Series

I define the second half of my mission for this blog and I join the 31-Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge promoted by Darren Rowse on Problogger. This is day 1 and today's task is to write an "Elevator Pitch" for the blog.

This post is part of the two series: Bloggers Who Inspire Me and the 31-Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Here I talk about my friend and fellow blogger Mario Kluser, whose blog Mario LIVE! is one of my favorite. Its tag line is: The People Blog, a highly apt tag for an inspiring and entertaining blog.

Here I continue to chronicle my experience of the 31-day challenge. Today I am to promote a post on this blog. So I promoted my first interview with Amanda Ackroyd and her modern-day retelling of one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

This post is part of the two series: Bloggers Who Inspire Me and the 31-Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Here I talk about my friend and fellow blogger Mario Kluser, whose blog Mario LIVE! is one of my favorite. Its tag line is: The People Blog, a highly apt tag for an inspiring and entertaining blog.

In this post, after a period of meditation and a break from the blog, I reassess my blog's mission and try to express it to my readers.

I define the second half of my mission for this blog and I join the 31-Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge promoted by Darren Rowse on Problogger. This is day 1 and today's task is to write an "Elevator Pitch" for the blog.

This post concludes the series of interviews with Yorkshire author Amanda Ackroyd, and begins the series featuring weekly installments of her novel, Scarborough Baby. In this post, teaser and Chapter 1, in which we are introduced to the main character, Harv Marvin, a 24-year-old English young woman, her mother Angie and stepfather Ken.

In Chapter 2 of Scarborough Baby, Harv introduces us to her landlord and best friend, Philip, a kind and affectionate gay art lover with connections in the contemporary art world of London. In exchange for a very modest rent, Harv takes care of his apartment when he's gone, and his cats. Philip encourages Harv to pursue her painting more seriously and asks her for any old photographs she might have for an exhibition.

In Chapter 3 Harv visits her mother Angie and stepfather Ken. During her visit she rummages around in the attic in search of some old photos for her friend Philip's art exhibition. She stumbles upon a diary her mother kept as a teenager, and realizes it must have been written at the time of her own conception. Unable to contain her curiosity, Harv embarks on a journey from which there is no turning back. In this post, the first half of the chapter.

In this post we feature the second half of Chapter 3 of Scarborough Baby, in which Harv, the young female protagonist, reads her mother's diary from when she was a teenager looking for love in all the wrong places. In this second half of the chapter, Harv, once having begun to read, is determined to get to the truth, but she makes a terrible discovery.

Seized by a mass of conflicting feelings of loss, resentment, confusion and fear, Harv sets off to see the last place her biological father was seen alive. She just wants to see, but once there cannot control her desire to know more, to delve deeper. The plot thickens.

This post features the first half of my interview with Alessandro Tombelli, a Florentine gardener of international renown, who has now also written a book, the podcast of the interview and some photos of gardens in which Alessandro has worked.

In the first part of this two-part interview series on the Amazon Kindle I begin a conversation with my friend Cristina, and she describes some of the benefits of owning this fascinating new gadget.

This is the second post in the Kindle series and concludes my interview with my friend Cristina. The advantages to owning a Kindle are many, and I am sure there are many more that have not yet come to light. There is definitely more to come.

This is the first of three interviews with my friend Amanda, of Leeds (Yorkshire, England), with whom I went to boarding school from 1976 to 1978. In the 30 years since we left school we have kept in touch very little but always remembered each other very fondly. She has not been idle. We had a wonderful and very inspiring English teacher and Amanda never lost her enjoyment of the challenge of writing. She has blossomed into a talented author, penning a lovely novel and several short stories. With this portion of the interview I am also publishing the first of two short stories she sent me, The New Scarlet Dress.

In the second segment of our three-part interview, Amanda tells me about why and how she wrote this short-short story, an exercise in the art of the precis.

This post concludes the series of interviews with Yorkshire author Amanda Ackroyd, and begins the series featuring weekly installments of her novel, Scarborough Baby. In this post, teaser and Chapter 1, in which we are introduced to the main character, Harv Marvin, a 24-year-old English young woman, her mother Angie and stepfather Ken.

This house tour is inspiring because it will give us the opportunity to see a before, during and after situation. My friend Cristina bought this apartment on the Upper West Side and allowed me to photograph it before she moved in. This inspired me to ask her and her partner Lisa to participate in my first social experiment with Twitter, of which I will write in an upcoming post.

In this post I introduce t^h's first social experiment using Twitter. My two friends Cristina & Lisa are going to tweet for two weeks about their daily routine and we are going to analyze the tweets to decide how best to arrange their new apartment.

In this post I analyze the first week of tweets by Cristina and Lisa and draw some preliminary conclusions on the flow of their days and how they could furnish the NY apartment to make it tell their story.

In this post I analyze the second and final week of Cristina and Lisa's Tweets. They have been tweeting on their daily routine, on their use of their living and work space, and on how they experience these spaces. They both appreciate light and simplicity, and the new apartment they have purchased in New York is shaping up into a small haven for the two women. This concludes our social experiment with Twitter, and I think it has been very successful.

In this final post of the series, I offer some "after" photos of Cristina's Upper West Side apartment with some closing comments.

In the first of three segments, Mario Kluser tells us how he went from dreaming of becoming a writer to completing his first novel, self-publishing it and then gaining nationwide distribution in the Netherlands.

In the second segment of three, Mario Kluser tells us about the genesis of his second novel, which he considers, without false modesty, to be the best book ever written in the Dutch language.

In the final segment of our 3-part interview, Mario tells us about his new tattoo, inspired by one of his characters. He also tells us the plot of his as-yet-unfinished third novel and talks about Script Frenzy and National Novel Writing Month.

In this first post in a series on clutter I tell the story of how I moved from Italy to the United States and years later had 40 boxes of books shipped to me from Florence. These boxes now line a wall in my basement and I don't have enough bookcases to house all the books. Weeding will have to be done!

In the second post in this series on clutter I set out a strategy to get rid of the basement boxes, by opening two boxes a day, one from the Italy pile and one from the Brooklyn pile. The key is to deal with what I find inside immediately, either throwing it out or finding a permanent place for it.

In the third post in the clutter series I showcase a series of drawings I did in a Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain class, that I found in one of the basement boxes. This is part of the fun of this project; forgotten items, forgotten times come back, with their stories in tow.

In the final post of this first series on clutter I outline my personal recipe for dealing with clutter, which allows hoarders some time to see actual proof that those things they were keeping for that unknown moment in the future when they will "need" them, can actually be discarded (hint: that moment never comes).

In this post I urge readers to vote for Obama in order to avoid the end of the universe as we know it. [Update: it worked!]

Here I republish a YouTube video on the election, mainly on the importance of voting, where Spielberg uses reverse psychology to tell people not to vote because one vote doesn't make a difference, but Harrison Ford rebels (go Indiana Jones, go!)

I celebrate Obama's victory in this post, admire McCain's gracious concession, and weep all over the keyboard with relief, dawning hope and exhaustion. Here's to new beginnings!