Spring Fever

Feeling like a terrible mother today. My oldest two were getting ready to go to school this morning and started some obnoxious bickering at the door instead of taking their leave. It was good natured, but purely focused on being obnoxious: half-giggling and shouting opposing words at each-other just for the sake of keeping the argument going.

They’re at an age where, actually, all I do for them in the morning is mildly harass them to eat something and brush their teeth before they leave for school and they take care of getting all their stuff together and leaving on time, and they were already suited up to leave, so I was sitting there waiting for them to realize that they were wasting time or to get tired of the game and then Hannah started imploring “Please stop. Please stop that. Please stop,” and that just made them get louder. So I stomped over and said, “GO.” And they said, “Fine we will.” And left without saying goodbye or giving anyone goodbye hugs – which upset Hannah. And then I realized they’d forgotten their lunches.

We had kind of a rough weekend, where everyone was being rammy and Rachel and Hannah ran around the house starting new games (and new messes) every 20 minutes while I felt like I trailed around them picking things up. There were pointlessly escalated tussles over things like pillows and things being knocked over until Ian and I said, “let’s go for a walk before supper”. We were already a bit late for supper, so it actually delayed supper until almost 7:30, but it seemed necessary. We took them just around the block letting them run ahead and rambunctiously throw themselves into every shrinking snowbank and wade through puddles up to their knees (well over their bootlines) and then we all came home slightly more human.

As it’s getting a little warmer outside, I’m realizing what a little greenhouse my house is. I leave thermostat on the away setting during the day and during February that meant that most days I had to wear a bunnyhug (ie, hoodie) and put a throw over my lap. Now that the outside temperatures are just slightly above freezing, my house is just naturally staying at our regular temperature and I think it’s all because of the sun that comes in through our back window.

I had plans to sew some heavy curtains for back there to block the sun and help us get through the summer on less air conditioning, but it seems like that will have to be a higher priority task than I’d originally thought.

Side note: I’m so happy to be spending the summer in an environment I control. The last few summers it drove me nuts that I could never dress like it was summer because my office was so air-conditioned that I needed sweaters in order to survive the day. I plan on living in sundresses and getting a little healthy sweating in this summer. It’s going to be awesome.

3 Comments by Megan / March 13, 2012 / Posted in: Uncategorized

Relevant to My Pinterests

So Pinterest is super-trendy right now; and is apparently the second-fastest growing social-media website having reached over 10 million users in under two years despite being invite only.

I guess I’ve been on Pinterest for about 5 months now. And I’m not, by far, a very prolific or well-followed pinner, but I do love Pinterest and find it both addictive and satisfying to my right brain (also, to that special part of my brain, the medulla procrastinatora).

There are a couple of thoughts about Pinterest etiquette and Pinterest’s long-term place in the social media forum that have been bubbling around in my head and I feel like I’m ready now to share my suggestions for elevating your participation on media-curation websites to a level that considers the well-being of the site, its other users, the original content providers and even, to some extent, the internet’s “sharingness”.

Poor Form Pins We Should Quit Perpetuating

1. Pins that link to a generic page of a regularly updated site.
Example: the home page of a blog or Page 3 of someone’s tumblr stream or the home page of a news site.
Why it sucks: By all accounts, even after you pin this particular page, time will continue to pass and if your pin is going to be found or read by anyone, that will happen sometime in the future. During that time, it is likely that more content will be added and the original post will be bumped into archives. If a lot of time has passed or this particular stream is prolific, the post that visitors are looking for might be buried so far down as to be virtually unfindable.
How to prevent it: If you’re on a page that has more than one post, you can bet this page will change. Usually you can click on the title of the post to get to a page that will contain only that post and will do so permanently. If that doesn’t work, look for anything marked “Permalink” and click through to that before you pin.

2. Pinning from other “Stuff I like” sites.
Example: Tumblr, We Heart It, “inspiration” blogs that are just a round-up of unattributed images
Why it sucks: When I click through, I don’t just want to see the original picture or other pictures that are similar, I want more information about THAT picture – an explanation, a tutorial, where to buy, etc. It sucks because the click-through doesn’t give me any more pertinent information. And partly it sucks because of the attribution issues. Pinterest is already morally sketchy with regards to copyright because all its content is copied. If Pinterest is going to be respected as a curatorial tool for collecting resources and eventually driving traffic and not just as a tool for content-theft then the click-through traffic it generates needs to be valuable and actually go to the source.
How to prevent it: This is actually going to take a bit of work from you. If you want to pin something that you know isn’t the source, you’re going to have to give a moment of your life to at least cursorily attempting to track down the source so you can pin from that page instead (image sourcing tips below).

