Have You Seen This Flier

I love things people do for their own fun.

Montana Sky | Flickr : partage de photos !.

I love Montana.  I don’t think I say that enough.  All I have to do is look at this picture and I remember why.  Beautiful blue skies and not a person around for miles.  You can see the horizon line and watch the weather come in.  I miss being able to say “looks like we got 15 minutes before the storm hits us” without looking online or at my blackberry or on the tv to find out.  I feel so out of sync with nature.

Christys’ Crown Series Blair Cloche.

I really love hats now. Actually I’ve always loved hats, frilly girly big and vintage looking. But I was never brave enough to wear them. Now I say “what the hell?” Go ahead, be jealous of my devil may care attitude. Because I love this hat. Cloche….. cloche….. and I love the word.

And I am running to meet it!  I love today how I felt so free to do things, whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  Within reason of course.  But it is so nice to have a day off and jump around doing 10,000 things at once.  Reading and shopping online, researching business and marketing ideas, learning a new way to hem pants, sketching out 10 new ideas of things to make.  My mind is racing and I am trying to keep up with it.

It is rainy and windy, my hair was whipping around my face I could barely see crossing the street. I love the wind when it is like this. Just a few leaves blowing around, making crinkling sounds as they go by. But the sun is still shining enough that you feel like you can sit in a sheltered spot and get a suntan if you wanted. Beautiful fall.

This is my new game.  Who am I today.  I will give you no clues.  The only way you will find out who I am is by picking the wrong person.  Then try to come back from that.

There are so few times in life that one gets to take a few seconds to enjoy the things that nature has to offer.  I really have been living my life in a blur, rushing from one  moment to the next.  What is the point?  I don’t think there is one.  It certainly isn’t making me any happier.  Everyone says you need to step outside your comfort zone, why?  Isn’t that the best place to be?  Where life is good and beautiful and no one can touch your emotions, no one can step on your feelings.  Do we really need to share our life with so many people who don’t deserve to be a part?

Planted my little raised garden this past weekend.  I wanted to try something new in the vegetable department and saw a fennel plant and said “sure, come to my house”.  It hadn’t been planted about 5 hours when I came back and saw that a bunny had chewed on a couple of leaves and pulled the whole plant out.  So I replanted it.  The next morning, the whole plant was gone.  Mr. Bunny had chewed it all the way down to the ground.  So, if you see a bunny and it has licorice on its breath, that is the one. 

I have been all nostalgic lately.  Life is zooming by and things I had wanted to achieve by now aren’t possible.  I will never be a child actor.  I will never be Miss America.  I will never be able to be Tuesday from the Addams Family for Halloween.  And by the way, never put on a Tuesday costume if you are over 40ish.  I still have nightmares of me in the movie “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”.  That is the movie with Bette Davis where she dresses up like a little girl and looks ghastly, right?   Most depressing Halloween ever.

So now I think “Grey Gardens”.  I will be Little Edie, I will be the crazy child-like adult who wears sweaters wrapped around my head and feeds raccoons that live in my attic loaves of bread.  I will dance and march around my house and imagine myself in my glory days, if I ever had some.  Who cares what anyone thinks?  That is the one nice thing about getting older, you become invisible.  I feel like I am invisible.  Like I am screaming at the top of my lungs and no one hears me. 

Back when we bought our brand spanking new built for us house (okay, from a list of features) over 10 years ago, you couldn’t view your house “from space”.  Not from the space station, but from an aerial view like in Google Maps.  Your home buying process pretty much involved looking at a map, driving around the neighborhood and looking at what neighborhoods and/or eyesores surrounded your potential house, and in our case driving down a muddy road to see the home site  (or at least what it looked like before the topsoil was ripped off and anything resembling nature was scraped from the earth).  Now, I can view my house on Google Maps from a tiny little blip on the East Coast all the way down to if I happened to be walking to the mailbox when they snapped the picture, you could tell what color my housecoat was.  Which for a house buyer, is an absolutely fantastic thing. But for a home seller, it can be a nightmare.
Let’s say that you are a buyer driving through a potential neighborhood and wow, the houses are pretty.  Everyone takes such good care of their yards, there are no rusty clunker cars up on cinderblocks mucking up their driveways, the roads are wide and tree-lined.  And the house is fantastic!  Let’s buy it!  But that night, you decide you want to see where the nearest grocery stores are….. or you want to find the quickest way to get to the big highway that gets you to work fast.  So you look on Google Maps.  And you zoom in on that house that you loved, that you already have arranged the furniture in “in your mind”, and find that 10 feet beyond those beautiful trees behind your dream house is…. what is that?!  Is that an industrial site?  No, it looks like a bunch of tractor trailers or something.  Let’s zoom in on that area more.  OMG, it is a scrap yard where they crush old trailers and make them into neat little squares of metal!  No wonder the price was so low on that house!  Whew!  Thank god we didn’t sign those papers!

Now imagine that you are the homeowner that is trying to sell that house.  10 years ago when you bought your house, it was pristine farmland.  Everyone loved the neighborhood, the houses practically sold themselves.   The first people who resold in the neighborhood made a tidy profit.  Things looked good.  Then Google Maps came along. Unbeknownst to you a small industry had been thriving on the land not zoned residential behind your house.  Didn’t really bother you, you couldn’t see what was going on through the trees and you couldn’t really hear any noises from the area, what with everyone out cutting their well manicured lawns every nice day in the summer.  But Google Maps saw the small industrial area.  And snapped a photo “from space” of the industrial area on a day when there was a backlog of work piling up on the lot.  That photo went out on the internet for everyone to see.  No big deal, one of many snapped that day to make our life as consumers and car drivers easier. But now you are trying to sell your house.  And every time someone “Googles” your address, that big old picture pops up and some potential home buyer, before they have even driven by your house, sees the now “huge seeming” industrial area and says “ugh!  Not that house, it is near some big icky factory or something!”

So my advice to you, is look at your house “from space”.  If Google (okay, I am picking on them because they are huge) took a picture on a day when your house/neighborhood/area wasn’t at its best, everyone will see it.  And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.  Just make sure your next house looks pretty from space.