Claudia — Page 735

Miniature Trees & More Lights

November 30, 2018 at 10:40 am by Claudia

Well, I didn’t get to the antique shop because I looked for the porch Christmas lights and couldn’t find them anywhere, which leads me to believe they’re tucked away under the stairs with the other decorations. As I’m not ready to move the egg cup cabinet yet, I decided to go to Target and buy some more. Why not? They’re inexpensive and it’s probably time to get some new ones because, as you know, some bulbs are almost guaranteed not to work.

So I headed out and stopped at Target and Michael’s.

The lights are currently hanging from this cabinet and the stair railing so they lose the kinks in the cords. I’m going to drape them on the porch railing later this morning.

I found this guy in the china cabinet in the office, so he’s now on display.

But basically, the rest of the decorating will happen at the end of next week. Except for the dollhouses. They get done first.

I bought some trim at Michael’s.

They were marked 50% off. My idea is to clip off the little balls and hang them on my mini Christmas tree. I’ve never been totally happy with the way I’ve decorated that tree and I’m going to try to step it up this year.

If you’re new to the blog, you might not know that I made this tree several years ago. The branches are a preserved pine called lycopodium. My memory of that day is of glue covering every inch of my fingers and hands. I love it, though – it was worth it. It looks very realistic. But the pine is dark and it needs some colorful ornaments. I added one little ball last night just to see how it looks.

I also bought some battery operated lights there.

But now that I look at the box more clearly, I realize that the string is 8 feet long! Way too long for my little tree. Hmmm. I’ll have to come up with something else.

I also want to try to do something with this silver tree. My thought it to put it in the more modern dollhouse that I bought last year. It’s too tall, so I’ll have to cut it down somehow. I’d like to eliminate some branches so it looks less like a bottle brush tree and more like an artificial mid-century silver tree. Either that, or lots of ornaments to hide its bottle brush origins. Or, I might go with the smaller gold tree that you can see on the right and put it on a table.

Fingers crossed.

I like decorating the dollhouses. Even Don’s mini studio gets some holiday touches!

I’m off to eat some oatmeal, take a shower, and hang those porch lights. Don and I are going to Rick and Doug’s tonight for a movie night – Rear Window, one of my favorites. When we head back home after the movie, we’ll see our pretty lights as we come down the street.

I’m going to reiterate a couple of things I’ve shared with you in the past. Even though I have a Blogger blog and Google account, it has become impossible for me to leave comments on other Blogger blogs. I know others are having the same problem. So, even if it appears I’m not reading your blogs, I am!

The other reminder is this: when you choose to respond to a post by replying to the email version of the post, I have absolutely no way of responding to you. I can read your reply, but as it comes from a separate email address meant only for sending out the post each day, I can’t write you back from that address. Even though I’ve been clear about this several times in the past, the occasional reader gets ticked off at me because they think I’m ignoring them. I’m not. I’d much rather you respond in the comments section on the blog, but if you’re not comfortable with that for some reason, send your response to my email address which you can find by clicking on the envelope icon at the top of the sidebar. If you’re fine with me not responding, that’s okay, too.

Happy Friday.

Light

November 29, 2018 at 10:20 am by Claudia

This may look like a cloud at sunset, but it’s actually our mountain range at sunrise. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sun hit it that way. I didn’t do any editing or enhance the colors. This is exactly how it looked. In fact, Don saw it and said “Go take a picture!!”

So I ran out on the porch in my pajamas and socks and took several pictures. I like this one best.

We also watched about 30 crows flying around our yard, calling out to each other, landing on our trees. Crows fascinate me. They are such intelligent beings. Nevertheless, I told Don it looked like a scene from The Birds out there.

It’s been an eventful morning.

I didn’t get around to doing the porch lights, simply because it was so windy and cold yesterday. The wind was relentless – all day long and into the night. Today is much calmer, so – once I figure out where I put them – I’ll loop them from porch post to porch post, connect them to the extension cord and they’ll be good to go. It doesn’t take long. But boy, it looks pretty!

Nothing much new around here. We watched Victor, Victoria last night. Neither of us had seen it in many years and it didn’t disappoint. It’s as good as ever. Gosh, I love Robert Preston. I love the entire cast, but I have a soft spot for Preston because I love The Music Man so much.

