What a Day!

The weather today was absolutely gorgeous.  NOAA said a high of 50F degrees but I think it must have been warmer than that.  The red in the sky yesterday evening portended beautiful weather...red sky at night, sailor's delight...

It was warm enough by noon that I was able to shampoo outside on the deck...

...and I read a little at the picnic table, one of my favorite places to read in warm weather...

...and even applied makeup outside...

...then I loaded Dixie into the car and went to Nederland to check the mail.  Still no check from Sears.

It was such a pretty day I decided to drive on down to Boulder.  I went to the Boulder Housing Authority to see if they keep applicants for senior housing apprised of their status.  Unfortunately, the answer was no.  They are short staffed and can't take the time to keep the hundreds of applicants informed.  All I ascertained was that I was in a group of applicants whose paperwork had not even made it to review.  Even if my paperwork had been reviewed and I was in line for an apartment, how quickly I moved to the head of the list would depend on how many people ahead of me either accepted or declined a unit after they viewed it.  Patience is going to be required.

After that news, I decided I needed some retail therapy so drove south on Broadway to Goodwill.  Here are a couple of things I didn't get:

This piece of "Sevres" porcelain was not only chipped and cracked, but I discovered after I processed the photos it had two different price tags and the only one I saw was the one on the front for $12.99.  Had I noticed the $2.99 tag on the back I might have at least taken it the register with me to have the price checked.  I keep thinking I might try making a mosaic on a tray. 

According to the web site Antique China Porcelain & Collectibles...

Sevres Porcelain traces its roots in France to early craftsmen who had small manufacturing operations in such places as Lille, Rouen. St. Cloud, and most notably Chantilly. It is from Chantilly that a cadre of workers migrated to the Chateau de Vincennes near Paris to form a larger porcelain manufactory in 1738. French King Louis XV, perhaps inspired by his rumored relationship with mistress Madame de Pompadour, took an intense interest in porcelain and moved the operation in 1756 to even larger quarters in the Paris suburb of Sevres. Sevres was also conveniently near the home of Madame de Pompadour and the King's own Palace at Versailles.

I do not see this particular Sevres marking among those listed on line so it could be fake.

I also did not get this length of burlap...

...for $12.99 even though I had been thinking since last fall that I wanted to enclose the bunk area with burlap.  It has become such a decorating fad that now I'm almost inclined not to go that route...and anyway, I think $12.99 is too much to pay for fabric at a thrift store.  If it's still there a week from Saturday when everything is 50% off I might consider it.

This is what I did get...

...for 99 cents less my15% senior discount.

This porcelain trivet has no markings, but there's no doubt in my mind it's Victorian.  I've read that no markings can actually mean the item is older, pre-dating the1890 McKinley Tariff Act requiring all U.S. imports to indicate "Foreign."  This was eventually amended to allow the actual country of origin. 

I also had been looking for one of these bottle spouts...

...so I could use the larger bottle in this photo...

...for dish washing soap.  Well, the small bottle with spout was $1.99...

...less the 15% daily senior discount...but the spout does not fit the larger bottle.  Darn. 

So that was it.  I headed back to Nederland, dropped Dixie off at the bookstore and came back and took a walk.  I was determined to get back over to the creek through that treacherous snow that is still drifted in between the road and the creek.  Here's a melted-out footprint.  You can see how deep it is...

I managed to navigate it and only fell once...lost my footing when I fell through the crust and grabbed for a branch that broke.  There wasn't anyone around, but I just pretended I was soaking up some high mountain rays while I lay there on my back.

It was worth it.  I got some photos of some of my favorite spots that I haven't seen since last fall...

I decided not to try to navigate these stairs, half of which are still under deep snow....

I'm tempted to take my snow shovel next time and clear a trail or at least scoop off the soft stuff on top so it isn't so treacherous and will melt more quickly.

What did you do today?  Teddee

Before or After?

When does a trend go from interesting to just plain silly? 

With another three inches of snow having fallen this morning on top of about one to two inches every day for the last week, I'm feeling more and more cabin bound and spending more and more time on the internet looking at blogs. 

I'd never looked at a blog until about a year ago.  I was working full time and didn't even have a working computer at home and certainly didn't have time at my job as an on-site community manager of a large homeowners association in Scottsdale, Arizona, to spend any time on the internet, let alone blogging.  But, as a retiree, and once I got a replacement computer at the Salvation Army in Boulder last April, I started exploring. 

Like many women, I'm drawn to any web site or blog related to interior design or decorating.  There are several trends in decorating right now that women (there may be men doing this, but I've not run across any of their blogs) seem to be just blindly following to the extreme.  One is painted furniture.  When I first started noticing it, I kind of liked it.  Some women providing tutorials on their blogs seem to do it well, but others, who seem to be extremely proud of their results, are just ruining nice pieces of furniture and, in some cases, entire rooms of gorgeous paneling.  I often have to look twice to make sure which is the "before" shot and which the "after," since the "after" looks so dreadful.

I don't know if this started with Rachel Ashwell's original Shabby Chic look, which used lots of white and pale pastels, but it seems to have been taken to the extreme in Belgium and/or France.  There are entire magazines devoted to what I'm calling the "White Movement."  In some cases it appears that homeowners have simply taken a spray gun and white paint and painted everything in their home white, not just the walls and ceilings and furniture, but all the accessories.  It really looks goofy.  There are some magazines, blogs and web sites, emulating the trend, in which everything is so pale you can't even read the type.

Another trend is numbering household decor.  I haven't picked up on the source of this, but many of these ideas seem to start with items found at French flea markets, called brocantes, if you aren't a follower.  I don't know why the actual vintage European items are numbered.  When it first started, a little bit of it was cute.  Now people are willy-nilly painting numbers on everything in the house without much thought to the font used or the style of the furniture.

Then there's the feed sack and burlap thing.  Lordy!  Again, it was cute when it first appeared and I think the use of burlap is probably a result of the current economy because it's cheap.  But, there seem to be different grades of burlap and the cheap kind many people are using bears no resemblance to some of the more eye-catching examples I'm seeing on line.  Having grown up on a farm, I can tell you that snuggling up to pillows wrapped in real burlap bags would not be fun.  The use of imported linen feed sacks for throw pillows and table runners is rampant and still cute, although I'm not fond of either the common red or blue stripes, but if they are real vintage European feed sacks they are not cheap.  I had been thinking of using burlap to enclose my bunk area in the cabin and perhaps even using it to help weatherproof the south wall of the cabin, but I'm having second thoughts.

Then there's the skirting thing.  People are removing cabinet doors in perfectly new, beautiful kitchen cabinets and replacing them with gathered fabric skirts to get that vintage look.  Again, sometimes it's done in a way that looks natural, but then more and more people hop on the band wagon and do it poorly and even if you had considered doing it (because the doors on a cupboard in this old cabin are so warped they won't stay shut), you start backing off.

As a tie-in to this rant, it appears to me that in blogland protocol, if you can't be a real "Go, girl," rah rah supporter--"It's really ugly, but you tried"--you're probably not supposed to say anything at all, hence no "credits" and no pictures in this blog.   However, I have been wondering if I might be able to use one of the latest on-line fads, Pinterest.  Pin your interests, get it?  You start an account and every time you see a photo of something that catches your eye, you pin it or post it so everyone can see what catches your eye as if anyone cared what catches your eye.  So far, I haven't seen anyone pinning things they disliked.  I wonder if I could start a new trend?  Teddee