This will be my fourth opportunity to cross our wonderful country. The first three times were pretty harried and hurried – the first a true unknown adventure full of break downs and roadside kindnesses in a dilapidated van (I didn’t know it at the time of purchase, but it had a blown head gasket!) which…
Shabbat is always good for a lazy, reflective, do-nothing-much day. Today it has rained on and off. So I fired up some wax tarts (Cinnamon Roll and Orange Spice), took out the sketch book (if you can call what I do at this stage ‘sketching’ lol), and connected the phone to the laptop. Yes. I…
And, it’s been a while since I wrote anything. I’ve been busy traveling, trying my hand at other forms of expression like watercolor (long way to go on that media!), Junk collage mixed media, alcohol inks, bone art, photography, and practicing looking at things differently. Today the real chill of fall is in the air,…
‘Tis done. I’m now traveling in my new-to-me rig. After tires, brakes, differential fluid and new batteries for solar, I was a lot lighter than when I arrived to pick up the little E-Nuff bus, wallet wise, lol. First stop was, aptly, Hope, ID. What a beautiful place for the first real road camping I…
Oh my, my, how I had forgotten the joy to be found in driving – particularly driving a responsive, well-functioning vehicle where gauges and issues did not have to be monitored. It’s glorious. You feel one with the car. The radio playing classic sounds – The Cranberries, Aerosmith, The Beatles, Panic at the Disco, Plain…
My eyes open in the dark, savoring the sounds of crickets and the edge of morning. It is quiet but not-quiet; life wells up in the dark and seeps into the windows of the van. I stretch and lay here thinking of all of the mornings like this I have missed while being surrounded by…
So, I bought a campervan. Nothing big, nothing fancy, nothing new. Just new to me. I want to approach this kind of like a fiddler crab, edging sideways towards a new hole in the sand; or maybe a hermit crab, checking a new shell for a better fit, always remembering that it is me…
A friend of mine recently said ” It doesn’t matter what anyone else wants, what do YOU want to do?” I thought back to what my goals were before Plannus Interruptus (common ailment for plans, no doctor needed). Remember nearly five years ago when I bought an RV and planned on paying off debt and…
Up until two weeks ago, my answer to that question would have been a myriad of things. A new SUV. Really nice smokey perfume. A case of fabu Pinot Noir. An all-inclusive trip to Alaska or Scotland. And so forth. My, my, how one’s perspective can change in a jiffy! Top of the list now?…
Well, they don’t call me the wandering Jew for lack of a reason, but I’m putting down tentative roots once more. I bought a house. I’ll try not to burden my mind with calling it my ‘forever’ home, as I did once before when I found a little slice of heaven – making it like…
Quote of the week: “…People should be able to walk into their back yards and say, ‘that’s a cicada, that’s a tree frog, and that’s a bird.’ Then, when they hear a bird scream, ‘get out of my territory, get out of my territory,’ I want them to recognize the cadence and remember that…
I did it! I am now the owner of a rolling version of a tiny house. Well, me and the credit union 🙂 And yes, I drove it, adrenaline inducing event that was. I’m scheduled for a full driving course prior to taking actual delivery, after it goes through its bells and whistles review and…
Yes, it is gory. Gut-wrenching. Painful. Overwhelming. That’s why I am taking a break to write about it instead of doing it. Heh. We squirrel away for all kinds of maybes. Maybe they won’t make (insert item of choice) any more. We stock and store because we’ve a prepper mentality so maybe there will…
I remember the times when January 1st was a bleary-eyed sleeping in day. A day that didn’t require going to work, woohoo! Those days seem to be long behind me, although if I had television I might still be tempted to watch the ball drop in Times Square. This year my goal was to go to…
Ensconced back in the micro-haus in balmy weather, last week feels like it passed in some kind of dream form. I’m pretty bone-weary in all honesty. It was a very emotional trip, in both good and bad ways, thanks to incredible friends. The roughshod road trip was to pick up venison on another person’s timeline.…
This experience, while considered by many to be slightly insane, is very educational for me. It is an opportunity to learn while learning is optional and not mandatory, or driven by necessity. I’ve known too many people relegated to a lifestyle they didn’t anticipate with no foreknowledge, myself included. The saving grace in my sleeping…
