A Giveaway and Six Years of Pretty Little Rough Patches

Six-Year Blog Anniversary Giveaway  ~  Click to enlarge pic.

This month marks six years that I've been writing here.  It was only a mere six months ago, though, that I made the blog public and findable by online search engines.  I Struggle with Shyness:  A post for another day.  :)  It was especially fun and rewarding this past fall and early winter, then, to find comments from new readers in my email inbox--I have all comments emailed to me--and to notice each time another person had found the blog and hit the "Follow" button.  When I learned that big-hearted at Vicki over at 2 Bags Full would be hosting an online blog party today, right before my blogging anniversary, to express her thanks for what blogging has brought into her own life and to help other bloggers meet, I asked to be added to the virtual guest list.  Blogging, even if I've done it quietly and kind of under-the-radar for so many years, has been a sweet thing in my life too, and I share her appreciation of it.  Thank you to Vicki ♥  and welcome to everyone who's visiting here via her party.  :) 

You know how people joke about visiting someone only to have to sit through his/her slide shows of vacations, pets, and family outings?  I'm a person who is thrilled by such things.  Tell me about your best friend from elementary school, your best friend now, the first person who broke your heart, the work you do and the work you want to do, the language you'd love to learn and the lesson you need to learn, the last movie you loved and didn't want to end and the last book you hated too much to finish, the flowers that most remind you of your grandmother, the birthday cake you always bake or buy for your wife, your funniest memory of your grandfather, the dress you'll save forever because you once had a perfect day wearing it, those songs that take you back to high school, that one dog who was your Best Dog EVER, the craziest neighbors you've ever had, and the kindness a stranger showed you the day your child died.  Give me your tired, your poor, your fridges covered in magnet-held family pictures and your scrapbooks bursting open with saved mementos. . . . ♥  Where did you find the piece of driftwood shaped like a seal?!  I love it.  ♥  Is that photo you and your sister when you were kids?!  ♥  Oh!  Your dog by the fireplace Christmas morning!  Look at his FACE!  ♥  Is that sketch of the house that you told me about?  ♥  That has to be your mom's photo above your chair--You look just like her.  ♥  My seventh-grade English teacher always had us spend one class period a week writing journal entries that we would hand in to her to read.  She said that we could write about absolutely anything and that that there was really nothing she didn't think was interesting.  I remember thinking, when I heard her say that, "Well, yeah, I'm the same way."  I hadn't known it until she articulated it, so that realization stuck in my memory.  And now I live in the Age of the Internet and get to see your slide shows and hear your stories this way, and every day, I find someone--and something--else that interests me.  And I love that. 

To celebrate six years here and to thank you for following along, I'm hosting my first-ever giveaway.  Everything (but my beloved old green check tablecloth) in this post's photos will be packed-up and shipped to the winner after I draw his/her name February 1st.  I had fun shopping for all the prizes and love putting care packages together, so this has already added some fun to my own week.  ♥   

The winner will receive: 

• Real Simple magazine's hardcover book Celebrations:  Easy Entertaining for Every Occasion, a big book that's full of ideas for gifts, meals, parties, invitations, and just thoughtful ways to make "everydays" into holidays and "special" occasions even more special
• one of my favorite books, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  ~  If you've read it, you know what a treasure it is, and if you haven't, I envy you the fact that you still have your first reading of it ahead of you.  Follow Francie as she grows from an eleven-year-old girl to a post-high school young woman.  I love this girl and her story.  
• the "love issue" of Sandra Lee's magazine, filled with recipes, tablescape and party ideas, Valentine-ey thoughts, and the most beautiful photos  ~  Her magazine is always a feast for the eyes and heart.
• a little book of 23 friendship-related stickers 
• 20 paper napkins covered in cupcakes-decorated-with-hearts
• 8 heart paper plates, also perfect for either Valentine's Day or any day
• 48 pink and red floral die-cut cupcake wrappers
• 4 packets of hot chocolate, each a different flavor
• 3 thinking-of-you-type cards with envelopes 
• 3 Valentine cards with envelopes 
• and 2 red-ink pens because, as some of you guys already know, I add red hearts to almost every piece of personal mail I send.  It's not just a "blog-thing."  ♥  :)

To see larger versions of the photos here, just click on them.  A reader mentioned the other day that it would be helpful if my blog's photos were bigger, but when I post extra-large versions of photos with this blog design/layout, their sides get cut off a little bit--and I really love this design/layout.  (I tried, Jenny!)

