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Music Guaranteed to Make Me Cry

May 5, 2012 at 8:00 am by Claudia

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was listening to Joni Mitchell sing River on Pandora Radio. And getting weepy. What other music makes me cry? So I assembled a list.

River by Joni Mitchell

The end of The Firebird Suite by Stravinsky

Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin

Make our Garden Grow – (from the musical Candide) by Leonard Bernstein

Both Sides Now – the most recent version sung by an older and wiser Joni Mitchell

Venus – sung by Frankie Avalon (my late brother and I used to sing it together)

Adagio for Strings – by Samuel Barber

The theme music from To Kill a Mockingbird by Elmer Bernstein

The theme music from Schindler’s List by John Williams

This Nearly Was Mine (from South Pacific) sung by Barbara Cook

I’d Sing You – composed and sung by my husband

Goin’ Out of My Head – sung by Little Anthony and the Imperials

The Party’s Over (from the musical, Bells are Ringing) – sung by Judy Holliday (who died much too young.)

Out of this World/So In Love or anything sung by Nancy LaMott (she had the most glorious voice and she also died much too young.)

Last Train Home by Pat Metheny

Losing My Mind by Steven Sondheim (a real torch song)

Since I Fell for You – sung by Lenny Welch

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – sung by anyone, but especially Judy Garland

O Mio Babbino Caro by Puccini, sung by Kiri Te Kanawa in A Room with a View

I’m sure I will think of more as soon as I hit Publish. What’s on your list? What music pushes your emotional buttons? Please share in the comments!

Blogging Tips: Playing Around with Banners

May 4, 2012 at 8:00 am by Claudia

This is what you do when you’re stuck in a hotel room on a rainy day. You mess around with your blog banner. Obsessively. Yesterday, I had to run out the door because I was playing around in PicMonkey and suddenly realized I had to be at rehearsal in 15 minutes.

I’ve been wanting to change the look of my header from the usual photo collage to something different. Last week I read this great post about how to make a banner/collage in PicMonkeyusing white space. (Thank you Bunny for writing to tell me about it!) And I got all excited about overlays and what I might be able to do. This is what I came up with when I first started playing around:

( I apologize for the large watermark, but I don’t want anyone stealing my banners.)

It’s not what I ultimately wanted because the flowers and button were PicMonkey’s and had nothing to do with my blog, but it was fun to do. You can add your own overlay in PicMonkey, so I thought about my McCoy Singing Bird and my little lamb with the hat, both of which have become familiar sights to readers of my blog. Perhaps they could become overlays? I wanted something that floated on a white background.

What next? I tried to figure out how to erase the background of a photo so that just the main image remained. I spent several days painstakingly trying to erase my backgrounds in Pixlrand got very frustrated. Yesterday, I finally did it! Then I added the images to the white space using PicMonkey’s overlay feature.

This was my first try (and what I was doing when I realized it was time to go to rehearsal.) It was just a test. I was unhappy with the color of the birds as they were too green when they are really aqua. So I uploaded them again and changed the color. I also played around with different fonts, but this (called Playball) is still my favorite so I went back to it. I made a new banner, using the recolored birds in a different configuration, along with my little lamb.

For now, it’s making me happy, so it will stay. I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking it. I never say never and who knows? I may end up going back to my photo collage banner. But not for a while.

Heck, that’s what is fun about having this little playground I call my blog. I can change things up when I want to. If I can figure out how to write a tutorial about all of this, including erasing the background in a photo, I will.

I’m sharing all of this with you because I encourage you to get in there and try new things. I almost always start with googling a question, like “how do I erase a background in Pixlr?” and go from there. It’s sort of like detective work. Then, once you find some sort of answer, go for it. Give it a try. You have nothing to lose. I play around with html on my blog a lot, too. There are all sorts of tutorials out there and, believe me, I’ve never not found an answer to a question. I’m not a blog designer. I don’t know a whole lot about coding, but I’ve learned enough to get by. The great thing about Blogger is that you can go into your template, change the html and preview. If you don’t like the results, all you have to do is hit delete edits and everything goes back to the way it was. I do that all the time.

Try playing around with your blog design. Or your banner design. It’s empowering! Every time I figure out how to do something, I feel great. You don’t have to rely on a designer. Play with PicMonkey, or iPiccy, or any one of a number of photo editing programs, some of which have much more available on their sites than just photo editing. Have fun!

Nothing better than working on the blog with Pandora playing Gershwin in the background!

The winner of a copy of The Paper Garden is Jen Kershner! Congratulations, Jen. I’ll drop you an email.

Flowers, Plants & a Big Patch of Dirt

May 3, 2012 at 9:25 am by Claudia

It’s raining a bit here today and I hope it’s raining back home. We need it! There’s been so little of it that we’ve had to get used to seeing this:

You remember that I stopped my watering when I realized how dry things were? We have a well and I decided using so much water was not a wise idea. When I was home last weekend, I walked around trying to find new grass sprouting up. There was a bit of it, but not much. I think this patch of dirt will be with us until we can reseed again in the fall. But, gosh darn it, the grass surrounding the dirt has been neatly and tidily mowed!

The garden is filling in nicely. (Note the two bathroom rugs drying in the sun.)

The hostas are really taking off. There were 2 or 3 established hostas on the property when we moved in, and I planted several more. I love them. I just planted 2 more over by the shed.

These hostas, day lilies and coneflowers are in a bed right by the front porch.

Wild Honeysuckle grows all over our property. This bush is next to the shed.

And this pink honeysuckle is thriving up on the back forty.

In two days, I get to go home for three days! I am planning on planting my window boxes, pots, and cleaning and prettying up the porch. I’ll be getting some hanging plants, as well. It’s much easier to do this kind of thing when I know I will be home this Spring. For the past 4 years, I’ve had to cross my fingers and hope Don watered everything regularly. And to his credit, he did the best he could. But let’s face it, I am more inclined to make sure everything is moist and happy.

We’re heading into the last two days in the rehearsal room. On Saturday, everything moves onstage and tech rehearsals begin. Today and tomorrow we have run-throughs of the entire show. That means lots of note-taking on my part.

Have a great Thursday.

Music Guaranteed to Make Me Cry

Blogging Tips: Playing Around with Banners

Flowers, Plants & a Big Patch of Dirt

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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