Living Life Beautifully

I love fall days. Although they make my allergies go a little crazy, it just feels like a bit of heaven to me. The deer are in their season, so you see large bucks running full steam through the brush and around the house like magnificent strong creations with this way they stand that just feels like they know exactly how beautiful they are. The winter grass is green and most of the trees still have their leaves from the confusion of warm weather here and there.  I even have peach tree blooms.  I probably need to have a talk with that tree and explain how the seasons work.  He's young.  ;) Having an old country house and a dirt road makes for a lot of dust in the house.  As I walk around with my dusting rag I think of what needs to be dusted and what can be considered a dusty rustic finish.   I'm trying to decide if I can decorate over dust, maybe sprinkle a little glitter to make it look intensional. I wish I could bring my husbands backpack blower in the ...

I'm opening this blog post having absolutely no idea what I'm going to blog about. It's a rainy afternoon that is so nice and desperately needed of rain.  About the only thing I need to leave the house for today is fancy flavored coffee for the machine.  I never thought I would like coffee, but it turns out, anything tastes good if you add enough chocolate. Yum.... Our house is so quiet.  You can hear the rain on the tin roof and I have all the lamps on so it looks like a nice cozy day. I have my little desk in one corner of the living room and my husband has his little desk about 20 feet away in the office. We are both doing our daily computer catch up.  My desk is one that was in my room when I was a child.  I remember at one point my mom had a pink layered ruffle around the desk that went all the way to the floor.  I loved that.  Kinda wish I still had it that way. After that, my mom used it as a sewing table and then I used it as a sewing table....

 When I was little, maybe 5-7  ish, every time I went to my grandfathers furniture store I would head over to the main desk and ask Jackie if there was any bubble wrap. I did this every time.  Between that and asking Joe if he could sneak me a soda while he filled Big Daddy's soda machine. After a while, they hid the bubble wrap because I knew where they put it.  Under the counter by the register. And I would pop it all up. Now that I am an adult and almost all of my children are out of my house and the youngest is at school.  I can pop all the bubble wrap that I want.  I don't have to share it with anyone.  Brinkley, who is not afraid of a 100, or more, pound deer, is hiding from me because I am popping tiny bubbles. Why does is seem so therapeutic to pop little plastic sheets of bubbles? As kids we would sit in an area of my grandparents store that had all the tv sets, and we would tune them all in to cartoons and lay on the floor until the...

It is a warm morning and the third day of school for my youngest. The house is quiet except for the occasional popping of the tin roof as it heats from the sun. I am sitting in my big country kitchen at a table that was once much shorter by about 6 and a half inches.  We took an antique table from Bruce's aunts house and turned it into a island type table, with mismatched bar stools, by adding feet.  It's a bit wobbly, but it does the job.  I remember a story my mother told me about a round table that sat in this kitchen.  Earlier in the day it seems the kids had broken my grandparents table when they were goofing around.  They panicked and stuck it together as if nothing had happened.  When my grandmother set the table for dinner that evening, the table at some point gave way and everything fell on the floor.  My grandparents didn't know the kids were the ones who broke the table, so they just looked at the mess, got up, and cleaned it all up....

I am amazed, sometimes, at how things work out without you realizing it. I have this little antique dresser in my house that was once my great grandmothers, according to my mother.  I looked at that dresser a little while ago, as I moved it to vacuum under it, and it occurred to me that it would not be sitting there if it weren't for some intervention from God or family from heaven watching over me. It was a dresser that was used by other people in my mothers family including my siblings and I when we were children.  It has been passed around, painted different colors and then stripped to its original wood. When my husband and I decided to move my great grandparents house, my mother said she wanted the dresser to go in this house once we moved in.  She liked the idea of it going back into its original home. Then my parents got a divorce.  It wasn't a very nice divorce and at some point my mother wanted to take the small dresser with her.  My dad reminded her tha...

4 weeks ago I decided to try growing a rose bush from a cutting.   I thought it might be a fun challenge, so I went online and read everything I could find on the subject. I had purchased a rose bush on clearance that looked a bit of a mess and had these small clusters of red roses.  Such a pretty plant and seemed to be a lot like one my great grandmother owned.   A family relative told me she grows new plants from the cuttings, so I decided to give it a try. There are so many different ways to grow a rose from a cutting, so I had to just pick one I thought might work best for me. I had some seed starter soil that is very light weight and thought that might be a good option. So, I washed up three pots and packed them with the soil. I had read that it is best to use a 6 inch cutting, but mine only turned out to be about three inches. I tried to leave a few small leaves on the cutting and then used a knife to carefully cut the outside skin off the bottom 1/2 inch of the ste...

I've been trying to get my garden ready for planting.  It is a slow process. The garden is full of larkspur so I don't want my husband to trim it all down until they bloom.  For some reason they are taking their sweet time to bloom this year.  But it's so worth it. I have a bunch of things ready for the garden but have to finish cleaning out and prepping the garden boxes with garden soil and then there is the matter of deer proofing.  The hubby and I have devised a plan.  We a going to put up some really tall cedar along the fence line and wrap the entire garden with netting.  It will be tricky and if a gate ever gets left open and a deer gets in only to get startled and hurt itself getting out, I will be very upset.  So I think I will put springs on all the gates so they close on their own.   We shall see if it works.  Meanwhile I just keep taking Brink into the garden so he can mark it and hopefully that will keep the deer away until we get...

A while back ago, while having lunch with one of my favorite people, we started talking about something I have been learning through a counselor.  It is something I wish I had learned a long time ago, so I thought I would share. Sometimes being really nice, fair and accommodating....bites you in the rear.   Being someone who tries to please others, gives the other person permission to treat you like a servant.  You teach people how to treat you. I hold my husband back often from speaking his mind.  I'm always saying, "make sure you say it in a nice way so you don't upset anyone".  He has defended me or himself, without holding back, a few times and I have blamed him for the outcome, when in reality, he was right to defend and the outcome was due to the shock of seeing him in a way that no one has seen him before.  Some people get upset when a people pleaser speaks up for himself or herself.  They aren't used to it. In this last year we have had some cr...

It is a pretty day.   The sun is not out.   In fact, it is cloudy and looks like it might rain. But the day has a nice soft breeze and everything is green from the recent rain. So....it is a pretty day. Each morning I go out onto my back deck with my tea or with my journal, and I sit for a bit. I listen to the birds and I look out onto the property and see the tall wild grass, the cactus, the tiny wild flowers that have started to bloom, the old wash house with its weathered wood, the trees with their fresh leaves starting, and I smell the fresh air that fills this place.  It is my favorite part of the day. As I sit there I often think about how so many people would cut it all down, plant grass and keep a perfectly manicured lawn.  I find myself looking at our property through the eyes of others and what they would think, and I start to pick it apart and judge every flaw.  Why? Bruce and I placed our home in the center of a brush filled lot.  We have only e...

Several years ago I read something that really made sense to me. I can't remember where I read it or what exactly it said but it talked about how saying the words "I am ......." before some value that you wish you had.  It was explained that, in doing so, it could change your subconscious thinking.   We all have so many thoughts running through our heads at any given moment and I would guess that not all those thoughts are positive.  If you are a woman, then you probably have many more thoughts running at one time than any man would.  Most of us have high expectations for ourselves, so every imaginable self criticism comes to mind and runs on a continuous loop in our heads. When we read the bible it has so many areas that talk about taking captive your thoughts, thinking of only good things, speaking words that only lift us up, and BELIEVING what you pray for, so it will be done.  So the trick for most of us is to shut down those negative subconscious thoughts t...