• 31Jan

  Great Minds Run Alike?

  blogging 2 Comments

  I just read a post on Billie’s Blog and just had to laugh! I had been thinking of talking about the same thing! And since Blogger wasn’t cooperating with allowing me to make a comment I thought I’d just go ahead and put my thoughts to um…er…plastic and wires.

  To start with, I met one of my favorite people ever through the internet - my husband Paul. It was crazy that we’d never met before since we both lived in Seattle in the same general area, our kids participated in Boys and Girls club sports and we frequented the same restaurants among other similarities. We exchanged emails for weeks before meeting in person, and the depth of our understanding of each other made us already friends.

  You get a certain kind of intimacy going when you write about things that are meaningful to you. With the circle of blogs that I read daily the intimacy is reciprocal since they read our thoughts, too. With non-blogging readers, it is one-sided, unless they choose to comment. (Which is always nice)

  Here’s the setup: Nancy and Paul at the dinner table

  Nancy: Did you see that post Jillian did about the critters? I laughed so hard!

  Paul: Yes, it was funny. Brenda finally got her easel, too.

  Nancy: Won’t it be fun to have coffee with Billie and Ned?

  Paul: It will. I envy them being married for fifty years!

  Ok, I made the last sentence up, but I do believe he would have said it!

  So, this community of bloggers have become a part of our daily life, and we do feel like we know you. I’m really looking forward to meeting Billie and Ned and hopefully more readers or bloggers in the future.

• 30Jan

  Even My Lists Have Lists

  packing the house 1 Comment

  I thought I’d do a quick post in response to a comment from Malcolm of Dropped In on one of our recent posts…

  He said that he sold a lot of books and cds on Amazon. I have sold a number of books and household items on eBay and also on Craigslist but have been struggling as to the best way to handle some of the things we own. And of course, get the most money. I could do an estate sale when we are ready to move, but they take a commission and I’m not sure it would be the best in our rural location.

  So, here goes:

  Books - we have many hundreds of books. I don’t know how many. A lot of mine are first editions - I collect mysteries (Grafton, Lockridge, Hillerman, AE Maxwell, Ed McBain, Earl Emerson, Robert Campbell, Lia Matera, Marcia Muller.) The Lockridges are from the 40’s and 50’s and have wonderful campy covers and are worth some money. There are also many more regular books and paperbacks…that have minimal value. I guess those go to the garage sale.

  I also have a number of first edition Yeats and Cather, among others. I’ve been in contact with a bunch of antiquarian booksellers, posted pictures, etc. and they have expressed interest but would like to see them in person. Maybe a trip to San Francisco is in order? I could put them on Abe Books but then I’m stuck with the price I put on them - or if I did use eBay I might not have the right people looking and sell too low.

  Furniture - We have number of pieces of antique furniture that I should make arrangements with an auction house in Seattle to sell.

  Art - We plan on bringing most of our artwork to Mexico, but there are about four pieces that we plan on selling. These will probably go to the auction house.

  CDs - As you saw in previous posts, I have about 350 cds to dispose of. Malcolm sold his on Amazon. I did a quick look this morning on a small pile of them and they were worth from $2 to $40. Mostly in the $4-$8 range. How long will it take me to put them on Amazon and mess around with the mailing, etc? I have to decide if this will be time well spent or not.

  Aaaugh! And this is just to get us to the point where we can stage the house!

• 28Jan

  We Are Getting Excited!

  decisionmaking 8 Comments

  Our trip to Mazatlan and Queretaro is coming right up! We are going to do our best to interview these cities as potential hometowns - while knowing that a vacation is quite different than actually living somewhere.

  Somehow, though, I think we’ll know the place when we see it. When we first saw the property we live on now we had an immediate positive reaction to it - and we knew we wanted to buy it even before we had seen the interior of the house!

  When we visited Ajijic several years ago, I knew after a couple of days that it wasn’t a place I could live. There were some wonderful neighborhoods, and we loved the B & B and some of the people we met, but I felt strongly that it was a place that wouldn’t suit me.

  So, while some of the features of our new community are black or white, there is a component that is just about how it feels.

• 25Jan

  The door is open - come on in.

  getting ready, packing the house 5 Comments

  Enter at your own risk…it’s kind of a mess here!

  The first picture is of me at my desk working on moving all our music from cds to the computer. We recently bought a Creative Zen 60 GB MP3 player as well as a 160 GB hard drive for backups. Our thinking is that all our music as well as our data will be on the new hard drive. Of course the new MP3 player will be a treat to use not just for music but for Spanish lessons and general goofing around.

  The picture also shows (horrors) the boxes under my desk full of books and other stuff to sell on eBay. The cds on the floor are what remains to be ripped to the computer. The blue bone belongs to Henry, the schnauzer-poodle mix.

  
  The following picture shows all the cd’s I have finished. This has been an amazing project, but we should be pretty happy with the result. I think I’ll donate the cds to our local library before we head down.

  
  When we move to Mexico we’ll bring our little stereo from the kitchen which has a wire to connect to the MP3 player, and “presto” all our music will have moved along with us!

• 24Jan

  Why Blog?

  our new life 6 Comments

  I thought about doing a post yesterday but I loved that picture of Seattle and didn’t want to see it moved lower on the page…isn’t that dumb? What a beautiful day that was, though.

  As we become more and more immersed in planning our move, the blogs I read daily become more and more important to me. I just want to know what people are thinking and doing so much - I guess to try to project what I will be doing in the not too distant future. I’ll be adding a few new blogs I’ve been watching to our links list sometime today.

  When you take on blogging people start to depend on your posts. One blog we were watching just stopped writing one day and I really worried about them!

  It can be a lot of work to blog sometimes - but then the opposite is true, too - that the ideas and words can flow quickly. I keep a list of topics that I’m thinking about and I imagine other bloggers do, too.

  But why do we do it? Make our thoughts and feelings and everything public? Is it some pathetic attempt at our 15 minutes of fame? Or a chance to connect with people we wouldn’t normally reach? Is it because some of us are frustrated writers or that we want to keep a diary for our own use? I still don’t know exactly what it is for me…although it is probably a bit of all of those reasons. And since I am on a sort of stream-of-consciousness flow here, if you haven’t read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, it is a great read for a blogger. The amazing thing is that it was written in 1909. The entire text is available to read here.

  I sometimes look at our blog statistics and see that there are regular visitors. (The only thing you can see is the city and state or country they are from, and sometimes their domain name.) I do wish that they would come our of lurkdom sometime and make a comment or just say hello. It is really nice to hear from people.

  Enough rambling! It’s time for me to get going on some project or another to get us closer to moving day! Hasta luego!

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