Lake Erie in November

Thanks to my mom, Saturday was a free night at an Erie hotel to enjoy the fall color around the lake.  'Rain and lightning the whole way back to Pittsburgh last night, but Saturday was gorgeous.  The foliage was mostly yellow by the shore but more colorful farther into the woods.  It was all beautiful--and a sweet break from routine after an exhausting week.  

And to marvel at when the world is soon covered in the grays, blues, and whites of winter, a video of the color around some of the swamps and ponds throughout the park:
 
Ah, fall!   ♥  

Thirty-Four Seconds in the May Garden

In between moments with my sweet family this past week, I got to visit my beloved pink and white flowers too.  ♥  Ahhh, spring! 

And by the time I get home again next month, my roses should all be in bloom.  We're back, Baby!  ;)  Love, love, love.  ♥ 

Sick-Day Chair-Stealer

The cold continues, but the cat is cute.  ♥

Garden Party with Mom and Aunt Laurie

And this photo is just how I will always remember Mom and Aunt Laurie.  Can you feel their sweetness right through this picture, or does it seem this way to me because I know them?  Well, they are that sweet, and this image from yesterday afternoon captures them perfectly.  And o' the fun we had!  ♥  Just to see Aunt Laurie again, period, after her health scare earlier this summer. . . And to get to share with her and Mom one of this summer's rare afternoons with a nice breeze. . . . I could still cry thinking about it.  And LAUGH thinking about it too, since right after Mom and Aunt Laurie had arranged the pretty tables and chairs and dainty tea party supplies out in the yard, one of my parents' neighbors decided the time was right to pull off his shirt and take care of the field behind their house on his riding mower.  'Not quite the ambience they been going for, so while the neighbor zoomed back and forth on the mower across the lawn behind them, they began moving the festivities father away into Mom's actual garden.  I was finishing decorating my frog cookies--I had to include frogs for Aunt Laurie, of course--when Mom came into my room to recount the Tale of the Topless Interloper.  Then Mom couldn't get my bedroom door to reopen.  Aunt Laurie was on the other side, and we all began howling as we imagined our sliding a cookie under the door for Aunt Laurie and of her somehow trying to jimmy a window open to rescue us.  As we laughed, the door popped free, and we set off--finally!--to enjoy our party.  And found, of course, that the neighbor had since finished his lawn-mowing and Mom and Aunt Laurie had moved everything for nothing.  :)

We hadn't coordinated our tea party plans with each other pre-visit, so each of us literally just brought something to the table and we made it work.  It ended up being a yellow, red, and pink affair with mismatched florals and ginghams.  I had kept it simple by buying a package of gluten-free sandwich cookies and decorating a few as frogs for my (long-suffering) aunt.  I combined lemon and lime-flavored mini marshmallows with a handful of sweetened coconut flakes, a can of fruit cocktail, a can of pineapple chunks, a little whipped cream, and a few spoonfuls of pistachio-flavored pudding mix for a quick take on ambrosia, one of Aunt Laurie's favorites. 

Mom had a similar idea and simply mixed together sliced strawberries, whipped cream, and a little strawberry-flavored gelatin powder for an easy strawberry salad.  (You can make these salads with any flavor of pudding or gelatin mix, of course, adding whatever fruit complements the mix-flavor. 'No waiting for gelatins to set or puddings to cook or chill.) 

Aunt Laurie gifted me with these cute little paper plates, but I just had to use the first three during our party, of course.  She gave Mom this new tea pot, brought Hershey Kisses candies in pink wrappers, and baked gluten-free blueberry and cranberry muffins in red gingham liners. 

 Aunt Laurie loved her little scrapbook I'd made her--  :)

--and she looked at it and a couple other little gifts I'd found her while we ate.  Dear Aunt Laurie.  ♥

The afternoon would grow hot, but we were outside early enough to enjoy warm-but-not-too-warm weather and even a good breeze.  The rain held off another day, only falling this morning as Dad and I made the trip back to the bus station. 

And while the table and chairs would have looked sweet beside the bunny shed and field too, Mom's garden ended up being the perfect spot for our little party, with Mom's flowers in bloom all around us, a bit of shade from the Sumac tree that stands nearby, and a bit of privacy from Dad's grape arbors off to one side. 

