernism

Street in Knoxville (1947, by Charles Griffin Farr) (KSS)

Seven Sisters of the World (late 1980s, by Bessie Harvey,
a self-taught artist) using roots, branches, paint, fabric
and embellishments

We walked over to the World's Fair Park,
site of the 1982 World's Fair

The Sunsphere, a 266-foot/81-meter tall
hexagonal steel truss structure topped by a
75-foot/23-meter tall gold-colored glass
sphere, the symbol of the 1982 World's Fair,
and is now a symbol for Knoxville, TN

The Tennessee Amphitheater, another structure
left from the 1982 World's Fair

In the lobby of the Knoxville Convention Center, we found
what is billed as the world's largest Rubik's Cube,
the cube puzzle that was introduced at the 1982
World's Fair in the Hungary pavilion; however, we were
disappointed to find it was only a representational
sculpture and not a true Rubik's Cube (1974, by Ernő Rubik)

Next: Roanoke, VA.