…hails. I had my reconnaisance survey work day today. That means going out into a neighborhood with a clipboard, pencil, several standard survey forms and several letters from the person who authorized the survey [in this case, the city planner] explaining what’s going on. You then observe the building from the sidewalk and determine approximate date of construction roof and siding material, window types and materials, etc. Someone had already done a windshield survey [where you just drive by slowly and tick off addresses that look interesting] and so the buildings I was to look at were predefined. I didn’t take any pictures that would be useful or interesting to post here, the official black and whites had already been taken.

It has been my experience thus far that any time that I am scheduled to do field work since I started graduate school it is bad weather. Cold and snow and hail and rain at field school. Cold and rain in Florence in January. And today, as we set out it started to dribble rain. After 10 minutes or so the rain let up and it started to be warmish and sunshiney. We worked for about 2.5 hours in the lovely weather. As I was surveying home 8 of 10 it started to rain. And hail. Big, heavy, soaking drops and ice chunks. So, we packed it in and will finish up on Thursday when we start on our intensive surveys [intensive surveys are a recon survey plus library/archive/oral history research about the buildings’ significance].

On the plus side I now know what it looks like when in the 1950’s people built birdhouses into their gables. They don’t actually have any place for birds to live, but this is what they look like:

I would never have guessed that that was a birdhouse.