My beautiful quilt

A year ago I was in Pennsylvania and thereabout. Lori Odhner had given me a beautiful quilt, for speaking at her "Caring for Marriage Conference." Today I found a photo and pulled it out and cropped it. Chara Odhner had set up a self-operating portrait operation with a fancy camera and lights and backgrounds and props, but I used my new quilt as my prop. Gravity and luck posed it very nicely.

Look what I did today!

You can see below that some of the things I had already created previously.
That's how it goes in my universe. :-)

(Here is the reality of it: http://sandradodd.com/reality)

January's gone and February's moving along

I haven't posted for a month! That's rare. We had company after the symposium, and then some more, and then some more. Joyce took some cool photos January 3 on a day out at the petroglyphs and Old Town.

We took our picnic lunch to sit on the plaza in Old Town, near the gazebo.

Holly said, "People get married there," and just about then a couple, one witness, and an officiant show up to do a wedding. They didn't have a photographer, so I took some photos, got an e-mail address, and sent them to the bride.

Elsewhere in Old Town, also by Joyce:

I invited some people over one day when Heather Brown was here, to talk about unschooling.

Heather, Amy Childs and her daughter Nikiah went for a quick hike, and later sat in the hot tub in our back yard.

In around that, I've been corresponding with people about visiting and speaking in ten or twelve places in the next year and a half. Some of those are already set, especially the 30 of June, in Leiden, south of Amsterdam. http://sandradoddleiden.wordpress.com/
A Day in Leiden with Sandra Dodd
learning about unschooling

I've moved my speaking schedule to a blog, and it's set up so that one can subscribe to one section (tour or set of talks):
http://speakingsandradodd.blogspot.com/

The symposium was good; I'm tired

I'm exhausted, still, and today Joyce and Carl leave.  We've been going, going, going and having houseguests and friends still at the hotel and tomorrow will be my first day of "just us" since Christmas.

Tomorrow I'm going to the hotel to create a contract for a symposium next year.  The Daniel family intends to come back again, from England, and Joyce and Carl Fetteroll intend to return as well.   I hope when they get home and recover from their own exhaustion they still feel that way. :-)

The feedback forms were very positive, but had suggestions I hope to implement, about having more panels or roundtables.  Rather than three presentations per day I'll probably schedule four, but I still plan to have long breaks for lunch and dinner so that people don't have to rush away or rush back.

We can't guarantee beautiful weather next year; it might be colder.  We hit 60 degrees one day!  I saved it:

My plan for 2012 is December 27-30, which will be Thursday night through Sunday morning, and people can go home for New Year's.

This was a surprise

The voice is Holly Dodd.

Trees without a tree

For a few years we had a kind-of-tree-like arrangement of lights, on a wooden platform that's in our front room (used to be a tiled base for a wood stove, long ago).



We put the gifts inside it.

This year, Holly had an idea to wrap lights around a banister sort of fence on the other side of the room, fastened at a center point on an eye hook. Keith set that up for us.

The coolest thing is that we could stick most of the gifts inside the fence, so they show decoratively from the stairs and (also Holly's idea) we put Christmas cards on the outside, so those who enter the house can see the cards and gifts.

Because I took this with a flash in a dark room, the metallic paper projected its pattern onto the wall above and the hardwood floor below. I didn't plan that. It was a Christmas surprise from my phone's camera.

I'm not philosophically opposed to having a Christmas tree, it's just hard to rearrange for one, and every year we seem to be busy with other things (this year, an unschooling symposium starts December 28).

But meanwhile, in another house around here, the mom didn't want a pine-needle-shedding tree anymore, and had for a while had an artificial tree. But it was shedding artificial pine needles, and so she asked her son, who's an artist, to come up with a tree that wasn't a tree.

Holly helped a little, around the purchasing thrift-store lamp shades part, at least, and painting, maybe. The artist is her boyfriend, Will.

Ghosts and Ghost Signs

Recently, somewhere in Texas, I took a photo. It will be the second photo below.

Today on the Shorpy blog, was this photo. If it seems at all interesting, click it. On the large image, you can see details of the little car to the right of the truck at the loading dock. You can see the pigeon on the roof, and the blurred ends of trees, so you can know the wind was blowing lightly when the photo was taken.




The photo I took was of a brick street and a building with a coca-cola sign painted on the side. Some of those old signs have been painted over, and re-appeared, over and over since they were first painted. They're called "ghost signs" and if you go to google image and put that in, you'll see lots that people have collected in photos.

What I like about having seen the Washington DC example above is the people's clothes, and the cars. So I can picture some people around "my" building, though mine would've been Texans so some aspects of the autos and clothes might have been different.

This was in Coleman, the town where Keith and I stopped for hamburgers on the way to Austin on November 19, 2011. Whoever painted that sign probably could not have imagined, nor believed it if we could have told him, that in 2011 someone could take a photo of it with a little pocket-sized digital camera and somehow show it all over the world without ever touching paper or chemicals to develop it. I'm pretty sure whoever painted that sign wouldn't have believed it would still BE there in 2011. :-)

So if you see ghost signs, maybe take a photo and think of the artist, of what it might have looked like the first day when the paint was still wet, and of the ghost cars and people who might have been there 100 years ago.

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Here are some I took in Bimidji, Minnesota, when Holly and I visited the Traaseths there in 2007.


You can click to enlarge.