A Preview of 2016 at View from the Birdhouse

Thanks for visiting View from the Birdhouse!  I'm looking forward to a fun year of blogging here, and hope you'll visit often.

I will be having daily themes through the year:

Music Monday - little mini histories behind songs (lots of retro music!).
Did You Know Tuesday - retro topics and nostalgia, as well as interesting facts about children's literature.
Wordless Wednesday - vintage ephemera from my shops at eBay, Etsy, and Bonanza.
Throwback Thursday - nostalgic fun with pictures!
Dear Abby - my little dog Abby blogs on Fridays.  :-)
Weekend Window Shopping at Birdhouse Books - new arrivals at my online shops.

This year I will take a break from the scheduled topics some days and just post about something fun for a change of pace.  This could be a visit to an antique show, a vintage treasure hunting experience, or unique historical places around town.  It could also be a fun seasonal topic!  I'm looking forward to these change of pace days.

I will continue posting book reviews, author interviews, and spotlights (with giveaways when possible!).  I am going to limit these book posts to 2 - 3 a week.  The books featured here will include cozy mysteries, historical fiction, women's fiction, and children's books.   A few upcoming books you'll see featured this month:

Murder Most Malicious by Alyssa Maxwell (a historical Upstairs-Downstairs type mystery)

Mermaid Moon by Colleen Coble (romantic suspense)

The Lady's Command by Stephanie Laurens (historical romance - regency)

The Restaurant Critic's Wife by Elizabeth LeBan (women's fiction with a culinary theme)

I would love to connect with you this year!  I love social media.  You will find me online:

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

You also can subscribe to this blog by email with the "follow by email" option in the right column. (It is near the top of the column, as you'll see in the photo below.  The subscription option is just beneath the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest buttons in the right column.)

Wishing you a wonderful year ahead!

Trish

Dear Abby - Vintage Christmas Dachshunds

Dear Friends,

I have enjoyed looking at vintage Christmas images on Pinterest lately.  I especially love vintage dog pictures.  I've found some wonderful Christmas pictures that I thought you would enjoy as well.

The dachshund on this vintage Christmas card  has a candy cane and presents!

This little dachshund is helping her person play records.  Fun!

The dachshund on this Christmas card is going for a walk with her person -- they even have matching red coats. 

This looks like Christmas morning, with a mother, daughter, and red dachshund.  The tinsel on that tree looks like fun to play with!

The dachshund on this 1960 Calling All Girls magazine cover is helping her person dress up as Santa.

This dachshund looks very excited about his present!   This is another Calling All Girls cover (1961).

This Calling All Girls magazine cover features a dachshund who is about to wake up to a tiny tree and presents.

This Calling All Girls magazine features another Santa dress up picture.  The dachshund is helping again!

I hope you enjoyed these images.  Which is your favorite?  I like them all, but have a special fondness for the Calling All Girls picture with the tiny tree and presents.

I hope you have a wonderful day -- and wishing you a very happy holiday season!

Love,

Abby xoxoxo

Dear Abby: Social Media

Dear Friends,

I hope you are having a wonderful week!  I am so happy that it is Autumn.  The weather will be cooler and nice for longer walks.   Plus, there are fun holidays to look forward to in the next few months.  Hooray!

I have a great question today from my friends: Barbara, her kitty Zeus, and dachshund Oz: 

We have a topic for you to write about: your experiences with social media. We have made so many wonderful connections and even some lovely friendships. There are some things that we don't enjoy about social media (like gossip, shaming, judgmental comments etc.) but if you are careful and choose your connections wisely, we find Twitter & Facebook to be a really good experience. Do you have any tips to help people & pups with this? Looking forward to your next column. 

Barbara, Zeus, and Oz, thank you for the wonderful question!   My Momma and I love social media too.   It is a great way to connect with family and old friends, and we have made some wonderful friends on social media as well!

