the best nest, or wherein i come out in favor of the interwebs

little bitty nest in a tree in our back yard. much smaller than it appears.
how does this bird know how to decorate it so well - acorn and all - without the interwebs?

it's a well-known fact that i love the internet - blogs, flickr, twitter, facebook, even linked-in. social media butterfly, that's me. well, sorta. within a small-ish circle.  when i began this bloggy adventure in earnest, i explored a lot of different blogs on a lot of different topics. i've pretty much weeded out all of the scrapbooking ones now, but those were kind of where i started. along the way, i found some people who seemed to have a really cool aesthetic that they were sharing - opening their homes and giving glimpses of their lives through their blogs. some, like me, just to share and reach out and make contact and some to sell their wares. i still read quite a few of those. but i think the blogs i am attracted to most these days share their process. they're pretty heavy on handmade (food, quilts, art) thematically, but i love the insight people are sharing into their creative processes.  but, i still love the blogs where people just show us glimpses of their beautifully-lived, well-lit everyday lives.

and i shudder think back to the time before blogs, where we had to figure out what we thought was cool home decor for ourselves. i guess we got our ideas from magazines then or, if we were me, by visiting the golden nugget in downtown las vegas and thinking that brass, glass and a lot of plants were really the way to go. (it was the late 80s, so sue me.)  now, i know better, because i can latch onto trends (mid-century modern, vintage in general, crocheted blankets) a whole lot faster, just by trolling the flickr groups i'm part of.

but in a way, i really envy people like anne, who despite being an ostensibly poor graduate student is a brilliant photographer and all around brainiac, and she cooks gorgeous food in a very deliberate and thoughtful way. i can tell you that i seldom did that as a grad student. i can recall a truly ugly broccoli cheese soup i once made, but which we ate anyway because it tasted great. but i wonder if i'd have done better if i'd had the internet then. i'd like to think i would have. i know i would have appreciated my hand-me-down furniture - i had a gorgeous danish modern desk and dining table & chairs that had belonged to my mom's aunt (where are they now, i wonder?) - a whole lot more.

even more, i envy inna karenina. at 18, she's already a completely stunning photographer and has that ability i've been working so hard on acquiring, that ability to really SEE and capture the world around her and to live in what seems to be a very deliberate way. i was so clueless at 18. if only we'd had the interwebs back then in the dark ages!

and digital photography, it's perhaps that that's done it more than anything else - i download pictures 3-4 times a day on a good day. in the old days, i would take a few pictures, leave the camera, which was some crap old canon snappy, lying in a corner for months, take a few more, leave it again, then finish the roll and eventually take it to be developed. if only i'd known then how cool expired film and light leaks are. but even now, i only know that because of, you guessed it, the internet.

so, moral of the story? if you want the best nest, you've gotta get online....