So I am on site in the midst of the great Polar Vortex caper (hmmm, didn’t I mention flailing in the vortex a few posts ago…prescient of me eh?) I like to camp. A lot. So in order to give the new widow some personal space I brought my camping gear since there is acreage…
I have made this run up 75 North so many times I should be able to do it in my sleep, but this is the first time in ten years I finally did it without taking a printed map. I’m directionally challenged in many ways and so I often don’t trust myself. But in the…
Photo Credit: BoredPanda.org “The Book of Life” – Artist David Kracov If I had a lot of money, I would so purchase this piece of sculpture. It is metal, and each butterfly is hand-painted. The book contains diary pages, poetry and notes written by the children of Auschwitz. I find it haunting and incredibly…
“’..and what will you trade for these things that you desire?’ he intoned flatly. ‘Blood, tears, sweat?’ I felt smaller even than before. ‘But, you see, I’ve already given all of that; and yet I still stand here before you empty-handed, without the Affection. Is there, there… no other way?’ My voice trails away imperceptibly,…
I normally don’t post on Wednesdays, because it’s the most hectic work day of my week. But in a conversation with another blogger, a thought hit me today about all of you, my readers. Many of you are new; in fact, more than half of you, within the last six weeks. You don’t really know…
I’m here cooling off after running around snapping shots in the humid heat for this week’s photo challenge over at my most recent newborn activity, my photo-focus blog: My Digital Eye Queue I’ll still include shots that add value here in my writing, but some folks don’t want to slog through my verbosity, they just want…
In quiet and through reflection, when I really want to get to the bottom of things, make sense, improve who I am, I peer into the Void. The Void is the place where other people developed things that I never did. What you read here is years of self-discovery; things I never had the quiet…
Did you ever have a wound that you dressed with care after finding out it was infected and festering? You had let it go a very long time, until it threatened the rest of you. So when you went to finally get a professional to examine the wound, and they gave you instructions, you followed…
Before I consciously decided to follow my dream of writing publicly as a concrete thing, I wrote primarily for me. I wrote, as I mentioned to a friend recently, “… just to express, to emote, to get feelings out of me since I no longer had anyone even to listen to me, my dreams, my fears.…
Can you tell I’m stringing this along just have another excuse to take these memories out and immerse in them again 🙂 I hope you don’t mind humoring me in it. It is difficult to tear myself away from the old homestead and all of its treasures and imaginings. But I hear the wild turkeys…
It’s a new month, and I often will try to follow something emotionally taxing with something that gives me more depth, find another way to stretch myself in order not to stagnate in the past and shift my focus onto something forward-looking. Yesterday’s post was lengthy and probably for some, a difficult or even bypassed…
I’ve not focused much on being a widow over the time that I have been writing; yet, that is really the entire back-story of this blog, documenting my life after widowhood – the thoughts, struggles, effects and the imprint that difficult things leave upon a person. I’ve never told here the story of how I…
One of my hobbies is photography, a bug that bit me back in High School when I worked for the Yearbook staff. Over the years I’ve played with the camera on and off, but did not know that in my late husband’s things there was a macro lens for the old Nikon. Here are…
As you know, I live in the city, in a studio smaller than most people’s garages, filled with boxes and containers from my farm. It was small before I brought anything in, it is much smaller in navigable space now, lol! So open space, I love it. It ain’t happenin’ here on a day to…
First off, I hadn’t hiked properly in a coon’s age. Actually, I’m not sure I ever hiked ‘properly’ as in official, hiking-trail, backpacking type activities. Hiking was usually a spontaneous activity that occurred when we went somewhere that had hiking trails. We never set out and said “Let’s go hiking!” But hike we did, in…
Yes, I know I said I’d be posting from the woods, and I didn’t. Something about being out there made me wish to eschew the computer, a rare event in my life, since nearly everything I do revolves around computers. Part of the issue was with my generators – one was more suited for phone…
I’ve led a fairly unobtrusive business life since leaving the Fortune 100 arena ten years ago. Long ago and far away, I used to fly a lot to client locations, speak before crowds, chat up potential customers at trade shows, and all of that jazz. As an introvert, that is some kind of tiring for…
