Third Time’s the Charm

The computer keeps eating whatever I try to post.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it will work this time.

My youngest was supposed to go with a friend swimming today and the other parent cancelled since the child seems to have come down with something.  So today is even slower than we anticipated.  They have plans to get together Monday though.  So hopefully that will work out.

We did cook cookies–keeping some for the house and giving the rest away to the new neighbors.  Hopefully they will enjoy them.

I have appointments next week with the dietician and with Tillie.  Hopefully we can see some progress with my weight and I can talk to Tillie about the malaise I’m feeling.  It’s nothing new–I just can’t seem to counter it this time with independent activity.  But I am trying.

I suppose I need to do the youngest one’s laundry today.  I’ll get started on that. Hope everyone has a good weekend.

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No Reason

to get up in the morning, so I haven’t been.  I’ve been sleeping in later and later.  Once I get up I seem to be up for good, but getting up is hard.  I’ll need to get up tomorrow since my youngest has a friend she is going swimming with.  But I’m sure I can.  I’ll just get up when Bob is leaving.

Only a week before we leave for Orlando.  But we’re looking forward to it.  Not sure what all we are going to do but we will all be together and have fun.  That’s the important thing.

I haven’t done much writing so far this summer.  A few pieces here and there.  I did do a lot of submitting yesterday but we will see what comes of it.  I just went through Submittable and looked at upcoming due dates.

Weel, it’s lunchtime here so I will sign off.  Happy Thursday!

 

Happy Anniversary!

TOday is our twenty-sixth wedding anniversary.  So that is exciting in and of itself–that we have made it thus far.  It seems like not such a very long time ago that we got married, but I know it has been.  We have two grown girls and one that is well on her way, so that makes the years seem more real than thinking about the marriage does.  SO we will see how things go from here on out!

Bob says that my oldest has found an anniversary present he is going to give me so I will wait on that until we get to Orlando in a week or so.  He seems very pleased with what ever it is so I will trust that I will really like it.

I am going out to lunch with my friend Mary Jane today–she asked me to go with her a few weeks ago so that will be fun. Bob’s parents plan to take us out tonight for Bob’s birthday since we will be coming back from Orlando the day of.  I have Bob’s birthday present bought and will see if I can find something nice for our anniversary before we leave for Orlando.

Hope everyone has a good week ahead–I need to run get ready for lunch.  Happy Wednesday!

 

Working on Laundry

It’s not glamourous, but it needs to be done.  So here I am.

I still have my peace.  Patience feels so much better than impatience.  I had really gotten in a bad place with being impatient.  I’m just going to wait and see what happens now.

Had kind of a bad night with the dish I had fixed for dinner refluxing on me.  I went and took my extra Nexium and it settled down, but I moved into another bedroom for a while since I was coughing.  SO I am really really tired and thinking about a coffee frappe to get woke up this morning. I’ll have to see about that.

Good news is that my manic symptoms have disappeared.  No more brain-spinning or pacing or any of that.  The bed news is that I am terribly sleepy again.  I’m trying to not go back to sleep now.  I need to start reading my books for class soon–I may wait until July to start.  We will see.

Need to run finish laundry.  Hope everyone is having a good day and a good week.

 

Good Morning

Started morning off well with breakfast with my friend Cindy.  We had a good talk and meal at Heart and Soul Diner this morning, talking about our kids and what all is going on with our lives.   So that was nice.

Now I’m home and getting ready to start the weekly laundry again.  I’ll start with Bob’s then do mine and my youngest’s.  Found out that my middle child is actually going to be able to be with us in Orlando, which we had been unsure about.  So that was exciting to hear this weekend.   We’ll all be together for the first time in a while.  So that will be fun.

I still have my peace and am glad of it.  I plan to try to keep myself occupied with other things these next two weeks before we head out again.  Not sure what I will do but will try to find some worthwhile project to hold my attention.  Or maybe not.  Maybe just try to spend time with my youngest.  We will see.

Hope everyone is having a good start to their week.  I will run and go do laundry now.  Happy MOnday!

Unusual Posting

I know I usually don’t post on Sundays, but today was unusual enough that I feel a need to. I have truly been struggling as of late as to what my path is supposed to look like.  Longtime readers of this blog know that I have tried for a long time just to focus on the day in front of me,  to survive it, because it felt like all I could do.

Now I am in a better place with my diagnosis.  I felt like I could try to plan for the future, figure out where I needed to be and what I needed to be doing.  Part of that was getting my MFA.  I knew that was the next thing.  But now I’m getting close to finishing, and I’ve felt a leading to go ahead and plan what the NEXT next thing would be.

I still have that “nice maybe” opportunity glistening out there for me, but I’m having to wait for some dominoes to fall into place for it to happen.  I am having to wait on God for that to happen, and I am getting terribly impatient with it.  So impatient that I’ve spent the past week praying silently for something, anything to happen to show me that I was on the right track. That I haven’t wasted my entire life trying to write and help others through that writing.  ALmost to the point of unhealthy fixation I have been praying for a sign.

So today’s sermon really hit me between the eyes.  It was about what to do when you feel like giving up. And I was on the edge of my seat, listening for the answers.  Because this week I have considered giving up, in more ways that one.  I had worried myself literally sick, mentally and physically.  SO I listened.

