blogging — Page 24

The Search for the Missing Egg Cup

October 17, 2013 at 9:46 am by Claudia

A blog can function as a virtual record of daily life, at least if you’ve blogged for 5½ years like I have. Many is the time that Don or I will question when something happened and I’ll say “I’ll check the blog!”

So, an interesting thing happened while I was in Hartford. I was doing some work on the blog; checking old posts, editing a bit, that sort of thing, when I saw something amiss.

I collect egg cups, as you all know by now, and I often highlight them around Easter. I came across the most recent photo of them on a shelf and something looked off. I had a feeling that one of them was missing. I wasn’t sure which one was missing, so I went back in time via my blog posts to the previous Easter.

Aha.

eggcupcollage

The photo on the left is from last spring. The one on the right is from the year before. The pink arrow is pointing to the egg cup that was missing: a hard-to-find Little Boy Wearing a Cowboy Hat egg cup made in Japan more than a few decades ago.

I racked my brain. Had I seen it lately? No. Where had it gone? I had no idea.

This is not an easy egg cup to replace – this sort of figural egg cup is getting harder and harder to find. How could it have suddenly disappeared? I regret to say that for a second or two, I wondered if someone had absconded with it. But then I regained my senses. I mean, why would anyone take a little egg cup? Ridiculous.

I called Don and asked him to look around the floor in the guest room, where we had previously hung these shelves before we moved them to our bedroom. He couldn’t find anything. Since I was away from home there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.

But it bugged me.

I had planned to look for the egg cup when I got back home, but Scout got sick and I forgot all about it. Cut to a few days ago. I went upstairs to look at the shelves. No cowboy. I went into the guest room and looked everywhere. Nothing. When I ‘lose’ something, I often say to myself “Nothing is ever lost” and I wait for some sort of clue to emerge from the recesses of my mind.

Wait a minute. I suddenly remembered hitting my head on the underside of that bottom shelf, which resulted in several egg cups crashing to the floor. One of them broke and I had to glue it together. At the time, I gathered all of them up and put them back on the shelves. Was that the clue? Could the egg cup have gone missing then?

And, as if guided by the Lost Item Guardian Angel, my eyes went to the bed – the end of the bed, which is a foot or two away from the shelves. I got on my knees, lifted the dust ruffle….and there it was. Just under the bed – a few inches under it. Nestled against a storage box. The Little Boy Wearing a Cowboy Hat had been sleeping. For several months.

He’d been there all the time.

cowboyeggcup1

Here he is. Did you have a nice nap?

Thank you dear blog. You alerted me to the fact that one of my egg cups had gone missing. I put out an APB and he was rescued. Now he’s back on the shelf where he belongs.

On another note: my friend Dawn recently posted a photo of a Stick Bug, or a Walking Stick Bug. I hadn’t seen one in years. Look what I found in the garden the other day:

walkingstickbug1

walkingstickbug2

walkingstickbug3

I made Don go get my camera so I could keep track of where he was in the meantime. Every time I got close with my camera, he would freeze. He knew we were there. The moment I moved away, he would continue climbing up that zinnia. I got several shots of him, then my attention was diverted by a bumble bee flying into a morning glory blossom. When I looked back, he was gone.

By the way, I’ve spoken to you all about Dawn before. She designed the watermarks you see here, as well as my signature. She offers her design services to bloggers and her prices are very, very reasonable. If you need something for your blog, I urge you to contact her. She is incredibly professional and her work is lovely. She is a busy wife and mother, devoted to her family and, boy, is she talented! I recommend her highly. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dawn over the past few months and she is the best.

Happy Thursday.

ClaudiaSignature140X93

On Keeping My Time on the Internet in Check: Making My Own Rules

October 15, 2013 at 10:11 am by Claudia

Social media. The very words exhaust me.

I know we are supposed to be connecting and re-connecting with people via Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram or Twitter. I’m sure there are more sites that I’m missing, which is sort of my point. I can’t keep up with them. Moreover, I don’t particularly want to.

