2009 In Review: Your Favourites

I think that almost everyone will be so glad to see the last of 2009. It’s been one of those years that has been rough on everyone, including me. Two bad pieces of news for me were getting my hours at work cut to four days a week, with the accompanying pay cut, and having my landlords tell me they were selling the house where I’ve been living.

However, neither of these two things is bad at all when I put them into perspective. I still have a job that I love and I still have a roof over my head, unlike so many other people.

As I was looking back through my nearly 340 posts of 2009, it struck me that some of the posts you liked best, and commented upon the most, were not always my favourites. Here are your top picks, in no particular order:

One post that struck a chord with a lot of people was titled Small World. I had just gotten back in touch with a childhood friend and neighbour, a very talented photographer whose people were from New Orleans, only to find out a few days later that he had been killed in a motorcycle crash. His death hit me harder than I ever would have expected. I wrote about fellow Baltimorean, Billy Baldwin, several times this year. I attended a lecture about Billy Baldwin at Evergreen House (pictured above) in the spring, and found out that we’d grown up just a few blocks from each other and tracked down the house where I think that he lived. Since I was in the neighbourhood, I took some pictures of other houses on the same street, and the one adjoining it. I was lucky enough to find a signed copy of “Billy Baldwin Remembers” at thrift shop where-rich-old-ladies-donate-amazing-things. I suspect that whoever donated the book may have known BB. A few months later, I found “Billy Baldwin Decorates” at the Book Thing. I am pretty sure that I remember it having a faint glow around it!

Another post that generated a lot of comments was one about bloggers having a code of ethics and saying when they’ve received goods or services in exchange for a mention on the blog. As more and more marketing companies realize the influence of bloggers, they are seeking bloggers positive reviews of almost any product, knowing that the bloggers can get the eyeballs that the marketers may miss. If bloggers are up-front about receiving the goods or services they are promoting, it goes a long way towards establishing credibility. I have truly appreciated all of the comments and suggestions I received during the painting project we undertook in our historic 1850’s house at Woodbourne. It’s still not completely finished, with the holidays and the painters being sick, but we hope to have it completed this week. Your ideas and hints were a huge help to us in selecting paint colours and your encouragement went a long way! Another project of mine that generated a lot of comments was the Turgot Plan De Paris, circa 1734 that I found on line and then downloaded, page by page and resized and digitized. It’s really a stunning map and I papered my dining room wall with a copy of it. I think that this map is so interesting because of its incredibly fine detail and scale. There are links to a variety of ways you can download this map here. It was thanks to fellow blogger, The Corinthian Column that I found the map! Tomorrow, I will post my favourite stories from 2009.

 

Thanks, as always, for reading Pigtown*Design!