Wanderlust? Here's the funnest thing ever!

http://geoguessr.com/

Bye bye long hair - Hello new summer do!

I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow! Bye bye long hair - Hello new summer do!

Here's to all my fav long hair shots:

By the way, today I tried flavored water, DIY strawberry lime. I was sceptic but my was I fooled. Flavored water is my new shit. Recipe coming soon!

THANKS!

I just wanted to say Thank You! to everyone who has visited and read my blog in these past few years. I am  2 page views away from reaching 7000! Thank you for your amazing support. I've come a long way since starting this as "Confessions of a College Graduate" and though I still have many confessions (and still openly share most of them with you guys like this recent confession) this blog has grown into so much more (and I'm very happy about that, I hope you guys are too!).

An Overgrown Path, A Dream

I have a knack for loving things that are depressingly, beautifully sad. Like the graveyard song, which I originally heard on the show Parenthood and that since has been stuck in my head inevitably. I just love the line about getting clean and waking at a decent hour. Oh how many times that goes through my head in a day. Waking and going for a run, losing the gut of drink, but my life is too set in stone, sometimes things are just too difficult to change.  I will always love that which is sad and beautiful and lonesome and true. I think that’s why I love to write. To delve deep into the unknown of myself and pull up things that don’t exist, but are so beautiful and so true.

Right now I am writing this on the end of my business plan. And writing this business plan is like writing a chemistry lab report, difficult and unknown (and something I truly hated in school). I am struggling. I am truly struggling. I have this vision of myself, but I’m not sure how to get from where I am now to where I’d like to be. So I take it slow, I start to write a plan, I take a fork in the road and as I follow the path I begin to forget why I’m going in that direction and my mind starts to imagine how wonderful the other path could be and then suddenly I’m on that path instead, or I’m nowhere at all and I am lost in desire.

I have this fear mostly. Or maybe it’s that I truly don’t know what I want out of this life. Am I alone in this thought? I see people with such clear life plans. Those working hard in grad school to get jobs, “real” jobs in finance or public health. Their path is so very defined.

What does this say of me?

Sometimes I wake up in the morning exhausted. I look under the covers to check my legs for cuts and scrapes and little signs of where I have been, but then I remember it is all just a dream. I remember my path is overgrown and thorny and that it’s not really a path at all but a track of land, woods in which I roam. Sometimes in my dreams, I am running through it like a nightmare. That’s when I wake and I am sure I am bleeding around my ankles. Other times I am hacking down thorns and vines with a blade, blazing my path, but most of the time I am sitting, deep in thought wondering where to go next.

This business plan is not helping. It seems like a desire that will never be reached. Am I putting too much into this? This something that I will spend the rest of my life doing, should it really matter that much?

In the meantime, I do the little things. Kiss my baby on the lips and say I love you. Rub the pup’s tummy when she rolls over. Paint little encouraging things. Till the soil and encourage things to grow. Work on a business plan or two and listen to the graveyard song. 

Listen to the gravyard song here. It's not the original, but you get the idea.

How To: Regrow Celery

I've been learning lately how to harvest veggies from food scraps. It’s quite an enlightening project as I’ve been throwing away usable vegetables for years now. Part of me is slightly embarrassed by the fact that I’ve trashed such valuable resources in the past. But no longer thanks partially to Pinterest.

Cut the base off and instead of tossing it, rinse and put in a clear plastic container with a lid. Add about an inch of water to cover the base of the celery and put in a sunny spot. Since it was still cold outside here on the OBX I put the celery in my east facing spare bedroom and forgot about it. When I returned a few days later it had grown so much it was busting through the lid.

At this point it’s ready to be planted in soil. Be sure to use rich soil as celery needs lots of nutrients to grow big and strong and green. I’ll be planting my celery this weekend and updating you on the process. Check back soon. . . 

Come on Spring

You know that old Christmas song, the familiar country lyrics beckoning Christmas to come on? I know it as Dwight Yoakam singing his twang (Listen here). Lately, I've been singing that song with a few tweaked lyrics, mostly "come on Spring" and dying for the warm sun to beat down on my face and jolt my garden to life.

Yesterday we had a taste of spring and today on Lo's ninth birthday, April showers.

Here's a little taste of my Sunday Funday.

"Count Shell-u-la"

Happy April! Playing any jokes today?

