New Claremont Blog

If anyone is still looking at this blog, I would like to direct you to my new, reimagined Claremont-based blog which I am calling Claremontography. 

I will shift focus from my life in Claremont, and point readers to those things which make this Southern California town the special place that it is. I will be carrying my camera around town more than I used to, looking for Claremont sights and moments worth sharing.

Thanks to my loyal and occasional readers for following me around, and I hope you enjoy the new format.

Glamping in Switzerland

Yes, I have started a blog for our sabbatical year. I can't call it Life in Claremont if I am not living in Claremont, so I thought about it for awhile, and decided to call it Glamping in Switzerland. The first post (there are now five) explains the title.

You can read the blog here.

As I have been cleaning our house this past weekend, month, summer, I keep wondering why I don't do this more often. As L said to me today, "You can pay people to do that, you know." Yeah, I know, but I don't generally think about what lurks behind the couch until I have to.

Last time we came home from sabbatical I thought I would have a plan to thoroughly clean one room each month, and though the house would not be clean all at the same time, at least each room would have some attention paid to it.  Sounds like a good plan....

Life will be simpler in a one-bedroom flat with fewer things around.

Vavara

I recently discovered that a friend of mine has started a blog. She lives near the ocean and walks along the shore daily, taking photos and posting not only a photo, but thoughts about life. Her site is called Vavara and her subtitle is Pondering the Ocean as Art.

Salad Days

The weather has turned hot - really hot yesterday at about 100 degrees. Time to have a salad for dinner every night. Time to find new recipes. I have been following a local blogger (see Blogs I Follow and find What's For Meat?) who sprinkles stories from her life at home with three little girls with recipes. The other day I looked through her salad recipes and copied a bunch and have tried two so far.

Tonight we had Butternut Squash with Lentils and Goat Cheese. We will have it again, and next time I will make sure we have enough mint leaves in the pot in the yard. Since I just knew we had a whole bunch, I didn't look before I went shopping, and when I went out with the scissors tonight, I harvested about a teaspoonful. 

Motifs in Music

I keep two blogs. This one and a music blog. Even though I write in that blog with less frequency, it doesn't mean that music doesn't occupy my mind much of the time in various ways.

Today I blogged about new words I wrote for Vista to sing for our annual Multicultural Day to the tune of This Land is Your Land.

You can read that post here.

* * *

Day 19 - Clutter Cleanse: More media is in the trash. I threw out an old VHS tape and also some CDs. Again, these are for things I may have used in my music classroom, but no longer do, and probably never will again.

Lessons from a Dog

I have a college friend who is also my Facebook friend. She has recently started a blog about what lessons she learns from her dog, Bob, and how she can be more like Bob. You can read her blog here. Maybe I can learn dog lessons from reading her blog rather than from actually owning such a pet.

Further Adventures of the Little Free Libraries

My friend Judy and her blog have kept me apprised of the newest additions to Claremont's Little Free Libraries which seem to be popping up in various locales throughout town. When last I blogged about these little gems, I knew of two - the first one I saw on the corner of Cambridge and 9th St., the one near The Press.  The Claremont Courier also mentioned the one in front of the new Crepe restaurant in the Packing House (where we have not yet had a chance to eat, despite our one attempt).

Then I heard about one in front of my friend Marjorie's house on N. Mills. It's on the east side just north of Foothill.  This morning I drove by and took a picture of the box as well as the contents. 

Judy's blog post yesterday altered me to yet another Little Free Library, this one in the 400 block of W. Harrison on the north side of the street. In its previous life, this repository was a small refrigerator. I not only snapped photos of the contents and the outside of this library, but I also deposited my copy of Amy Tan's One Hundred Secret Senses and took out a John Irving novel, The Fourth Hand.

A Peace Corps Blog

You know you are getting old when people you knew as children are now adults and out in the world creating change. I recently found out that a young woman who was on swim team with my daughters years ago has not only finished her master's degree in biology, but is now in Equador in the Peace Corps working on water projects for a village there. You can read about her adventures in her blog here. Way to go, Dani!

The Burning House

One of the articles I ran across while flipping through Flipboard concerned the website theburninghouse.com. It poses this question:

I took the challenge, and although my photo shows that I do not value the practical (I figure that I can replace my electronics, my instruments, my books, furniture, etc), it became an interesting exercise for me. 

I started by wandering through my house to see what I had that could never be replaced, and I started with items that I have from my grandparents. The first thing I picked up was a wedding present from my grandfather who carved a knot and inscribed our names on it. Then I saw the brooch that I chose from my grandmother's jewelry box after her memorial service. That got me to thinking and I went through the Christmas decorations and chose the angel tree-topper that my other grandmother had given me years ago. Unfortunately, I do not think I have anything from my other grandfather.

