Almostgotit.com

Earlier this week, I somehow stumbled upon a whole run of country-cottage type blogs,  each with a massive, chintz-filled header at top and packed with photos below.  

And, um, soundtracks.

All of these bloggers seem currently to be making their own magazine covers  which they post on their blogs, featuring luscious photos of wide verandas, sweet white wicker, quaint pink roses, and whatever else those blissful homemakers- without- mattresses- mouldering- in- their- back- yards can conjure up. 

I tracked down their online photo toy because I wanted to make a country magazine cover, too.  But I don’t seem to have the right photos. 

Okay. I mean I don’t seem to have the right life, in which those kinds of photos happen.

I did find this bucolic photo we took inside an old stone barn in a cottage farm in England — pretty darn quaint, I’d say — but something funny happened with the photo-cropping.   It seemed appropriate, though, so I just went with it.

I am really conflicted here. I would love to have a beautiful, giant farm house.  And those women’s photos (and magazine covers) were truly stunning.  But I happened to have my speakers turned on when I clicked on several of them, and — I’m so sorry — I giggled until the milk (almost) came out of my nose.

So I made another one, and I have to say, I think this piece communicates something that is so much more authentically *me*. What do you think?

Big Huge Labs has lots of other fun photo toys to play with, too, and you can be sure I’ll be using more of them in future posts.  Just don’t expect any chintz.

Cool Creative Commons Photos by Weeping Willow

To quote Kermit the Frog: It’s not easy being green.

Not all of us can commute by bicycle, plant a community garden, or volunteer to wash all of our colleagues’ dishes so they’ll stop using styrofoam. But here are a few of the easier ways to make your workspace more eco-friendly, and most of them will save you money as well.

1. Always turn off your monitor and computer when not in use. Don’t forget to turn off the printer, too! Some folks believe screen savers save energy: sadly, they do not. If you are in the market for a new computer, remember that laptops are more energy-efficient than desktops (they were designed that way, in order to conserve battery life).

2. Take the Stairs. I started doing this when I was twenty pounds heavier, and at first it was hard work. Sometimes I cheated. Finally, though, I decided to pretend that none of the elevators worked, ever. The hardest part? Walking with other people and having to stop mid-conversation so I could hike up the stairs and meet them at the top. Sometimes though, I WON! (Elevators often aren’t time savers. Nor are cars, when you have to search high and low for a place to park them, then walk between car and actual destination. These have been very interesting discoveries of mine…)

3. Think of ways to reduce your business meeting travel. Besides contributing to global warming, the use of gasoline and airplane fuel isn’t getting any cheaper. Travel is a time investment, as well, and your time has monetary value too. Therefore, many businesses (and independent consultants) are using more virtual world technologies instead of physical travel. The key is to choose the right tool. Email and instant messaging are great for simple questions; videoconferencing works well for more in-depth conversations. Technology will never completely replace face-to-face human interaction, but it’s a smart way to augment it.

4. Use less paper. Print on both sides. Send more mail electronically. Save scrap paper and use it to take notes. Reuse mailers and boxes, too – you can use mailing labels to add new addresses – and extra blank ones to neatly cover the old printing, if necessary.

5. Buy used. Craigslist and Freecycle are great places to find almost anything you need. Thrift stores (Goodwill, etc.) are great places, too – several of my favorite, designer-label business clothes (not to mention my umbrella, my computer case, and all the storage baskets in my office) were thrift-store finds.

6. Carry your own shopping bags. Reuse old ones, or keep a stash of canvas shopping bags in your car.

The key to being green? You don’t have to start big, just start! And I’d love to hear your ideas, too.

Here are some more online ideas on working greener:

Nature.org: Earthday

Treehugger.com: How to Green Your Work

MoreBusiness.Com: Running your Business

CoopAmerica.org: Buying Green

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Related Post:

11 ways to be cheap in honor of Earth Day

Change Is Hard Work; it requires hope, direction, bravery and time. -Thomas Moore

The sign at left is a standard one in Great Britain, and was one of our favorites.  While it merely means “adjusted right-of-way ahead,” I always had the strong sense that Stephen Covey was speaking to us directly from the heavens.  Other signs we loved were “Caution: Rising Bollards!” (which sounds like a variety of aggressive ostrich but in fact refers to adjustable traffic barriers) and various humorous — and at times salacious – notices about “zebra crossings” (which are crosswalks with painted lines.  Get it?) 

When we lived in England, we were frequently amazed and amused at how different our two languages were.  Pantyhose don’t “run” in Britain, they “ladder.”  Sinister-sounding ”schemes” merely refer to ”plans.”  Our children’s classmates patiently explained to us that a “pavement” is not a material but a sidewalk.  (though they also knew what “sidewalks” were from watching American telly.)   ”Corn” is a generic term for grain, while “lumber” is the rubbish you store in your attic.  