I have no idea where some words come from and enter my stream of consciousness, thereby leaping from cellular thought point into usage. Actually, the word that came to mind as I was standing at the kitchen sink making a cuppa joe was ‘floccula’ – about which I mused if that would be flocculae (nope,…
After a long, LONG day at work covering two vacationing managers (funny how we non-managers get that role eh?), the Big Boss being in the office in person from Dallas and holding scads of meetings, a walk of the dog and then a flick of the button to turn on my laptop, and voila! –…
I am keeping up my commitment to write daily, but I don’t have a number one person in my life to write about, which was the prompt for today. Instead, I have a number one dream to write about. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do…
WordPress offers this cool little tool called “The Daily Prompt” for bloggers, in order to give them a push to write daily. Last night, on a whim (impulsive, remember?) as I was lying in bed I thought “I should write something every day until the end of the year.” I mean, it is the slowest…
Anyone who has followed my blog for a month or more knows that homesteading, the euphemism for ‘simpler times’, is the dream that I desire to return to. It has been a few years since I lived that life, 2011 to be exact. Previously embarked on by me and my husband, it is a lifestyle…
The Reader’s Digest that I picked up on a grocery run has a lot of fascinating content, as usual. But among the other great reads was an excerpt from Ellen Stimson’s Mud Season that truly struck me as hilarious – and also probably quite foreshadowing of the time when I return to the country on…
I really like Gazpacho…LOL! The coolness and the crispness, combined with the taste of all of the veggies, simply makes my mouth happy 🙂 It also makes my tiny studio kitchen smell like cool summer veggies. Please don’t ever ask me for a recipe, as I no longer use one. I just start chopping the…
Someone brought up the term relationship this weekend, ferreting around for a definition in this new day and age where there are no real rules or roles like there used to be. I’ve qualified my own ‘thing’ as a relationship, and then wondered if that was truly an accurate representation. As I often do with…
It is a small word, trust. Unobtrusive, rather plain. But it is so important, so vital, to all relationships, be they family, friend or partner. Due to some childhood traumas, by all intents and purposes I should be distrustful. Instead, I trust with wild abandon. I give everyone the option to prove me wrong.…
Parenting is a very difficult job. Parenting well is often simply a dream; something we parents know we did a time or two at least in our children’s lives…we hope. And in all but the worst of cases, our children grow up into adulthood as fairly functional people, despite our perceived failings, insecurities, and the…
Beauty. There is so much beauty in the countryside that it can take my breath away. But I am a sappy, impractical person like that. I’m the one that pulls off to the side of the road simply because the sunlight is hitting a field of goldenrod just so, highlighting the variant shades of green…
So, yesterday sucked. But today is a new day. Instead of letting yesterday drive today, I took charge of my emotional barometer. Rather than laze around feeling gloomy, I forced myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and made sure I worked out. YEAH! Get your blood pumping first thing in the morning, that banishes…
I’ve mentally prepared myself for this for months. I’ve practiced positive thoughts, talked up the positives to most everyone I know, steeled myself, and put on my stoic front. I got news for ya. It’s painful. It hurts like hell. I’m tired, drawn, exposed, hurt and drained. I truly thought I was mentally prepared, but…
Yesterday was just one of those days that I felt productive, satisfied and appreciative. And so I woke up today with a smile and a stretch. Sleeping on a lumpy, bumpy hot pink, third hand futon is a test for my body’s restorative powers, lol! I am so thankful for the opportunity to come back…
If you think that time travel is not possible, then you have not kept much of your life in boxes for long periods of time as I have. Or perhaps you are not a linker of time and events to objects as I am. The activities of yesterday proved once again that simply to touch…
One of the things I made a private agreement with self about was to write at least one post a day during this vacation. Rarely do I get to ‘vacate’ without it being related to something else, never just a vacation for fun. This time is no exception. However, I LOVE road trips! And…
Sunflower Solace Farm 