Technological Wonders

Thank you to all the nice readers who commented on my previous post. I'm glad you didn't flame me for my toddler intolerance. The thing is, I can generally forgive the children - but it's the parents I laser with my Evil Eye. I'm sure everyone who reads my blog has well-behaved little children that are a pleasure to be with. That much goes without saying.

This is the bedroom that unleashed the Ikea horror: it's a grown-up room, a civilised and tasteful room. And it's also the new home to this blanket, which travelled several thousand miles before ending up on Sherry's bed. When I see photos like this, I have a couple of seconds of decoration envy (why don't my rooms look like this?), swiftly followed by technological wonder (this blanket was in my craft room a fortnight ago and now it's on a bed in Pennsylvania and I CAN SEE IT ON MY COMPUTER SCREEN!) Awesome, eh?

And today brought another technological wonder. I hope you don't think it's too crass of me to boast about my father again, but I think he's done something really, really clever. If you are a regular reader, you'll know that my Dad is an artist. Sadly, he does not specialise in mermaids, yarnpires or stickmen, but he paints a mean landscape. He has just printed two of his winter snowscapes as Christmas cards - and here's the really smart thing: on the back of the card there's a barcode which you can scan with your smart phone and this will direct you to a YouTube video of the picture on the Christmas card being painted (or, if you're like me with a 10-year-old Nokia phone that's essentially a large Lego brick with a mobile phone connection, you can just type in the link and look at it there). Isn't that clever? I don't know if this has been done before, but I suspect it hasn't - my father is very innovative in most creative ways. This, to my mind, is just the perfect balance of technology and creativity.

And the video for the picture below is here.

Christmas Morning