This has been a slow moving blog for quite a while. I don’t know if that has bothered you, but it has been bothering me, a lot. One of my problems with blogging is that I had developed something of an identity crisis with this blog. When I started blogging I planned for it to be mostly about paper crafts and a little bit about me. As time passed I was doing less and less crafting and the blog was becoming more about me and my other interests. I felt a little guilty about the waywardness of it all but real life reality was leaving me a bit low on craft related things to write about. Then I broke my thumbs and had an excuse for less posts and time to contemplate my plans for the blog.  I contemplated and contemplated and then realized that I was using the broken thumbs as a crutch to avoid making a decision.

I gave myself a little talking to yesterday and finally came to a decision. This blog is going to stay what it was naturally evolving into. It’s about me and my life. Crafts will always be part of my life, but so will taking photos of my cat and baking pound cakes. If you hang around you will be getting all of that.

One of the things that helped me make the decision was taking a good hard look at who my readers are. There aren’t a lot of you so it was pretty easy to place you into categories. Most of you are family and friends, there are two lurkers who don’t want to be friends, and  a few are random people who stumble in to see one post about Kitchen Bouquet or Paper Kimono folding. Knowing that most of you fall into the friend category made it a lot easier to decide that this was a place to share of myself, and not just of one interest. While thinking about this I also realized that the blogs I most enjoy reading are the ones where I have found new friends and can keep up with their day to day adventures.  Thank you, friends, for joining me here and for sharing yourselves on your own blogs.

So what does all this have to do with today’s photo? Not a whole lot, other than it is one of the many things I’ve been doing lately. Before I figured out how to craft with broken thumbs I figured out how to mouse with broken thumbs. I’m a computer addict and I think if I lost all four limbs you could still find me here at the desk, moving the mouse around with my nose. LOL Anyhoo, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on eBay and Etsy, tracking down childhood memories, in the last 2 months. This lamp is my latest find.

When Recliner Man was a boy a lamp just like this sat on his bedside table. He loved the images of the deer and this lamp became one of the few items from his youth to survive as a treasured memory. Most of the things he remembered where handed down to younger children in the family, and they either destroyed them or claimed them as their own in later years. He isn’t sure what the fate of this lamp was, just that he hadn’t seen it in years.

It took a while for me to find it since his memory was of the deer, more than anything. This particular lamp is most often associated with its fire and the grizzly bear that appears on the other side from the deer. I did a lot of searching before I found the deer images. Then there was the issue of the price. These old beauties can go for a pretty penny and Recliner Man was feeling a bit let down when I told him that. He wasn’t quite ready to assign much value to holding a memory. Lucky for him, he is married to a gal with broken thumbs, a new obsession with finding deals on eBay, and a strong belief in the value of childhood memories. (So many little boxes have been arriving in the mail that he has taken to calling it EvilBay, but we will discuss that another time.) I’ve gotten pretty good at swooping in at the last second and scoring items for a low price, so I set my sights on the lamp as a surprise for him. As luck would have it I save a bundle and the lamp arrive just in time to be the perfect Birthday gift for him, yesterday. The smile on his face tells me that it was worth every penny.

I think I only saw one Motion Lamp in my childhood but it was enough to leave a lasting impression. My grandmother had one with images of the Niagara Falls and I was mesmerized by how real the rushing water looked. Watching this one in action makes me realize how easily we were amazed by low tech special effects back them! For anyone who isn’t familiar with them: These lamps have a 2 layer outer shade with the image you see being lined by a layer with alternating opaque and transparent designs on it. Inside of this is an assembly consisting of a light bulb and another opaque/transparent shade that balances on a point above the bulb. This inner shade spins as the bulb heats up and casts flickering shadows, via the 2 layers of opaque/transparent designs, onto the outer shade. These shadows give the illusion of movement in the fire and water. I don’t know how well I described it so check out this link to a video on You Tube.