I’m no Julie… or, this blog talks a lot about old windows and is unlikely ever to become a movie

Blogging is a great way to build community, as I discovered more than five years ago when I started up my first blog to serve as the on-call virtual girlfriend I needed to blather about the experience of going from married to single.  I was welcomed into other people’s lives and the internet became a kind of kaffeeklatsch that was there for me any time of day or night.  [One blogger friend is nodding, remembering how she kept me company — online — until three in the morning while I worked through an angsty thesis moment.]

Of course, the absurd angle on blogging are those blogs that exist in a land filled with the sound of crickets and tumbleweeds blowing down a dusty street and the author writing posts that amount to an echoey “hello?”  Other people just want a place to ponder or rant and could care less if anyone ever comes to call.  It all reminds me of advice from my mother each time we moved to a new town, “sometimes the best way to make friends is by saying “hi” first.”  In other words, the best way to get readers, is to be a reader (even better, be a commenter because otherwise you are known, in this virtual world, as a “lurker”).

I like to hop on my surfboard and cruise around, window shopping here, waving cheerfully there, finding one spot and really poking around through archives and links to see what’s there and what treasures await.

Beginning bloggers (yes, I’ll admit I was this way in my blogger youth) can fall into a funny obsession about how many hits they’ve had and craving [“please, please, when?!”] comments.  Some are narrow-eyed envious of the blogger with 78 comments on a post about the mother-in-law’s visit and wonder why their own clever observations on changing a diaper goes unrecognized by the outside world.

It’s such a common affliction, this desperate desire for linky love, that it’s tweaked for those in the know in the charming film “Julie & Julia” when beginning blogger Julie, writing about cooking Julia Child’s French cuisine, chirps in triumph when she finally gets her first comment.  I had to giggle when she started talking to her husband about “her readers” and worrying about what they would think, feeling an obligation to the invisible people she was sure were sitting poised at their computers waiting for the next installment of her adventures in the kitchen.

A bloggity friend and I used to obsess over the rankings on technorati, comparing notes and devising strategies for boosting our numbers.  (She excelled and built a remarkble network truly deserving of the word “web”; I did fine and then realized I was going a little crazy over the whole thing.)

The point of this post, dear friends, is simply a very long and meandering introduction to point you to this post by the National Trust for Historic Preservation with more information about what has become a sub-theme here — preservation of old windows.  And why that relates to all the above blather about links and blogs and connections is simply because they used a photo I took last spring.

I love the photo because I loved the fact there were fake silk flowers in the window box even though it was spring and there were neon-bright blooms everywhere else, including the highlighter-yellow forsythia in the foreground.  I love the paint peeling around the window, the shape of missing shutters suggesting that the last housepainter worked around any given obstacle, not deigning to shift a shutter in order to do a thorough job.  (Reminds me of my terrible experience with Roger Simon painters who seemed such scam artists to me that I marvel they get work every time I see their sign on a  job site.)

Do check out the page and all its excellent links for window info.  And the NTHP invites you to submit your own photos to their “Love Your Historic Windows” flickr group.  You can get some linky love too!