I like the way you worded this:  "choose your connections wisely."   I think that is a great point about social media.  It is very public, much more so than email or a phone call, so you have to choose who you want to connect to.  

With online time I believe it is important to trust your instincts and if people or pups do not seem to be friendly and kind, you can just disconnect from them.  We like nice people.

I do not have my own social media accounts (alas!), but I have still made friends with dachshunds, dog people, and animal lovers wherever we go. 

On any of the social media sites, you can search for words like: dachshund, dog rescue, etc. and come up with lots of great results.  That is a good way to find pages and groups on Facebook (those are fun places to interract with like-minded pups!).  On Twitter you can search by the words on their own, i.e. dachshunds, but you can also search with hashtags, like #dachshunds.   

We have learned that lists make Twitter a lot more fun.  For instance, you can make lists of your dachshund friends and click on that list at any time (or save the link) in order to read the latest doxie news.  Momma says you can do the same thing with blogger friends, eBay friends, etc.   We like the free version of Hootsuite to read our Twitter posts.  A neat feature of Hootsuite is you can display all your lists side by side.  Twitter can get very overwhelming quickly with the volume of posts there;  this makes it a lot easier to read. 

One of the biggest issues we have with social media is it is addictive!  Momma sometimes sets the timer when she is checking in on our social media sites for work.  That helps!

We would love to connect with all our friends on social media.   I help with these pages: 

Birdhouse Books on Pinterest (check out the Cute Dogs and Dachshund boards I helped set up) 

Birdhouse Books on Facebook (books, nostalgia, and links to my blog posts, too) 

Birdhouse Books on Twitter (mostly Mom's work but I love to chat with dachshund friends there as well!)

I would love to hear from you about your experiences with social media!   Please leave any comments below.

I'm also looking for questions for future posts, so welcome those in the comments section as well.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!

Love from Abby  xoxoxo

Dear Abby: Recent Dachshund Pictures from Pinterest

Dear Friends,

I hope you have had a wonderful week, with fun plans for Labor Day weekend!   Because it is a holiday weekend, I'll keep my post short and sweet today.

I like to help Momma find fun doggie pins at her Pinterest page.   I help with the boards Cute Dogs and Dachshunds.  As you can imagine, I have a lot of opinions!

Here are a few doxie pictures that I love from the past week or so.

Vintage children's book illustration of a dachshund riding on a turtle:

Truer words were never spoken: 

A vintage dachshund book, translated as Nicki and the Red Butterfly:

A dachshund puppy napping with her sock puppy:

A vintage photo of a dachshund drinking from a water faucet (I love this!):

A vintage Christmas card featuring a dachshund playing records with his person:

A dachshund who has the right idea about bed:

I hope you have a wonderful weekend ahead!   Would love to hear from  you in the comments, below.  I only have a few questions stored here to answer, so would really love more questions for Dear Abby.

Thanks and love to all,

Abby xoxoxo

Let's Connect Via Social Media!

Hi all!

Just a short and sweet note.  I would love to connect with YOU via social media:

Facebook page - BirdhouseBooks

Twitter - @birdhousebooks

Pinterest - BirdhouseBooks

Store newsletter - eBay store newsletter, birdhouse-in-your-soul

Blog newsletter - look at the right hand side of this screen and scroll down for "Follow By Email."  Voila!

I'm very active at these sites and love to chat with book friends, blog friends, and anyone who loves retro/vintage!

A Day in the Life of an eBay Seller

The alarm goes off at 7:00 AM.  It feels much too early!   I get up, walk the dogs, and sit down to breakfast.  Over breakfast I check in at work-related social media sites:  my business page on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.   Then I come here to blog.  (This is one of my favorite parts of the day!)

I pack anything that sold and drop it off, usually in the neighborhood "blue box."  (Most of my packages are small, and I always print postage on eBay, so they can be mailed in any USPS mailbox.)   If I have any bigger packages, they need to go to the Post Office, which is thankfully only 2 miles away.

