One Cobble at a Time

Making Books

My blogging has been brief the last few days because I’ve been putting the last of the 2012 entries into my blog book for that year. Any time I’m placing blog entries into one of these books I spend some of that time wondering why on earth I’m so very wordy. The book for 2012 [...]

Contemplating a Year of Growth

The first day of a new calendar is a good day for looking forward. It is often a day when I put up the wall calendar and survey all the landmarks ahead. Sometimes it was a day of calculation as I tried to estimate when our lives will be busy and when they will be [...]

Facing the Fear

This morning I sat in Howard’s office while he worked on painting a miniature. His hands are busy, his ears are available, and he’s likely to stay put rather than wandering off to go work on a project. I enjoy talking to Howard while he’s painting. I’m not sure whether he can say the same, [...]

Choosing to Reach for Happiness

I don’t remember the stated topic for the church lesson, but a tangent landed us in a discussion about the power of conscious choice in changing our lives for the better. I love hearing discussions like this. I like it when people are empowered in their lives. However the phrase “choose happiness” kept getting tossed [...]

Writing Things I Do Not Post to the Internet

Last April I went to visit my Grandma in the hospital. She was suffering from a broken hip and was having trouble keeping track of reality while she was there. She is much improved now, back at home and back to normal. Yet during that time we all worried for her very much. I did [...]

A Resting Place

This week was a push week. I pushed to get the last calendar pre-orders out. I pushed to do the regular shipping. I pushed to organize all the scout things. I pushed to help Patch with his big assignment. I pushed to help Kiki with her massive, must-not-fail, picture book project. All of that on [...]

Anxiety Follow Up

Writing the list of why I am doomed and then mocking that list was extremely helpful in establishing perspective. It let me quell the fears and move forward with the day. However it also revealed something else. I expected the list to be much longer because I thought the anxiety was a generalized mood for [...]

Poking in the Irrational Recesses of My Brain

I really should not have written that post about how I was not feeling afraid. I summoned it, or taunted it, or something. Today everything terrifies me, even though some part of my brain can step back and see how completely irrational all the fear is. So I am going to make a list of [...]

Sympathetic Vibration and Depression

If you slowly press down the C key on a piano so that the hammer does not strike the string and then keep it pressed so that the dampers are off of it, that string is now sitting free inside the piano. Then take a different finger and play a different C somewhere on the [...]

Fear and Growing

One of the side effects of putting together a book composed of all the blog entries for the year is that I get to review the year just past and let me tell you, I would not re-do January through May of this year ever again. June calmed down a bit, but July and August [...]