Feeling creative

Early yesterday morning, after a very bad night, I pootled sleepily across to read Debra’s latest post on her lovely blog  breathelighter, as I drank my morning tea. I always enjoy Debra’s take on life in the very different setting of Southern California, and was happily reading about her granddaughter’s sayings, when I almost dropped my mug as I found that she had nominated me for a blogging award I hadn’t heard of – the Kreativ Blogger.

Feeling very pleased and much more wide-awake after reading this, but also nosy curious, I turned to Google to find out where this award had originated. I soon discovered that the design has mutated in its travels through cyberspace from the original

the creation of which is documented on a visually stunning Norwegian blog (which really makes me wish I could read Norwegian) to the one most commonly circulating at the moment. 

I also discovered that the updated version of this award asks that we pass it on to seven other bloggers, after posting seven interesting facts about ourselves.  Hulda, however, was more modest in her original concept and only chose four. She also laid down no conditions for her recipients, simply explaining why she felt the blogs she had chosen qualified for the description ‘creative’.

This is where I start to get creative and post the one interesting thing about myself I think is relevant, which is that I feel a little uncomfortable about the way Hulda’s unconditional mark of recognition now comes with conditions. To me an award should be something given because of who the recipient is and what they have already achieved, with no strings attached.

So I’ve decided to revert to Hulda’s original intention and add her lovely design to my sidebar, as it seems a pity for it to fade into obscurity. In the same spirit of freedom I’m not going to place any conditions on my own recipients, leaving them to choose which version of the award they want to download, if any, and whether and how to pass it on in their turn.

Creativity matters deeply to me and I love the idea of acknowledging it in other bloggers. I am touched that Debra sees it in my blog and in my turn I find it in abundance in the blogs I so enjoy reading. My choices are very varied, because creativity comes in so many guises, and are:

Baking in Franglais – a blog I practically have to give up for Lent. Jean is as passionate and creative about her craft of baking as she is about blogging and her baking blog is a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. Her enthusiasm for good food is contagious and I can’t wait for Easter to try some of her wonderful recipes.

Moving on  Annie was an obvious choice, as she is always being creative with words, photos, yarn and chocolate, not necessarily all at the same time. J Annie and I go back a long way in my blogging life, as we found each other’s blogs only a few weeks after I pressed the publish button on my first post. It’s always fun when blogging friends share a hobby and knitting matters a lot to both of us, though living in the heat of southern Spain does make it more difficult for Annie to show off her creations.

Janice in Caunes   Janice is a newer blogging friend, who, like me, enjoys life in more than one country. She is busy learning the craft of blogging and is rapidly discovering how fascinating and addictive it is. I have enjoyed watching her posts become more and more creative over the few months since I found her blog and shall equally enjoy watching her be creative with her beloved house in France, when she migrates south for the summer.

 

Last, but by no means least, Ayak’s Turkish Delight.  I was recommended by a commenter on my very first post to visit Ayak’s blog and I’ve haunted it happily ever since. I go there to savour Ayak’s inimitable view of life in a very different country and the creative ways she copes with its vagaries and difficulties. I also go there never sure how it will look today, as she always enjoys being creative with template and photos. J

So there you have it: a few examples of creativity plucked from the maelstrom of creativity that is the blogosphere. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Home, sweet home

Recently my blogging friend Fly in the Web, of French Leave and Costa Rica Calling, sent me a lovely video clip of a robin which had set up its nest in a garden hanging basket. 

After watching this super little video it occurred to me that people might also enjoy the story told in the photographs below. Four years ago, in the middle of May, we took our trusty little campervan into our local market town for its annual MOT test (the compulsory British test of roadworthiness) only to get a bemused phone call from the garage soon after we arrived home. They had opened up the engine compartment to find a bird’s nest, complete with eggs, on top of the carburettor! 

