I downloaded some software last night that I wound up ditching today. It was shareware or freeware, and I hadn't already paid for it, so having it to look at today was like trying on clothes. Sometimes you have to put on a garment before you realize it just doesn't fit. That was the case with this batch of programs. They just didn't fit what I need.

And today I went out running errands, and saw something that truly doesn't fit. Not doesn't fit me, but doesn't fit what it's supposed to fit. And it's not something that can be discarded. It's a new facade on a shopping center. The center is a very small one, a strip center, with one part older than the rest. And I suspect the landlords got hit on by the local prettifiers to do some prettifying.

From what I saw today, it ain't pretty. The effort to make the parts of the center all look alike involves the use of beige paint and dark brown shingles. And takes away every last bit of character the place had. It's not a bad paint job. Nor are the shingles themselves bad. But adding a boxy contraption to the roof and trying to turn the whole roof into something that could star in a gable commercial was not well thought-out. I was stunned to see the transformation. This was not done in an attempt to deflect rainwater, by the way; it's strictly an appearance thing. I wound up driving around to the back of the center. There, the roof looks the same as always.

The town here has some strange ideas of what looks nice and what doesn't. They have an appearance commission that pretty much gets its own way. And apparently they approved this remodel job, since I haven't heard of any controversy around it (and I would have heard; these fights are news hereabouts).

I'm all in favor of things looking neat and clean, and garish doesn't appeal to me as a color scheme. But to take a storefront that had character and perfectly serviceable red brick and paint it beige, plus put that roof thing on it? Yuck. You can barely see the front of the store itself, for the shadow caused by the roof redo.

I've seen shopping center renovations that have been done quite nicely, where disparate storefronts were redone to match each other. But in this case, the stores were all done in red brick anyway, and the roofs matched. The windows and doorways didn't particularly match, and I can see the value of having them do so. But guess what? They still don't. This is just paint and shingles.

And tacky.

And that's a shame.