February 26th, 2010

Today was very quiet. Mom had the day off, and she chose to spend most of it at home with us. We took a lot of naps, watched some TV, and got current with all of the blogs we read. Mom posted our first article on the Bear Place. We decided to write it on the TY Inc. company because Feddie, the bear who is in charge of the site, is a TY beanie baby. We hope everyone likes it! Mom is very nervous about it. She has not written anything that is not about trees, and nature and things like that in a long time. (That’s what she went to school for—nature-like things!) But now it is done and posted, so we can only hope that it goes over well.

Shirley has taken one of our new friends, Calla, under her guidance. Calla was worried that she was the only orange bear in our hug. Shirley told her while it doesn’t matter what color you are, we do have other orange bears, Azalea and Candace. It seemed to help her feel better. We’re all going to just have to try harder to help her feel at home here!

Caleb wants me to post a picture of him wearing his new Packers jersey. Mom found it at thrift store last week and it is perfectly his size! While Mom really isn’t into the Packers, all of us bears do often watch the games when they are on. Caleb is quite the Packers fan—even though a football is at least three times as big has he is! (We live in Wisconsin, where Packers and football are cultural institutions!) This is one of the first t-shirts that Caleb really likes! He was awfully fond of all the the BAB clothes that they used to make. These finds of Mom’s are the only way that he is going to get clothes now!

Mom says that it is time to go to bed. Since she won’t let me play with the computer when she isn’t around, I have to end my entry here! I hope you all are having a great day!

February 22nd, 2010

Much like my friends Tat and George the Duck, I received a medal for my efforts in the Teddy Olympics! I won in the hugging event! This makes me a very happy bear! I was worried that I would not place! Mom said that it is supposed to be the spirit of participating in such a grand event, but I can tell that she is glad that I won something too! There were so many great photos—and one of the events I entered really didn’t have a category! Mom says that we practice more next time—perhaps we will take more photos all year long! I can enter more events that way. I thought about entering the bed jumping event, but Mom said that I ought not to jump on the bed. There was an unmaking the bed event though! I probably could have only done that once before Mom would have been kind of peeved!

Mom discovered a few days ago that Naples, one of our new friends, had two owies! He had a owie on his leg and another on his cheek! Mom worked up her courage and started to sew him up! He was under teddy anesthetics the entire time, so it didn’t hurt him at all. 

That is the little hole that was in his leg. He said that he really didn’t notice it much, but still appreciated Mom patching him up. It only took Mom a few minutes to patch his leg up, but it took a while longer for her to do his cheek. She didn’t want to make any mistakes. After she was finished, I gave him a big hug! He said that it was kind of scary! But he is all better now! Mom has had to do surgery of this kind on Opal as well—one of the webbings of her feet had come loose! I have been lucky thus far, but I am waiting for the surgery on my paws!

I have been having fun lately chatting on the Bear Place. If I go after Mom gets out of work sometimes around 3 my time, it is the right time in the UK. We have a lot of fun talking about bear things and sometimes human things. We talked about Twitter and hash-tags and the like today. We also talked about something called wine gums—which is apparently some kind of candy! I like talking to plushies from different countries. It makes me feel like a very multi-cultural bear, I guess!

Mom uploaded some new photos to my Picasa folder. We went through the Photobucket album that Mom has had since the beginning of her digital picture taking career and found some of my friends and I. The first camera that Mom had took pretty crummy photos inside, so some of them aren’t the greatest. But Mom says that they’re a part of my history, so we posted them. We’re not sure if you can see the photos by that link. I know you have to have a Google account, but that is as far as we understand!

February 19th, 2010

My mom found this book at Goodwill last week. Through my mom’s limited language skills (mostly Google), she thinks this is a copy of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak in Dutch! Mom has read this book—in English—a long time ago. I think it is strange for a book in Dutch to be found at Goodwill by a person such as my mom who reads blog entries by people who live in the Netherlands!

Mom has found several new friends at Goodwill lately. She thinks that someone must’ve gotten rid of their entire Build-a-Bear collection. Mom found the following new friends:

• Larkspur- a bear with a Build-a-Bear patch on her foot; still unsure of what kind she is.
• Miles- a shaggy dog
• Morton- a Baby’s First Bear Blue; he comes from sometime between 1997 and 1998!
• Naples- a velvet teddy
• Sheridan- last year’s St. Patrick’s Day teddy

She also found some new clothes for us. A lot of the clothes she buys for us come in grab bags of various different sizes and origins. The person who gets the most out of the entire thing is usually Tilia, because she is Barbie sized!

