My friend Jill and I agreed some weeks back that more nouns ought to be made into verbs. There's actually a linguistic term for this: verbing. Apparently verbing is a growing trend and Jill and I did not, in fact, think of it ourselves. Therefore, because we are nothing if not trendy girls (snicker), we've decided that "porch-sitting" shall now and forevermore be known instead as "porching".
Y'all know my fondness for porching. I porch nearly year-round, except when freezing cold keeps me from it. My favorite porching season--indeed, my favorite season, period--is summer. As far as I'm concerned, baseball, porching, and peaches are the Holy Trinity of summer. Late afternoon porching with my ever-dapper and gracious neighbor Carl is the best. (And not just because he provides rum & Cokes.) A close second, though, is middle-of-the-night porching. That's when the furbabies and I sit amiably together on the porch with almost no noise but the crickets and the frogs. It's lovely. Still, practical considerations have to be made, and one of those is the need for at least a little light. Sometimes I turn on the ceiling fixture in the brown parlor so that the light spills out onto the front porch, but I really prefer candlelight. Candlelight requires matches, of course, and I'm forever misplacing the matches, or leaving them on the porch so that they get rained on or the box gets floppy from the Missouri humidity.
Then I spied this great little idea on Pinterest.
A Mason jar with matches in it. Brilliant. It keeps the matches dry and looks cute to boot. The original idea used a Mason jar with the ring, and the flat lid had sandpaper glued onto it. I tried that but the only sandpaper I had was 80-grit, which pretty much tore the head off the match as I tried to strike it. So, I got one of my other jars with the zinc lid, cut the strike strip off the side of the matchbox, and fitted it inside the lid. Wabam! A weatherproof and cute container for porch matches. And since I mentioned Pinterest, I must tell you that if you haven't already discovered this website, you really ought to go there. It's a ginormous pinboard (thousands of pinboards, actually) of craft ideas, home decor, fashion, recipes, photos....almost anything you can think of that you like, you'll find on Pinterest. I will not be held responsible if you become hopelessly addicted to this website. If you can tear yourself away from Pinterest, and you have an Android phone, then you really ought to download the photo app Vignette for it. The demo version (which is free) has so many filters and effects that you may never upgrade to the full version. (The photo in this post was processed through Vignette,) Now make no mistake, I doubt seriously that anyone will become the next Annie Liebowitz with just a camera phone and Vignette, but it sure does make taking photos with your phone a lot more fun.
