Bric A Brac

So... I got up too early and full of awakeness, and got up to start sorting through all my papers from last year for taxes. Fun, huh? (Not fun for me.)

So I was sorting through my receipts from the UK, throwing away the things that weren't deductible and remembering how much I love museums and books and charity shops (not, not, and not deductible).

I thought I would add this to the knowledge base of anyone who didn't know and might care a teensy bit: In the U.S. when you buy something from a thrift store and it wasn't worth a category of its own, they call it misc (for miscellaneous). In the UK, it's BRIC A BRAC (a term I knew for the little statues grandmothers put on little shelves). Or on a receipt that's not all upper case, capitalized with a weighty three capitals: Bric A Brac

I hope someone needs to know this and can maybe win some money on Jeopardy, or Countdown.

Here's some bric-a-brac (American spelling):



I bought that round Elizabeth II cup, second from the left, for Bea Marshall. I have the receipt sitting right here. Marie Curie Cancer Care charity shop, 107 GLoucester Rd. Bishopston, Bristol. June 30, 2011. I mailed it to her, worried that it might break, but it didn't. I sent it because when I had visited her earlier in Sheffield, she'd asked me who my favorite member of the royal family was. I said Charles, because I felt sorry for him. So I got a Charles and Diana memorial teacup. I think it was supposed to be a commemorative teacup, but poor Charles. So I thought an older Elizabeth might be good for her everyday teacup collection.

No good way to get this home, but England is swimming in cool teapots:



And egg cups:



I almost bought that one. Then I thought a photo of it was plenty.

They have a much better quality of bric-a-brac than the U.S. has:



... though maybe when it's useful like a teapot it should be dishes. According to what I can learn from my receipt, though, if it's not toys, books, or womens accessories, it must be Bric A Brac!

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.