gratefulness

i'm kind of glad being grateful is trendy again these days (probably thanks to oprah) because it reminds me to remember to be that way. sometimes, i still struggle with it though...a number of years ago, i actually got a "gratefulness" journal for a gift. i started out filling that journal up with good things to be grateful for...for about 3 days. then, 2 years later, another 3 days. then, just last year, another 3 days.

makes me wonder why i am only grateful for 3 days every 2 years!!

at any rate, i woke up this morning grumbly. the weather is crappy, crappy, crappy. i have quite a bit of work to do this weekend, so i'm stressed about that. phillip has to work, and i have no friends around to do coffee and have fun with. then it hit me like a lightening bolt. thank you God for dryers! really, sincerely, that is what i thought.



see, i've been doing without a dryer for about 6 or 8 weeks. and i VOWED not to go to sears and charge up a big fancy one until i have paid off the last appliances that i desperately needed. in the meantime, i've been going to the laundrymat up the street, which is new and not too stinky and not too full of scary people. (did you know it now costs $2.75 to wash a load of clothes? and $3.75 for the big washers??! crazy.) i also vowed to look for a used dryer on a garage sale this summer, since there's a pretty good chance i could get a cheap one.

anyhoo, when i went to visit kirsten 2 weekends ago, lo and behold, a dryer was sitting on her porch when i arrived. the first words out of her mouth when i saw her were "you don't need a dryer by any chance do you?"

talk about manna from heaven. long story short. rick figured out how to squeeze the "new old" dryer they got on freecycle (they needed a washer, and the people made them take the dryer too, or they couldn't have anything) into the honda, and finally yesterday, phillip rolled it down the stairs.

wha la!! so even if this weekend is grey and rainy and cold, i will come out of it with fluffy comforters and sheets and clean winter clothes to pack away and ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm everything i own clean. and dry. now THAT is something to be grateful for :)

prayers

lettuce eat

as i was foraging through the cupboard at lunchtime today, i remembered that i had an awesome stash out back. when the lettuce is ready, it's definitely ready.

now, if i could just go back out there to find a home-grown kit kat bar, it'd be all good.


:)

the cool thing about spring gardens is how much they change from week to week. last week, it was all about plum blossoms and the end of the tulips. this week, it's about lilacs and bleeding hearts. that would be a neat country song, don't you think?!

anyway, so lovely. still LOTS to do, though, including painting the darn greenhouse!

walk in the park

nothing like a nice walk in the woods to discover how very, very out of shape you are. it's kind of hard to concentrate on the peace and tranquility when you are puffing more loudly than the birds are singing.

luckily, a nice dinner was waiting as an incentive to finish... :)

must must must have

why oh WHY do i keep looking over here?!

love love love em.

deuglified

phillip and i worked in the yard last night to get all of the "edges" around the house nice and tidy. he did the sidewalks, using the scary edger thingey that seems dangerous to me. i trimmed the edges around the curvy gardens with a hand shears. then, we bagged two huge bags of "edge" for the garbage man.


i cannot tell you how nice it feels to have tidy edges. i sat outside until almost dark last night and admired how nice everything looked. i think it's kind of like when you vacuum the floor in your house, and how you just cannot really relax until it's done....maybe that is just me (and carey).


anyway, the funny part is that the whole time we were working, my "new" next door neighbors were out in the yard too. i wish i could say we were chatting it up over the fence, but instead they were REVVING up the motorcycles to sonic levels. aaaaaaaaaaarrrgggh. i can tell from day one that they will be "sandpaper" people in my life. 2 rednecks, 2 kids (who are woefully absent in most of the activities), and 2 dogs. ZERO attentiveness to aesthetics, as you can tell from the above pic. they do seem happy with their life choices, so i guess i will just have to get used to wearing earplugs, and not looking to the left :)

sunny little things

it was nice to come back from st. paul last night, and wake up to a day filled with sunny things....


...my little stash of goodies found with kirsten on our shopping expeditions. i think perhaps i had a color theme (SUMMER) going in my head, although i did not realize it at the time!
...a burst of happy from my plum tree. yummmmmmm.


...tulips still on a roll.



