One byproduct of revamping the blog is that due to various formating issues, I’ve had to touch just about every entry again. It gives a girl a chance to rethink the blog — why I started it, what I want to do with it. Among the many things I noticed was that although I started out with faith as a real topic on this blog (see the Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days series from 2003), it’s not something I’ve written about much in the last couple of years. There are a number of reasons for that, of course, and cruising…
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So, after three years of avoiding it, I’m finally tackling the bathroom. Part of the reason I’ve been avoiding the bathroom remodel, is that there are just too many things to buy and too many decisions to make when renovating a bathroom. Some decisions were easy — the ceiling fan for example, but other decisions were more of a challenge. I mean, on the one hand I want it to look nice, but really — does the universe need so many styles of towel bars? To say nothing of tile — what kind of tile? pattern? shape? chair rail or…
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Some girls get roses for Valentine’s Day, I got a wall, denuded of it’s really messy old horsehair plaster. It’s the beginning of the bathroom renovation — while my tiny bathroom isn’t getting any bigger, we’re moving the door, putting in tile, moving the bathtub to the opposite wall, painting, and putting in a fan, lights, and new towel bars and stuff. I’ve been putting this off for three years, because it was just too overwhelming — but it’s begun. The bathroom transformation.
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A couple of days ago I got a voice mail from Wendy-the-Buddhist. She had a terrible head cold. Her kids were sick. She needed some novel recommendations because as she said on the phone, “I’m tired of all this Zen crap.” (One of Wendy’s best qualities is that while a dedicated Zen practitioner, she also understands that taking one’s Zen too seriously belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles.) So I went downstairs into my lovely hidey-hole office where the library currently resides and started looking through the fiction section (legacy of my bookseller past, my library is sorted by…
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I’ve added a couple of features to the blog — if you look to the left you’ll see a link to Interviews and Profiles, and Place Last Seen. One of the things I’m liking about WordPress is having the flexibility to post some longer pieces. In the Interviews and Profiles section I’ve posted an profile I wrote for the Corporation for the Northern Rockies of Rick Bayless. I spoke with Bayless shortly after returning to Montana after a visit to Chicago where I was astounded by the vibrant Farmer’s Market culture that has grown up in the 20 years since…
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It’s snowing this morning. Peaceful still snow. Sometimes big flakes, sometimes tiny, but the air is still and a quiet trickle of snow falls outside. It’s as if we’re all inside some quiet, gentle, still place. Looking out the back window as I did the breakfast dishes I saw a woodpecker on the birdfeeder — since my cat died last fall, I finally felt I could get a birdfeeder (Patsy in her prime was quite a birder. She once caught a hummingbird and brought it to us when we were barbequeing on my front porch in Salt Lake — as…
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Just after Christmas I was in Target looking for a new phone, but I also checked out some pawnshops to see if I could find a good deal. I even browsed valuepawnandjewelry.com to compare prices and options. We’re experiencing something of a total electronics breakdown at LivingSmall — the TV (a future blog topic), the phone, the move to the new blog — it’s been a month of wrestling with technology. Anyhow, as I was wandering through Target I came around an end cap and found this, the perfect sewing machine. This is the sewing machine of my childhood —…
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Okay, I admit it, when I saw the news, I got a little weepy. I’ve written before about how the Kentucky Derby kills me every time, and there are times, like watching Barbaro in the Preakness that having grown up surrounded by horses and horse shows, in houses cluttered with boots and tack, having spent most of my childhood in barns with people who live and breathe horses — even if you were a kid like me mostly reading a book over in the viewing room waiting to go home, you wind up with an eye for when something has…
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Hi folks — welcome to the new and improved LivingSmall. This should be the last move — we went from Blogspot to Typepad, and now we’ve moved to WordPress, which allows one to use blogging software and host it anyplace. There wasn’t anything wrong with Blogger or Typepad, but they were starting to feel restrictive. I haven’t been happy with my template for a while now, nor was I crazy about the idea of all my work being hosted out there in anonymous-land someplace. WordPress requires a little more work on my part, but it’s open-source, and there’s no Big…
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I had to go to California last week — the Corporate Job was calling. My office in CA is right next to my favorite store in the world, the Ranch 99 Market. The Ranch 99 has many wonderful things including fresh shellfish in little tanks through which fresh water continually flows, a stupendous selection of condiments, and Hong Kong-Style roasted items. The Mighty Hunter wanted a roast duck, so the morning I was leaving I bought one, and with a significant amount of pantomime communicated to the man behind the counter that while I wanted the head and neck cut…