Dear Friends,
Thank you so, so much for attending The Mad Tea Party last month! It was SO much fun, wasn't it?
How is it that so much time has gone by already that the party was LAST month? What have I been doing since then? Well, some real-life things that I leave at the door, but some fun and artistic things too! First, I have been reading this book, "Paris, The Magic City of the Seine", written by Gertrude Hauck Vonne in 1918! I am lucky in that the copy I own is from that date and is in beautiful condition! How fun it is to hold a book in your hands that is this old! In reading it, I found that so many impressions of Paris that this woman had exactly matched ours!! And just when you think she just may have been a friend who went along with you, she speaks about riding in an "electric carriage"!! I've finished it now, but it is one of those books that stays with you! This book is, however, somewhat of a mystery to me. I usually remember how and when I got all of the books in my collection (which is fairly vast), but I am not sure if this was one I bought in one of the many used bookstores I used to frequent when I lived in Washington, DC, if it was one sent to me by my mother (who was single-handedly responsible for my book addiction) or if it was left here in the house by my great-aunt, who used to live here. All I know is that it has now won itself a place of honor in the little bookcase next to my bed, to be read in long passages or short, over and over again!
But I digress...speaking of history (and we were, before I began my swooning description of my life-long affair with books!), we are finding ourselves spending a lot of time perusing a site called Retronaut. Something between an online museum of history and a virtual time machine, The Retronaut is the creation of Chris Wild. He has a background in museum curation. His site is arranged by time period, but within each time period are endless subjects of every imagined interest and many things you may never have known about before. Subjects can be searched by key word, by time period or by subject category. Oh...I'm sorry...I've managed to make it all sound a bit dry and somewhat like the explanations of the Dewey Decimal System that you would get from that librarian...but I promise you, dry does NOT describe the contents of this site. I usually avoid much that would elicit much controversy, not for any other reason than it was just easier that way. But this website is worth a look and so, I will warn you that there are many wonderful and educational things on this site, but not all of it is "all audiences approved". That having been said, please take a clue from Mr. Wild's very enticing tagline, which appears in his logo: "The past is a foreign country. This is your passport."
Won't you please come and visit?
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