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Sunday, October 7, 2007

Warning! Playing with Google Earth

is highly addictive to the n-th degree

This is my parish from a 521 ft. bird's eye view.
My parish takes up the lower portion of this city block in the Old Town Area of San Diego. I've noticed google earth can sometimes skew things a bit...what's labeled "SerraaHall" is actually a small Mexican walk up restaurant.

The parish buildings are all under those red roofings.


The church itself was finished in about 1917, it's the building at the left that the two big palm trees are casting shadows on. The sacristy is behind (newsflash there) and it is connected by a walkway to the rectory, which was built in the mid 1930s. Just to the right of the rectory, is the large social hall, which has two levels. The large upper level, includes a kitchen and a stage area and storage, plus a good sized hall. And there is a small lower level which contains our gift shop and some office space and smaller rooms. The hall was completed in the fall of 1977 as I recall. It replaced the much smaller Gregory hall, of late and happy memory. The top right building is a garage & apartment.

We now have a fairly small parking lot, to the right of the hall and garage, but the "old timers" (I'm talking about folks in their late 70s and older) told me the church used to own the whole city block. Pity we didn't keep it, because we could have made a fortune in car park fees and had no church debt EVER. The large lot is state or city owned now. At least the parking is free.

Close to the edge of the street behind the restaurant and to the right of where the rectory is, we had a few tiny bungalows where we used to teach CCD when I was in college in the 70s. We had a blast tearing them down, more fun than an old fashioned car bash. Sledgehammers are fun! [In pre PC days high schools used to often have an annual car bash fund raiser. I say this for the benefit of my UK and other overseas readers. I don't know if high schools do this or not any more, I expect the nanny police worry about flying glass and things like that.]

In the early 90s the church was really made a lot more earthquake sound. And they did a terrific job with the latest and greatest engineering techniques without the diocesan wreckovation committee ruining us. Because now, when you have building committees in to do needed major repair/maintenance the diocese wants to see what it can do about screwing up your "worship space." A few diocesan dweebs showed their faces about the time we were having to renovate the church, but they were met with lit torches and a few hand grenades and the only casualties were the dweebs from the diocesan wreckovation committee, who were forced on their own swords. Yours truly lobbed the first hand grenade. I think Sherman might have received a better reception in Atlanta.

Astute readers will note I haven't used the name of my parish. I don't mind if anybody from the parish stumbles across my blog in the blogosphere, but I'm flying under the radar, for now, anyway. Eagle eyed readers, can see the name of the parish in the picture. I will say the parish is named after the patron saint of the United States. Hush now. Don't give the game away. Otherwise the pastor might say: "Why don't you write about this, that or the other." Let him get his own blog!

And if you think it might be fun to post a pic of what your parish looks like from bird's eye view, consider yourself tagged and this post a meme.

9 comments:

EC Gefroh said...

I have a cousin in the Navy who lives in SD. He loves playing with Google earth too ;-)

gemoftheocean said...

Yeah, and to think I had "writer's block" earlier today.

What I really like is playing "look where I used to live." When I was little, we moved around quite a bit. [My dad kept getting promotions and progressively better jobs.] It's fun to look at the old "hoods" and places I thought I'd never get to lay eyes on.

It's a bit lousy at dept perception, but that's not what it was designed for. you can tilt and rotate too.

WhiteStoneNameSeeker said...

oooh errr I might have a go.

gemoftheocean said...

Go for it...only I warn you that it's exceedingly tempting to also look at the queen's backyard and things like that. [Did you know she had a tennis court way up in the corner?]

a thorn in the pew said...

My son plays with Google Earth for hours. I played with Silly Putty and Barbie when I was his age...haha.

gemoftheocean said...

Yeah, but thorn if WE had had computers back then it would have been "Who is this Barbie Bi-atch who has everything and why would I want to play with silly putty when I can hack into NASA, fly over the Grand Canyon, talk to someone in Australia, and write the great American novel?"
Oh, and clobber the computer chess game. Not mention photo shopping in my favorite actor into the family photos.

Anonymous said...

That is soooo cool! I want to do my house. I'm going to give it a try.

Anonymous said...

there's software that takes up a notch. it can extrapolate from like images to create a 3D photo model that you can view at eye level and zoom in and out without pixelating.

check it out: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

and

http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx

gemoftheocean said...

Thanks for the tip, anon!

Karen

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