Its been nice being one of a handful of people in town with a lime green vehicle.  It makes it easy to give directions to your house,

“Down the street and at the end of the Cul-De-Sac you’ll see a lime green Jeep, can’t miss it”

Lime green gets you instant recognition that you belong to a club of people who aren’t afraid of “BOLD ALL CAPS” color.  Well us El Paso Lime Greenie’s will be inducting a new member soon:

He sits menacingly off the freeway waiting for the right individual to snap him up and lay waste to the tread wrapped around the 20″ aluminum wheels.

Come on, you want to join the club. We’ll let you in… the membership fee is only 50,000.

Full Flickr here: Green Meanie

Like any big metropolitan area, El Paso has its share of weirdness. Today I bring you the end result of one really devoted individual in the northeast part of El Paso.

La Casa de Asucar:

This houses perimeter is completely covered on a very ornate and intricate fence that makes no bones about just exactly who this person believes in.

The level of detail is amazing.  I wouldn’t want to be responsible for the upkeep on this place.  I was also quite shocked that there was no apparent damage from vandals. No tagging, no missing heads or hands.

I was left with a kind of Hansel and Gretta feeling after seeing the Sugar House.  What do the neighbors think? Its well maintained and lighted at night but it is a bit over the top.  The Sugar House is a very appropriate name for the religious beacon just off the freeway. More sweetness can be found here: La Case de Asucar

I caught this guy buzzing my tomatoes:

Zoom lenses are awesome for getting close like this.  Luckily he wasn’t moving around a whole bunch so I was able to focus in on him.  I thought it was interesting that his wings were placed in a forward position when he was at rest, not backwards.  It’s kind of like he’s using them as counter balances.

Down by the southern end of Doniphan, there are several old industrial, mixed use lots. A few have buildings and equipment left that are worth checking out:

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I have been next door in the past and shot some pics of graffiti covering a large grey wall. (Flickr set here:Graffiti) For those shots I used my Holga and now that I have my Rebel T3i I wanted to go back and take them again.  They have since been painted over so I focused my attention on the empty terminal lot:

The BNSF train line that runs along Doniphan splits off and travels up to this site so there must have been some loading and unloading going on here in the past.  If a train happened to travel up the tracks now he would meet an old Olds:

The last resident looks to have been a construction company, and they liked Dr Pepper:

For 35¢ who wouldn’t? I wished it was full and running, the 100 degree heat was pretty unbearable, every surface radiated the high temps right back at you. The Pepper machine has been dragged out into the elements and cracked open but it looks to be intact. Other objects have been exposed for far longer as evident in this electrical panel:

There are other industrial artifacts scattered around the site in the same states of disrepair.  I was short on time to begin with so I exited and headed back to the cool confines of my office. Full Flicker set here: Abandoned Terminal

Tuesday night the Plaza Theater hosted Chris Isaak and the Silvertones,  a first for El Paso.  We’ve seen him before elsewhere but this was the first time we’d been to the restored theater.  I’ll have to say, I was quite impressed.  The sound was incredible and the band played flawlessly.

There was an especially amusing instance where in typical El Paso fashion a couple was late and getting escorted to their seat in the front row 3 songs into the set.  Chris joked ” We’ve been waiting for you, until now we’ve just been messing around”  Classic!

If you are only familiar with his hits and not his full albums you are missing out.  He plays the gamut from slow ballads to rockin numbers.  It may have been small size of the venue, but the band was really engaged and there was a lot participation with the audience.

Chris played his hits, fan favorites and then broke out into a jam session where they covered Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and other Sun Records recording artists.  He mentioned that they had previously recorded at Sun Records for an upcoming album.

They finished up and for the encore out came the famous mirror suit!

It was about a two hour set making for a very enjoyable night.  I was able to record a couple of videos which are included in my flickr set here: Chris Issak @ the Plaza