...and my "work" waiting for me at the end of the day. awesome.

munki pjs

tell me it would not be fun to wear these!

they are a brand called munki munki by another super cool fabric designer named heather ross.

love her website!

going boho

dreary d**n days call for pulling out the big guns, like this beautiful bohemian bedspread i got on clearance for $10 bucks last fall. yes, it's every bit as outlandishly bright as it looks.

and the cat loves fabric almost as much as me, because she was onto it in about 10 seconds. i feel a nap coming on...

wrap up

hair newly dyed and fluffed in anticipation of the evening ... check.


new/old vintage pin attached to blazer for spring-like fashion presence ... check.


appearance of big daddy weave even though lead singer has a throat ache (which doesn't matter much because he still sounds SO good) ... check.


ending the night with a feast of apps at applebees shared with my two concert buddies k and p ... check :)

green life

i think it's kind of funny that my passion for reading has reemerged right along with the spring garden. a natural "offshoot" of that combination is the desire to read books about gardening. not necessarily how-to books, but novels about gardening and natural things.

in that vein, i thought i would share a couple favorites, in fact, i need to dig them up to reread them, because they "go" with my frame of mind right now.

Amy Stewart is kind of a modern garden warrior woman, she is a blogger and has gotten a career somehow out of garden activism, if there is such a thing. i have not read all her books, but her book "from the ground up" is the tale of her first garden. i wish i had written that book :)



"quite a year for plums" is one of my favorite books ever. i think i have blogged about it before. bailey white is an NPR commentator, and southern woman. this book is not so much about gardening, as the kind of people who garden, and their quirks and eccentricities in a small georgia town. love the cover, too.



and just this morning, i ordered a book called "the green year" from Biblio. apparently it's about a woman and her artist husband, who decide to take a whole year off and live off the land. it was written in 1956. i feel lucky i found a copy online, because the author (barbara webster) is not easy to find. one copy i found was nearly $70, but i got mine for $22. ohhhhh, can hardly wait.

if it stays rainy this weekend, i guess i know what i'll be doing :)

ugly truth

ha. i like this ad by a coffee brand called "ugly mug."

tulip parade

well, it's not exactly holland around here, but the tulips that i thought would never come up ... did.

i like the purple/yellow/orange color combo, but it might just take a couple of years for them to be tuliptastic.



still, they make me happy enough that i bought a few more on clearance to tuck somewhere. happy tulip day whereever you are.

27 out of 34

try your luck at guessing the correct font.

so, i got 79% correct. probably easier for me than for somebody who doesn't work with fonts for a living. still, i thought the game was HARD. some of those fonts, i have never ever heard of!

forward motion

the paper said this morning that our weather is approx. 2 weeks behind schedule...not too bad considering it feels like MONTHS of delay. since yesterday was so nice out, i got the garden tilled up and ready to go (thanks phillip). now i should be able to put a few crops into the ground (onions/cabbage/lettuce/radishes) barring the rain that is supposed to come this afternoon.



the robins are loving all the fresh dirt, bet the fresh earthworms are mighty tasty!

great pipes

listening to an old favorite today, don williams.

check out those lambchops!

cinco de finally

i think if i ever decide to invent my own perfume, it's going to be called "happy weekend." because there really is no way to bottle up and save the feelings inside from a weekend well spent. i'm sure it will get me through a good part of this monday just thinking about it, though!

stuff to reflect on:



flea marketing and house hunting with cassie and kristie ("the best threesome ever" according to lou). i have missed you girls!



homemade peanut butter cups. nuff said.





the return of green. now if i could just get the lawnmower started!



taking off the garden shoes, and watching the sun go down in the chair in the back yard. ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

thumbs up

well, for those of you waiting for an iron man review, i gotta say "wow."

i thought it was one of the best comic hero movies EVER! almost better than my fave batman! i liked that it had a current day context, and of course, robert downey jr. was 110%. love that guy.

oh. and there is a scene ala 'top gun' that would put tom cruise to shame. i was sitting upright in my chair and it was COOL.

go see it :)

cooloroid

k. found this cool thing on the web. go here. don't be afraid that it is in Japanese. i figured out how to use it anyway :)

you can enter in a new photo of yours and it will give you BACK a vintage photo! isn't that neat?! i tried it with a photo of mabel (i added in the swirly edges) but i think it would be really cool to do this with a current family photo?! if you try it (those of you with families) let me know how it looked!