3. Small images
Example: anything less than 250 pixels wide or tall.
Why it sucks: It’s the same as clicking through to a site but not getting any more information. Clicking on a thumbnail just to get a lightbox with the same sized image in it is irritating.
How to prevent it: If you use the ‘Pin It’ bookmarklet, it works using a javascript that finds all the images on your current page. It can only process the page as it appears when you click the ‘Pin It’ button. So if you are on a gallery page that uses lightboxes, you might have to click on the thumbnail of the image you like to make sure that the bigger image is open before you click ‘Pin It’. That way the bookmarklet script will actually find the bigger image for you to pin. If this doesn’t work, please take a moment and see if you can find a better source for the image (again, image sourcing tips below).

4. One character/One word captions
Example: / ? . want, love, need, etc…
Why it sucks: Okay, I’m guilty of this one. Sometimes there’s nothing more to say about an image. Sometimes all you can articulate is “waaaant” And so on. But remember that in addition to serving as your own inspiration board, Pinterest is a social tool and a powerful tool for discovering new things. And for content creators, it can be a powerful marketing or traffic-driving tool. But nobody is going to find your pin by searching for ‘/’.
How to prevent it: Even if you don’t have anything profound to say, a quick description of the pin’s contents or even its category will make it that much more searchable and when it’s searchable, more people will be able to find it through the Pinterest search and through google search. And that will make Pinterest, as a tool, stronger and more valuable to the online community, so it’s really just good online citizenship to help the content you curate be as indexable and searchable as possible.

5. Repinning a pin with any of the above issues with no attempt to fix them
It’s everyone’s responsibility to improve the state of things. Enough said.

Sourcing Your Images

I used to use TinEye, a reverse image search tool, to track down other instances of an image online. You might still have luck with them. However, google’s image search now has a very similar tool, and I find that google often comes up with more results – I think they may just have the resources to have a more full and up-to-date index of internet images.

So, say you’re about to re-pin something, but first you click the pin and notice that it doesn’t go anywhere helpful, or say you’re on a blog that just has a round-up of “prettiest beach cottages evah” and you want to pin one of the images. To attempt to trace the image back to its source, first right-click on the image and select “copy image location” – this will copy the image address to your clipboard. Alternatively, click “View Image” so your browser will navigate to viewing only the image and then copy the image address from your browser’s address bar (I do this on sites like Flickr so I can make sure I’m getting the address for the right image because Flickr likes to think that the only possible reason to right-click on an image is because you’re going to download it).

Next go to http://images.google.com. Click on the camera image in the search box to search by image. Paste your image address into the resulting search form and search. On the results page, toward the bottom, you can scroll through a list of web pages that include that image and see if you immediately spot something that seems like the original source.

If nothing pops out at you from the web page list, come back to the top of your results page where it shows you the image you just searched on. Next to that image, click the link that says “All Sizes”. That results page will just show you a list of all the versions of that image that are online – sorted biggest to smallest. Since most image edits result in reduced size and quality, you can start your search at the top, reasoning that the original poster probably has the largest, highest quality image. This won’t always be the case, sometimes someone sizes an image up, even though that will make the quality poorer, but this is a good start.

And while we’re on the topic, a thousand blessings on the round-up bloggers who do link to their sources, making finding the source just a matter of clicking an extra link instead of an image search.

It’s not what I typically blog, but it reminds me that I do have some old posts to go back and fix up so they link to the right places. Which brings me to another point: it’s never too late to fix your content. On pinterest, if you edit a pin, the only thing you can’t change is the image. So, admittedly, if you’ve pinned a small or poor quality image, your only option is to find a better one and re-pin. But if you’ve pinned something that doesn’t give credit or link to the right source, there’s nothing stopping you from fixing up your pins’ links.

Finally, I know that the joy of Pinterest is how easy it is to like and add things. It’s like twitter for your right-brain. Or like having the Facebook ‘Like’ button all over the internet. You don’t even have to think of what to say, you can just click “Pin It”, “Like” and “Re-Pin” all day and that makes you a big-wig contributor. I’m not trying to diminish that joy by over-complicating a simple pleasure, but we are talking about intellectual property etiquette and that stuff matters on the internet. Mostly these tips are about making sure you attribute properly wherever you can and making sure that when you reproduce content, it is with the intention of helping a wider audience reach its source not just to show a wider audience what great taste you have.

** Update:

I found a bookmarklet for searching google by Image. How convenient.

6 Comments by Megan / March 9, 2012 / Posted in: Craft & Creativity

Sippy Cup

So here’s what I made today.

