My somewhat large, white, short-haired dog, Carlton, has been chilly lately. Because of that, he’s spending a lot of time on our laps, under covers, or on us in bed (he used to sleep next to me, but lately he’s been on top of that excellent source of warmth, Lee). Sometimes he asks to get under the covers and sleeps next to me.
This is my frequent view of Carlton the Dogman.
But, also, he has been hanging around with me in my little recliner when I’m home, nuzzling under the afghan I’m knitting. It’s a good thing I’d already planned to wash it before giving it to the recipient!
For a dog, he has a great occlusion. Look how well his teeth meet.
He likes to raise his head up and ask me to pet his neck. I realized I could get some pretty fun photos of him while he did this, and want to share them with you. He is one pink dog with weird blue eyes, that’s for sure.
This close, it’s fun to see all the different directions his hair grows.
I feel so lucky to have him in my life. I guess I must, if I write about him twice in one week!
Happy back to work day, for those of us who are working. I had a lovely morning, even though I didn’t sleep much last night. When I looked out the window, I saw an amazing sunrise, plus very low fog. You can’t help but be cheered up by two early-morning Nature gifts, right?
The yellow part here was actually gleaming gold. Check out that fog right above the horizon
I got a couple photos looking in each direction before heading off to Austin.
Cool white stripe
Fog is behind first layer of trees
Fun with fog
My drive in was in and out of fog, with a lot of interesting vistas, but you get no photos, since I was keeping my eye out for deer or other road hazards. It’s pleasant when fog is pretty and not so thick that you can’t see.
I’m actually looking forward to getting back to work this week. I miss my coworkers. My poor work plants missed me, and one is looking pretty sad. But, at least one coffee machine is working, and Zoom seems functional, so off I go.
I’m also hoping to get my car tire back. I drove the giant white car this week, which has such a big trunk (boot) that there is no issue with putting an entire wheel in it.
I hope you’re getting back into whatever passes for “normal” in 2021!
Apache and I are proud to report that we got to be a horse and rider pair again today. I think we were both happy about it.
Ignore bad form and look at happiness.
Just before he was declared un rideable, I’d gotten this side pull bridle and fixed it up for him. He never got to use it. So, I figured I’d try it today. It annoyed him at first.
This thing’s dumb.
But, he got used to it in the round pen pretty quickly. We then headed out to one of the pastures and rode around. Apache did pretty well other than wanting to eat grass a lot at first. I got him to stop, though.
The main problem we had was that I didn’t cinch the saddle tightly enough. I remembered he’d lost weight and checked, but not well enough. I’ll fix it next time. All in all, we had a good riding reunion. My legs hurt though, so I need to get back into saddle shape.
A Little Cow Cuteness
On my way home, the new group of cows that are behind us were investigating the chickens. When they spotted me walking toward the coop and all came to see me.
These are the 19 series, from different places, apparently.
As I chatted with them, I heard mooing from behind me. A couple of the cows who live on our property came up to meet the neighbors. I got this cute shot of a calf and cow saying hi to the new gals.
One thing I’ve figured out in the past year is that I need more rest than I’d been getting. My mental health is so much better now that I’m allowing myself more downtime. I’m going to try to keep that up. After all, I’m at the Hermits’ Rest. I should rest when I can.
My role model.
I’m not even going to pressure myself to blog if I don’t have anything useful to say. My plan for today is to finally ride Apache again, and otherwise knit and play with dogs.
My role model can snooze under the afghan while I knit, now (that’s the back).
I guess there IS good among the challenges of this era. I do see more self care and kindness to others. Let’s keep it up!
Front of afghan, actually with Carlton under it, too !
One of the things I would like to do this year is change the color of my bedroom at the Hermits’ Rest. It is a shade of chocolate brown that I chose in hopes of making the immense room look more cozy. Here’s a picture of Harvey looking like he’s calling a meeting to order, which shows the color.
Hmm, that looks even darker than it actually is.
What I didn’t do when I chose the color, was compare it to the color of the floor, doors, cabinetry, and trim, which are a currently unfashionable cherry stain. The wall color is more of a “bluish” brown and looks sorta sick to me. (I do not care if cherry and reddish wood tones are not in fashion. They will probably come back into fashion again before I die, knowing how things cycle.)
This photo, from my “shoes I like” blog post, shows the reddish color of the floors (which are actually bamboo).
Plus, this is MY house, it’s a ranch house, and the color looks nice and rustic to me. We’re never moving from here, so resale value can be something my heirs deal with as they rush to sell our hayseed property as fast as their urban-living selves can do it.
Perhaps, off in the background, you can see how the shelves and the wall color aren’t nice together.