Mom says that I should admit that we have plenty to do online. With Twitter, BearPlace, and the like, we spend a good half hour each day checking my various online profiles. She says that along with her various online profiles, we probably spend too much time online. I don’t think it’s much of a problem! All my friends are online!

February 16th, 2010

Mom was really impressed when we found the Bear Club. When we found the Bear Place, we were even more impressed. In the past couple of days, we’ve found several other teddy social networking websites! Now we’re impressed with the availability of such places for plushies to meet other plushies! We did sign up for an account on Fofurree. Our friend, Tat, is on there. We also found a place called Soft Toys and TeddyandCo! Who would have thought that there were five places on the internet for bears to hang out. We didn’t make an account for the other two. Mom says that along with Twitter, I have enough things to do. (We found these other places by clicking links and googling things that we found via Twitter! )

There seemed to be plenty of entries on Twitter for the Teddy Olympics! I wish I would have entered the napping event! Some of the other entrants looked like they were having very nice naps! And the eating events—the food that some of those plushies were eating looked very good! We will have to plan better for next year! I can practice all year long! We can also take the photos all year long too so we can chose the best ones for the event itself!

Princess, our old English bulldog, allowed me to sit near her and pet her a few days ago. She is a good dog most of the time but sometimes awfully cranky! She’s never hurt me, but she’s pushed me off the couch a few times! On my Picasa folder, there are a few pictures of her letting me get closer to her. She sniffed my hand and let me sit next to her for a while before she grew bored and left!

February 15th, 2010

I like these meme like things, so I thought I’d post my award. Hammie gave it to me. The directions are in Dutch—so you’re going to have to deal with my summary! (Mom used Google to translate it!) She is impressed with the entire Google translate thing, so she is glad to have any excuse to use it. Sigh. Mom is impressed by technology sometimes! I guess whatever makes her happy!

I am supposed to post seven things that you probably don’t know about me. It took Mom a little while to come up with seven things that she wanted me to share.

1. My mom named me after the main character in her favorite book, Heart of Darkness, by an English-Polish gentleman named Joseph Conrad. The character is Charley Marlow, a seaman who travels around the world. The books that he is in, including Lord Jim  and Chance and the short stories Youth and Amy Foster, are not happy books. Mom likes them for the style and way that Conrad writes. It is a strange character to be named after—a happy bear named after a man who goes through a lot of strife!
2. I am a big reader—I don’t talk too much about books on here though. I don’t want to be thought of as a bear who is trying to sell things.
3. I have been blogging for most of my life. We started in 2005, and I was Mom’s Christmas present for 2004. There are long time periods that I didn’t blog, but I was still here. Until very recently, I was only blogging for Mom and me. She had joined some mailing lists about traveling dolls—and bears—that gave her the idea that maybe she should publicize my blog! And here we are!
4. My best friends are Milton and Robinson. You don’t see Robinson so much on here because he can’t sit up by himself! He needs something to lean against, and some of my pictures don’t lend to that. Mom says that I am lucky to have beans inside me that weighs me down.
5. Caleb is my bear. He is a very good friend of mine. He sometimes wanders off though. He likes going on adventures with Mom. He wants to go on adventures himself, but he doesn’t quite plan everything very well!
6. I am the longest tenured bear in our hug. (Mom says that some of the Build-a-Bear friends might be older technically—that they were made before 2004.) She says that I am the bear that started it all!
7. I love it when you all comment on my postings. Mom’s own blog is really only for herself and prosperity, so the only comments we get are here. I try to comment on everyone’s blog in kind, but if I ever forget—I want you all to know that I appreciate the comments!

And there we are. It’s a very long list—but like I said, I do love to blog!

February 13th, 2010

Our new arrival is Weeny the Sockbunny! She is from the warren at Widget and Friends! We bought her from the UK equivalent of Etsy, a website called Folksy! We read Widget’s blog and had to order own sockbunny to add to our hug!

We got the package today! It was wrapped up in very pretty green plastic! (This was after we opened it. Mom forgot to take a picture!

