Wednesday Link Love

So, I’ve discovered that there are folks who like office supplies…..like enough to blog about them. Like this blog, or then there’s this blog, or this one.

One of my girls really loves Mike and Ike’s. I should make her some of these!

Photo booths were a very fun and important part of my teen years, so of course I love this. Here’s my first stab at it..

I HAVE to learn to thread my sewing machine. I could so easily whip one of these up, and I love the look.

Oooohh. I’m lovin’ these crowns!

I’m doing this. I have some paint sample books squirreled away.

Happy Wednesday!

Six Word Saturday

Awareness is good.  Action is better.

As many of you know, I work in a clinic that serves more than half of the HIV+ patients in our state.  Tomorrow is a very important day for our community.  Of course, the funds that are raised on walk  day are vital to each to each of the agencies that serve this community.  But it is also a day to continue to try to raise public awareness.  Issues come and go, and AIDS (especially in America) seems to have dropped off folks radar screen.  At least at this point, our financial support of the AIDS Walk appears to be down dramatically.  If you live in Louisville, join us tomorrow and stand in solidarity with this brave community of folks.  And if you can’t be there, please consider making a donation.   I

Wednesday Link Love

So, I got my 2011 planner today.  And I’m hopeful.  For years I have relied on an old shell of a Franklin Planner with the monthly calendars, and for my daily lists, I’ve utilized this system:

Yep.  File cards and a binder clip.  I’ve used this for a good 20 years.  I’ve tried other things along the way.  Even had a Palm Pilot for a while.  But I’m a paper person and the cards worked.  This year I wanted something smaller than the big Franklin binder that kept getting full of stuff I really didn’t have to carry around.  Thus began my search for the perfect planner.  The one I got today is not perfect.  But it’s seeming like it will work.  We’ll see. 

BUT, if you like me are very taken with different planners, I have a great little site for you.  It’s where I found mine. I went for the Quo Vadis Daily Pocket.  Who knew there were so many options?!!

Don’t you want to be a guest at Julie’s house?

I want to sit down and make a life list now!  What would you put on yours?

Okay, I don’t have any decorating ideas for these folks, but they are living my favorite recurring dream!  For years I have dreamed of finding a room in my house that I didn’t know I had. I haven’t had that sweet dream for a while, but this just reminded me of the joy of it.

Fun idea for pumpkins

More food on a stick here and here.

Home!

This makes me happy……

but THIS makes me happier!

So nice to have my girls at home this weekend.

Six Word Saturday

The end of a lifelong friendship

If As The World Turns ran for 53 years, I surely watched it for 50.   My mother, and her mother, and  most all the other women of their era carved time out of their daily schedules for “the stories” of which As The World Turns was always one of the favorites.  Many is the family gathering where all the womenfolk discussed the Hughes and the Stewarts and the many scandals and heartbreaks in Oakdale.  It was a wonderful diversion from our day to day life.    As an adult, I have remained an unashamed fan.  I love that for years, women (mostly) could put aside their cares and responsibilities and lose themselves for a bit in the lives of people who became old friends.  Some of the same actors who began with the show in the 50’s have continued their roles all these years.    I will sorely miss not only the characters and twisted story lines, but also this link to my grandmother and to all the women everywhere who for one hour a day left behind the cares of their world to enter into the drama of another.

Wednesday Link Love

Loving these candles!

I know four precious fingerprints I’d love to have close to my heart!

I’d be hard pressed to pick the funniest in this group.

Make sure you scroll all the way down to the link for the video.  It is precious.

Wonder why I haven’t seen one of these around the Derby City in the Bluegrass State?

Maybe for our 25th anniversary DH and I will have another wedding….and we will give out these.

Love these chairs!!

Oh!  Look at what Amy has to share with us!

six word saturday

Where were you when you heard?

Join others for Six Word Saturday

Wednesday Link Love

LOVE this mirror!  I’ll be hitting up the thrift store soon for some costume jewelry!

Rebecca makes this look a lot easier than it probably is, but it’s a sweet fall project.

Another dollar store project.

This looks fun…if you know how to use a sewing machine…..but this one looks more my speed.

I like Sara’s Cup of Kindness

Want a little perk to your day?  Check out this video of some friends who visited our church.

