Appreciating the little things...

...like the gorgeous weather we've had recently.











(taken by Jeremy)

Happy Easter!

Well, sort of.  I'm at work. I've been writing out thank-you cards for wedding presents that are still trickling in and I've been catching up on "Big Bang Theory" instead of dying and hiding brightly-colored eggs in cute little baskets.

Speaking of which ... I kind of miss dying eggs.

It boggles my brain to walk through a store that is stocked with Easter goodies and to see the plethora of various egg-dying kits that are available now.  Forgive me for sounding old, but back when I was younger, I believe the most fancy kits we had a available were the glitter kits -- and those came about around the time I was losing interest in partaking in holiday traditions. I wonder if the hubs would humor me if I picked up a clearance-priced egg-dying kit due to nostalgic longing. Probably. He's a chef. He could figure out something to do with the boiled eggs after I'd dyed them and taken photos of them and subsequently lost interest.

At least Jeremy gets off work in time to have lunch with me today.  I'm thankful for that because sometimes when we work opposite shifts, there's just enough of an overlap that it causes us to miss my lunch hour. There are days when I kiss him goodbye at 7:30am and then I don't see him again until nearly midnight when I get home. Those days stink.

Mom is cooking for Easter -- actually, she's been marathon-cooking all weekend.  My sister called her and asked her to cook, so Mom went into a whirlwind and ended up cooking basically every signature meal she has.  This is a Big Deal(tm), because her back has her down so often that she rarely ever cooks anymore. She called yesterday to inform me that any we wanted to stop by, we would have ham, chicken and dressing, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, stuffed eggs, corn, potatoes, and strawberry shortcake to graze upon. Nom! 

...and now my stomach is growling. I'm going to return to the thank-you cards.  Maybe the next hour and a half will fly by and I'll be able to calm the cravings.

What was your favorite Easter tradition as a kid? 

Where we love is home -- home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

In an auction that lasted less than half an hour's time, a very large part of my family history was sold to complete strangers.  


Papaw and Granny lived in that house for over fifty years of their seventy years or marriage. 

a plausible finish

there ought to be a place to go
when you can't sleep
or you're tired of getting drunk
and the grass doesn't work anymore,
and I don't mean to go
to hash or cocaine,
I mean a place to go besides
the death that's waiting
or to a love that doesn't work
anymore.

there ought to be a place to go
when you can't sleep
besides to a tv set or to a movie
or to buy a newspaper
or to read a novel.

it's not having that place to go to
that creates the people now in madhouses
and the suicides.

I suppose what most people do
when there isn't any place to go
is to go to some place or something
that hardly satisfies them,
and this ritual tends to sandpaper them
down to where they can somehow continue even
without hope.

 those faces you see every day on the streets
were not created
entirely without
hope: be kind to them;
like you
they have not
escaped.

Charles Bukowski

Machinery

An excerpt from The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this -- how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery.  It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes.  Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone.

A man lives so many different lengths of time.
A man is so many different lengths of time.
Change. Collapse. Reinvention.