I see them, in my moments of clarity, as huge time-sucks. And I have enough of those time-sucks in my life already. First of all, I write this blog seven days a week. Every post is an original post with my thoughts and photos. No guest posts. No using photos from other sources and linking to content elsewhere, unless it’s a quick link to something I think you might enjoy reading. For better or worse, it’s all mine. I answer comments. I do my best to visit other blogs when I get a chunk of free time. I check in on Facebook at least once a day. Facebook, by the way, is the one thing I will take some time for. It’s my way of keeping up with with former students and hearing about their lives, and that means a great deal to me. I spend much, much, much less time on the Facebook page for this blog. Sometimes I forget to check in there for several days. Since I post daily, I often feel I’m just duplicating things on MHC’s Facebook page. I started that page because it seemed to be the thing to do, but I’m far from committed to it. I try.

I force myself to go on Pinterest once every 3 or 4 weeks. I have no desire to spend hours pinning photos. I don’t care about being a “Power Pinner. ” Again: exhausting. I see its appeal. I do. But I have other things I’d rather be doing, like reading a book, taking a walk, working outside, working inside, talking to my husband or my sister or playing with my dog.

Instagram? I think I’ve done it 2 or 3 times. And that was well over a year, maybe even two years, ago. Twitter? Every once in a while. But I have to reminded to check in there. It’s not on my wave length. I did tweet John Boehner the other day to tell him to do his job and end this ridiculous shutdown. That’s as political as I’m going to get on this blog. At least for the moment.

Bloggers, especially, are told to use social media extensively. We should be tweeting our posts. We should be talking about our posts on Facebook. We should use Google+. We should do all this stuff to increase our page rankings. We should, we should, we should. I’m not sure who made up these rules, but, as you know, I’m not a big fan of rules. Yes, I do a bit of that. But only a bit.

I’ve already made peace with the fact that this blog is not a niche blog. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, if I had a niche blog I would go nuts, and not in a good way. Limiting myself to one subject matter would drive me right up the wall. Since this blog is about my life, it can’t be narrowed down to just one thing. Thank goodness. All that is to say that for niche bloggers, maybe all that social media stuff is a good thing. But for me? No. As it is, the first part of my day is about writing a post, checking in on comments, reading the news headlines from the New York Times, checking in on Facebook and reading my email. That takes a big chunk of time.

After that? I have other things to do. I already feel that I spend too much time in front of my laptop screen. The Internet is a temptress, don’t you think? I could easily spend hours here in this chair, going from link to link, site to site. Indeed, I’ve done that more that a few times. All of these ‘rules’ for blogging and/or living on the Internet only serve to suck up more of my time. So now every picture I take has to be Pinterest worthy? Every post I write has to be touted on other sites? I have to spend time tweeting things about this blog? I have to join Google+ because Google tells me I should? I have to be part of a ‘circle’ that involves even more work?

I don’t think so. I have nothing against any of these things. I’m absolutely sure they are used and loved by many; I just have to make choices that feel right for me.

I have to find some sort of balance in my online life. I need to make sure I don’t lose hours of my life staring at a computer screen. I will not let my life take place within the virtual world. I’m so aware these days of time slipping by; of years that seem to go by in an instant, of days that can be lost to the computer. Time seems to move more quickly as you get older. Days and weeks and years are more precious. I’d rather hear the sounds of the birds in our trees, watch a butterfly flit from flower to flower, read a good book, work on my real home – this cottage, and do what I love, whether it be my coaching work, crocheting a scarf, hand quilting a quilt or writing a post a day for this blog that I love so much.

So, while I’m very grateful for the Internet and all the information and entertainment it offers, not the least of which is the opportunity to write this blog, I’m constantly aware that its siren call needs to be kept in check. I need to be holding the reins. I need to do all of this my way. Not the way others tell me I should do it.

What are your thoughts on all of this, my friends? How do you spend your time on the Internet?