I must admit, though, that while I take lots of pictures of things I like (my office, plants, dogs, chickens, horses, renovations), I do NOT take many pictures of my bedroom. I used to not like the furniture or the arrangement, but I like it a bit better now. That said, I haven’t taken a photo of the room in a long time, other than these images of a lamp and dogs.
I like the light-colored window trim with the wall color just fine. Also note that this room contains furniture I bought 30 years ago for my first “grownup” living space, plus a very old swam rocker from my family. There is a loveseat under that sheet, to collect dog hair and get washed often.
So, What New Color?
I want to repaint the room, or at least most of it. I’d like a deep or saturated color, to keep the room feeling warm, and contrast with the light-colored furniture that’s there, under dog-proofing. I don’t need to match curtains, since there are only prayer flags, and I always buy inexpensive bed covers, due to dogs and their propensity to ruin things with their toenails. So, I can get another color.
Our rugs are maroon and brown, which are the exciting theme colors from before. Right now those seem really gloomy to me. We can use them elsewhere, like in the office building, and get happier ones.
Here Are Ideas I Have:
Turquoise: that frightens Lee
Robins-egg blue: that would let us keep one wall brown (probably behind the bed), since that color goes well with brown.
Coral or terra cotta: I like orange, and these are less scary versions of orange.
Sage green: I love this color, but I have enough of it already.
Buttery yellow: that’s the color of my bedroom in Austin, and I love it (and it has a contrasting milk-chocolatey brown wall that I also want to change. I must have been in a brown period 5 years ago.
Colors to Avoid
Red: my favorite color, but not good in a bedroom. Ditto maroon.
Pink: I think Lee would go all sexist on that, plus I only like a few shades of pink, myself.
Blue other than the two shades mentioned above. I’m not fond of blue.
Black: Yuck. I don’t care how trendy it is.
White: Nope. Too sterile.
Gray: A warm gray might be okay, but I have painted so many rooms gray lately that I’m tired of it.
Tan: the whole rest of the damned house is tan.
Before we had any furniture, Lee said this was the most white-folks colored room he ever saw. Yes, that thing I am knitting is getting longer!
So, what shades have I not thought of? And yes, I would LOVE wallpaper, but we would have to re-texture the walls. That costs money, and people starting a new business generally don’t spend money on things like that until there is profit to be had!
A Doggy PS
You may remember that yesterday I posted a photo of the delicious lemon cake I baked and carefully decorated. Sigh. I set it as far back as I could on the kitchen counter, but someone very tall and with a giant tongue managed to find it.
Cake is now much higher up. The empty spot is where Alfred “tasted” the frosting.
We now have to store all bread and other tasty items in cupboards or on the bar. Well, I like things put away, ANYWAY. And I still love Alfred.
Lee tells Alfred he still loves him, in the very tan downstairs open concept room.
My goodness, I love traditional Southern US New Year’s food. I also love cooking it. Today has been the best day all year so far (ha) because all I did was cook easy food in a relaxing manner. Then I got to eat it.
The chickens got to enjoy collard green stems. They preferred the chicken food, but eventually ate ir.
I made fresh black-eyed peas, for luck. I cooked them with some mystery sausage and onions. They were so good. I cooked them all day. Yum.
My favorite pea.
Then I cooked two bunches of collard greens. The secret is to cut out the thick ribs (and feed them to chickens) and cook them with tasty meat. You can use bacon, ham hocks, andouille sausage, or pork of some sort. Mmmm.
Collard greens with pork loin (leftover)
I do so love collards. They aren’t so bitter and just have a mild, soothing flavor. They go great with cornbread. So if course I made that. Leftover collards and gravy (pot liquor) served over cornbread was my mother’s favorite.
Cool pattern on the cornbread.
My sister made deviled eggs courtesy of our chickens.
Very yellow yolks!
And in my family, you have to serve the peas over rice. Just one of many possibilities in the US. Here’s dinner.
Yes. I like eggs.
The most fun part of the meal was that I decided to make a lemon cake. I just took my favorite cake mix and added some lemon juice in the water. I put in an extra egg and half a cup of sour cream. That made it really rich and moist.
Lemon cake
I put a orange marmalade between the layers then frosted it with store bought lemon frosting. I added colored sugar for fun.
Gingerbread cake
Dang, it was so good! Plus, my sister made gingerbread cake, another favorite of mine. It was also moist and tasty. So, yep, I’m full. But, so what? We had a wonderful meal and a very pleasant day. At least so far 2021 is just fine.
This morning dawned chilly and shiny. The chickens were out running in their pen as usual, and new cows are behind us, enjoying a nice, full pond. I’m drinking New Year’s coffee and plan to read a while before cooking my black-eyed peas, so no photos of any of this.