They promised to complete the test without disturbing the nest and later that day we collected the van and drove it home very gently indeed. Amazingly, not only were the eggs undamaged by the heat and vibration of the engine, but the mother blackbird went back to her nest as soon as we got back and eventually hatched all her eggs.

Over the next few weeks DH and I carefully peeped in from time to time to watch over the nest and the rapid progress of its precious contents. Obviously we couldn't use the van again until all the baby birds had grown up and left the nest and in fact it was touch and go as to whether they would leave in time for our scheduled trip to France. From memory the last of the fledglings finally made his entrance into the wider world little more than a week before we were due to travel.

Every spring since then we have been very careful to check that no other enterprising birds have decided to set up home in this particular desirable neighbourhood. J

MOT Nest or The Patient Mother  May 14th

Very small but growing fast  May 29th

Let's look at the world  June 1st

Where's Mum?  June 3rd

A nice cuddle  June 4th

The last to leave June 8th

All Gone or The Empty Nest June 9th

STOP PRESS!  Apologies to my earlier visitors. The video I put in wasn't in fact the one Fly sent me. I inadvertently clicked on the wrong one in the YouTube list. Silly me! I have now added the correct one, so if you have popped back, you may like to watch again.

If you want to see the photos enlarged, double-click on them and they will open in what Google calls a light-box, which really enhances the colour and detail.

By day and by night

Who needs words?

The view from our bathroom window in Wales

The joys of spring

According to my old friend Dancing Beastie, spring is sprung. Another old friend, Sian, of Life on a Small Island, concurs with her opinion. 

Bear in mind that both these blogs hail from north of the Border and, very unusually, Scotland has on the whole had a much milder winter than the rest of the UK. When was the last time, I wonder, that daffodils came out earlier on Orkney than in the land of Saint David himself?

But now it’s official. Here on the Welsh hilltop that the Transit family call home (that is, when they stop all this moving about) spring has finally arrived. There are primroses in the hedgerows up the hill from the village and even one or two in our very exposed back garden. The birds are working themselves into a frenzy of nest-building and even I, as you know, have been spring-cleaning.

Best of all, for all of us who prefer light to darkness, the days are rapidly getting longer and today, according to the BBC weather page, sunset here won’t be until 6pm. Oh, we may still get snow if we’re unlucky, and certainly frost won’t disappear for months yet. Nevertheless, winter is over, new life is springing up everywhere and I think that calls for a little music, courtesy of a clip I was treated to recently on a new friend’s blog from Some Other Mountain. Thanks, Molly.

Image via Wikipedia

Bother Blogger!

Sometimes it feels as if all I’ve been doing lately is grumble about Blogger and the changes that are being made to it. I’m not averse to change, truly I’m not, but only change for the better. Change for change’s sake, purely to get a new look without any improvement in function, just makes me cross.

The latest little gem in the ongoing Blogger revamp came earlier this week, when the full-page and pop-up comment formats were changed without warning to the glossy (and barely legible) new Google look, all acres of white space and small, cramped, pale, difficult-to-read text, ornamented with tasteful orange highlights. What do you mean, don’t I like it?

I could have lived, albeit grudgingly, with the new look if it hadn’t brought with it the loss of two invaluable functions – the ability to subscribe to receive later comments by email and, in the full-page format, the ability to collapse comments. Without these, the full-page format, which I’ve always had, became worse than useless and I had no option but to change to the embedded format.

This has proved to be an unexpectedly positive move and I’m really enjoying the ability to reply directly to each comment, rather than having my response appear sometimes several comments below the one I’m replying to. It gives a much stronger feeling of commenting as conversation and is one of the functions I’ve always admired and envied in WordPress blogs.

That bonus apart, I’m left with the time-consuming annoyance of having to go back to many of the blogs I comment on, in order to find and read the author’s response to my comment. I will do it, because I appreciate replies and don’t want to miss them, but I would so much rather be reading and writing new posts. Fingers crossed that the Google engineers will make it a priority to fix this, but I’m not holding my breath….