I see the Followers Gadget is missing again. It was there this morning but when I signed on about noon it was gone. My dashboard says I have followers, but when I click on the number the page is blank. I tried deleting the gadget and then adding it again – nothing. This seems to be an ongoing problem with Blogger and is getting very annoying. I’ve checked other blogs and their gadgets seem to be missing, too.

On to more pleasant things. I have this little table that I have had since I was teaching at Boston University. You can see a bit of it in this photo. There is a little back story on this table. When I started teaching at BU, I was very poor, having just left graduate school. My salary was not very much as I was just starting out. Boston has one of the highest costs of living in the country. Translate all this to: I didn’t have much and I could afford nothing. The Theater Department had 2 Prop Rooms – one in the main theater and a small one in the classroom building. The smaller room had all sorts of cast-offs donated by faculty and students that were used for acting projects. I needed a little table for my office and found this one in the shop. When I moved to a larger, rent-controlled apartment in Cambridge, the table somehow left my office and appeared in my apartment. And it has stayed with me ever since. (Disclaimer: I repaid that loan by donating some pieces to the prop room when I moved on to San Diego.)

Although it is a bit wobbly, I would never get rid of it because it is full of memories of that time in Boston. But I have been staring at it for a while thinking it needed something. You can see that it is tucked in right next to the piano and the piano is mahogany. Too much dark wood. As I am not about to paint the piano, I decided to paint the table.

Simple – but I think it lightens things up a bit. This part of the living room tends to be dark. Now I am going to paint two tables in the den. I keep wanting “lighter” here at MHC. By the way, this is paint I already had on hand – I used it for the kitchen island.

Speaking of the piano, it sounds so much better!