Aunt Laurie showed me sketches she had made of dreams and experiences she had had while in the hospital during her sepsis care this June. . . .She was visited by her and Mom's dearly-missed grandmother and by their beloved aunt Ann.  Aunt Laurie said that even at her sickest, she was never afraid because she could feel like a protective force around her all the prayers and good energy we were all sending her way. 

Hearing that from her was itself an answered prayer for me, as was this entire get-together, of course. 

'One of our favorite times together, and that it could have so easily not happened at all--due to illness and weather and lawn-mowers and locked doors--made it, ultimately, all the sweeter. 

I captured eighty seconds of it on video too, but I will remember the gentle breeze, pretty flowers and goodies, and these sweet hearts even without it. 

Ah, love!  ♥  Blessed, blessed, blessed. 

November's Visit Home, with Video :)

I knew even Saturday morning that I needed sleep more than the visit home, but I wanted to help Mom put up the Christmas tree, since she's only four weeks post-surgery and still can't lift much on her own and I didn't want her to push it, and I wanted to see my family, of course.  I was to have caught the bus home to my parents on Saturday but called them that morning to say I needed another day to sleep and catch up around here, so I returned home Sunday instead--and soon realized I'd uncharacteristically told my dad the wrong time to pick me up at the bus station.  When I called home to let him know, Mom said he was out for a walk.  After finally arriving at my parents' house around 9 am, I felt half-asleep again and ended up napping in my former bedroom until about 2:30 in the afternoon, only waking because Mom knocked on my door to let me know my brothers would soon be there.  The exhaustion just dogged me the entire visit.  I went to bed Sunday at 9 pm but woke up around 3 am and read til joining Mom when she got up at 7.  I napped from 1-4:30 pm Monday but then only slept from 10 pm to a little after midnight, reading the rest of the night.  I somehow stayed awake on the bus's return-trip today, finishing the last of the three books I'd packed for the trip, but then crashed once back here at the apartment and slept from noon-5, only rousing myself because I needed to run out for salad things for supper.  The book trilogy I'd decided to reread the past few days was The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and the disturbing world of the three books coupled with my collapsing into sleep, or confusedly emerging from it, all weekend added to the muddled-brain feeling. We all had a great dinner Sunday, though, and Mom and I did get the tree up Monday morning, so all was well, even if I felt a bit like I was underwater the whole visit.

The yard was coated in frost Monday morning, and the deck in ice, but the snow held off.  Despite the rain, my younger brother got a deer on the first day of  buck season, and when my two-year-old niece saw it in the back of his truck, she commanded him and my nephew to "Wake it up!  Wake it up!"  Sweet angel.  My older niece also simultaneously broke my heart and made me smile when I learned that after having eight inches of her hair cut off a couple weeks ago, she came home and wrote out a Christmas wish list and the first item on it was "My hair."  These girls!  It is so wild and funny and heartbreaking and beautiful to watch them grow up.  Here's a minute and thirty seconds of Mom with little Bianca:

Sweet, sweet, sweet.  And so begins December.  ♥

Video: 60 Seconds with Stuffed

Now that I (think I) have figured out how to share the videos from my camera--and even add music--I should take you on a virtual tour of my shoe-box of a kitchen, or along on some of my walks, or. . . !  The possibilities!  I feel mad with power!  ;)  

Thank you all for your kind responses to Friday's post.  ♥

Today is my day off and is supposed to be a sunny 74°.  We'll see where it takes me.  Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends here. 

And a sweet day to you all.  

