Keep on blipping in the free world...

Another day of rushing: 4.30 pm, two jobs down, and one to go. The first one went not as well as usual, and I came home on the bus realising that the nasty-wet-sock feeling was caused by having stepped in urine! Not my own, I hasten to add.

And now it's my 2ooth blipday! Fortunately, being a Blue Peter type of girl, I had prepared a 'thing' earlier, out of sticky back plaaaahstic, the inside of a toilet roll, six cocktail sticks, and a selection of buttons. The sunshine this morning was bouncing off the white wall by the fridge, so I was able to attach the thing to the wall and blip it, with a shadow SP to boot.

About the thing:
I renamed my journal ages ago, as "the accidental finding" [of treasure], meaning that blipping helps us to find images that are as treasure shining out of the dross of our everyday lives. Searching in, say, granny's, button box as a child also yielded treasure: bright sparkly buttons, mother of pearl, colourful buttons, bakelite buttons, toggles and horn buttons among the quotidian white shirt-collar buttons.

The friendships that I've made on blip are another form of treasure. So far I've met up with Cowgirl, Lozarithm, and Horrigans. Rickyshitpants was a near-miss. TMLHereandThere and CleanSteve were the reason I started in the first place. But I feel I now know many people all over the (free) world, and the buttons are an approximation of which blippers live where. The spare buttons at the top represent the people I have yet to meet on blipfoto. I have always loved maps, but this one is perhaps a bit too small for my purposes. Thanks, though, to CleanSteve for driving me up the valley amid the melting snow to get it, and to the superb PaperArts shop in the Toadsmoor valley for taking time to help me with my enquiries.

Getting to 200 through the winter has been tough. I've enjoyed the discipline of writing every day, and the photos...well, they can always get better. Maybe get off Auto a bit more often, even. I certainly see things differently now. And am a bit more daring than I used to be about whipping my camera out in public (it's green and shiny, so I can always pretend it's a phone, or an alien). Having a part time job that offers no intellectual challenge has meant that I've had time to attend classes, and wander around town looking for blips. I now realise that I'm interested in history and architecture, especially that of my town. My under-the-floorboards blip was a personal highlight, because the newspaper fragment looked better when blown up. So, off to the forum to suggest a history group.

I've become a rubbish commenter, and do apologise for that, but I do try to reply to comments, at the very minimum. It might be better to make comments on others' pages more often. We'll see...

Another great thing about blip is that I can share what I'm reading! I love that. At the moment I'm re-reading And then there were Five, a childhood favourite set in upstate New York in the 1940s. Some day I might get around to writing my own version, except in that my family's case there were six children, living in the Ireland and the West highlands of Scotland in the 1970s.

Thanks to all for sticking with me and sharing the journey. It's not over yet.

...and miles to go before we sleep
and miles to go before we sleep!

PS Error correction. My siblings and I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, not the 1940s as I suggested earlier! De Valera was the president of Eire, and Queen Elizabeth II was on the throne in the UK!