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.