Spoiler alert for next book report, and dirty cup.
This morning, my friend and insurance agent, Carolyn, posted this:
How refreshing.
I like the idea of making a wish for the new year. Hope is something I can muster up right now. I can wish for enough, the word for my year, and not feel let down if 2021 is more of the same.
Interrupting my musing with proof it’s chilly. That lump is Carlton, who has taken to asking me to lift up the covers so he can lay on my feet. Mmm. Toasty.
Probably my best lesson from last year is that life can be okay with lower expectations. Getting through another day with my family all right, the pets beside me, and relatively good health is enough. No need to save the world. Suddenly, this smarmy over-used sentiment works for me:
Might as well enjoy being alive, find humor when you can, and focus on love over hate and divisiveness. Simple and mostly manageable, I hope. I’m still a little worried about the next few weeks from a civility viewpoint, but I’ll be positive. Why not?
That’s always my goal. Just trying to manifest it!
There. I’ve set reasonable expectations, won’t forget my resolutions, but won’t be hard on myself or others if we just muddle through and slog through the next few months as best we can. That feels like enough.
Yesterday the wetness was just a preview. Starting last night it really, really rained. That storm system is quite intense! We’ve had over four inches so far, and others have had more. So, yeah, the ponds are now full.
Water flowing into front pond.
I was able to get out to drive to the office this morning, but soon after, Mandi called to tell me the road by the creek was flooded.
Here’s her photo showing a truck having trouble crossing.
Luckily, the surge didn’t last long and I was able to get back around 1pm. Lee had removed some debris from the road, so cars were safer.
You can see how much higher the water was. All that brown is balloon vine, which floats.
The chickens were very happy to have their new roof. The uncovered part of their run became a puddle, but the covered part was fine. They didn’t come out of the coop until I gave them some scratch.
Meanwhile, I had to feed the horses. I decided to walk, since I have that great new coat, hat, and gloves. I checked out the water, of course.
The trees you see are the creek. I’m always amazed how quickly this happens.
I dawdled a while watching the water flow, which I probably shouldn’t have done, since it started raining again. But it was cool.
Here, watch how fast the creek is flowing!
My coat protected me, and I was able to feed the horses and Big Red, who all seemed just fine. I enjoyed the exercise and once again surprised myself at enjoying bad weather.
Water flowing from the front pond to our happy stream.
So, it will be a chilly new year. I have pot toast happening, and some Prosecco for tonight. Happy New Year.
Last year I went over the most and least popular posts of the year, but I’ll just gather a few statistics today and sum the 2020 blogging up with that. It was, at least, a good blog year. It wasn’t all that exciting, though, because I got halfway through this post last week and never finished it. A suiting “tribute” to 2020: Not worth the effort of summarizing.
The trends
I didn’t see it as it happened, but more readers (real and bot) found The Hermits’ Rest blog, which led to more interaction and me discovering more interesting blogs, too!
Yep. Increased.
Slowly but surely, as the months passed, the readers built up, went down, and came back. I think a lot of it was better tagging, linking and keyword use on my part. I was apparently very interesting this summer.
The winners
I always wonder what causes a post to be popular, but this year I know.
Popularity Contest
The most popular post is the one linked to my recent very simple knitting pattern, and #3 is the other post about it. Yep. If I want hits, I need to write more easy knitting patterns. I know why the Passive Aggressive Facebook Posts one got so many hits, too. That’s because I tagged it with “passive aggressive Facebook memes.” That’s apparently a popular thing to search for, and I did include some doozies!
Popularity fell off after those, but I was happy to see so many posts with over 100 hits, which is high for me. Two of those were popular from being shared, the Ghosts from the Past one about my former college professor, Doc Shenkman, and the Restoring Your Historical House one, which the book’s author shared.
Of course, we will want to know what is NOT popular. I predicted which genre of post would fill the sad end of the spectrum: book reports. I figure no one reads those but me. I like just going to the Book Report page and delightedly realizing that I read 44 books last year (which I just did). Hey, not bad for someone who also reads a lot of wordy magazines!
But, look, I was wrong!
But look, I was wrong!
Virtual xox from scary me.
Only one book report was in among the sad posts that only got viewed 18 times, and that’s the one about one of my favorite books of the year, good old Barry O. I thought I did a good job on that one, too. Well, 18 people enjoyed it.
The nature posts generally don’t do too well, so I am not surprised to see lots of them down in the basement. That’s perfectly fine with me, since those are mainly to help me remember what I did and saw.
All in all, though 2020 had its challenges for living one’s life, it was a fine year for blogging. I think I’ll keep it up, as long as writing brings me pleasure and helps me meet new and interesting people. Now, go click a lot of links and get me hits. No, wait, that’s not it. Now, go read things you are interested in and that make you happy. Much better!
