I had a really nice surprise this morning - Wormtown Taxi posted his list of 10 excellent blogs and mine was one of them - woot!

So, now I’m going to spread more blogosphere-love by sharing my favorites.

There are a few that are already part of this fun “Excellent Blog Award” list-making game that I also read every day: Daily Worcesteria, Hyphoid Logic, Wormtown Taxi and Papamoka Straight Talk but just repeating everyone else’s lists is kinda cheating so I won’t count them as part of my “official” list. I did want to at least mention that I really enjoy reading what these folks have to say. They are all “most excellent bloggers”.

I’m sure my post won’t be as entertaining as Hyphoid Logic’s list, but here it goes…

Claudia’s most excellent blog choices

Bread and Love
This is a friend of mine in the “real” world - and she’s just fantastic. Her blog is a really cool bit of homeyness and good food. It’s just really “her” which is why it rocks!

Worcester Love
OK, not a blog really in the sense that they haven’t structured their web site in what would would be called a “blog” type format but they most certainly are vlogging and I totally love it! I can’t wait for the next season.

Punky Style
I really like this fun blog! She’s got a great sense of style and a very fun way of delivering it. The design on her blog fits perfectly too - NICE JOB!

Web Designer Wall
OMG!! I would not know what to do without my Web Designer Wall fix - tutorials, art, inspiration and freebies from an incredible designer/artist. (did I gush enough yet? I do not think so). Go look for yourself.

Earth Friendly Gardening
I found this cool blog while working on a project at work. There’s a lot of great information and beautiful pictures. It’s just really well done.

Pie and Coffee
While I don’t always agree with the point of view I do like this blog , it’s got good, thoughtful content. Since I’m not one of those people that needs to have everyone agreeing with me all the time it works for me. Certainly gives me stuff to think about and I like that.

TrainStopping
Oh my… this one made me totally re-think my previous thinking about possibly using the commuter rail to get to Boston for work. I’m not loving the Pike but it doesn’t look like the train will cure everything either. Great information and much more realistic than stuff written by folks that don’t actually use the thing.

Aral Balkan
Lots of tips, information, reviews and whatnot from web guru, Aral Balkan. Yep, more geek stuff. Can’t help it - I totally love it

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
And MORE web-geekness. Zeldman is another leader in web design - just brilliant. (yes, if you are a web geek you should know him). His blog is always entertaining. Includes links to Happy Cog and A List Apart. All three sites are must-read if you build sites.

Pink Granite
Just a really nice blog about living in Central Massachusetts. It’s great to see all the different voices online.

Ok, that’s it for now. My list of 10 excellent blogs. Like it? Didn’t like it? Did I miss something? Let me know. I’m always looking for feedback and new stuff to read

Update on all the blog-love

I just wanted to thank the bloggers who showed me link-love during our “Excellent Blog Fest”. The eWard was originally awarded to this blog by Wormown Taxi. And then by Papamoka Straight Talk. Their comments were really nice - thank you both! The link-love for this blog also was shared by Train Stopping and Daily Worcesteria. I also got a lot of great comments on this post.

Thank you everyone! Although it’s not an official award from any big organization, I guess you can say we all had an outbreak of mutual-blog-appreciation. It was really nice. (aaawwwww - sweet!)

Flora In Winter ‘08 / Worcester, MA, originally uploaded by Claudia Snell.

We went to the museum today and there were tons of beautiful flowers everywhere (and lots of people).

The museum is having it’s 6th Annual Flora in Winter exhibit. Floral designers interpret paintings in the museum. It was pretty cool. Tomorrow, January 27, is the last day.

My daughter had fun seeing how the different designers interpreted the paintings (or as she kept saying “implicated” the paintings. wrong word, right thought - LOL). I enjoyed watching her have fun looking at the art and flowers.

Although it’s a great event for flower/art-luvin’ grown-ups, It was a really good event for kids too. It was a fun way to get them interested in really looking at the art.

Links

• Worcester Art Museum, Flora In Winter
• I have a few more pix on Flickr
• Lea Deschenes took lots of pictures - and hers are way better than mine so go look at those

Well, it looks like the American Sanitary Plumbing Museum (AKA The Toilet Museum) is closing and it’s big news on the interwebs this morning.

I first encountered the tragic news via Wormtown Taxi and made my way to the Telegram via his link.

According to the T&G the owner is retiring & donating the collection to the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors of Greater Boston. They’re going to take the collection to Watertown (not kidding) and expand it to include modern toilet technology. Darn it - we just can’t seem to keep anything around here. I’m just not even going to try coming up with some clever pun - Hyphoid Logic did a good enough job with that.

I’ve never actually made it over to the toilet museum. The strange thing is that I was just talking to someone about going and checking it out. I looked at their hours and it looks like I’ll be out of luck. They are only open at times when I’m nowhere near Worcester. I won’t make it over there before it floats away - oh well.

Links

• ‘Toilet museum’ closing doors / Telegram & Gazette story
• No Place For Museums - Wormtown Taxi - keeping an eye on everything!
• Worcester Losing a Quirky Institution: The Toilets Are Leaving Town - Hyphoid Logic making me laugh (again)

Kaz and Andrea visited the Worcester Earn-A-Bike program located on King Street at the Stone Soup Community Center. It looks like they had a lot of fun (again) learning about how to Earn-A-Bike.

Worcester Earn-A-Bike is a community program that teaches everyone age 9 & up how to repair bicycles. People can sign on to volunteer at the bike repair shop. After they have worked for 5 hours they can choose one of the bicycles to keep. Bicycles are donated to the program.

The shop is open for volunteers or donations at these times:
Wednesday 4:30 - 7:00 pm
Thursday 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (Woman’s Night)

Saturday 2:00 - 4:30 pm
Sunday 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (ages 17 and over)

Links

• Worcester Earn-A-Bike- Learn about the program or contact them to make a donation.
• Worcester Love - Check out all the episodes.

Here’s a very silly video

I liked it. If you’ve played any of the Super Mario games you may like it too.

One small warning - they do have a few “naughty words” so this is not really for kids.