day 4: something green

I noticed yesterday when I went out to take my "cloud" photo that our big tree in the backyard is budding. I love how the sun is out today and shining through the new green leaves. 

"If spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change. "  -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

day 3: clouds

no interesting cloud formations today...just a cloudy sky that's spitting out snow and sleet.

day 2: what I wore

Here is what I wore today: it's my Mary Tyler-Moore dress. I think of it that way because the first time I tried it on, I felt like Mary Richards, snazzy career gal of the 70s. 

I don't wear it often, but I was feeling like wearing a dress today, and instead of being 80 degrees like it was on Sunday, it was a 40-degree Monday. So sweater-dress and boots it was. 

I'm gonna make it after all!

30-day photo challenge

I needed something to inspire me to take more photos, and something to post on this-here blog-thing, so when I ran across this 30-day photo challenge, I thought it sounded like something I could do.

This is day 1: self-portrait.

I am going to try to do this each day this month and post here. Let's see how I do!

counting my blessings

If my biggest problem is that I can't think of anything to write about on my blog, or that my husband wants to take my daughter to Paris while my other daughter and I are on a mother-daughter girl scout cruise, then I don't really have any problems.

The photo above is of balloons we released at a gathering last weekend to honor the life and birthday of a boy that my daughter went to school with from kindergarten through sixth grade. He was born with a heart defect and had received a heart transplant as a tiny baby. He was always struggling with health issues but was a lively, funny, quirky kid and I always enjoyed him. He was the only child of a single mom, who adored him.

He died before he ever made it to middle school.

My family is healthy. I don't really have any problems.

am I going to do something with this?

I am always looking for a way to be inspired to be more creative. The THING that's going to get me to stretch creatively and do something new.

Before Christmas, my in-laws asked me to add more items to my Amazon wishlist to give faraway family members some ideas for gifts to get for me. On a whim, I added a package of 8x10 canvas panels, some acrylic paints, and paintbrushes. Thinking I might like to paint something colorful and textury like this.

My in-laws thought, hmm, art supplies? Didn't know she painted . . . okay.

I opened up a couple of packages when we visited at Christmastime and ended up receiving the canvases and the brushes. No paints.

Oh well, it's not like I was going to paint anything while I was up in Wisconsin anyway.

But when I got home I decided that if I actually had the paints on hand, maybe I would paint something. So I ordered them from Amazon. And here they sit.

I don't really know what to do with them. My creative impulse has kind of blown over at the moment. I don't have a good place to set up to paint. How do you even work with acrylic paints? I can't even WRITE about painting. It's taken me a good three days to even put together this disjointed little blog post.

BUT . . . I am inspired by my talented friend Lisa. She used some time that fell into her lap to sit down and create something cool and beautiful. I need to learn to use my time like that. 

what sparkles

My dear friend Lisa challenged me to post something today, since I haven't done anything here in a while. She gave me a prompt of "what is sparkling in your life this week?"

Well, there's been a lot of sparkling going on, since it IS the holiday season, but I decided on this: the giant wedge of cheese that they "drop" on New Year's Eve in my husband's little Wisconsin hometown.

Our family tradition, when we are in Wisconsin for the holidays every other year, is to go downtown at quarter to midnight on New Year's Eve and watch the cheese get lowered from the tall ladder of the town firetruck. Families gather beneath the lit-up "cheese" wedge with their mittens and hot chocolate and count down from 10 as the cheese, dangling on a cable, gets brought down. Lights flash and sirens blare as the crowd cheers when the cheese reaches the ground.

It's a short drop, but it's a lot of fun and everyone loves sending up "that ball drop they do in New York." Each year we've gone (and we were there for the first one), it's drawn more of a crowd and they've gotten more efficient with the hoisting and lowering.

While the cheese itself was festooned with lights, what really sparkled for me last night was the glow of the happy crowd, the smiles of my girls (giggling even though they are teenagers and so over it), and the warmth of a family tradition renewed.