Hanging On Threads

Sometimes I feel like I am wasting my days. I sit at work waiting to go home and I sit at home waiting to go to work. A drowning little cycle of life glued together with smiles from Adam and groans from Lola. What’s for dinner tonight? We ask. What was for dinner last night?

I’m not complaining in the least bit. The slow simple life does me well. It opens up space for things like this blog, filled with quiet little ramblings and photos of life as it is, but then it opens up space for other things as well. Things like thoughts and thoughts like Logan.

Little Logan who was with us for less than a year; little Logan who died too young, but who is to judge that. I often find myself questioning little Logan’s purpose. Why my family? What does it mean? What should I learn from this?

Should I learn that life is hard, unexpected, straight out spiteful?

Should I learn that life is short, transient, and fleeting?

And so I eat sleep wake, eat sleep wake, sometimes that’s all you can do. That and hang onto threads. That and breathe. That and remember.

Today Logan would have been 2 years old. Happy Birthday Little Loge! A little man, in life, in death, in remembrance he has taught me more than I could have imagined.  

DIY i-Phone Sparkle Case

What you'll need:

• Modpodge
• Clear i-phone case
• Paint brush
• Glitter

Directions:

1. Paint a layer of Mod Podge on the inside of the case. 
2. Sprinkle on glitter.
3. Allow to dry 1 -2 hours.
4. Add another layer of Mod Podge. 
5. Allow to dry overnight.
6. Fini! Sport your new glitter case around town. 

Where it Hurts the Most - Remembering Logan

When you lose a loved one, it often takes many years to grieve over their death, or at least that’s what I’m learning. I’m also learning that you never quite forget.

I lost my nephew a little over a year ago on February 8^th, 2012. I can still remember that day frozen in my mind like a photograph. There's not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him, his baby blue eyes, blond baby hair, and sweet little smile. I think of him the way he should be thought of and not laying frozen in that coffin. That is no bed for a baby. (Sorry for the morbidity. It’s just truth.)

In case you haven’t been reading since then my nephew passed away from a genetic disorder called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. He was almost 11 months old. He had two little baby teeth breaking through the skin in his lower jaw. He has a sister that smothered him with kisses and called him Loge (pronounced like Logan without the an).  He couldn’t move his arms, legs, neck, back or any voluntary muscle for that matter, but he could smile, big, beautiful and bright. Read about SMA here, here, here or here.

These days I have been thinking about him a lot, not only because it’s been a year since his death and on March 21, 2013 he would have been two years old and because my sister is having another baby at the end of March, and because my co-worker just had a baby and named him Logan, but also because each year we raise money in his honor in a one-mile community walk. Each year we remind the community about SMA and that it’s real. That SMA is the number 1 genetic killer of children under 2 years of age. That medical centers are very unaware of this disease and that there is no cure, but that you can help.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can help and what I do to raise awareness click here or like Loving Logan for SMA on facebook and help us spread the word about SMA. The worst thing is not knowing that it could happen to you. 

Life Unexpected

Sometimes life hands you things you never thought would happen and sometimes life hands you things you don’t want to happen. Maybe those unexpected, unwanted things were never really supposed to happen but then in a slight turn of the wrist or blink of the eye, things change and it just happens.  

The other day I came home to yard full of feathers, the little downy ones beneath the outer layer. Adam greeted me with a bag in hand as he picked up the remaining parts of our little birdy friend.

“Must have been a dove eating on the ground,” he said. We had sprinkled seed there earlier in the week and our new Christmas gifted feeder, still candy cane striped from it's holiday wrapping, seems to be a trap rather than a feeder as the neighborhood cats have taken over our little makeshift sanctuary in the back yard.

Most of the feathers still remain, after a storm, after the rain, after the wind, a path drawn across the backyard forever marking the war zone. The bird maybe would have never died had I not put up a bird trap in my back yard. The little bird’s death would never have been mine to bear, an albatross of someone else perhaps. But these are things I may never know, but I may also never see a feather the same way again.

Now, days after the storm, I watched three little doves sit on the telephone wire above the feeder.

“You know, doves mate for life, don’t they.” I said in passing to Adam. He nodded his head “Yeah”. Lola peered up at the birds on the wire and 2 flitted away leaving one lonesome little dove behind.