Moreover?  It is not nice to mention your pants (underwear) in public, but perfectly acceptable to announce that you need the toilet (bathroom). 

That last, in particular, was a particular challenge for us as embarrassed Americans, even when we understood that a willingness to ask perfect strangers to please point out the nearest toilet was not only necessary, but completely ordinary to everyone but ourselves. 

In other words: change was hard, but we had to get over it or else pee in our, er, trousers.  Sigh.  (Life is so brutal sometimes.)

So maybe my current life stage is not so very different from learning to use a new language, nor even so very different from potty training.  What do we tell our children when they are learning such a life-changing skill?  You need to think ahead. You need to pay attention to yourself.  Sometimes, there will be accidents, but keep trying and eventually you will succeed.  

Since our “mums” aren’t here to tell us these things anymore,  maybe posting signs for ourselves now and then would actually be a good idea.  Post-it notes on the bathroom mirror or on the computer monitor or in a daytimer?  Or maybe posting signs for the REST of the family would be in order, too.  What would your signs say?
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Creative Commons images by
Christine(bpc) (Changed Priorities);  Andrewb47 (Rising Bollards);  SeanMcTex (Humped Zebra Crossing); Ceejayoz (Princess Parking)
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Ten honeymoons in ten days, hoo boy! I’ve just written and posted the last of them for The Rocky Road of Love blog.  While the honeymoons are pretend, every one of these places really exist and really would accept visitors (that was the “rule” I made for myself when researching them.)  Anyway, here are links to the final five. (You can revisit summaries of the first five honeymoons by clicking here.)

 Tree House: Turkish Wedding Soup with Spiced Sauce

A treehouse, a freehouse,
A secret you and me house,
A high up in the leafy branches
Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,
Be sure and wipe your feet house,
Is not my kind of house at all –
Let’s go live in a tree house.

I was inspired by Shel Silverstein’s poem, then I found a real funky-looking treehouse hotel in Turkey and a romantic recipe to go with it.

Tropical Honeymoon in Aruba: Baked Bananas with Rum Sauce

Guilt drove me to give the couple a brief respite at a more typical honeymoon locale.

The “Baked Bananas with Rum Sauce” recipe seems to have been particularly popular, too.

Gee, bananas. Who knew?

To the (Australian) Lighthouse: Lighthouse Cocktails

In researching this one, I fell in love with the Straviken lighthouse in Sweden, but still felt guilty. (My life.  Guilt.)  This time I worried about sending the lovers to someplace so cold in February.  So I found a lighthouse hotel for them in Australia, instead.

There followed a lively exchange (see post’s comments!) with the Straviken’s owner about whether or not there are polar bears in Scandanavia. 

N.B.: There aren’t.

Honey, let’s play (Spanish) Caveman: Quick Vegetarian Paella

I used my own experience staying in a Spanish cave hotel near the Alhambra in Grenada for this one.

And have been yearning for Flamenco music and sangria ever since.

I also finally figured out a way to cook paella that doesn’t call for a million weird ingredients and doesn’t take all day to cook, either.

(Unlike this post, which is giving me absolute fits, probably because of all the pictures.  Wordpress codemakers have some ’splaining to do!!)

Romance on (Ice Hotels) Ice: How to Make an Ice Bowl

Sam and Harry are due home later today, but I have one last honeymoon fantasy to spin for them. This time, it’s a hotel entirely made of ice.  I wanted to make a hotel entirely out of ice too, but decided to settle for making an ice bowl instead.  It took me a while to work out the directions, finally settling for a sort of “Ice Bowls for Dummies” approach (the kind I’d prefer myself) and was quite pleased with it. 

Here’s a link to summaries of my previous five “Honeymoons”, which I’ve just updated.  Don’t expect pictures, though, because I’m done messing with them!

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Treehouse Image: Kadir’s Treehouses in Olympos, Turkey
Divi Tree Image: Manchebo Beach Resort & Spa, Aruba 
Lighthouse Image: Cape Otway Lightstation (original photo source unknown)
View of Alhambra from the Sacromonte: Photograph © John Willer and used with permission.
Ice Bowl: Creative Commons photo by EuphoriaLand

Since you asked, all the photos on this site are either my own or available for use with attribution through creative commons licensing, with the exception of the Elizabeth Dewberry/ Robert Olen Butler portrait and the photo of Anne Lamott’s book I used last week, both of which were already in such wide re-syndication I don’t know their original sources.

I realize I am being more scrupulous than most bloggers. It is also rather painful not to use all of the other glorious and oftentimes-much-more-suitable images that are widely available on the web, but I feel pretty strongly about this.

