2010 Here I come!

Well, I thought I had written a draft, but it isn't here, gone, poof, outahere, oh well. Yesterday I found the Pioneer Woman's blog and was promptly addicted. She is adorable and so real. I like people who are real. Real life is beautiful, and I love people who can embrace it just like it is even when it is a really muddy day.


Speaking of real, my car is parked in the garage!! And I have parked there all week! Amazing. It has been icy cold this whole last week, so I have enjoyed it as a special gift from my Handsome Hubby and my oldest. They say it's gonna stay that way. Won't that be nice? I'm not gonna hold my breath, but the idea is really nice.


Christmas is slowly disappearing around my house. Saturday morning we de-decorated the tree. That is always a little sad for me, but I made some sweet memories. We like to watch the Lord of the Rings series over Christmas break. This year we watched on New Years Eve and New Years Night. Then we stuck in one of the extra DVD's that showed how they did it. How fascinating!! My creative juices were flowing. It was freezing outside, but I knew Christmas would disappear before I knew it and I had really wanted to take some pictures of the lights. So I started playing. It was really fun. I went from swirls and then played with words - that I found out I had to spell backwards and upside down - not easy. What do you think?

Christmas 2009

Can it really be? The hubub of the season is in full swing. Christmas is just a little less than two weeks away - says my wipe board that one of my boys has taken to updating every day. I have pulled off one office party with 13 gifts bought and wrapped as well as an office decorated and a new tree put up and decorated as well. Whew! My house is mostly decorated, though a few things have been abandoned for lack of time and energy - like the wreaths on every window and the garland for the stairs that finally blew some fuses, and that in turn blew some fuses in me. So we have no garland on our stairs this year - not the end of the world.

Hope Garden - Second Year

Wish I could have blogged more about this year as it was happening, but in summation, here's what happened. My Hope garden last year was wonderful in it's beginning, and I love all the application it had to my heart - the woman with the 12 years of bleeding, Sarah's LONG wait for her fulfilled promise from God. I can hardly believe these women endured such long drawn out physical and heart and soul pain waiting with no answers from God. Yet they are hardly the only ones. Funny thing, this Christianity "myth" is - hear me out. I don't think Christianity is a myth at all, but we have built up, preached, believed and told each other in our words of encouragment that it will be all right, that God is in control and somehow perpetuate the idea that God will do it our way or in our time. Then when He doesn't, we try to cover it up. Personally, I want to get beyond our/my mythical beliefs about God and get to know the real thing.


Back to my Hope garden of last year - honestly?- it didn't do so well. South Carolina was at the end of a long drought, and despite my efforts to set up sprinklers on timers and spending hours watering by hand to make sure my flowers and little hope seeds grew, the veggies didn't make it. I got some odd looking cucumbers that tasted strange and the rest baked in the hot sun. But my Hope garden was still that for my heart: Hope. June of last year was a blessed time of respite from the dark clouds of depression that had haunted me for over a year. It happened one day in June - I don't know exactly which one, but one day I wasn't sad. I enjoyed it - that good day, and then I enjoyed the next one and pretty soon felt like my year plus of depression had never happened at all. I call it the amnesia of depression. (Unfortunately, it works the other way too.) In November, it returned. Not as bad as last year, but about every other day was quite a struggle.

New Post???

Can it be? Have I really figured out how to post a new blog? We'll see. I was hoping when I started this to get back to it regularly, but couldn't figure out how to post a new one. So this is just an experiment to see if I can get it up and running again.