Thank you for all the health and all the experiences that I have lived. . . . ~ Carolina Kostner

The only event of this year's Olympic games that interested me enough to look up the TV schedule for it was the ladies' figure skating--the skating is the only winter event that ever seems to catch my interest, just as gymnastics used to be the one in the summer Olympics--and I found myself enchanted by one of the skaters:  Carolina Kostner.  One of her programs was performed to "Ave Maria."  It is hauntingly beautiful, and all I have read about Kostner's road to this Olympics has only made the performance more touching to me.  Apparently, she has battled injuries the past few years, fell a number of times during her programs in the 2010 Olympics, finishing in sixteenth place--prompting the satirical newspaper "The Onion" to post a headline earlier this week that described her needing to be rescued after falling through the ice this Olympics--and had decided after 2010 to retire from skating.  She took time off but eventually came back to it, deciding to return for the pure love of it, instead of thinking in terms of competitions, judges' scores, and others' expectations.  Kostner, in her "Ave Maria" performance above, reminds me of one of those miniature ballerinas inside a music box.  I have watched this over and over.  In an interview after this Olympics--in which she finally earned an Olympic medal, at the ripe "old" age of twenty-seven--she commented that the this lovely performance "felt almost like a prayer saying, 'Thank you for all the health and all the experiences that I have lived.'"  Ah!  ♥  I think it more than shows. 

The Pig ID Photo Commercial

I practically cackle every time this commercial airs.  ". . .Gots all my pertinents on it and such."  And the bewildered look on the pig's face when the disinterested clerk says "Turn to the camera."  The way she bellows "Next!" like it has three syllables.  I laugh and laugh, every time.  And the shot of his new photo!  Ahhhh!  I love it.  

I first saw it about two days before having my own photo taken for a new badge for work, and it is putting it kindly to say that my old photo was better, making this commercial even funnier to me every time it comes on this winter. 

Sad Sack Looks Forward to April

When I finally got around to treating myself to the Daffodils, the store was out of them and had moved on to other flowers.  And that kind of sums up March So Far.  There was also the moment Monday night when after what seemed like three weeks straight of  my bumbling through life like Sad Sack, I was washing dishes and noticed how beautiful it all was:  The grooved orange cereal bowl, the curvy bottle of pink (pink!) dish liquid (Palmolive "Soft Touch" with Vitamin E [it's lovely]), the mounds of sparkling soap suds, the green plaid dish cloth. . . .It was all so colorful and so pretty, and the sink smelled rich from the soap, and my hands were warm in the water, and finally, finally, my mood lifted.  I breathed it all in and thought about how lucky I was, how blessed, really, to be able to enjoy such a moment.  And I told myself to laugh off the absurdities and blunders of the past few weeks, to make amends where needed, and to go ahead and just declare this March over already and start anew.  I even imagined myself writing about it here, the rainbow of dishes in the sink and the rainbows on bubbles in the soap suds and the gift of--and the life-long lesson in--seeing beauty where others see a mess.  I had the blog post half-composed in my head when, lost in my revelry, I somehow squeezed the sink's hose nozzle and sprayed myself full-on in the face.  Water up my nose, water flooding my eyes, water dripping out of my hair, water trickling from my face down into my bra. . . .And so March continued.  You really do just have to laugh.

The month's best laugh came from Stuffed, however, who decided to help us do our taxes Sunday afternoon.

He had seen paper clips many times before, so I don't know what the fascination was Sunday, but he went to this clipped pile of Mike's tax forms over and over and over, looking ever more shark-like each time he approached the pile.  This is a ten-second clip, but this went on for about an hour before we took the papers away from him a final time and settled down to the thrill that is tax-prep, and we laughed until we ached every time he ran off with them.  God bless curious little cats.  ♥

The Face of Sweetness and Trust

After a few days of not sleeping well, I'm spending today catching up on cleaning and errand-running now that I've gotten some sleep and am feeling better.  A quick Kit Kat break, though, since Stuffed's too sweet to keep to myself.  The photo above is one of my all-time favorite ones of him.  Mike's parents' cat died two weeks ago, and there were more than a few tears here when we heard that and then looked down at this dear little face before us.  Live forever, Stuffed!  ♥ 

And especially for Lisa, who asked for Stuffed's latest home movie, here's a minute-long one Mike made one night last week while I was at work.  :)

 

And with dish-washing and lasagna-making still not crossed-off on the List of Things to Do, that's all she wrote. 

Want to watch Stuffed for a minute?

Volume up. :) A week ago, I figured out how to make a short video on Mike's phone. Enjoy our stuffed animal of a cat for a minute. He's pure sweetness. ♥