What a cool card!

There are surprises inside!

And here she is! Weeny! Isn’t she SO CUTE! (The emphasis is Mom’s, not mine!)

I will introduce her to the rest of the family after she settles in a little. There will be more pictures as well, because—well, that’s just the way things work around here!  Mom wants to order another one—a custom bunny of some sort! More later!

February 12th, 2010

Tomorrow is the start of the Teddy Olympics and I just posted my photos on Twitter. Technically it’s tomorrow somewhere, so Mom said it was all right. But there were plenty more photos that we took, so I thought I would share them here.

Mom thought that we should get all dressed up if we were going to appear in such an important event. Milton dressed up with me. Casual is the usual fashion trend around here, so when I got dressed up, Milton did too for moral support.

Mom decided that the hugging event was a good one to start out with. Charlotte volunteered to be the hugged.

Getting the photo taken became more of a struggle then she had thought. By the end of the entire thing, she was ready to hurt someone. (In a plushie sort of way, of course. She’s so much taller and bigger then the rest of us that stepping on someone’s toes hurts enough!)

When Mom was finally happy with that, Caleb let me give him a hug and Mom took our photo.  It didn’t take that many photos to get one that Mom liked.

We then started on our only physical event. I don’t have any ice skates—and there certainly isn’t any ice inside the house. We decided that roller skating was close enough. I didn’t get to go outside and skate because it was too cold. Mom also has no clue where my helmet and pads are. Safety is important!

After a bit of balancing, I finally got to my feet. Mom had to help me stay upright! It’s been a long time since I got my roller skates on, and I didn’t find it as easy as I did the last time. I was very wobbly!

She encouraged me to take a step forward.

And I was finally standing on my own! Wahoo! But then I took one more step forward--

And fell straight down! It hurt! That was the end of my Teddy Olympic career! I think I’ll stick to blogging and twittering instead! Ouch!!

Today, a new friend arrived, all the way from the UK! I’ll leave the rest of the arrival until tomorrow!

February 10th, 2010

I had a good day yesterday. Mom spent the entire day with me. I spent a little time in the morning tweeting back and forth with Tat. And we lucked out and checked the chat room on the Bear Place and found plushies chatting! I spent a good half hour chatting with Jeff Ogre, Archimedes, FedBear, and Barney Bear! It was grand fun!

My friends sat on the top of the couch and watched Mom play with the computer. (I posed with them for this picture!) I introduced Milton and Robinson to Twitter. (Mom says that they’re going to have to just read my feed. No more accounts for a while!) Robinson says that I need to find some plushie horses to follow. Charlotte was impressed with the two giraffe plushies that I found!

It snowed a lot yesterday. It has covered any ground that was exposed after our little warm up a few weeks ago. It peeves the bulldog, who likes the snow but expects it to disappear when she wants it to. I think she wants to spend time outside lying on the porch, but it is covered with snow!

I thought of finding some dragons to share with Dilly, but I don’t think there are any my size around here. Mom has several Webkinz dragons, like Wilhelmina, Ptolemy, and Capricorn, but they are not part of my immediate hug. I don’t know too much about them personally, but I would imagine that Wilhelmina, being a pink girl dragon, likes pink and princesses as much as Dilly does!

My sister Chloe wants to know that if she likes princesses, pink, and other girly things, if that makes her a not-a-stinky bear. She says that only boy bears are stinky! I think I’m a good boy bear—I’m not stinky! Mom says that she doesn’t really mean it, but I’m not so sure!

February 6th, 2010

So, my mom found a website that allows her to check two twitter accounts at the same time. This is important because my mom couldn’t figure out a way to let me have a twitter account, but stay signed in to hers. (She’s kind of obsessed with Twitter!) Yesterday, after a little google-ing, she found a website called TwitIQ. It allows you to be signed in to as many twitter accounts as you want! You can post from them all too—all from the same webpage! After a bit of finagling, I am the proud owner of a twitter account! I’ve even made my first twitter list! Mom has found me some other plushies that are on Twitter, so I’ve already got friends! A new friend, @i_am_fuzzy, sent me my first mention yesterday and I responded! I’ve re-tweeted! It’s really cool! I’ve become quite the tweeting bear! Mom and I can check our twitter pages together!

