It's time to turn off my left brain...

for a little while and do something creative, I think.  Every January, after having looked eagerly forward to it for a month or so, tax season begins and I put the left side of my brain to work full time.  For the six months prior to the beginning of the mad rush, I've enjoyed a contented balance between concrete and abstract thinking.  I do my work, but I also write, create cards, read, sew and take on little nesting projects.  You know, like rearranging stuff and cleaning the bathroom.  I have been moving pretty slowly the last couple of weeks - mainly from the horrific allergy and laryngitis episode which couldn't have come at a worse time - and I realized today that part of my lethargy is due to not taking a little time to indulge my creative side.  Maybe indulge is the wrong word; nurture is more like it.  So this morning, stacking the client tax files ever higher in the middle of my desk, I took an hour or so to putz around the house and do some freshening up.  I dusted the kitchen counter and rearranged the potted plants and some canisters.  I sorted through a couple of boxes of gift wrap supplies and consolidated them into one flat yellow box on my art desk that's easier to get to.  I put a load of laundry in the washer and put a care package together for a friend.  I worked on a word processing project for a friend having some difficulty with Microsoft Word and some pesky 3x5 index cards for a recipe book he's putting together.  All in all, not terribly creative things, but the mundane sort of tasks that require just a little creativity.  The kinds of things that soothe my soul - and that is just what I needed.  Now I can get back to work...

Cats, burning candles and finding your calling...

I know it's sort of silly, but I really like burning scented candles.  For a long time I couldn't burn candles at home because of our herd of overly inquisitive cats.  I couldn't even put a candle in one of those warmers that just melts the wax to release the scent.  I came home one day to find red candle wax all over the wall and poor George's front paws encased in the stuff.  It took a while to get George clean and he wasn't happy about it.  No more candles for me.  I took advantage of being able to enjoy them at the office where Peter was completely oblivious.  He still shows absolutely no interest in a candle at all - and so I am happy to have not only a vanilla candle in the warmer tucked away on the living room bookshelf, but a candle actually burning on my desk for most of the day.  It doesn't take much to please me; I'm simple that way.

Which is not to say that I don't miss the all of the cats, because I do.  Terribly - so much so sometimes that I can hardly bear to think about them and where they all might be now.  These are my grey twinkie boys: Walter Kroncat and Charles Kuralt.  I know that Tim's cat lady friend found a home for Charley, but the last I knew, Walter was still at the farm living in the cow barn with his sister Lucie Bee, Louis XII, Sophie, Ernest Hemingway and my sixteen-year-old Eddie, aka Edward R. Murrow.  I love them all and I hope they know that - but life changes sometimes and there is nothing we can do about it.  It wasn't my decision to split them up and give them away - but I also know that I assign human emotions to them when I am rational enough to know that they are animals and have most likely forgotten all about me.

It doesn't make it hurt any less.

And when life doesn't turn out the way we have hoped it would, we find other ways to occupy our time.  At least I have - and I may have finally found - or rediscovered - my calling.  I recently read that the things we do while we are procrastinating to keep from working are probably the things we are really meant to be doing all along.  The writer of the original thought put it much more eloquently - but that's the gist of it.  I write when I should be working - and I've always dreamed of writing for a living.  For years I've written and edited and torn up my work.  I've started and stopped and started again.  I finally decided over the past couple of weeks that the only way I would ever find out if I could really write fiction was to just throw my words out to the universe and see if anyone bothered to read them.  I've challenged myself to write my first real mystery one day at a time - a chapter at a time for a small but hopefully growing audience.  If my readers want to know how the story ends, then I'll have to write it.  If they hate it, well - that's fine, too.  At least I will have finished the story.  I found this funny photograph today of me with my first typewriter; I must have been about six.  My sister looks stunned - I'm not sure why.  But I was having a good time.  Maybe I knew what my calling was back then - and I somehow lost sight of it along the way.  I've graduated to more sophisticated writing tools over the years, but I'm hoping to rediscover the joy of story-telling.

Ten years ago today...

A new year is finally here...

and it's time to make my annual list of good intentions.  I don't call them resolutions because I have discovered that I always have good intentions, whether or not I actually keep to my resolutions.  Better to just call them good intentions to begin with - even though they supposedly pave the road to hell.  This year I intend to pray more and worry less.  Oh, and listen more and talk less.  That's always a good one and it usually lasts several months.  I intend to write more and read marginally less - that is a really difficult one.  I intend to look up more.  I have really good intentions about letting things go, too.  Another hard one.  And then there's trying hard to be truly kind - a daily struggle sometimes.

