Little, Brown, You've Let Me Down, Too?

I 'm reading the The Mysterious Benedict Society out to the kids right now. Hey, guess what? The front cover is surprisingly white. We couldn't figure which one was supposed to be Sticky.

100 Scope Notes and Bookshelves of Doom are all over this, and Betsy Bird first brought it up at Fuse #8 before I started reading her blog.

Y'all, it's not funny.

You can view the first cover for yourself.

Solar System Visualizer

Cool and sciency!

Thanks, Live Granades

A Stair With a View

Architecture: Stairs Bookcase Actually Makes Me Want to Move to London Me, too.

Okay, everything makes me want to live in London, except my family.

Via Cville Words

A Domestic Manifesto

frontstepdesign: Manifesto:

"What I do, as an Architect and a person, is learn how to create a wonderful domestic life. 'Wonder' in this case, means not only pretty - and pretty* is very important! - but also helpful."

I am so there, only without the architecture training or the devotion to the cause or the creativity. It's an updated version of the William Morris quote I love:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

As an only peripherally connected aside: now that we have a composting bin, it's really encouraging to see how much compost we generate. All those fruits and veggies we eat, are tangible, and useful.

Unclear on the Concept

HGTV is holding their annual Dream Home Giveaway. Apparently, every year they build some huge expensive resort home and give it away to some unlucky person, although this year, the recipient will be luckier than those in the past. This year they are giving away enough cash ($250,000) to enable the winner to insure and pay taxes on the beast until they can unload it.

You know, I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about dream homes. My math grades would have been higher in middle school, had I not devoted class time to drawing floor plans. Here's the fundamental flaw in HGTV's contest: a Dream Home is a personal thing, not generic. My dream home is designed for me. It does not feature an elaborate dog house. Currently, the mental version incorporates universal design, cradle to cradle* products where possible, and green, sustainable products everywhere else. My dream home is fully accessible to our disabled friends and family, and fun for our aging, unable-to-jump enormous cats. My dream home has a library for fiction and lots of bookshelves everywhere else for all the other subjects we like to read about. My dream home includes a separate-but-attached granny cottage. My dream home looks traditional, but is virtually fireproof and very easy to keep clean. My dream house is in my current neighborhood, and will enable me to stay here for the rest of my life.** My dream house has many windows on the south, east, and west sides, and few on the north, and all of those windows are shaded from the summer sun.

If HGTV would like to draw my name out of their hat, I'll be delighted to sell off their faux dream house, and build my own. I'm pretty sure I could have everything I want for considerably less than 2.5 million.



*Fun fact: the book Cradle to Cradle is waterproof, and itself recyclable

**I just realized yesterday that given my expected lifespan, I have even more years ahead of me for reading than I have so far enjoyed. And I don't have to waste four years learning to read.