Texeira Lane

This is kind of fun. You can go to the Draw a House site and draw a house and then your personality is analyzed. Now you can either do this on your own or you can draw your house on Texeira Lane. I drew a house and created Texeira Lane. If you follow this link --> Texeira Lane - you can draw your house and add it to the lane. If you want to view the street I made you can follow this link --> View. I hope someone else will draw a house & add it to the lane. I'm kind of lonely there by myself. Also I'm hoping your house will look better than mine & improve the neighborhood! I'm not a very good artist. Those are cats in the yard by the way! Give it a try - you really don't have anything better to do, do you? If so you should be posting it!

FYI - there is room for 20 houses on the street so get busy!

Robin, the lonely blog mistress

Silent Sunday

My cats got catnip filled fortune cookies from Santa Claus. Mellifera was completely flipped out!

FYI: These came from Santa via Jake & Micah, a terrific store you should check out! 

My Word for 2009

In an earlier post I mentioned that I was working on choosing a word of the year for 2009. I promised to share mine when I figured it out. I had a long list of words but none of them felt right to me. I was reading a post on the Zen Habits blog about thriving on a simpler lifestyle and it came to me what word I wanted - Simplify.

I have this recurring (weekly, daily, hourly recurring) fantasy of packing a bag and flying to London to stay. When I think about what I'd put in the bag I'm always surprised at how easy it would be to leave things behind. Which makes me wonder why I have so much stuff!

Simplify

To make simple or simpler, as:

a. To reduce in complexity or extent.

b. To reduce to fundamental parts.

c. To make easier to understand.

I like definition b best - to reduce to fundamental parts. My goal for 2009 is going to be to reduce my life to fundamentals - only those things which are necessary. I don't mean just stuff although that is part of it. I want to figure out what is really essential and keep only those things, emotions, etc that I can't do without. I read once that you should only keep what is useful or beautiful. I think that could apply to more than material things. I'm going to use that as a starting point. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this but it should be interesting!

So did anyone else choose a word? Please share if you did!

Robin, the lonely (but simplified) blog mistress

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!!

Silent Sunday

This is the Dark Doodad Nebula. I liked the name!

Inaugural Poet

President-elect Obama has chosen the poet Elizabeth Alexander to compose a poem to be read at his inauguration. Obama is only the third president to have done this. (The other two were Clinton & Kennedy.) Alexander is the author of four books of poetry and a professor of African-American studies at Yale. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her book, American Sublime. Here is one of her poems:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?