Goals are good intentions with a deadline.  My primary goal for this year is to finish the first draft of the mystery I'm writing and move one step closer to being published.  I'll let you know how that turns out.

And finally, I have to confess that I really don't like black-eyed peas anymore.  I have been eating them every year on New Year's Day for luck and well, they taste terrible no matter how you doctor them up and they haven't really brought me any good luck over the years anyway.  I have good intentions to resolve that my goal is to never eat them again.  So there.

I've been having...

one of those months so far...  It seems like December first came around and I lost all of my holiday spirit and momentum and I am just now finally catching up.  You'll probably notice that a bunch of posts appeared on my blog almost all at once - and I've just about got all of the Christmas decorations exactly where I want them - only to take them down and put them away in about three weeks.  The holiday season has been hard for me the past couple of years and I was feeling more festive this year - for about a minute.  And then the aloneness and worry crept in and I ended up moving a couple of squares back.  Actually, I don't even know what square I started out on, but at least I'm not back at Square One, wherever that is.  I've been working on some client projects that I need to finish by the first of the year and so I've been fortunate to keep my mind and hands busy.  Too much time to think is my worst enemy.  Playing with my new e-reader gadget has cheered me up immensely - and so has getting caught up on my blog.  This is something I've done mainly for me - to improve my writing and to share something positive every day and it has been one constant that has kept me going over the last eighteen months or so.  I've met some lovely people and made some new friends - and I am very grateful for that opportunity.  I'm also encouraged that people do like to read what I write and that it's not just my friends being nice when they say how hilarious my stories can be.  So I'm caught up and moving on toward the next square and a bright new year.  Now if I can just find a place for that antique table...

Random musings...

Today I am thankful for:

Fall - or what feels like might become fall soon.

Instant maple brown sugar oatmeal.

Clean socks.

Intuit Online Payroll and how easy it makes helping my clients.

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

Herbal tea.

Blank composition books.

Adopt a Shelter Pet postage stamps.

Mini pumpkins that last from before Halloween until Thanksgiving.

Krusteaz Banana Bread mix.

God's daily provision for my needs.

When a cookie crumbles...

it's been scientifically proven that most of the calories leak out.  But when your heart breaks, everything leaks out.  It takes a long time to get some of the stuff back - and some things you never can recover.  Hope is the hardest thing to hang on to - just when you think you've got it all together again, those tears you thought had dried up forever appear unbidden and wash the little bit of hope you had managed to put back away again. 

Have my nose buried in a book...

Hope you all have a great day!

Lord, I am thankful for today...

and for all of its blessings: I have a roof over my head, clothes to wear, food to eat and the companionship of sweetest little dog and and the most persnickety cat in the whole world.  I am thankful for my dear friend Ariela who came by with a lovely lunch of salad and pizza on Tuesday.  I am thankful for the two friends who called me out of the blue this week and made two long evenings a little less lonely.  I am thankful for my faithful client and friend Jonathan who was willing to pay me early this month and for my friend Richard who picked up the part for my car and then drove me to the bank.  I am thankful for the Pad Thai I had for lunch and for someone to eat with besides Aggie - as much as I love her - and that Richard speaks in complete sentences and doesn't beg for food from my plate.  I am grateful for the check that awaited me in my mailbox upon my return home.  I am especially thankful for my friend Long who in a matter of minutes changed the starter on my little car - a potentially huge repair that only cost me $47.93.  I've spent much of the last week feeling a little sorry for myself and worrying about stuff I have no control over.  Sometimes it's a good thing to just calm your mind, let the worry go and count your many blessings.

Thought for the day...

God is a big God and He is crazy about me.

Comforting, isn't it?

I just read the Proverbs 31 devotional for today

and I love this thought!

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

A.  Not all movies are created equal.

2.  Just because a movie has John Cusack in it doesn't make it good.

d)  Hollywood loves the F-word and thinks people want to hear it over and over again.

7.  Hot Tub Time Machine is a stinker of epic proportions.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Don't let her kid you, Mom laughed at a few things.

Project completed...

It seems like I've been clipping odd pictures and recipes from magazines for eons - and several years ago, I started putting them into this Mary Engelbreit binder.  I've been calling it my possibilities scrapbook.  After I decimated my collection of ME Home Companion magazines a couple of weeks ago, I had a huge new pile of clippings to trim and add to my book.  Well, it was a great project for a rainy Sunday afternoon.  They're all neatly put away - but in no particular order, which I am sure will shock anyone who truly knows me.  I did that on purpose - the joy of thumbing through the scrapbook is how random it is - and how little things in the photographs catch your eye, especially things you didn't notice the first time through.  Odd how strangely satisfying a really meaningless little project can be, isn't it?

