Archives
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- October 2019
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
2013 Small Stones
Post a Day 2012
No Comfort Zone
Mixing It Up Reading Challenge
Mount TBR Reading Challenge
Vintage Mystery Challenge 2012
Third Sentence Thursday
Mystery and Suspense Reading Challenge
Pratchett Reading Challenge
Chunkster Challenge 2012
- 52 books in 52 weeks 100 Steps 100 Word Challenge for Grownups 186cookbookchallenge 2012darkglobefebruaryshootoff 2013 Animals Annoyances arthur conan doyle Back to the Classics Challenge books Budgeting byzantine art and architecture Camp Nanowrimo Cee's Fun Foto Challenge Christmas Chunkster Challenge Cooking Determination DP Challenge Drawing Eleven questions Festival of Leaves Flowers Food Friday Fictioneers Gardening getting organized Greater Philadelphia Food Stamp Challenge Hundred Day Cleanup Hurricane Jakesprinter Knitting Knitting Experiments Memorial Day Minor techiness Mixing it up challenge Mount TBR Mystery and Suspense Challenge nablopomo Nanowrimo NaPoWriMo nocomfortzone oven-safe glass Philadelphia Philadelphia Flower Show Photos poetry Poetry 201 postaday2011 postaday2012 project365 Prompts for the Promptless PSAs Rants Reverse 100 Thing Challenge riverofstones Script Frenzy Sightseeing Silent Sunday Sir Terry Pratchett reading challenge Small stones Stories Third Sentence Thursday Thursday's Windows Today's 100 Travel Themes Vintage Mystery Challenge Weather weeklyphotochallenge Wordless Wednesday WordPress Daily Prompt world of late antiquity Write 31 Days Writing 101
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Image ImageSightseeing, if you can…
A few weeks ago we went on a short vacation, just to run away from home and look at unfamiliar scenery. One of our plans was to follow the Skyline Drive, which meanders down the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.
There are lots of places to pull off and look down at the valley on either side of the mountains – farms, little towns here and there, and always forest.
Unfortunately, as we drove on the valley below filled with fog.
Then we had to crawl slowly through some road construction
and finally the fog climbed up the mountain and surrounded us. The whole point of the Skyline Drive is scenery, and we couldn’t see any. So we headed downhill at the first exit and went to Luray Caverns instead.
We were underneath the Shenandoah Valley instead of looking down on it from a mountaintop, but the view was a lot better.
24 Bankers Boxes
That’s what I have in my living room right now. Two dozen cardboard boxes full of papers from my mother’s house. Unsorted, miscellaneous, mostly-but-not-all worthless papers, just the way I found them while we were clearing out the rooms. Forty year old bank statements, income tax records, recipes she clipped out of newspapers (thousands of recipes), deeds to property, receipts from her doctor’s office…
And, of course, the usual furniture you expect to find in a living room: chairs, sofa, table, a desk. You can’t get to the desk or sit in two of the chairs at the moment; there are bankers boxes in the way. All in all, it looks like one of those TV shows about hoarders who have piles and heaps of Things, with only narrow lanes left clear to let you navigate through the piles.
This has to change.
And the problem isn’t only my mother’s stuff. I learned my lessons well – I’ve never been good at throwing things away. It’s time to master that skill, time to sort through all the junk I’ve kept for no good reason and get rid of it. Then I’ll probably need to sort through things I think I do have good reason to keep and dispose of a lot of them. The idea of all that work and decision making gives me the shudders, but looking at the handful of spaces I have cleaned so far makes me happy. Being happier with an emptier house – that’s the goal. Now, how to get there from here?
As I’ve mentioned a time or three, I intended to start this project last New Year’s Day. I was supposed to spend a hundred days cleaning out my own house and be finished by early April. Instead, my husband and I kept working on my mom’s house and bringing more and more boxes home with us, while I got more and more exhausted.
Well, now that my mother’s house is finally cleared out and sold and off my hands, and now that I’ve had a few desperately needed weeks to rest, I can start that long-delayed project. We’re in the middle of August now, and in 100 days it will be Wednesday, November 25. So I ought to be all done the day before Thanksgiving. Good timing. I don’t plan to cook a turkey dinner while I continue with major housecleaning – and being done with the Great Emptying would certainly be something to be thankful for.
I wonder if there will be snow on the ground by the time I finish cleaning?
Travel Theme – Grey. Gray. Whatever.
And welcome to the delights of English spelling; it’s not enough that it has very little to do with the way words sound, it has to vary from place to place just to confuse us further. Anyway, Ailsa of Where’s My Backpack, She Who Invents Travel Themes, is from Ireland, so she spells this week’s theme “grey”. But I was taught to write “gray”, so I will.
As colors go, gray has a bad reputation, and this first picture shows why.
These are houses for iron workers and glass makers at Batsto Village in New Jersey. When they were newly built, I suppose the unpainted wood was various shades of light brown. Not any more. They’re gray now.
On the other hand, this building in Venice is much too exuberantly baroque to look even a little bit depressed, no matter how gray it is.
Moving forward a few centuries, there’s the architecture in Center City Philadelphia – if these office buildings didn’t have so many windows that insist on reflecting the blue sky, they’d all be thoroughly gray.
The meeting room in Independence Hall (Philadelphia, too) is painted gray and cream.
And then there’s artistic gray –
A lady from an Impressionist painting, turned three-dimensional to visit a sculpture garden…
Gray stone, cut into two parts that seem to be trying to rejoin…
So many grays, all so different.