The rest of the items are correspondence (with the exception of a drawing that I made when I was 4. I remember drawing it and thinking then that it was THE most beautiful piece of art. Ever.). The rest of the letters represent all the other letters that I have in boxes. A letter from my husband when we were dating. A thank you note from each of my daughters (who write excellent thank you notes). A letter my father wrote to his parents when I was young. A letter my mother wrote to her in-laws when I was young. (I was looking for the letter my father wrote to me when I was expecting our second child with a whole list of suggested names for that child, none of which we used, but all of which I enjoyed reading. I need to find that letter.)

As a blogger, it's easy to conclude that I value the written word (pictures, too) which document even the most mundane aspects of lives. I am sentimental. That is not news to me or anyone who knows me well.

Follow By Email

Several days ago I connected with a violinist I know but hadn't seen in a few years.  I told her about my music blog (after reading hers) and she wanted to know if she could subscribe to it.  I have my whole list of blogs I follow with a reading list, so I know just when the sites are updated. I didn't really know how she could do that.

But then, of course, I googled "subscribe to blogger" and found the simple instructions of how to add a "follow by email" to my blog.  I doubt if anyone would want to get a daily email from lifeinclaremont since I post most days, but my posts to the music blog are somewhat erratic.

Just in case anyone is interested, though, one can now subscribe to either this blog or motifs in music.

Velvet Aroma

When in Palm Springs last weekend I spoke with a HMC trustee spouse who has launched this website - Velvet Aroma - which is for cooks who want to organize all the food blogs they follow and recipes into one convenient place.

Now, I'm sure that I am not the only person who finds a recipe on the internet and carries the laptop to the kitchen to use as the cookbook.  I can look through bookmarks of recipes, but often I just look for new recipes.  Or I go through my own blog at all the posts tagged "food" in order to find a recipe I liked in the past.

Velvet Aroma will allow you to import recipes from the web (as well as enter your own family recipes) and organize them in a way that is helpful to you.

You can also follow Velvet Aroma's own food blog - flipcookbook.

Monday Blog-Reading

This is a screen shot of the stats on this blog from just a few minutes ago.  Although Monday is not over yet, there are already quite a few more page views today than yesterday.  That's pretty typical.  I'm guessing that Sunday is not as big a day for surfing the web, but Monday mornings, when you are all trying to get back into the work week, it doesn't hurt to have a few distractions....

Sugar, Eggs and Flour

New blog of note.  I know there must be thousands of food blogs floating through cyberspace, but this one is my favorite.  (I also like Mennonite Girls Can Cook.)  One of the things I like about it is the new format.  The default view is Magazine (see in upper left-hand corner).  You need to click on the date to see all of the pictures in that particular blog post.  If you want another view of the blog entries, click on Magazine for the other options (Classic, Flipcard, Mosaic, Sidebar, Snapshot, and Timeslide). Pretty cool.

When I get a hankering to change the view of my blog, I may decide to go with this dynamic formatting.

More Armchair Travel

Just as my friends returned from their sabbatical years in New Zealand and Denmark, two more families have set off for a year of foreign exploration and fun.  I have added their blogs to my reading list (links on left) and am now enjoying Kyoto and London vicariously.

Blog Following

Two of the blogs I have been reading this year are almost about to expire as my friends will be returning to Claremont from their respective sabbaticals.  Just in time, one of our teachers at Vista has embarked upon her exciting year traveling to Asia and Central America, and I just discovered her blog which you can access from the column on the left of "Blogs I Follow".  It's called Buried Treasures.

No Joy in Joyland

While reading this local blog, I found out that the amusement park of my youth, Joyland, in Wichita, Kansas, has been closed since 2006.  Nature is reclaiming the park, and you can see more pictures of its demise at this site.

The best thing to do when school was out in May was to take your report card to Joyland, and they would give you tickets for your grades.  I seem to remember that for every A you got 4 (or was it 5?) tickets, and fewer tickets for each lower grade.

The roller coaster was pretty scary, not only for its drops, but it looked like it would fall apart at any moment, even when it was running.

Blog Categories

Last month I thought I would go through my past year's blog and tag or categorize the various posts. The impetus behind that task was trying to remember the name of a movie I had seen in the past year. It's much easier to look through 20 blog posts than them all, especially if you don't remember what month or year you are searching for.

It doesn't quite surprise me that my most used tags are: book, food, and Vista which consume much of my time!

Recycling Blog

Here's a creative recycling blog that I stumbled on a little while ago.

It's from the UK, so some of the items are not familiar to Americans. At the bottom of the page are all kinds of categories if you are searching for a certain types of recycling.

Hello China!

I reported a little while back that I could see that my friends living in New Zealand and Denmark this year were reading my blog. Until recently, most of my readers have been from the U.S., understandably. But now it seems that some people in China are reading about life in our little So Cal town, too. And by some people, I mean more people in China than the U.S.

New Blog to Follow

My friend, Pat, has started a blog which I have added to my "Blogs I Follow" list on the left side of this page. Check it out!