family home pragmatic historian projects tips work in progress

Breaking the Keys & Leaving the Mess

Removing the plaster and lath in our dining room continues. I’m doing most of the plaster removal and cleanup while Hubby removes the lath and some of the harder-to-remove plaster. Back in the early 2000s, when we were remodeling other rooms in the house and removing the plaster and lath, I learned one trick that could help remove the plaster more easily: Breaking the keys. That sounds mysterious, like snapping a bunch of skeleton keys…

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family health observations projects work in progress

Home Improvements Delayed by Pandemic

I’m blogging late today. Hubby and I have been sanding, priming, and Bondo-ing trim as part of our home improvement projects. The weather has been lovely today, so we’ve been able to work outside, which kept the dust mostly out of the house. As I was sanding trim with an orbital sander, I had plenty of time to consider blog topics. I want to talk about “My Fair Lady,” but after today’s work I don’t…

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history ideas observations pragmatic historian preservation work in progress

Embodied Energy Is Key to the Grand Unified Theory of Preservation

Big, complex ideas take a significant amount of thought. Such is the case with the Grand Unified Theory of Preservation I’ve been working on for years. The thinking has continued since I shared the post I wrote about the theory a couple of weeks ago on this blog. Friend and history colleague David Grabitske sparked fresh thinking about the theory with a question he left on LinkedIn: “Where does Language Preservation fit? Just curious.“ Yes,…

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history observations pragmatic historian thanks work in progress

Website Work Continues

This week I exploded two websites. Not really, but that’s kinda what it felt like. I decided, in what felt like a spur-of-the-moment decision, that I no longer wanted to keep up two personal blogs. While I had been blogging weekly at The Pragmatic Historian for about two years, my blogging at this site, maryewarner.com, has lagged. If I didn’t have a job and other obligations, sure, I could write for two blogs, but that’s…

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work in progress

New Web Design & New Website

 If you haven’t visited my website in a while, you’ll see I’ve made significant changes. New WordPress theme, new header image, which means a new look. But the part you can’t see, the back-end architecture in web-speak, is that I have purchased server space from a web hosting company. This provides me more control over my website(s) (yes, I have more than one!), allowing me to avoid advertising I don’t want on my site. The…

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