Red Kitchen Update

My Red Kitchen

Not long ago I included a post about the The Kitchen Makeover and I asked for feed back about what kitchen counter tops and replacement islands. Today, we are virtually finished with the Kitchen Transformation. Finished for now, anyway. We had quite a lot of fun changing the room to make it reflect our personality.

Sunday Musings

If you are following my blog please don't leave me...there were posts that appeared and then disappeared over the last two days...I know this. I've been obsessed with all things blog lately. I've been desperately trying to figure out how to get my blog to look the way I want it.  There's this whole HTML thing going on behind the scenes that I'm trying to master. And, frankly, it's kicking my a$$.

My daughter has a blog and I'm really liking how she has made hers look. She was good enough to come to my house yesterday and teach me some of the design tricks she has learned. (Forever grateful.) I spent the rest of the afternoon trying out new things on my blog.

Last night I discovered Microsoft Word has a word template called "Blog Post". So...I spent the time configuring Word to work with Blogger. My thought is/was to be able to type my posts in Word, along with images, and then upload straight from Word. It only partially worked. It uploaded the text but none of the images. --Which is pretty much useless to me.  The whole point for me was to be able to do some funky things with my images that are too difficult for me to do in Blogger itself. 

Then I found if I downloaded a program from Blogger to work with Word that it will all be so easy.  Again...wrong. It's all about the images. They don't seem to want to come into this blog unless I'm in the blogger. So many hours of frustration have ensued.

I just simply need to learn HTML. That's all there is to it.

I want to be able to share images and I want them to to "stay" where I put it.

My Sissy just offered to let me borrow a book and let me read it before she does. That is so generous. It's the new book by Liane Moriarty.

The first Liane Moriarty book I read was Three Wishes and I LOVED it! It is about Triplets on their 34th Birthday (and the year that led up to it. The sisters are in a nice restaurant celebrating their shared birthday when they have a sister fight. One that ends with the pregnant sister getting a fondue fork in her belly. (But not in a sinister, murderous, kind of way. More like in a sisterly, "I'm really mad at you", kind of way.)  Needless to say, this one had me at "hello", ahem, "fork in belly". Who needs Jersey Shore when you can read such a fun read?

After I devoured Three Wishes, I shared it with my Sissy. --The youngest one. That's right, while we aren't triplets, we are three sisters that are very close in age. My Sissy and I have a very similar sense of humor and she loved the book too.

Moriarity's second book...I loved, NOT AT ALL. And, I'm a little scared now. How can one book be so screechingly funny that I can't wait for more...and the next be so painful that I can't imagine it is the same writer?

Sissy is in the middle of a new mystery, so I don't know when she'll read this new book by Liane Moriarty. I'm hoping to get her take on it first.

I recently finished reading the last of Jen Lancaster's memoirs.  LOVED THEM ALL. But most especially loved SUCH A PRETTY FAT.

Now I'm reading Remember Me by Sophie Kinsella.  I'm about a third of the way through...and I'm not sure I will be able to stop myself from jumping to the last chapter to verify that it gets better. --I do that sometimes...if a book is starting to teeter on the "suck-a-meter", then I will jump to the end to see if it sounds like it got better.  If it does, then, typically I read backwards.  Really...what I do is read the last chapter. If I sort of liked it, or was intrigued enough to know how the characters "got there" then I read the next to the last chapter...and so on. I'm hoping not to have to go there with this one.

I consider myself an avid reader, but I decided long ago that life is too short to read a book beyond the "it could get good" stage.

I remember the first time I dared not actually read a book was in 9th grade. The book was...David Copperfield. I'd read Oliver Twist the year before and was surprised that I liked it. But Copperfield? I tried it for like three chapters and then decided if I couldn't pass with Cliff Notes then I just wouldn't pass. 

Well..that's what I'm thinking about tonight as I try to wind down the weekend. Hope everyone had a good weekend.

NC Waterfall Photos Available for Viewing

You remember that last month that my Hubby and I spent several days in the NC Mountains, photographing waterfalls.  I promised photos would follow...and here they are. I hope that you enjoy the photographs.

Mail Call & Modern Design

I've been thinking a lot about writing lately. By "this" I mean writing with a pen and paper, versus using the laptop. I had coffee with a new friend today and our discussion was about our relationship with writing.  Specifically, we were talking about writing for yourself and not writing related to a profession. We talked about how the simple act of writing can bring about a Zen-like moment that involves being fully in the moment. 

