Psalm 19:1--The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork.
I wish to apologize to anyone who may be having trouble making comments on my posts. I appreciate your visit so much, and wish I could read what you have to say, but something is going on with my computer, and until I can get the issue addressed, this may continue. Please keep visiting! Also, often I cannot make a comment on some posts I look at, particularly those who ask for me to show I am a guest. I have noticed sometimes someone can only comment in the "Reply" section of another comment...if that's all that works, then that's fine! Let's keep visiting no matter what happens, and know we are touching each other with our creativity and thoughts and images even when we can't get (or leave) feedback. God bless you my dear blogger friends!
I am not fully back but I wanted to start getting in there a bit again. This summer has been a lot of staying inside out of the heat. There haven't been too many appointments of any kind to break that up. I am packing and writing and resting a lot. But I had a little fun recently with my friends from church and I wanted to share with Willy Nilly Friday Five with Tanya....
1. This is Tohono Chul, a bird sanctuary and wildlife area off of Ina Road in N Tucson. It is very popular for bird watching, and the old home there has been turned into a restaurant and an education center and shop. Check out their website HERE.
2. We church ladies had a reservation for brunch two Saturdays ago. The food was scrumptious! The company was great!...
3. This is the outside seating that is available. Isn't it lovely!
4. We hit the gift shop and then a couple of other shops in Oro Valley before our excursion was over. I went home very tired but happy. I wanted to try to get a nap before we had to head out again later on a separate excursion, but was unable to sleep. You see, one of our friends from Virginia was coming through town and wanted to take us out to dinner. We had a wonderful visit with him....
5. Here are a couple of butterflies and a bee from the park for Saturday Critters with Eileen:
I will try to be "fully back" some time next week. Unfortunately I will have to take breaks fairly regularly over the next two or three months. Pray for us to get the loan and get the perfect house for us in Oregon! I'll keep you updated!
Sometimes when I am reading everyone's blog posts, I won't always go to the links provided, just depending on the amount of time I have. I would like to suggest a nice link provided by Mom at Living Life on Main Street (Latane to the rest of you!) this past Friday to the lunching blog she and my sister have set up. If you didn't get a chance to check it out, I highly recommend a visit! It's delightful! See it HERE.
I'm still on my break, but check one or two important things out each day just to keep my big toe in the water, and of course Mom's blog is generally something I don't ignore. I will be back soon, but wanted to give you something to look at till I do....
As much as I hate to do it, I have to take a break. I have to concentrate on a few things right now:
1) packing (I had almost a week of "life" that came up that prevented me from packing a single box!)
2) writing....
I may or may not have mentioned that I have been working on a book for quite a while. At first, because this book is based on real people who are relatives of mine, I was worried about doing their story justice. I was also worried about the times when I had to embellish and also add dialogue, because of the lack of accuracy. I finally got past that hurdle. The long and short of it is, in the past few months I have become more and more impelled to get this book written! I WAS writing it all out by hand on notebooks (ouch for my arthritis!), but this past week after my computer issues became more than I could deal with, my husband and a friend cleaned my computer up, and suddenly now it will accept new downloads (which it wouldn't do before!) and I was able to get Office loaded. So, now I am typing away! And yes, it's kind've an inconvenient time to be on fire to write a book, what with my move and all, but on fire I seem to be! :-)
So, here are three photos from my archives to round out my five for Willy Nilly Friday Five with Tanya. Please bear with me while I take this break. I will get back here as soon as I can, I promise!
3)
A sailboat on the Elizabeth River from about 2008, when we lived in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
4) Two photos from our trip to Disneyland when we first moved to Tucson back in 2011 and took our first family vacation in over ten years!
We had to rent two scooters to get around. Incidentally, the V.A. FINALLY got a scooter to my husband this week after a year of waiting! The DAV had loaned him one over the past year, which we greatly appreciated, but we didn't have a lift that went "with" that scooter, and it had to be strapped on...we almost lost it in traffic twice! This new scooter is ours, and is a really nice one with its own lift mounted on our car! It's been a HUGE relief to him to finally have it!
