Easy Eatin'

This is too good not to pass on.  It works wonderfully!

I'm Blessed!

Life gets away from me too easily.  I truly live Blowin' In The Wind!  Sometimes I need to stop and take a breath.  We had a Revival this last week at our church and it was fabulous!  Not that everything went perfectly or that we weren't tired.  But, if you ever have a chance to hear Pat Cammarata, don't let it pass you by.  He's a dynamic speaker and the Holy Spirit really works through him.  I'm really glad I went to every service!  

He made this point that reached me:  If God is not moving in your life, then YOU need to change.  You are not opening yourself up to experiencing God.  God hasn't gone anywhere....YOU have.  I had realized this in the last few years, but it takes time to change the pattern we have made for ourselves.  It's an ongoing process for me, as I suspect it is for everybody.  I truly am blessed and I need to remember that every day.

Happy Valentine's Day All Year Long

My husband and I have been married for 29 years.  We've never made a big deal out of Valentine's Day.  We both kinda think that you should show your spouse that you really love them more than once a year!  He did bring me a miniature rose plant a couple of days ago because he thought it was beautiful.  We try to tell each other every day that we love each other and we try to do things for each other that show the other we love them.  Don't get the impression that we are perfect because we're not.  The important thing is that we keep striving.  So, tomorrow, when Valentine's Day is past and the day after that and the day after that, tell your spouse how much you love them and why they are special to you and do a little something for them.  And, if for some reason a day escapes without these simple things, then do them the next day - keep striving!

Falling on my Face

Okay, I didn't do so well with my vacation post......or anything since.  I may fill it in so I will have a record of our travels and the interesting places, things and people that we saw.  We always enjoy traveling; the journey is as much fun as the destination.  Jerry and I love being together - if we could just figure out how to find an unending source of funds, we would retire right now and just enjoy life!
I am not going to beat myself up over not keeping up with the blog - I'm just going to pick it up again.  I think that's a key to happiness - don't spend time in regret, persist in what is important to you.  If you falter, pick yourself up and keep going!

Day !

We really wanted to go on a vacation this summer.  If we don't get off sooner rather than later, we usually don't get to go at all.  I was a little worried when we didn't leave as we originally planned, but it worked out okay.  My teacher husband got his contract signed for a school in the fall and that is just fine to delay for.  We got some of his pictures hung in his room and some of his school stuff out of the garage and up to the school!  He is looking forward to having just one subject to prepare for instead of five.  It may be a blessing in disguise that he was downsized out along with others due to funding issues at the private school he was at, though it made him sad.  But that's a ways off...for now we are on the road!
We are headed to New York to see one of our daughters.  It's been a year since we last set eyes on her and her family, way too long!  We have over 1700 miles to go before we get there, so there's time for some adventures along the way.

We paused at a rest stop in Oklahoma near Erick.  A man who worked there told us about a local photographer and showed us a book by him; we were admiring the pictures he'd taken that decorated that rest stop.  So I'm giving a shout-out to him: http://themasterslightajourney.com/ .  It's a website to buy his book that we looked at, but one of his photographs is featured on the cover.  He likes reflection photography and does some really good work.  Some of his photographs are also featured at http://www.classicoilfieldphotography.com/1/cb86#/gallery/western-photography/ : look for pictures by Sam Hagen.  I always enjoy finding others who see the world the way I do.  

A Day's Work

We have a corner of the yard that never grew grass well, so years ago we decided to put in a container garden with a fountain.  It takes maintenance over time and some years I've been better at keeping it up and other years, not so much.  I always put plants there, mind you, but I don't always work on the upkeep.  We originally laid down so-called weed cloth which has bio-degraded itself into scraps.  The grass has merrily grown on top of it, which at least makes it easy to pull, but is frustrating.  We had laid down a good bed of wood chips originally - not the bark kind from the store, but some from a tree lot where people take the trees they cut down and the city chips them into mulch.  And it's free!  This was very important when we set this up.  Not the prettiest of mulch, but free is good!  Over time, this kind of mulch turns into soil, hence the grass.  My dad one year, being very helpful, got rid of the ugly stuff in our corner garden, which was the remains of our wood chips.  This left pretty much just the scrappy weed cloth.  Now what?  So, we invested in store-bought bark mulch, much better looking than our wood chips and not overly expensive, no bigger than the area is.
I've been planning on working on that garden and had gotten all the needed materials: bags of mulch and a new fountain pump, but hadn't gotten around to actually doing it.  The weatherman was making dire forecasts of "These are the last cool mornings we are going to have for a while" and "Chance of severe storms" (Ha), so I decided I'd better get busy.  My little project ended up lasting all day......and the plants were already potted (the work of other days).  It takes an amazing amount of time to unload a fountain of all its goodies and clean it out and change out the pump and put it back together (making sure it works before you load it back up!).  I had to wash off all the rocks because they were covered in mulch silt and we have a LOT of rocks on that tiny little fountain.

Then came the laying of the new bark mulch, which involved moving all the plants previously potted and placed, removing mulch silt where necessary and then decoratively distributing said bark mulch.  I added some stepping stones to hopefully keep mulch from being redistributed to the yard and re-placed all the potted plants and rocks and other things I have except for the garden critters (decorative animals and such I've collected over time) because I pooped out.  Still, it was a good day's work.

Time Management

This is something I'm fairly abysmal at, time management, which is funny considering I have a degree in Business Management and you would think the two would go hand-in-hand.  And I did manage time well when I was in college. I had two young children in grade school, two all grown and out on their own; I was in PTA and kept up with everything pretty well.  But, as time has gone on, something has slipped.  I have a long, long list of things-to-be-done and a somewhat (okay, much) shorter list of already-accomplished.  Of course, big additions to the list were aging parents and grandparents and also health issues and me going back to work.  All of it combined to undermine my time management, though I needed it more than ever.
I read a blogpost by Peter Bregman titled "Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning" where he talked about a Focus list and an Ignore list.  I think these are  the things I've been working on, basically, but I take too much time to make my lists!  I get caught up in what I need to do, but then also "What do I really NEED to do today?" and then "What I need to do sometime" and "What can I put off today, but that needs to be done fairly soon", etc.  It goes on and on.  I waste more time making my lists to help me stay focused....hmmmm.  
Things happen to sidetrack me that are unplanned, but necessary.  I just need to learn to accept what I can do and not stress over what I can't get done.  The Focus lists and the Ignore lists are important, but I need to keep them shorter and more to the point and not worry so much about the lists! Though writing-things-down-so-I-won't-forget-them is another whole blogpost, writing things down does help me to not waste time worrying about what I've forgotten that I wanted to do!  Sigh!