ninety years of page turning

I’m reading a 1920 copy of GK Chesteron’s The Man Who Was Thursday. The book is small and hard covered. When I’m turning a page, the pages are so thick, I often think two pages are stuck together. The front cover has library return date stamps from the 1970’s, 80’s, and 90’s. As I hit page 135, I saw a stamp from 1940.

It made me imagine the sheer number of people who have read this copy over the last 90 years. How different the world was each time someone read the book. 2009 looks a lot different than 1970, 1940, and 1920. But it’s the same book, with same intriguing story that has drawn people into a different world.

How I would love to know about the lives of the other people who have read the book. I read mine on the couch. Did they read their’s in the parlor like Elizabeth Bennet? I’ll have to let my imagination answer those questions.

Filed under: Creativity

new design

I’m not really sure I can call this a “new design” since I didn’t design it. I just picked it out among the list that WordPress provides. Perhaps it’s more of a “new look.” I’m not sure how I’m going to like not having a photo masthead, but I do like the three columns more than four.

Filed under: Creativity

details, details

Jeannie’s motto is that new (or rejuvenated) plants need three years before they hit their stride. The first year they sleep, the second they creep, and the third they leap. This year, we’re definitely leaping.

First we had daffodils, hyacinth, and lilacs. Then the tulips came. Followed by yellow, purple, and white irises. And now peonies and roses. I’ve enjoyed photographing all of them, particularly when it comes to their details — close up shots that show their dashes of color or marvelous ornate designs that one would miss if they didn’t look closely.

What’s caught my eye isn’t just the beauty of what’s in front of me, but the evidence of God’s ability (and desire) to take great care in all details of His creation. Seeing these amazing details in the plant world makes the fact that every hair on my head is numbered more real and believable.

Filed under: Creativity, Faith, in process

studio living

If you’ve been in our house this winter, you’ve felt the cold. While it’s funny to say that Andy’s a Scrooge and makes me freeze because of his unwillingness to turn up the heat, the chilliness is most likely due to our uninsulated floors.

Anyway, the central heat wasn’t doing much for us, so Andy picked up some space heaters to help out. They worked pretty good if they were literally blowing right on your feet, but lacked the punch to actually heat the room. And so it was… until yesterday.

Andy IM’d to say that he had a “surprise” for me when I got home. The surprise was that by closing the door between the kitchen and the den and putting up a sheet between the den and the hallway, he had created a 12×12 heated cocoon!

As we both sat working and reading last night, I pretended that we were living in a one-room studio apartment in New York. I’m not sure how we would handle the close living quarters for a long period of time, but it sure is nice right now!

Here are some pics of our new found coziness:

Filed under: Around the house, Creativity

design

If you travel past my old blog, you’ll find its not-so-pretty shadow. While I liked having complete control over the blog’s design, my inexperienced fingers tragically ended the life of my unique template. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get the blog to look like I wanted and went searching for some new templates to upload. I found one. Uploaded it.

Not only did the template not load, it messed up the old one for good. (And yes, I saved the html code of the prior format, but the uploaded template changed more than I could figure out.)

Blog design is somewhat like painting to me. In both situations, I have a vision in my head of what I want it to look like, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to look exactly like I want. The one serious difference is that with painting, even though it doesn’t exactly resemble the image in my head, I can make it work into something beautiful, or at least interesting. With blog design, I can’t “fudge my way through the difficult passages.” Instead, I have grand ideas that I don’t have the patience (or know how) to figure out how to implement.

But that’s ok. Being creative, for me, is largely influenced by my environment. And the old blog design was an environment that I didn’t find interesting to me anymore. So, here we are! In my journey to find a new blog host and templates, I was hoping to find something that I felt could show both photos and text in interesting ways. Unfortunately, I found that those with interesting text options, were terrible for photos and vice versa. For this reason, I now have a photoblog too.

I have yet to decide if I’ll try to import any or all of my old posts over here. A part of me just wants to start over. A new environment. A new start.

Filed under: Creativity