Happy Tuesday.

The Den

October 9, 2013 at 10:07 am by Claudia

leaves

I spent much of yesterday raking up leaves. We had a big, scary storm come through on Monday and the high winds knocked ¾ of the leaves off the sugar maple. Then we grabbed the tarp, raked them onto the tarp and took them up to the woods to become mulch. Most of the leaves on the flower beds stay there, protecting the plants and doing their thing to help the soil. Of course, raking at this time of year is endless, but the front yard is definitely looking better than it did.

I’m late getting this post up because we stayed up until 1:00 am watching the Red Sox/Rays game. Oh lord. It was endless and frustrating as Boston couldn’t seem to get anything going for most of the game. I found myself yelling at the screen more than a few times. After the Rays scored a run and maintained that lead for much of the game, somehow the Sox managed to get three runs up on the scoreboard and they won. They will play either the Detroit Tigers or the Oakland A’s for the American League Pennant. If it’s the Tigers, it will be a bit tough for me as they are my hometown team and I grew up watching them.

One of you asked to see the newly acquired lamps in a larger photo of the den. Let me say right off that the den is notoriously hard to photograph; it has a lot of windows and it borders the porch with its deep overhang. So, light? A problem. But I grabbed my camera and came up with these.

den1

The den is a smallish room (every room in this house is small – the house is less than 1200 sq. ft and that includes the uninhabitable basement) and it’s sort of packed with furniture. But we hang out there a lot. I blog in that chair. Evenings find us sitting side by side on the sofa, more often than not with Scout taking up half of the sofa and Don and I crammed into the other half. What’s wrong with that picture?

The window blinds were here when we bought the cottage and, so far, I’ve been okay with them. Lately, I’ve been thinking about some sort of curtains. But curtains are my other source of frustration, right after lamps. We’ll see what I come up with.

den2

We’ve had the sofa for about 17 years. Would I like a new one? Yes. But it’s hanging in there with the help of a slipcover.

den3

The blogging chair is vintage – we got it in California. It needs to be reupholstered but somehow there is always something else that is more pressing on the budget front. So I use this IKEA slipcover which doesn’t quite fit but is cheap and easy to replace when I subject it to one too many coffee stains. To the right of that china cabinet is the television. You don’t need to see that, although sometime I’ll show you the cabinet, found at auction for $5 and repainted and ‘aged’ by me.

Like everything in our home, the furniture is used, recycled and reimagined. I bought that beautiful old china cabinet when I first moved to San Diego. It used to hold my collection of vintage Fiesta. The ottoman has a wicker base and we got that in San Diego, as well. I got the green table at an auction for $20. The coffee table was found in an antique store for $10. The vintage wire laundry basket was a Craig’s List find for $50. Well worth it. The white table was purchased at Heidi’s antique shop when we first moved to the cottage. The screen against the wall was a find in San Diego (it’s from our Craftsman days – I tied some strips of fabric to the rods) and the painting over the sofa with my favorite frame ever was an auction score for $15. We’ve had the rug (originally from Pottery Barn) since we first moved out east. That would be 12 years ago. The floor lamp on the left side of the sofa is vintage, we found it in San Diego. The glass shade was found separately. Everything, except for the initial investment in the sofa, was very inexpensive.

My little desk (found on the street and not pictured) is in the corner and there is a vintage sheet music cabinet (found at auction for $25) just inside the entrance to the den.

While the living room has lighter McCoy Pottery-like-sherbety-colors, the den is predominantly red, cream and tan, with a splash of green. It’s a very cozy room at any time of year, but it is especially so when the weather turns cold. Now you can see where I work each morning. With coffee in hand, I step down (it’s sunken) into the den, Scout following. We arrange ourselves, my girl and I, in our respective places; yours truly in the chair, Scoutie in the ‘tunnel.’

I’m there right now.

Happy Wednesday.

ClaudiaSignature140X93

The Search for the Missing Egg Cup

The Den

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

Archives