Oooh! Oooh! Ooooh!

I just had the coolest idea and I'm going to give it a try; maybe even this evening or tomorrow.  I noticed this project here http://rustyroostervintage.blogspot.com/2012/12/ornaments-from-trash-and-scraps.html.  Then I found this one a few days ago here https://www.facebook.com/SouvenirMagazine.  This is a project contributed by Sadie Olive to Souvenir Magazine.

I'm going to see about combining the two projects.  It looks cool in my head.  We'll see how it looks in real life.  Off the top of my head, I'll use a mini canvas, tiny vintage buttons, antique book pages, antique lace . . . and . . . I'm not sure what else.  Maybe some old glitter?  Stay tuned.

Dec. 14 --- Turns out I needed to make some things for a school fundraiser.  This is on the back burner for now.

Benson!

My puppy is 9 1/2 months old!

October in Oregon

I was up in Oregon a couple of weeks ago, visiting my folk, sisters, niece, daughter and grandsons.

One of the days we took a drive up towards St. Paul to take some photos of growing trees.

These are trees in a nursery in the area.  Their colors really were beautiful.

On the way home, I stopped along the coast in Humboldt County to take some photos.

This is one of my favorite photo sites there.

I haven't had much of an inclination to write much in the last six months or so.  There are some health issues going on with my mom so I've been trying to get up there more.  It's still not as much as I'd like, but it's more than it has been.  I'll TRY to be better.

Letter Writing

      I've been going through boxes of old papers recently, sorting everything by year.  In doing so, I sorted 30 years worth of family birthday cards.  I pulled all of those out and sorted them by recipient.  They're all in separate containers now while I think of some artistic way to display them and then give them to the girls.  Card with notes on them are the best.

    I miss receiving cards and letters.  We all stopped sending cards when we started sending birthday greetings via email.  It's just not the same.  Letters are like a diary, historical documents.  You can read through them and piece together what was going on in the writer's life.  Yes, you can do the same thing with regular emails, but they lack something by not being in the author's handwriting.  I can't see anyone printing out their regular emails, tying them up with pretty ribbon and storing them away for their children and grandchildren to read.  Maybe I'm wrong.  It's really not the same though.   

    Email is nice for its' immediacy and volume, but, to me, there's nothing like a newsy letter that you can read over and over.  It doesn't even have to be anything exciting.  I have letters from my Grandma that just talk about what she did that day or that week; how much she canned, how the gardens were doing, who she visited, how my Grandpa was.  The mundane details of her life were interesting, even if it didn't feel like it at the time.
    While sorting all of those old papers and cards, I read letters from Mom and Grandma.  Those letters from Mom are especially important to me now.  

     I know that we're all still loved even though we don't receive cards or letters any more, but there will be no written record  of the bits and pieces of our lives to pass along for future generations.  I miss that.  I think they will as well.

     A couple of other interesting stories on the same topic; A Bag of Letters Tells A Personal Story and The Vanishing Art of Letter Writing.

Take pains ... to write a neat round, plain hand, and you will find it a great convenience through life to write a small and compact hand as well as a fair and legible one.  Thomas Jefferson
     
In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.  Anatole Broyard
     
When he wrote a letter, he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a by-matter.  Francis Bacon
     
The word that is heard perishes, but the letter that is written remains.  Proverbs
     
Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; for, thus friends absent speak.  John Donne

     

We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

     
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.  Mother Theresa
     
Or don't you like to write letters.  I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.  ~Ernest Hemingway

     

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Grandma

So . . . remember back in January or February when my 96 year old Grandma was in palliative care in the hospital?  She'd fallen, shattering her shoulder and breaking her arm and, while in the hospital, was found to be suffering from congestive heart failure, with her heart only being about 12% effective.  Or something like that.  The doctor gathered the family up there together and they had a meeting and she told them that she wasn't God, but . . . that Grandma had days or weeks as opposed to months or years.  Guess what.  Grandma got out of the hospital and went home back in March.  She's doing great, for 96.  She's walking around, taking care of herself and generally hanging out.  The doctor was right.  She wasn't God.  Grandma's still ready to go, but apparently it's not time yet.  I love having my Grandma around!