I got the answer I was looking for–God is in charge.  Don’t give up.  Get back to work. And know that God is working his plan, not yours.  So I am back to focusing on just every single day trying to do the next thing to be done that day.  Because I can’t be trusted to look beyond that.  I end up just like Elijah in the text today, wanting to quit everything because it’s not being done on my timetable.  My stability seems to depend on not looking too far ahead and not focusing on what could come about as the result of my own strength.  But on working on God’s timetable and being patient.

So I went down and asked for prayer for clarity and for patience for God to work out whatever he wants to work out in my life.  If my weakness is impatience, I’m certainly aware of it, and know I need for God to work on it  every single day.  So pray for me to be 1) patient and 2) obedient to whatever I am called to do.

I feel a peace today that I haven’t felt in months.  I need patience and obedience. I know that God knows my heart and how I feel about my calling to write and how frustrated I have been.  But I can’t keep building castles in the air about my life.  I need to focus on the simplicity of every day as I go through it, doing whatever I am called to that day.  God has his hand on it all–today and tomorrow and the time to come.  Pray for this peace to continue and for me to continue to pray through my frustrations and spiritual aches and pains.  Thank you for your prayers.

Surprise!

I got jolted last night–I remembered I needed to turn in my Defying Shadows post for the month.  So I wrote it up in an hour or so and posted it.  It was on “10 things no one ever tells you about depression”.  I think it turned out well.  I posted it last night around seven since it was supposed to be the new post for today.  But I was a little scared for a minute that I might not be able to do it because I had forgotten.  But the words came like they always do.  So that was good.

In other news, Mississippi State lost out in the College World Series last night.  So depressing.  But there’s always next year. Lost to Vanderbilt then to Louisville.

Getting geared up to go visit my oldest down in Orlando in a couple of weeks.  That should be good.  Not sure how much we will actually see of her with her work schedule being pretty intense, but we should get to see her some at night.  We will find out closer to time if she will be off any of the time we are down.  Doubt it, but you never know with these people.

I need to go get ready to take my daughter and her friend to the pool in a bit.  We should leave before eleven.  We will hang out there for a while then take her friend back home and come here and eat lunch.  So I will sign off and start getting ready.  Hope everyone has a good weekend!
 

Maybe I Can Salvage This

I sat down and wrote a humor piece last night that I had been thinking of since we went on vacation and saw some modern art museums where the talent of the artist was not so evident on first glance, but the contributor’s notes added another layer of confusion rather than explanation.  Anyone who aspires to be artistically cultured has seen this phenomenon, right?

So I wrote up a fake museum catalog’s page and sent it off to a humor site, and we will see what happens with it.  I really laid on the jargon and rhetoric of art museums everywhere, too.  We will see what they think of it.

I don’t want to leave out doing things with my youngest, but she certainly is not that deeply interested in doing much.  She has tried to get together with friends, but she says the dates keep lining up badly.  So we will see what happens on that front as well.

I guess I will go get ready for the day.  Hopefully we can find something to do together. And hopefully I can manage on a little ray of hope for my writing.  Hope everyone has a good day!

Goofing Off

I shouldn’t be goofing off, but I am.  I’m sleepy all over again and I assume it’s because I’m back home with nothing to do.  I don’t know how long I will be able to stand this.  I know the summer is already half over and it won’t be long until I get back into classes for my degree, but this year is my last class-taking year.  After that is thesis.  Then I am done.  I don’t know how I am going to  cope after that if I don’t have something to do.  That’s always been the plan–to have something to do once I finish.  But so far I haven’t shown any stamina for writing outside of my class deadlines during the summers except for on this blog.

I need to sell work and produce new work.  I’m finding it hard to produce new work outside of classes.  That is the real shame in how I am feeling right now.  I fought so hard for the right to write and now I don’t seem to be able to without something external motivating me.  SO I guess I can only point the finger at myself at how purposeless I feel. If I were for real, I would spend all of this empty time writing,  But I don’t.  And that’s the real problem, right there in black and white.  I don’t want to write badly enough.

And with that insight, I will close and go do laundry.  Then will I be woman enough to write after that just because that what I say I want to do?  We will see.

 

Back From Vacay

Back from vacation very refreshed and feeling good.  We had a wonderful time seeing all kinds of interesting things.  We went to the Billy Graham Library outside Charlotte, NC and had a wonderful experience there learning about his roots and his ministry.  It was wonderful to learn about him but a bit sad since he has gone from us and we may not see his kind again in our lifetime.  We also went to a plantation house very different from the ones we are used to seeing of the antebellum era around here.

WE went to two museums in Charlotte–both focusing on modern art–and Bob found more to like than he thought he might.  We saw some work from an artist we had admired a great deal at MOMA in NYC when we went years ago, so we bought a postcard of his art and plan to frame it for our bedroom as part of our travel collection.  We also saw a lot of Romare Bearden’s work; he was born in Charlotte so they had a good sampling of his art.

Then we went to Asheville and saw the Biltmore House.  It was so amazing architecturally and decoratively.  Truly an American castle. We had an interesting interlude on our way down from Asheville–we stopped off at a small historic downtown area that had a series of painted bears by local artists that they were exhibiting outside and were going to auction off to benefit various charities at the end of tourist season. We got lots of pictures  and had a good time poking around.

Then in GA we stopped off to see our middle one in Carrollton and spent a lot of time with her.  We got to take her out to dinner and visit her apartment for a bit   A really nice visit.  Then we took it easy today and drove back here.

And I wasn’t the least bit mental the entire trip.  I actually had days where I fotgot I had bipolar disorder. Those are hard to come by.  But no mania and no depression.  Very much appreciated.