Before and After

Sometimes I think it's hard to imagine the damage a fire can do, even when looking directly at pictures of the damage. It just doesn't really fit in our frame of reference. Here are a few before and after photos I scavenged and pasted to try to make it more comparable for you.

Our Hallway:



The 'chaise':


The Kitchen:

"Are those your legs?"

The flag of Sicily looks like this:

The three bent legs conjoined at the crotch is called a triskelion. It's supposed to represent good luck and prosperity. If you've been to my house (Ben's apartment) you probably recognize this scene:

Oft I've been asked if they are my legs. I mean I know I used to have hairy legs, but these are obviously a man's leg. Right? Okay, so what's up with the legs anyway? Let me tell you a little story.

I was in Sicily with a class from school in undergrad. After Sicily, I went to Barcelona with 2 friends. We went to lots of museums and in one of them, there was a room with a honeycomb on the wall, a huge clear bin with white plastic disks in it, and a pillar in the middle of the room with the image of the leg on top. I thought it was quite a strange exhibit, but I kept coming back to it thinking there must be more to it. Somehow it dawned on me that the plastic disks fit in the holes of the honey comb--and with that realization I noticed that, in fact, Yes, the honeycomb was actually a wall of poster tubes stacked horizontally, and the bin of plastic disks were the ends to the cardboard poster tubes. But why have poster tubes without posters? AHA! The image on the top of the pillar must be a poster! I went to the pillar, looked around, saw a guard watching me, but touched the image of the leg anyway. The guard did nothing. I squidged my fingers on the image of the leg, and behold! the leg poster glided off the top of the pillar with ease. The guard still did nothing, so I ventured to the honeycomb, collected a tube, tentatively rolled the leg poster and put it inside. The guard did not react at all, and I was sure that this strange exhibit was interactive. Cool! I put the plastic disks on the ends of the tube and voila, I had my very own leg poster. I had so much fun doing it, I did it twice more to get posters for my two friends. The other museum goers took my que and began packing their very own leg posters too.
My friends were not as impressed by the exhibit or the posters as me, so I ended up with three. Which I thought was appropriate because it's like the three disjointed legs of the triskelion.