fun!

new old stuff

well, no snow for us last night. but it IS a pretty chilly day, i probably could not do much gardening anyway. so luckily, i already have plans! my 2 best art girls and myself are going to the gigantic benson flea market. i have not been there in YEARS, which is just silly considering how much i love thrifting. so excited! on my list to look for: linens/fabric; old watches; gardening and craft books; green and yellow pottery; anything else that cass and kristie do not grab first :)

i did get a bit of an early start, and found a couple great new old things on thursday.



like a complete set of audubon encyclopedias from 1971. i have a craft project involving old books that i am itching to start! if i have the heart to cut these up, i'll be using them for that.



big new discovery! wall pockets. this little cuckoo clock one is uber cool, eh?



topping off the day with a dose of "ironman" with my phillip. he loves vintage cartoons, and i hear robert downey jr. is back in form with this movie.

happy day everybody!

morning after. or before.

every year when i go back to the garden again, i feel like the old lady in the neighborhood who hasn't cleaned up her yard in twenty years. it seriously gets pretty bad back there. last year was ESPECIALLY BAD because i planted big ole plants in almost every nook. most of my geriatric peers in the neighborhood clear off their gardens in the fall. i like leaving the brush, with the thought that the decomposition that takes place over the winter is good for the soil. i also like creating bunny shelter, although i am paying for it now as they are eating every blessed thing that is growing!

anyway, the burning idea was a godsend. i know it may not be great for the ozone, but the alternative is to bag and haul to the landfill, and i don't think that is so hot, either. so, i'll continue to chop and burn through the weekend. except for if it blizzards. which it will, because it's already happening in rapid city.

i like life on the land though! after i got most of the brush cleared off the garden yesterday and things are ready to rototill, i felt happy!

great idea

cool. i don't know about you, but i have saved about a jillion plastic grocery bags. this is a good way to make use of em, no?

read about it here.

pyro

woo hoo. kirsten just gave me the brilliant idea that i could get rid of some of my garden refuse by burning it in my outdoor fireplace! wow. who knew burning was SO MUCH FUN?! i had my charcoal grill fluid and an oven mitt to keep things from getting out of hand! the flames got about 5 or 6 feet high, but i got alot of yuck burned down. it will probably take 3 or 4 of these episodes to clean up the yard, but so much easier than trying to bag all of that crap!

in other news, the greenhouse is yielding some lettuce action :)

give it up

whew. one more beautiful day here in Iceland, then snow forecasted for the weekend. i should be a meteorologist, because i did predict a May snowfall this year.

which is perhaps the least of my worries. because if you have been reading my blog between the lines, you'd see i've been struggling for a bit of time. struggling emotionally, physically and spiritually. and fighting a big fight that i cannot win.

of course, i've been asking God to back me up in the fight. and the more and more i try to set things right, the more i seem to lose ground. i don't think God is in the position of playing backup, do you? ummmm. neither did i, and i am ashamed that i keep putting Him there.

long story short, i know that the key phrase for this season of struggling is SURRENDER. that word has such a negative connotation in the world, doesn't it? and my good old wordly self is a fighter. rocky style. you wouldn't think it by looking at me, but i'm determined. and my will is .... willfull, and i keep going LONG after the bell has rung.

Not sure God is impressed with my style. He likes soft, pliable hearts that are not so set in how things should be. i'm getting the message loud and clear (thankfully!) that He wants me to lay some things down. when i let it sink in, the burden is lighter. His yoke IS easy. but of course whenever i get an ounce of peace, i pick up the "job" again!! aaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggh!

so, my scriptures each day are about letting myself go. completely. into the arms of a trusting, loving God who is wanting to give me security like i have never known. i keep getting the recurring image of jumping off a diving board into a pool of unknown depths, into the arms of safety (and since i cannot swim, that is an especially compelling image).

i laugh when i think about taking swimming lessons in my head. thank you Lord for not leaving me as i am, a middle-aged non-swimmer... :) and thank you blogger friends, for your love and support.