color my world

I love this generator! You choose colors and it mines photos from flickr with those colors and puts them together in a collage. It’s not just fun, but actually useful. Say you are planning to redecorate a room or paint a picture, but aren’t sure about a color scheme, you can use it to help visualize your finished project. Very cool website, check it out here🙂

skywatch friday

Yes, we are those dumb people who go outside when a storm is blowing in to see if it’s bringing a tornado with it! The pic is from earlier this week, we saw a few swirling clouds, but thankfully no funnels, just a lot of wind and rain. Notice Mr. bookbabie has his wine with him, he read somewhere that offering up a glass Cabernet Sauvigon to the weather Gods will protect you 🙂

being and becoming

I took some flower pics for fun this morning. I’m still struggling with the whole balance thing, I always feel like I should be doing chores or only taking the kind of iStock photos that sell well. I wonder if it’s mostly an American problem, always feeling like we need to be doing something that will make money or accomplish some kind of work related goal? We do tend to be a workaholic society. Why is it when we do something solely to feed our spirit we feel guilty, even though we know in our hearts that at the end of our lives we aren’t going to wish we had spent more time at the office or vacuuming the floors! Hmm, so I think I’ll take a me day today, do some creative stuff, read, meditate, maybe even watch the grass grow (really, I sprinkled grass seed this week outside my office window and it’s cool and rainy so it’s going to sprout any minute now!). But first, I should throw the wet towels in the dryer before they start growing mold, empty the dishwasher, clean off my messy desk…

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.  ~Matthew Arnold

(almost) wordless wednesday

Mr. Bookbabie is making an appearance on my blog today in honor of Earth Day. That’s my guy enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame on the front page of the newspaper a “few” years ago. He was a very young Biology teacher at the time displaying a water purification system and he just confessed to me last night that he was actually distilling booze! Oh well, it was the early seventies after all, at least he didn’t have the students growing “herbs” in the greenhouse. He also told me he wishes he still had all that hair and those really groovy pants 🙂

See other Wordless Wednesday participants here.

skywatch friday

I wandered over to the fishing pond across the street to take a few pictures and two swans were conveniently floating around enjoying the bright sunny day. It’s finally starting to feel like spring around here. I must admit to feeling a little blue today however, it was a year ago this week that we lost our first granddaughter at only five months gestation. Last spring was tough with my mom being so ill and then the baby’s death. Thinking about those days and weeks reminds me that I have so much to be grateful for; that Meagan is pregnant again and doing well, that my mother is no longer suffering and my dad is adjusting as well as can be expected to living alone.

I suppose what they say is true, time heals all wounds. Or perhaps it just puts some much needed space between you and the pain. And in that space, if you are lucky, you may find a little peace. Near the end of one of my books I write …when the earthly lives of my daddy and brother had safely made that transformation from flesh and blood to mist and memory, when the grief had finally settled itself comfortably into the undercurrent of my days and nights, my voice came back to me. I wrote that not long after losing my beloved father-in-law Hank, and I was remembering that shift, that soft gray place where grief slips quietly into the background and we begin again. That is the joy and wonder of spring too, and it is here at long last.

easter memories

Once upon a time, on a lovely sunny Easter morning just like this one, three little girls got all dressed up in their Easter finery. Before they left to go to their grandmother’s house for supper, they posed with their pretty mom for a picture. When their daddy said “smile” they did, thinking the whole time about the Easter egg hunt, the coconut cakes dotted with jelly beans, and their many cousins waiting for them at the other end of 8 Mile Road.

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family. ~Anthony Brandt