I’m really loving Amazon Prime, which, to me, has more variety than Netflix. But Netflix has things that Prime doesn’t, so they balance each other rather nicely. One thing Prime does that I love: when you pause the film for some reason, they identify the names of the actors in the current scene. For people like us, who constantly try to identify certain actors or pause to Google a name, it’s really handy. And more importantly, it shows respect for the actors. Unlike Netflix, which shoves the credits up into the upper left hand corner of the screen, requiring the viewer to grab the remote and click on that tiny box to get it back on the full screen, Prime shows who the actors are – even those in minor roles. One of my pet peeves, both online, on television, and in the movie theater is this ‘racing’ through the credits. Excuse me? Actors and designers and camera operators and prop people and a whole host of creatives worked on this piece and they deserve to have their names clearly stated without the viewer trying to friggin’ speed read or having to constantly pause the screen to read the names. It’s so disrespectful. The powers-that-be keep pandering to the short attention spans of some viewers. We don’t all have short attention spans. Stop. Please.

My only Christmas decoration so far. And that’s only because he’s on display on the den bookshelves year round. You know the drill. I always wait until the end of the first week in December. I must admit I’m a bit more eager to decorate this year than usual – I suspect it’s due to the state of the world and my need to have something positive and sparkly and beautiful in my home. But I’ll wait. Besides, Don would not be happy if I decorated too early. He feels the same way I do.

I may drive over to an antique shop I haven’t been to for a while. I’m feeling the need to browse.

Happy Thursday.

Deer and Dialects

November 28, 2018 at 10:22 am by Claudia

This morning, as I raised the blind in the kitchen, I saw a beautiful buck just a few feet from the window. I rarely, if ever, see bucks on our property and have never seen one this close! Unfortunately, I didn’t have my phone with me, so the perfect shot eluded me. However, he stayed in the yard for a long time, eating the brush, safely camouflaged from human predators. We must have stood there for 10 minutes watching him. Don took a video, which is on his IG account (@donsroadtrip).

Look closely. You can see him.

We think he’s an older buck. He was walking slowly and bit stiffly – sort of like us – but goodness, was he beautiful!

I said to him “Stay here on this side of the road. You’re safe here.” He is, as all of the surrounding property is privately owned by our neighbors.

A beautiful way to start our morning. Almost like a private viewing, just for us. He didn’t seem at all concerned that we were standing on the other side of the window. I’m not even sure he noticed us. Normally, when we see deer right outside the kitchen, they notice us, freeze for a moment, and move on. Not this guy. And we’re grateful for that.

It’s gray, windy and cold out there today. Not my favorite weather.

This is what it looked like around here in the late afternoon yesterday. I had walked down the driveway to get the mail (including the newest Louise Penny) and turned back toward the house. I didn’t try to lighten this photo because I wanted you to see it as taken. As I said on IG, I love our house, but I find this particular barren view depressing.

Sigh.

I think I’ll put up the porch Christmas lights today simply to have some cheery lights out there. We need that.

We watched Florence Foster Jenkins last night. What a wonderful movie, with the incomparable Meryl Streep, who I am convinced can do anything, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg. As I was watching, knowing nothing about the actual filming whatsoever, I became convinced that it was filmed, at least in part, in England. I believed that more than a few of the actors who were playing American characters were British. There’s a ‘tell’ in the way they do an American accent – a sort of flatness, a bit of nasality, a change in inflection – that I can spot a mile away. (It is, after all, what I do for living.) There are some British actors who do American dialects flawlessly. But, I have to say, most of them don’t. It sort of drives me crazy.

Sure enough, much of it was filmed in England. And the actors I was suspicious of? British.

My theory – and it’s just a theory – is that to Brits, the American accent sounds flatter, more nasal, less melodious. After all, one of the things I love about British dialects as a rule is their use of much more melody and range than we tend to use. So the actors, and their coaches, tend to concentrate on the nasality they think they’re hearing and the comparatively flatter, less rounded vowel sounds that we use, and the sound becomes a wash of those qualities, which are part of, but by no means all of the qualities in the way we speak. We have our own melodies that we use when speaking. They’re just different than a British dialect.

I suppose Brits would say the same thing about Americans using British accents, though I do think, generally, we’re a bit better at it. When I was acting, I was often pulled aside by audience members who were British and were convinced that I was also British. Obviously, I wasn’t.

This is daily life around here when you have two actors living in a cottage, one of them a vocal coach. We constantly comment about actors emphasizing the wrong word in a line, or stressing pronouns when it’s not at all appropriate, or not articulating clearly, or, in this case, not quite sounding American. We can’t help it. On the other hand, we far more often praise actors’ work, knowing everything that goes into making a role come alive, and just how tough that is. Acting is hard work and exemplary acting? Amazing. Rare. Meryl Streep? One of the rarest.

I’ve also started The Comforts of Home, Susan Hill’s newest Simon Serailler mystery. It’s excellent.

I had a couple of comments from readers concerning On Tyranny, which I recommended yesterday. It’s on sale on Amazon for $6.39 in paperback and the Kindle version is $3.99. Go for it!

Happy Wednesday.

Miniature Trees & More Lights

Light

Deer and Dialects

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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