My introduction to the twittering world started with reading a blog through my Google Reader by a bear named Stinky. He mentioned something about Teddy Olympics. A group of twittering teddy bears have organized a sort of—well a cyber version of the Winter Olympics, but for plushies! There are all sorts of events! Mom says that I can try out for one or two of the events! We’re going to look through the listings tomorrow when she gets out of work! We’re not quite sure about the entry process, but we think that it has something to do with posting the picture via twitter. I’ve also posted on the Bear Place website that I am willing to join their team! Mom says that I might have more cyber things to do then she does! HA!

February 3rd, 2010

I have read Bob T. Bear’s post about the Sweet Friends Award and have decided to post it here on my blog. Along with the nifty picture of a cupcake, you are supposed to post ten things that make you happy and try to do one of them today.

Mom and I had a good long think about ten items that made us happy and came up with the following list.

1. Hanging out with my friends and family. I get to do this all the time, so I guess I’m pretty lucky! I am rarely by myself! I’ve always got at least Caleb, Milton, or Robinson near!
2. Reading books! There are lots of books around here to read too!
3. Having chocolate! Mom likes dark chocolate, but I’m not so picky! Anything chocolate works for me.
4. Taking naps. Mom and I like to take naps. And when she’s not around, I like to take naps by myself too!
5. Petting Princess, our bulldog. Granted, I only pet her when she allows me to! She’s a cranky dog!
6. Taking pictures! Mom usually takes most of the pictures around here, but she’s let me take a few and I’m really beginning to like it!
7. Playing on the internet! Mom likes to check her Facebook and Twitter pages, but I mostly like to read your blogs! And go to the Bear Place. And the Bear Club!
8. Cupcakes! With real frosting—none of that whipped cream stuff.
9. Watching television! We watch a lot of Food Network around here. Yeah for Good Eats!
10. Watching movies! I enjoy watching movies because it means that we go into the kitchen and sit on the table and have snacks!

Mom likes making lists, so this was right up her alley. I’m lucky that she let me post it without putting it in alphabetical order or something like that!

February 2nd, 2010

It’s snowing here again. It’s a very light snow, and Mom says that it probably won’t last very long. On Sunday, Mom attempted a photograph of the full moon. It’s very simple, but I guess it’s a step in the right direction. Her camera has setting for night landscape photographs, but I don’t think it really helped. She says that she may work on the idea of photographing outdoors at night when it is a bit warmer out. We couldn’t stay outside for very long because it was so cold!

Sir Woodstock introduced a new friend to the people who read his blog. His name is Prince Hector.  I think he writes from England as well. He seems to be a clever fellow! Look at his guest book! You can post pictures, and it gives your location. (It was wrong about mine, but it in the right country!)

I did not get to chat with my friends from the Bear Place today. Mom had off work, so I thought that the scheduling differences between England and the US finally could have been overcome! I was looking forward to meeting my friends. I have been blogging for a long time, but I’ve never chatted! Mom went shopping with her friend instead. Sigh. Well, at least we had a good morning together and I got to get a good nap in when she was gone!

They went thrifting. Thrifting is the word that Mom and her friend uses for going to all the second hand places around where we live. Sometimes, she comes home with new friends, clothing, or books. Today she came home with new clothing and books. At one of the places, Mom found some vintage doll clothing that happened to fit my friends and I! Mom had to explain what vintage meant to us, We understood that it meant that the clothes were possibly even older then Mom! Mom bought the shirt for me, and when she got home, she decided that Ruby could be the model for the dress she found. Mom liked the shirt because it had little buttons and the dress because of the fabric. On the Bear Place, you can see a closer photo of the shirt. It was probably made by machine, but it is still pretty cool. The dress on the other hand is very handmade. Ruby wanted to wear it longer, but the back of it is torn and Mom says that she would get too cold!

She also found a little shirt for Caleb. It’s not vintage, nor does anyone here have any feelings for the state of New York. But it is difficult to find clothes Caleb’s size now that Build-a-Bear and Target no longer make the smaller BAB clothes. Mom seems to find a fair share of girl clothes his size, but she won’t make him wear them! We know that technically, plushies really don’t care too much about fashion trends, but it’s more of a principle! As long as the clothes are warm, Caleb doesn’t really care about how many clothes he has! Although I do think he misses the BAB clothes—because he could get some of them that looked like mine!