Hodge Podge

Oranges on the tree at Janet’s house in Antibes, France, February 2010.

I just read a post by blogger extraordinaire David Lebovitz about his making “Compost Cookies,” or “Amnesty Cookies” as he called them. He ties together the concept of having an “Email Amnesty Day” whereby a person deletes all of his or her inbox in an attempt to lighten his or her load with the idea of making Compost Cookies, which entails going through one’s cupboards and putting a hodge podge of ingredients in the dough in order to lighten the contents of the cupboards, if not one’s waistline. It’s a post written with his usual light humor and aplomb, but it also gave me an idea.

I have Chrome Open Tab Disorder right now, which is the condition by which one has a bajillion tabs open in his or her browser, so many that the top bar of the browser looks like this:

(I made this image “private” in Flickr, so you can’t click on it to see it any bigger, but it gives you the idea that that’s what my Google Chrome browser looks like right now: a bar of salmon pink open tabs where I cannot even tell which tab is which anymore! I have to play “Hunt the Website” by clicking on various tabs to see which page is attached to it in order to find anything.)

I decided that the only cure for this disease, which exists because I have Blogstipation too often, is to purge here on the page about all the tabs I have open about which I have something to say or make note of. I am going to do the same as David has done, except instead of bake cookies with ingredients piling up in cupboards, I am going to cook up a blog of odds and ends which have interested me in recent days.

Ghetto Living in Paris, Part 1

Outside our window at sunrise, 8:28 am, Tues. 9 Dec., 2009

Yes, sunrise is at about 8:30 am right now.  Check it out:

It’s a screen shot of this site: Time and date dot com – Sun & Moon.   Believe it or not, Paris is really far NORTH. Like As Far North as Canada North. Infoplease lists Paris as 48° 48N latitude, which compares to Cornerbrook, Newfoundland or Minot, North Dakota. We’re freakin’ north of Québec (city). No, it’s not Alaska North, but a lot more north than I think the average person realizes.

What this means is that we near the Winter Soltice and the days shorten, it is dark in the morning until 8:30 and beyond, and then sun goes down before 5 pm. It’s conducive to hibernating, something I do quite a lot of these days.

Back to the Blog & Christmas Lights

A suncatcher/hanging I gave to PJ for his birthday yesterday. It is a fairy resting on a crescent moon. I found it when I went shopping a couple months ago at the Marché aux Fleurs.

I’ve taken a week off of blogging at my site here after officially completing the writing of 63,523 words for this blog during the month of November during the NaNoWriMo challenge. I was pretty pooped after all that writing. Still, I have missed coming here and posting with great frequency and voluminocity. According to spell-check, “voluminocity” is not a word. I am sure it is supposed to be something boring like “volume” or “voluminousness.” Yup, those ones check out. But “voluminocity” feels like a good word — a combo of “volume” and “velocity.” That’s the word I want to describe what I felt like for the month of November here.