Who's up for a challenge? Yeah, me neither. That word just makes me think of buckets of ice water. Still, it has a nice ring to it. According to the Colonel's theory of mundanity the degree of mundane-ness of an object is directly proportional to the proximity of the observer. Thus it is possible for something to simultaneously be boring as hell and interesting as hell.
This duality is the inspiration for the #MundaneChallenge, which is basically to post photos of the mundane, the extra ordinary, the things you see every day but never take much notice of. With the global nature of hive someone is bound to be far enough away to find it interesting.
Does that even count as a challenge? It's really more of an idea for when you're out of ideas for blog posts. That doesn't make for a very convenient title though.
Anyways, enough about that, lets have some photos. To start things off with a bang, we have shotgun houses. These long, narrow houses get their name from the fact that if the front and back doors are open you can fire a shotgun through the house and not touch anything, all the doorways align. Ever since Hurricane Katrina gave New Orleans it's nice long bath Louisville has had the largest collection of shotgun houses of any city in the US. There's several neighborhoods here that are still almost exclusively shotguns.
The house on left is a classic example of a shotgun, one room wide and long as hell. There's no hallways, to get to the back of the house you have to walk through each room. Efficient, if you're trying to throw up as many houses as possible in as small of a space as you can but there's not much in the way of privacy.
Uh-oh, the gentrifiers have made it here. The sign in the window reads "NOTICE OF INTENT TO DEMOLISH" and that's always a good sign there's mischief afoot.
This is what you get if you don't shoot guns off in your backyard often enough. Nice, new, overpriced housing to make sure no student loan monies goes unspent. The University of Louisville is just a couple blocks away and developers have been steadily buying up nearby properties and turning them into these sorts of abominations. When I moved to Louisville in 2004 there was a church and lots of shotgun houses where the dorms now stand.
Don't know how it is in other places but here you can usually tell a building is (or was) a school just by looking at it. They don't quite rise to the level of the Brutalist Cold War era federal buildings or Soviet architecture but they still manage to have their own unique brutal, industrial air to them. The slightly wrecked and abandoned car just complements the vibe.
Is it normal to lock up the air conditioner where you live? It's not exactly common here but it's not exactly uncommon for scrap metal thieves to scavenge the metal parts from them either.
To borrow from Chuck Palahniuk, it's a glass slipper wrapper! Surprisingly, it's former contents weren't to be found.
Does it get more mundane than the neighborhood watering hole? Officially its name is Zanzabar but everybody here just calls it Z Bar for some strange reason. The hipster crowd is strong with this one.
Nord's Bakery is something of a Louisville institution. They're a bit old school, they make everything fresh and then once it's gone they close for the day. To get what you want you have to get there early, on the weekends the line is out the door and going down the block by 0800. A while back BuzzFeed named it the best bakery in the state. All I know is that their maple bacon longjohns are the shit.
With as many coffee shops as Louisville has it's easy to overlook them after a while. This particular one is next to the bakery and has great coffee and culty ownership. I used to go there almost daily but never took my camera. Now I don't patronize the place so I might as well take photos.
This last photo is a kitchen hawk. Or at least I took the photo out the kitchen window. Any birders out there have an idea what it is? I'm guessing it's either a red-tail or Cooper's hawk but I'm no expert on that.