To enter, just leave a comment on this post--and please make sure that either your comment or profile gives me a way to contact you if you should win.  Any comment with a date of January19th-January 31st will count, and I'll randomly choose a name and announce the winner here on February 1st.  You don't need to "follow" to enter.  I hope you'll follow if you want to, though, of course.  :)

Good luck!  And a truly warm welcome to you new readers and an equally-heartfelt thank you to those who have been with me either from my very first post in 2007 or since earlier this week.  I've loved sharing the past six years here.  Keep telling your own stories.  Make time for your friends.  Finish and mail the letter you keep meaning to write.  Offer a piece of gum to the person sharing the elevator with you.  Keep putting yourself out there.  Say thank you.  And remember that even when it's rough, life is good and beautiful and worth the effort.  Ride it out.  Find the silver lining.  Go hug your cat.  ♥

xox♥, Val

All Things Wise and Wonderful

While at the thrift shop last week, I spotted a paperback copy of one of the books from Jame's Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small series.  Do you know these books?  My grandmother loved them and always told me I should try them, but although I devoured just about every other book and magazine in her and Papa's house, I somehow could never get into Herriot's writings.  I truly tried.  I read enough of them as a kid--then as a pre-teen, then as a teenager, then as a twenty-something--to remember, without even needing to skim through the book's yellowed pages for a refresher at Goodwill last week, how the veterinary surgeon/narrator was always being telephoned in the middle of the night by farmers in need of his help and how he always seemed to be traveling and working in the cold in the wee hours of the morning.  Grandma would urge me to take one or more of her Herriot books home with me after a visit, but I never did.  "I just can't get into them," I'd apologize to her.  I loved animals and nature and memoirs and history and (the idea of) England but still couldn't connect with her beloved book series.  It's just like that sometimes.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was another of Grandma's favorites, and she was always disappointed that I couldn't get into that story either. 

I would instead leave her and Papa's house with a paper grocery bag full of her "Best Loved" and "America's Favorite" poetry books, her biographies of John or Jacqueline Kennedy, her Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and her Golden Press nature field guides.  While looking at the tree book at their house, I would hold it up and ask Papa after every other page, "Have you seen this tree before?  Have you ever seen one of these?  Do they have these around here?"  Ditto for the American Birds book.  But the Wildflowers book was all Grandma and I, the two of us curled up on "her" chair in the corner of the living room or rocking side by side on the floral barkcloth-cushioned front porch swing as we slowly turned the pages.  Neither Grandma nor I were ever people who fell asleep easily or quickly, and it was while we were looking at the illustrated flowers one day that she told me that when she was in bed and couldn't sleep, she would try to think of a flower that begin with each letter of the alphabet.  It is funny what you remember.  When the time came in 2001 to help my parents clean out Papa and Grandma's house, I left behind many of their books because I assumed others in the family would also want them and I felt the person who had gifted my grandparents with certain books should be the one to hold on to them now.  I saved the "Disney's Wonderful World of Reading" hardcovers that Grandma had read to me before I knew how, and that I would later read and reread to her, in our afghan-covered reading chair, and I took a few more things from her bookcases, but I forced myself to be fair and let go of the rest.  

It was bittersweet when I finally read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn years ago.  Grandma was right and I was wrong:  It is one of my favorite books.  If Grandma had still been alive, it would have been something we would have talked about, or if we weren't going to see each other soon, I would have mentioned it in one of my letters to her.  I wish I could tell her that just recently, I shared with Mike Francie's mom's wise way of helping Francie feel "casually extravagant" by letting her dump her grown-cold coffee down the drain.  I love that. I also love thinking that Grandma knew me in a way that I didn't yet know myself as she watched me pull and then re-shelf books from her collection all those years.  She wouldn't be surprised, then, to hear that I bought the paperback of the James Herriot book last week--and that I am loving it too.  I have raced through the first forty-four chapters and will soon be done with the rest, and I've been bookmarking used copies on amazon of his other works so I can buy them with Christmas money later this month.  I want more, more, more!  Yorkshire is now home of the "World of James Herriot visitor attraction," I've learned this past week.  And an online shop of Herriot merchandise is, they say, coming soon!  While I can't buy Grandma a trinket from the store or museum and it is now too late for more book discussions out on the porch swing, I believe she's somehow shared my excitement this past week as I dip into Mr. Herriot's tales of performing Caesareans on sheep and pulling the village tailor's pins from the pads of his dog's paws.  I really think she knows.  As I cuddle up with the book in my own afghan-covered reading chair this week, it only seems right to believe, given all she knew before and all she knew all along, that somehow, Grandma knows.