..Is very simple: make the house sparkle. The more it sparkles, the more successful my efforts. That boils down to lots of lights and lots of clear or reflective surfaces. By that standard, this year is…pretty good. Better than most years, not as good as it can get. I didn’t have the go juice to do some of the things I’d like to, esp in the windows with lights and stars.
It’s an embarrassing indication of my state of mind that I broke, yes broke three things during the decorating process. And that’s only because I was lucky. It could have been a lot worse. Sigh. I salvaged two, but one was beyond repair.
Lessee…pictures…I’m not real happy with any of them. They just aren’t clear. I do think my camera is dying. Sigh. But these’ll give you an idea.
The dining room: The tree is fibre-optic with little crystal thingies on it. It loses a few little crystal thingies every year, but I’m saving them. When it gets too thin, I’ll try to reglue them. We both love the delicate (and wireless!) lighting. Our main tree is also FO, as is the garland at the base of the fireplace. Anyway…with this tree, I’m trying something new this year and put a few of our spun glass ornaments on it. I think I like it.
Father Christmas. We brought our begonias in to winter them and moved the bakers rack that usually stands here around the corner to the window to keep them on. That left this nice big wall for Father Christmas! It’s the first time in years we’ve had a good spot for him. He spent last year in the office. He was a gift from a friend.
The hunt bucket and cups: These are cool and very traditional. I got the bucket and several of the mugs for Carolyn for Christmas about fifteen years ago. Every year they have a new “spot” but it always involves greenery and apples. Traditionally, the bucket would contain a pre-hunt hot drink that would be served to already mounted riders in the pre-hunt milling. I leave the substance to your imagination, but I wouldn’t think one would want to over imbibe!
The stags that are on top of the fish tank are also very special. I hate to say that I “collect” stags, but I do love them and am always on the lookout at this time of year. I generally end up with one new ornament (or style…they usually come in pairs) each year, and have a few gorgeous “display” types, when I can get them on half-price! :D I’m very selective…they have to be “stags” … you know, like Bambi’s papa. :D They have to have at-ti-tude. This keeps me from being tempted by the thousands of cutsie reindeer ornaments out there.
Anyway, our first Christmas up here, we went to a local restaurant and they had these gorgeous fellows’ “clones” on display. I asked and they gave me the name of the display source where they thought they’d bought them, but it had been several years, so I figured I was hosed. I spent a lot of time cruising the internet looking for them, but no go. A year or so later, I happened to see a single pair in a local display shop…I couldn’t justify the cost, but Carolyn told my brother about them and lo and behold, there they were under the tree on Christmas!
Then, believe it or not, a couple of years ago, I got a second pair, the frosted ones you see here, off ebay for an absolute steal (I kid you not…under $20 including shipping!). I couldn’t pass up the chance, backup, you know…but somehow, both pairs always end up out!
Next…the piano. The figure is lady Crow, a native American collector doll we picked up in Oklahoma. We’re neither of us big on dolls, but we both fell in love with her. It’s funny we have her and Ximene (she’s on the mantle this year) and we both wanted them as soon as we saw them and have never been tempted by any others. Weird.
The woodland tree is a gorgeous, table-display sized “natural” tree that we got for apartment life. I can’t seem to get a good picture. It’s actually very airy, with pinecones attached. It gives a home to all our “cutsie crittur” ornaments, now we have a “floor-sized” tree again. I went through a time when I made all my ornaments. The little raccoon is one of them. He began life as a greenware mold. I cleaned him up, had him fired, then painted him. I’ve got several I did that way, but he’s my favorite. We also put all our Marvin the Martian ornaments on this tree this year.
The fireplace…The carousel on the table at the right is a Mr. Christmas piece I’ve had for over twenty years now. That company makes indestructible stuff! The cool two-layer pedastal to the left was a Christmas gift from Carolyn, back when Lynn was living with us in OKC. CJ found these gorgeous things in a mall and hauled two of them back to the car with her! One for me, one for Lynn.
Ximene we found in a little antique store in Colfax, WA. We’re both fans of the movie “El Cid” and this is the historical character played by the eternal beauty Sophia Loren. We’ve since found out she is my (very, very, very) distant relative! :biggrin: Anyway, she came home with us.
Finally…our new little fireplace resident. I think he might have to stay there year round.
And I just realized…no pix of the real tree. Or the TV…or the coffee table. Or the hallway…Ah, well, I’ve bored you enough for one day.
Happy Solstice Holidays, everyone!
Nothing on it yet, but we’ll get that tonight. It’s weird, usually when it comes to decorating for the solstice season, I can just dig out the boxes, look at something, and know exactly what I want to do with it. And it’s never quite the same thing two years running (I mean, we’ve only had a couple of years every place we’ve lived since we moved up here!) And this year, with the fireplace insert, I’ve lost the place for the carousel, so I had to completely rethink the hearth. Normally, this isn’t a problem, but I just seem to be a little…creatively drained, I guess. Or so into hyper-critical mode that I’m not happy with anything. Or maybe I’m just not thinking visually at the moment.