Five Year Diary

I've been a journal writer off and on since I was young. Actually, I remember getting my first diary when I was in 1st grade. It was a "5 Year" Diary. Each page was divided into five small sections and the pages were dated January 1 to December 31. The idea was that you would write an entry on the January 1st page each year for five years. The photo to the right is exactly the diary, except that my diary was blue. I was just learning to read and write on my own and I wanted very much to fill the diary with secret stories. I knew right away that this diary was not going to last five years. I tried for the first few entries to keep my musings to the prescribed amount of space on the page. But I found, even then, that once any real writing began I could not predict the amount of space that would be required. 

My friend and I spoke at length of the benefits we get from journal writing. We believe that there are no hard and fast rules. There is no rule that says you must journal every day. There is no rule that says anything. It is a tool to pick up when you want or need.

Tonight, as I was thinking of my own relationship with writing, one of the things that come to mind was when I was an avid letter writer. My first experiences as a "letter writer" began in the 6th grade. (Funny what specifics I remember. Especially when you consider that I truly can't remember where I put my sweater...again.) My 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Paris (originally from Boston), had a contest for writing essays and the number of homework assignments actually completed and turned in. (Have I mentioned before that I am competitive?) I won this contest twice! The first time I won a box of stationary. The stationary had daisies on it and there was a big bottle bubble design to encapsulate your writing. The Jim Croce song "Time in a Bottle" was really big that year.

That summer I met a friend during day camp when we took a field trip to the Amusement Park. I still remember her name (Darla...will keep last name private for, well, privacy). Darla did not live near me. She lived in Virginia, which seemed quite far. She was one or two years older than I was and I thought she was quite wise. She brought her Kodak Instamatic (camera) on the trip and took many photos of our fun time on the rides. We decided after that week of camp that we would stay friends by being pen pals. And she promised to send me copies of the pictures when they came back from being developed. (Who knew how long that would be). And, sure enough, Darla and I were pen pals for a year or two. This was a pretty good writing relationship, especially considering that she was already in Junior High and I was going into Junior High the next year. I remember lots of letters. I don't remember what we wrote about, but I remember that I used my stationary. I also remember the joy of getting a letter back from her. There is nothing quite like getting a real letter in the real mailbox.

In 7th grade, my professed best friend decided to live with her father instead of her mother. This meant that she would move to the next town over and would not be near me anymore. No more spend the nights and no more conspiring on the school playground. I already had confidence that friendships don't have to end just because of distance. The solution...letter writing. Julie and I wrote very regularly. (Typically, we wrote each other once a week.) After a while, she decided to move back "home" with her mother and sister. When she came back she had experienced life differently and we had developed different interests. The friendship naturally ran its course.

At the end of 7th grade another friend (also named Julie) moved. Julie and I had grown close after my "first" Julie had moved away. New Julie came to school in the middle of the year. Her Dad had a job in our town. New Julie was from Michigan. She was tall and confident. She dressed differently than those of us that had never moved more than 5 or 10 miles since kindergarten. But she was so confident and likable she did not suffer from being teased. She wore a Vietnam POW bracelet. I remember being intrigued by that. I had been insulated from the status of the war. Of course I knew about the war in Vietnam I just didn't KNOW about it. At the end of the year, her family returned to Michigan. She and I were letter writers for about a year as well.

As an adult, I began to write letters diligently after leaving Virginia Beach. Hubster and I lived there for three years. Our daughter was born there. But we decided to move to NC when our daughter was 18 months old. The first year in the new town in NC was one that I did not know anyone. (This was not my home town). I was lonely for the friendships that I had recently cemented. So, at night I would write letters or postcards. During that experience I found two things to be true: Number one: Letter writing can deepen a friendship more deeply than a phone call. One of my friends continued with our deep friendship writing for many years. The letter writing friendship was also kept fresh and alive by several visits back to see her. This person is still someone that I consider to be a very deep friend. And Number two: I was driven to find fun and exciting things to do during my "regular" non working life so that I could have something fun and interesting to write about. The adventures made me a better writer AND the writing made me a better adventurer.  That was key to getting acclimated and finding my niche in this new town.

It is fitting that I would be thinking about writing and letter writing in particular. I began thinking of "snail mail" today when I saw the fun new stamps issued by the US Post Office last week. The stamps are a series to celebrate American Industrial Designers.

Last month, you'll remember that I was in Atanta. The Hubs and I went to the High Museum of Modern Art. I really enjoyed the Exhibition on Modern Design. Many of the things in the exhibit are pieces of furniture or lamps or other items that filled many homes in the '60s and '70s. Seeing these items made me happy and nostalgic. The new stamps make me happy for the beauty of everyday things.

The Museum Allowed Photos

The same week that the USPS issued the new stamps, mail delivery resumed for our Canadian neighbors.