Apparently drinking out of mason jars is all the rage with the hipster kids these days. Who knew? (I would have if I’d paid attention to my cousin.) Anyhow, they’re great for home-drinking, and because they have lids, they seem like they’d be great for on-the-go drinking. Not so much, though, because you have to remove the whole lid to drink.

We learned this last week when Ian and I were running out the door for errands, short on time, and we’d neither of us had our coffee, but all the travel mugs seemed to be in various cars. So I poured him a jar of coffee and away we went. And it was very convenient, until he needed to drink from it.

This week, I started thinking about how a mason-jar-drinking friend was all excited about a company making sippy-cup-style lids for mason jars. But they don’t ship to Canada, she lamented.

Okay well, who doesn’t have a few too many sippy-cup-lids sitting around their cupboards nearing the end of their usefulness as their youngest approaches school-age? Well, a lot of non-parents, I suppose. But not me.

Ridiculously simple process, but I’ll break it down a bit.

Remove the metal band from the jar, turn it upside down and place the ring over the top of your proposed sippy cup lid. That will let you know if you have the right amount of flat space around the spout in order to fit well with the collar.
Flip the lid the other way, so the bottom of the collar is against the plastic lid and start tracing around it with a utility-knife.

I found that it was easiest to get it mostly to size and then keep doing test-fits to see which areas were rubbing or folding worst when I tried to push the plastic lid inside the collar. Then I’d use the utility knife to carefully shave bits off the edges (as you can see from all the plastic bits on the table in the first picture).

I worked slowly and only shaved tiny bits off at a time because I didn’t want it to get so small that it wouldn’t sit on top of the jar edge because then it wouldn’t make a good seal.

Some lids might work better if you use them with a rubber canning ring, but this one seems pretty water-tight so far.

Oh yes, I also used the utility knife to cut out the inside of the spout and used a pin to poke a vent-hole in the top. Like most sippy cups, it throttled the flow of liquid by only having three pinholes and I thought this might be frustrating to most adult users.

No Comments by Megan / March 8, 2012 / Posted in: Uncategorized

Thrilling Thrift

I’m in a photo mood tonight. I hope you’re with me.

This is the followup to my Can We Do it For Free project roundup. You may recall how I said then that my projects weren’t 100% done yet.

So here’s where we’re at now:

In my last round of photos, the door trim was primed but not painted, the wall had patched drywall that needed priming and painting, we were dreaming up the transom but hadn’t begun it yet and I was starting the task of covering my cookbooks with varied blue fabrics. Those things are all done now.

We might even be able to move on to an entirely different corner of the house for our next project(s).

The first thing on the agenda was to finish painting the trim and the wall. Prior to all this, the kitchen was white and the trim was a slightly different shade of white. We don’t own paint in the wall-color-white, so we were a little torn about what to do.

We don’t really want a white kitchen in the long run, so we decided we should put some colour on at least this wall rather than buy a colormatched white paint that we don’t want.

There’s a bit of a story about how I was going to try to be frugal and use paint that we already had to mix a colour that would suffice, but I needed more white, and when I went to pick up some cheap, donated, plain white paint at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, I accidentally bought tinted paint that turned out to be exactly the colour I wanted (but had been having difficulty producing in my mixing experiments).

The bottom line is that we got the paint for $6.

After we finished the painting, I finished covering my cookbooks.

I used on-hand fabric scraps (which I had selected prior to our accidentally acquiring this paint colour, so you can see by how well they go together what a ridiculous piece of luck that colour was).

In order for the books to continue to be useful, I needed them to be labeled and for a moment, I actually considered buying myself an alphabet stamp set, reasoning that I would obviously use it for so many things (like what? not sure). But when I started talking about that plan, my mother said that she had such a stamp set. And so this part of the project was done completely with on-hand scraps and borrowed tools.

That crate recipe box, by the way, is another recent project, made with about $1 worth of wood lath and on-hand spraypaint.

We had a red clock on this wall that just doesn’t really go anymore. So it’s down, right now, getting painted white.

Inspired by this lovely chipped vintage kitchen scale, it’s going to be a flat white and will probably be given a bit of scuffing and a yellowed face before it goes back up.

So while I was painting and covering books, Ian was tackling the transom. We bought the glass panes, because we felt it was important for them to be beveled. At about $1.25 per 3×3″ pane, that was about $9.

For the frame, Ian used only scrap wood that we had on hand.

He mounted the transom window forward in the frame, to be level with the door-face. Which left me the lovely shelf behind it for all my tiny vintage bottles.

Which, really, has turned out to be the crowning glory of this whole project.