Weird.
If I get it so i like it, I’ll post a pic or three
I’ve given a lot of thought to the whole notion of charging for “GrounTies.” I can’t tell you how wonderful it makes me feel that you all think it’s too good for that, but I keep thinking back to the time when Warner changed imprints and was hyping their new authors. They gave away thousands of copies of David Feintuch’s first book at an East Coast World Con…and pretty much made him a best seller in that one move. Certainly, they ensured he’d get on, and likely win, the Campbell award, which he did. What happens in a case like that…a bunch of people read the same thing…and talk about it. And get excited about it. And talk about it to their friends who didn’t go to the con and on the internet and write reviews…
I’ve always wondered just what would have happened had Warner done something remotely like that for “GroundTies”…or if they’d even condescended to send out review copies.
Making it available for free, at least for these first few months, is kind of my attempt to give it that chance to be read by people who may then go out and write reviews and talk about it on facebook and twitter and to their friends and encourage their friends to do the same. My favorite books over the years are those that make me think and make me want to talk about those thoughts with other people. My best friends over the years have all come out of shared reading experiences.
I hope “GroundTies” will do that for people and that those people will come back for more.
So…if you’d like to “pay me,” the best thing you can do is go out and post reviews everywhere you can think of. My next goal after getting Cafe Press up is to figure out getting the books up on Kindle’s lists. We’ll need to raise the price there because Amazon takes a cut, but exposure is definitely better. When I do…reviews there would be phenomenal.
thanks again, everyone, for the wonderful comments.
Especially for anyone using the PDF. It’s readable now. 
And I’m going in today and making a pdf for GroundTies that will match the other two, so it will have a “pretty” display as well. That’s part of what held me up on the other two. We have Adobe Pro, and I kept trying to search out a formatting command for its “import and combine” but nothing gave me any kind of control. I finally got smart, took the pieces into WordPerfect and formatted them to 6×9 (like a hardcover) then published to pdf. Took those pieces in along with the cover and got, I think, anyway, a very pretty result. There’s probably an easier way to do it, but this is working. So…anyway, for all of you who already downloaded GT…if you use pdf, you might want to grab another one off the shelf!
TOMORROW! It’s still the old one right now! :D
And Harmonies is soon to follow.
I really really really recommend the Mobi reader, if you’re going PC. After playing around with the various options, that is by far the most pleasant combination of book reading and flowable type…plus you can choose your default font from anything you’ve got installed on your computer, so you can find something that is readable for you.
It also does the best job of pleasing formatting, other than PDF.
Anyway…I’d be keeping my fingers crossed if I didn’t have to be typing. Hope all of you who downloaded GT want the next volume!
Yay! go check it out. She has such a wonderful, wry view of the world of writing!
A bit of a frustratin’ day. I know there are limitations to these formats, but the ones, like Mobi (Prc) and epub and lit should at least give you even indentation. I spent hours this afternoon trying to figure out why my indentations are, well, less than perfect. My html code going into Mobi is spotless. The Mobi output is really very nice. But the minute Calibre gets its mits on it, the indentations look like waves viewed from a sinking ship! It’s very frustrating. I think, maybe, it’s an artifact of all these programs insisting on right justification. There’s no way to simply turn it off, that I’ve been able to find. I’d much rather my indentations were even.
And then, it insisted on warping my internal images beyond recognizability! I tried creating a separate html page with the image imbedded at a specific size/ratio…and it still skewed them. Grrrrr….
Anyway…I’ve decided to simply announce that if you want a PRETTY version of the file, use Mobi. It’s by far the best reader available, IMO. For one thing, I really like the two page display. Plus, the scalable, flowable type, and a choice of default font (my favorite is a surprise to me…Georgia really is very readable. Never used it before.)
For the maximum effect, the ‘NetWalkers books really want just a few small snippets of particular fonts as well, and Mobi handles that beautifully, if the fonts are installed. (I’m making those available in the download for those that want them.) Sounds odd, but ‘NetWalkers is so very much about perception and there’s something quite visceral about how someone who normally communicates via computer expresses themselves when they write something by hand…
(<Especially when they’re a certifiable nut-case—>TW)
(Oh…sod off, ya meanie!)
Anyway…after countless builds and different pathways, I’ve given up. They’re as good as I can do. UpLink will be up in the AM, with Harmonies to follow soon. Sigh…I’m such a control freak….
And then…I’m putting up Christmas! I’ve had bits and pieces scattered all around the hearth for two weeks now. I want my trees!
…on UpLink and Harmonies. They are, to say the least, book-design challenging and are making us really learn to manipulate our programs. But I’m hoping to have them up later tonight.
New at Closed Circle!