Pictures are great on a blog, though, and I’ve been putting all my blog photos (uploading them) onto Flickr.com, a free service which is very easy and fast to use. Besides saving server space, Flickr.com does all of the optimizing and resizing for you so you can dispense with photoshopping them first — another time saver! Flickr also carries a large data-base of creative commons photos which you may use — be sure to check the terms first.

To use your uploaded Flickr.com photos:

1. In your Flickr.com account, click the photo you want to use to open it. You can choose one of three sizes — be sure the size you want is open.

Right-click on your photo and choose “properties” to display the URL, (looks like “http://yourphoto.jpg”) Highlight and copy that bit, without any of the stuff after “.jpg”. Paste the URL right into your blog if you’ve got the editor open already in another window, or paste it into “notepad” or something to save it for a minute.

In your blog posting window, click where you want the image to go and EITHER use the “insert image” button or, by hand, insert the following code, changing the brackets from [ ] to < > (I can’t do it here or the web will think it’s code!) Substitute your own photo’s URL and title in place of http://yourphoto.jpg (and keeping all the other quote marks in place)
[img src=”http://yourphoto.jpg” alt=”Name of your photo”/]

Feeling fancy? If you’d like the text to wrap around your photo, try this code instead (remember to change all the brackets from [ ] to < >):
[p align=”left”][img border=”0″ align=”left” src=”http://www.your photo.jpg” alt=”Name of your photo” /]

Do you use photos in your blog? Tell us about it and post a link to your blog here so we can all admire your work in person! (Hint for newbies: leave your blog URL in the space provided when leaving a comment, or use this code in your comment text to make a link:)
[a href=”http://yourblog”]Name of your blog[/a]

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We rode the train to Portland today. We had to go to some effort to get onto the train with the dining car, because while my children have been on many trains, they’ve never eaten in a dining car. It all worked out perfectly, except for the playing cards part.

Everyone knows that one of the best ways to pass the time on a train is to play cards. Another of the best things to do on a train is to walk from one end of the train to the other, finding the snack car along the way and buying something there. And what we wanted to buy was a pack of playing cards. We got on at the beginning of the Seattle-LA route, so everything should have been freshly stocked. Moreover, I was a perfect customer — on vacation, living large, and willing to spend almost anything for a little deck of cards with “Amtrak” written on them. And which, moreover, they had listed prominently for purchase on their snack car menu. We waited eagerly in line, being bumped by all the hotdogs and dorito bags going the other way.

But they were OUT. No cards. They’d not even bothered to stock them this morning, apparently.

Amtrak is a company in perpetual financial straits, and they really need my money. And I would very happily have obliged at their snack car, as I already had in their dining car. They also need to fill me with happy memories so I’ll come back as a repeat customer, and playing card games with my daughter in the lounge car would have gone a long, long way in that direction — for both of us!

On the other hand, later that afternoon, we stopped at Powell Books’ flagship store in Portland. What a great bookstore! And by coincidence, in a matter of hours, also one of many that would be unveiling HARRY POTTER #7. They had the costumes, the signs, the brilliant cross-promotions. There were “Harry Potter Updates” going out over the loudspeaker every few minutes. Outside, the line of excited H.P. fans was already wrapped around the block. Powells, however, was prepared already with tents, signs, and traffic cones. Two news vans were already comfortably parked on the busy street as well, and ready to jump on the unfolding story.

Which is why Amazon.com STILL hasn’t beat Powells books, even in this, their mutual home territory.

It’s a canal boat on the Thames, near where we once spent a year in Oxford.  It is also an experiment in very rudimentary PhotoShop…

 ”Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
- Søren Kierkegaard

We shamelessly put the kids to work last weekend and “put up” more than half a winter’s worth of heating wood in one day   (3+ cords)  The log splitter doesn’t make wood nearly so pretty as an axe does, nor even as fast, but you can run it all day long – a thing you can’t do with a set of axe-wielding arms. 

Summer rhythm never seems to set in around here until summer is half-way through.  To tell you the truth, I still don’t know how to do it all very well, with kids and work — what there is of it — and Everything Else never quite fitting into whatever time we’ve allotted for it. 

Here, surely, is part of the solution, though.  Living, green things.  This is part of our whiskey barrel garden (hic) which we fenced off and built on what used to be the end of our driveway.  

It is wonderfully peaceful to get up in the morning when it is still cool and stand over the cucumbers or beans with a hose.  Everything smells good in the morning, too.

Later in the day, when Everything Else gets to be too much, I can slip out the back door without telling anyone to dump some stuff into the compost bin, lean into the barrels to pluck a few weeds, see how the volunteer tomatoes are doing, or rifle through the foliage to see if it’s time to pick the beans again. 

It’s not highly-productive time, it’s Being Time.  And I’ve (almost) learned that I can’t live without it.

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Related posts:
Chapter two-ing 
In defense of thoughts

I’m nobody! Who are you?

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?

Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Photos by Almostgotit

Poem by Emily Dickinson