Landslide

Well, I’ve been afraid of changing

Cause I built my life around you

But time makes you bolder

Children get older

I’m getting older too.       Landslide - Stevie Nicks

 

The week before my “baby” left for college, a new and disarming vertigo set in.  The day would be going along normally, and then I would feel the earth shifting and I kept feeling as though I were sliding.    I knew enough to expect a great sadness as I watched another child leave for college and I had been really staring that down, but I had not addressed the issue of all three now being gone. 

I woke up on the Sunday before she was to leave in pure panic- what would I do with my time, what would define me, what kind of social life would I have apart from being a mom?   C was leaving that day right after lunch and when he said the blessing at lunch I wanted to say, “Stop talking so fast.  Go slower.  Go very very slowly.”  Sliding.  S had left, but I knew she would be back on Tuesday so I had that to hold on to.  And then we did it-  we took that baby and all of her stuff and made her new bed and pulled away.   S, having made the ride home with me the first year I took C to school knew what to expect and let me just wail and sob all the way home.  DH was flat on his back on the bed,  lonely as could be for his baby.  I laid down flat too, thinking that the shifting feeling would subside. 

And it has, for the most part.   Other family responsibilities and work upon work have kept me more than occupied and in some ways relieved not to have to figure out how to juggle meals and carpools in the mix.  But  today when I dropped K off after her first weekend visit,  there was this groaning in the earth and this sliding. 

I know for sure that we will survive this, that a day is coming when in fact I will actually start to enjoy it.   Probably the week before they all come home for the summer…

The Reveal

I was ill prepared for the rigors of shopping at IKEA, and for the assembly of the furniture.  When you get two big chairs and a huge couch and nothing is in a box deeper than 3 inches, you sort of start to get the picture.  But DH and I (mostly DH) worked like  we were on some HGTV special with a deadline to have it all ready for K’s arrival on Saturday night.  There is still a small chest that is unassembled…..it was assembled…….by  me……..and everything I put on, I put on backwards.  So, that will come in time.  So, here’s what we did!

It’s a very tiny room, so wedging everything in wasn’t easy! 

The couch turns into a really good size double bed with a simple lift and click, one handed.

The chair makes a very comfortable twin bed.

The beautiful sari fabric I used for the curtains just doesn’t photograph well.  They are gorgeous.

Thank you IKEA for good simple bedding options for our big family in a little house!

IKEA Bound!

This

is the bedroom my “little girls” have shared for years, minus the dragonflies around the windows which had already been removed before the picture.  I have dreamed of giving the girls a better, more grown up space, and of giving my son a better bedding option.  So, S gave me a great head start by breaking all of the furniture down after we dropped off K, the painter showed up last week, and the room has evolved to this

and after a run to IKEA tomorrow will hopefully evolve into a room that will be a little more grown up than pink and purple dragonflies.   I’m so excited!  I mean, when I say I have dreamed about giving them a better room, I mean I have literally dreamed about it!  I can die tomorrow night, happy to at least have all the makings under roof.  The girls don’t visit often, but at least when they do they will have a room befitting college girls. 

Hello? Any friends still here?

I still hold the hope in my heart that I will get back to posting on a regular basis again very soon.  I have had some long days- maybe some of the longest in my life. By the end of my days, I can’t make a complete thought, much less type it.  There are pockets of beauty though in every day- the yellow finch in the aviary at the nursing home my mother is in, heirloom tomatoes fresh from an Amish field, a gift from friends afar whom I have never met honoring the life of my little Herbie, the familiarity of the same best friend who has walked through every long day I’ve had since we were 13 with me, lots and lots of time with my sister and mother, and this week discovering this poem.

Enjoy it!

Blessing by Imitiaz Dharker

The skin cracks like a pod.
There never is enough water.
Imagine the drip of it,
the small splash, echo
in a tin mug,
the voice of a kindly god.
Sometimes, the sudden rush
of fortune. The municipal pipe bursts,
silver crashes to the ground
and the flow has found
a roar of tongues. From the huts,
a congregation : every man woman
child for streets around
butts in, with pots,
brass, copper, aluminium,
plastic buckets,
frantic hands,
and naked children
screaming in the liquid sun,
their highlights polished to perfection,
flashing light,
as the blessing sings
over their small bones.