Live life ✔, Write ✔

That might sound like an odd title, but you all know I’m going to explain it with a story. The year was 2008.  Our little family of four was renting an old house in a tiny little town in central Ohio.   When I say “old house” I mean that the main part was built in 1850, and the foot-thick wooden floor beams that could be seen from the rough hole that was the basement were so old that I half expected them to be petrified.  The floor of that original section slanted heavily downward to the north.  I would lay our baby on the carpet in the living room, and she’d roll her way into the computer nook every time because downhill travel was easier.   The newer sections, which were the result of various subsequent additions over 150 years or so, didn’t quite line up with the original.  As a result, there were odd 6”-12” steps between many of the areas.  The rooms themselves were smashed together in a strange format that made no logical sense and were const...

This is not what I originally had planned for this week’s newsletter.  I had figured that every other post you will see this month is going to be about Thanksgiving, and the things we’re/you’re thankful for, so I was going to just pass on that topic and write about a tablecloth instead (spoiler alert: that one is coming sometime down the road) but I had a last-minute change of mind (or heart). “In all things give thanks…” (1 Thess. 5:8) Thankfulness and gratitude are mentioned an awful lot in scripture.  I would hazard a guess that behind love (“for God is love” ~ 1 John 4:6), and alongside humility, giving thanks is among the leading topics spanning the 66 books of the Bible. At the risk of appearing cliche, I still like to make a habit of devoting November to a focus on gratitude.  Yes, I do think that we should be grateful all year round.  No, I don’t do it just because everyone else does.  Yes, I do think it makes a positive difference.   I am conv...

Warning: May contain spoilers for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” A long time ago (September of 2017) in a galaxy far, far away (my living room) my husband and I found a rare free kid-less evening and decided to watch a movie together.  I’m a Rom-Com or light-action-with-happy-endings kind of girl.  He’s got a very specific and complex taste regarding cinema.  We rarely agree.  On this particular evening, I was tired and figured I was going to fall asleep anyway, so I just let him pick. He suggested that we watch a Star Wars movie.  I really had no frame of reference for this; I’m pretty sure I’d seen most of “A New Hope” about two decades earlier and could remember maybe one scene from the whole thing.  It felt too old to be modernly good and not old enough to be classic…  He had a newer one in mind that he thought I might like.  Ten minutes and a few bags of burned popcorn later (you can never trust the popcorn button) we were cozy in front of “...

Our family just finished up one of our favorite weeks of the year in this household.  Not quite family-vacation favorite, or Christmas or first-week-of-summer-break favorite, but the kind of favorite that’s right behind those.  It was “Fair Week”, and it was a pretty good one, so I think it’s time for another “The Places We Go” letter - (Previously posts from this series are found here and here .)  So without further ado… The Places We Go - To the Fair! “Fair week” for us falls on the second full week of October every year, when our county holds its annual festival at the Fairfield County Fairgrounds.  Since 2008 my girls and I have entered the fair almost every year, packing up our finest baking, art, photos and collections (to name a few), and submitting them to the scrutiny of the judges.  We have racked up ribbons and premiums, and once that job is done we have ridden the rides and played the games, and helped keep the cider slushies and the lemon shake-up ...

 You know, like class rings, but for adults... Remember class rings?  They seem to be less common now than they were when I graduated, I think, but when I was in school everyone who could would get professional “senior pictures”, wear a varsity jacket, and buy a “class ring”.  Sometime after my junior year in high school I ordered mine.  This was a thing that “all” (meaning the popular half of) the seniors in my high school (who could afford it) did.  The process of ordering this particular accessory was a whole complex ordeal.  Once you had your class ring things got even more complicated, because it was only somewhat cool to wear it, and exceptionally cool to have someone else (particularly of boyfriend/girlfriend material) want to wear it, in exchange for you wearing theirs.  But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s take a look at the first step first. The procedure for ordering your class ring began with finding a catalog (because the internet was ...