Feline words of wisdom...

"Just chill, Mom.  Everything will be all right."

When will I learn...

to stop worrying about everything?  Philippians 4:6 reminds us: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And I try not to worry, I really do, but over the past year with everything that's happened, I get in these end-of-the-month oh-no-what-am-I-going-to-do panics.  It affects my whole outlook on life - and I wonder if that's why I was feeling so negative last week.  Subconsciously I was working up to my full-blown tizzy - I don't know.  So last night I prayed for peace (and for my clients to pay up - honestly, I think some of them think that this is my hobby!) and gave thanks for the blessings God has given me.  I balanced my checkbook this morning and pondered whether to pay the electric bill or my car payment.  Or the phone & internet bill.  I called one of my delinquent clients to give them some information they requested and asked if they had sent the form they needed to sign back to me yet.  No - so I knew a check wasn't on the way from that front.  I'm not going to worry, I told myself; I have a few days yet until my financial situation reaches critical mass.  Peter hopped up on the desk for a pet and then - the phone rang.  It was one of my clients calling to tell me that he wanted to drop off a check.  He lives over by my old office, so I told him to just drop it off with Cari at the restaurant since I need to go out anyway.  I shouldn't have worried at all - the check is more than enough to pay the electric bill and my car payment.  God provides for our needs, sometimes daily, in His own time.

Please, Lord, help me to remember that!

The perfect spot...

for my Celestial Seasonings tea rack!  And to think I was going to give it away...  This rack used to hang in the kitchen in my old house and I am quite attached to it, but unfortunately I have zero wall space in this kitchen.  I had stashed it in the pantry and was well on my way to letting go of this treasure, when I suddenly realized that I didn't have to hang it up at all - there was the perfect spot for it on the kitchen counter right next to the teapot and the rest of the tea supplies.  Isn't it great how we sometimes look at something in a different way and find the solution we were looking for all along?  Now if I could only be as perceptive about other problems I need solutions to...

Gotta stop arranging...

and re-arranging all this stuff trying to get everything perfect.

I have work to do - paying work!

Doesn't this just...

make you want to take a vacation?

An Occurrence at...

Shanghai Express...  Bet you thought I was going to say Owl Creek Bridge.  Alas, no - I'm sure that movie can be rented somewhere (the story is much better!), but tonight after a dinner of take-out sesame chicken, Aggie and I are going to watch Gregory Peck in Old Gringo, the fictional tale of writer Ambrose Bierce's last days in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.  It has Jimmy Smits (as General Arroyo) and Jane Fonda (as spinster Harriet Winslow).  Pancho Villa is only a minor character, apparently.  They don't make actors like Gregory Peck anymore, I'll say that.  Now we just have movie stars and publicity hounds for the most part.  Oh, for the days of Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and John Wayne.  I even miss Steve McQueen.  I wonder if Paul Newman has staged any plays on the great soundstage in the sky...  I know, I know, I can get the DVDs.  After all, a classic is a classic and worthy of watching over and over again.

And...  I just finished indexing the posts on my blog. 

An OCD dream!

Why don't more people barter?

I traded doing taxes for a neck & shoulder massage today.  It was amazing - and I am so relaxed!  Apparently, I was very tense from hunching over my paperwork and computer screen.  At least seven of my clients are massage therapists and I finally took one of them up on a massage.  Bartering is a great thing!

Thinking deep, theological thoughts...

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

James Russell Lowell

The other day a friend of mine said that she doesn't like the idea of God testing us.  She said that she doesn't think He has time to sit around thinking of things to throw our way with which to test our mettle.  I asked her if she thought God had time to watch over us and send good things our way.  "Well, of course," was her reply.  I asked her why she thought He had time for that but not time to test us.  All I got was a puzzled glance.  She admitted that she just didn't really like the idea of a God who would test our faithfulness.  "I just don't like the word test," she said.  I suggested that maybe God challenges us to make the right choices and in doing so, helps us to become better people.  She decided that she could live with an occasional challenge from above more easily than she could a test.  The whole idea of challenges from God got me thinking about how everything, from little challenges to major hurdles, is really a blessing in disguise - like James Russell Lowell's thoughts about weeds and flowers.  I've made more than my fair share of wrong choices in what were surely tests from God , but I'm learning to make the right choices much more often.