Then it is time to list items in my eBay store.  Over summer I'm listing just a few new items a day (5 most days).   I look into one of my "treasure boxes" of unlisted inventory.  (You'll find a peek into one of the boxes above.)  These are items I found at local yard sales, estate sales, or thrift stores.  I try to list similar items on any given day in order to expedite listings.  It is much faster to list 5 motel postcards, 5 cookbooks, or 5 children's books at the same time.

At this point the pups will want to walk again.   This is a nice break!

By now it is probably lunch time, so I make something fast -- usually a sandwich with fruit or yogurt.

Then I settle in for the long afternoon.  This is tedious, so I make sure to have something fun to listen to (usually XM Radio - oh how I love XM!).  Each afternoon I open up Turbolister, my listing program, and pull out my inventory cards.  I am going through items A - Z and checking titles and item specifics.  I am pulling some lower value items to donate.  I am also saving photos to my computer if the listing was created before 2013.   In early 2013 I had a major hard drive crash and lost all my photos.   I had backed up most of my personal pictures but have very few of the eBay pics here.  (I know - not smart!  I learned!)  My goal is to complete this process by Labor Day.  This work fills the afternoon, broken only by a late afternoon dog walk. 

By the time dinner rolls around (6:00 PM) I am delighted to turn the computer off and take a break.  I find I am spending much less time on the computer outside of work hours these days.  I do enjoy my personal Facebook page, and I usually pop in there most often (via iPad or phone).  

This schedule will change in September.  I am excited about Fall, and look forward to spending time on Etsy.  I am trying to freshen up my eBay listings and save photos this Summer, so I can put some real energy into Etsy this Fall.  I will have to post another day in the life then.

Only Connect! Rethinking Twitter

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End 

Lately it seems I'm spending more time off the computer and communicating via phone and iPad.  As a result, I find myself looking at the social media sites and thinking about whether they work for me.

My beloved Pinterest is the same on computer or iPad - a stream of beautiful, whimsical, funny photos.

Facebook is also fun in any medium -- a chance to catch up with friends and family, read updates, share photos (and, okay, I will admit it - play Songpop as well!).

Twitter, though, is another story.  I am finding that I end up reading long streams of items for sale, books promoted, but very little actual conversation. 

I have been doing Twitter wrong.  As a vintage seller, for years I have scheduled item tweets with Hootsuite (a lovely program for organizing Twitter reads by lists and stream).  Unfortunately, this means I wasn't really talking on twitter, except for brief conversations with personal friends and dachshund community buddies.

I'm going to try something different.  I have some Valentine tweets scheduled (one a day) but after these run out, I am not going to schedule tweets, but will interact regularly.  Of course I will still tweet some of my vintage items, but I will do so live online, and on a much smaller basis.  My new motto is to talk more and promote less.

The same goes for massive retweets.  I was retweeting sometimes 25, 50, or more vintage tweets at any given time.  Yikes!   I participate in a link exchange with a small group of longtime eBay friends, and I will still do that, but that is again on a small scale, resulting in just a handful of tweets.  

I don't know how this will change things, but I'm looking forward to finding out.   I can't promise that my tweets will all be pithy or interesting, but I can promise this:  they will be real.  

Let's Connect Via Social Media

I would love to connect with you on the various social media sites that I'm active on.

Adventures on eBay Blog - a day in the life of an eBay seller - photos, daily projects, information on authors, illustrators, styles of ephemera, more

Birdhouse Books on Facebook - photos, updates, and vintage chat!

Chat with Birdhouse Books on Twitter - eBay but also vintage friends, dachshunds, dog rescue

One of my new favorite sites -- Pinterest.  I have photos there including Vintage Christmas Cards, Vintage Valentines, Vintage Easter, Southern Roadside Americana, Growing Up in the 1960's - 1970's, Books, and Retro Home.

Hope you'll join me!   Would love to hear from you!