There’s one final book review for this year, and it’s a book I always wanted to read: the history of alphabetical order! Be still, my heart! A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, by Judith Flanders is a book that begged me to read it. And with its huge index (alphabetized, of course), end notes, and all the hallmarks of a modern nonfiction book, it did not fail to disappoint, at least if that’s the kind of reading material you like.
Nice cover!
I’ll have to resort to memoirs to explain my excitement at finding this book. You see, when I was in second and third grade, I was annoying to teachers. They could not find enough work for me to do to keep me quiet, and I kept raising my hand to answer all the questions. I probably annoyed other kids, too. To remedy this, they passed me off to the patient librarian at Sidney Lanier Elementary School in Gainesville, Florida (also at the time home of education for deaf, mentally handicapped, and otherwise challenged kids, which was GREAT for teaching us that those are regular kids that are fine for playing with at recess). And yes, I know now that Sidney Lanier served in the Confederate military, but we were told he was a poet. The End.
Anyway, I proceeded to read through the contents of the library that matched my reading ability. I also needed books that matched my social development, which means not books with a lot of sex or overly “adult” themes that would confuse me. The librarian was very glad that I loved horses, because that made it simple. Just give Sue Ann books about horses, she thought. Then, she taught me how to find them myself in the magical card catalogue. OOOOOOO.
I loved the card catalogue. I’d just browse through it, amazed at its orderliness. I aged a bit and started my own collection of books, of course starting with Black Beauty. Duh. Once I had more than a few books, I was compelled to alphabetize them, by author, of course. There WERE a few I organized by size (which I learned from the book I’m supposed to be reviewing was common).
By the time I was in middle school, I had my own card catalogue (always spelled that way in my mind), made from index cards. I had a title index and an author index. Each card said when I got it and had an indication of its type (mainly F, NF, and SF for fiction, nonfiction, and science fiction (I moved on from horses)). This went with me and was updated throughout high school.
Sigh, alphabetized by author, but not title.
Even as I got older, I obsessively alphabetized my books. It made me happy. It also made finding books easy. I was an academic. I had a LOT of books, but added categories like Japanese, linguistics, knitting to the system.
Once I had children, I gave up and just shelved books by type. Every time I’d get them alphabetized, something would mess them up, so I gave up.
Back to the Book
Judith Flanders taught me a lot about books and their organization, or lack thereof. First off, there weren’t many books for a long time, and they were often bundled together randomly. That’s parchment books. Papyrus ones were scrolled, of course. And you generally read a book from start to finish, so there weren’t many organizational helps like subtitles, page numbers and such. All those things had to be invented!
Once libraries showed up there were lots and lots of ways to organize them. Some organized by size, some by topic, and some by the conventionally used systems of organization, which were fascinating hierarchies. God always came first, then rich people, then other subjects. That’s how lists of all sorts were organized, not just books. I have no idea how anyone found anything in the olden days. People also wrote all over books, and no two copies of any book were the same, since they were hand copied. Challenging.
Eventually, typing and carbon paper made organizing correspondence less complex, while double entry bookkeeping made financial stuff easier, but that all depended on having notebooks and files. So many things we take for granted today are NOT that old, like filing cabinets, file folders, staples, desks, and more. This book will blow your mind and really, really make you respect all those humans of the past who had to memorize everything.
So, as you can see, Everything in Its Place shares the history of a lot more than ordering systems! There’s writing systems, ways to permanently or impermanently record things in writing, storage methods, and of course, organizing systems.
Today’s shelves are beautiful, but disorganized. We are still unpacking books. I still have a lot in Austin. Eek.
That brings me to my favorite discovery in the book, which is about Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System. I was always very annoyed by this whole thing. Topics just didn’t make sense to me, especially the order in which they were arranged (all that Christian stuff in the beginning with lots of numbers, but then just one number for each other religion, for example, and science was weirdly arranged). I never arranged my books by that system, nope.
Was I ever thrilled to discover that Melvil Dewey was an asshole! A sexist! An anti-Semite! A homophobe! A creep! I just knew it. And these biases of his made finding certain topics really hard (there were changes made…but now I see why they use other systems now).
In the end, while Flanders didn’t make the book overly exciting, she did add some fun footnotes that I enjoyed, and she was certainly thorough in her research, which was complicated by the fact that there actually hasn’t been all that much research on organizational systems and alphabets. People just take them for granted. I was glad she addressed how to organize information in non-roman alphabets, like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. I really feel bad that typewriters are still based on Western principles, which can make typing and printing take a while.
The Hermits' Rest 