Could it be that our grandson was rather excited about being there?! :-)
I sometimes see something I would love to share myself when I am perusing the various blogs I follow! A couple of things cropped up last week: These comprise #1 and #2 of my Willy Nilly Friday Fives with Tanya. Check out others Willy Nilly posts by clicking HERE. Continue on for 3-5, of course.
1. It isn't Christmas yet, but then we all know the real Christmas didn't happen in December anyway. We should all celebrate Christ's birth, death and resurrection every day! I just had to share this. I was inspired by Jackie Junkboat Travels's visit to Sainte-Marie...see her post HERE. It's a wonderful historic site in Ontario with so much to offer from that early time, much of it archeological treasures! Her sharing of the Huron Carol (written in French and Wendat languages originally) made me want to post it myself, so here it is via You Tube, and also the translation. Hope you find it as beautiful as I did:
Here is the translation:
Huron Carol
Have courage, you who are humans; Jesus, he is born
Behold, the spirit who had us as prisoners has fled
Do not listen to it, as it corrupts the spirits of our minds
Jesus, he is born
They are spirits, sky people, coming with a message for us
They are coming to say, "Rejoice (Be on top of life)"
Marie, she has just given birth. Rejoice"
Jesus, he is born
Three have left for such, those who are elders
Tichion, a star that has just appeared on the horizon leads them there
He will seize the path, he who leads them there
Jesus, he is born
As they arrived there, where he was born, Jesus
the star was at the point of stopping, not far past it
Having found someone for them, he says, "Come here!"
Jesus, he is born
Behold, they have arrived there and have seen Jesus,
They praised (made a name) many times, saying "Hurray, he is good in nature"
They greeted him with reverence (greased his scalp many times), saying 'Hurray'
Jesus, he is born
"We will give to him praise for his name,
Let us show reverence for him as he comes to be compassionate to us.
It is providential that you love us and wish, 'I should adopt them.'"
Jesus, he is born.
2. On Sallie's A Full Time Life last week she did a wonderful post of Eugene street sights...see that HERE. But what I wanted to share was this very wonderful quote she posted from Picture Your Parks magazine about the Eugene, OR parks (and since we are moving not too terribly far from Eugene, this attitude about our pollinators made me very happy!):
"As a natural replacement to pesticide use in the beautiful hanging baskets downtown, the City of Eugene has hired Ladybugs, Green Lacewings, and Praying Mantis to control aphids and spider mites. Over the course of the summer, nearly 1.5 million beneficial insects will help us manage harmful pests without hurting our critical bee population. Time and again, we are reminded that nature knows best!"
3. I had such an interesting "accidental" borrow...I buy a lot of used books from Abebooks.com and am always so happy when I can get "near fine" and "very good" condition books for just a few dollars, and I usually also get the "no shipping" books as well. One book I recently purchased that I decided to read contained an unexpected surprise! I opened the pages and about one and a half chapters in was a book mark, and this sweet note:
" Feb 25, 2014....Mom, You were sawing logs when I came. Didn't want to wake you. I'll be back tomorrow with a surprise for lunch....Karen"
I felt like I had intruded on such a sweet, private moment between mother and daughter. I wondered, was Mom in a nursing home or Care Center, or her own home; I wondered why the bookmark and note were so close to the front of the book...did she never finish it? Did she not like it; did she pass away before she could read again? Or did she finish the book and stick the bookmark and precious note back inside the book just "wherever" for safe keeping. Two years later, I was sent the book from a used book store affiliated with Abebooks. I wonder how long the shop had it...soon after the Feb 25, 2014 date, or just recently? I will never know the answer to any of these questions. But I caught a glimpse of these two women in a brief moment of their lives through that note, and felt so close to them.
One rarely finds anything in the leaves of a book, but it does happen...sometimes Valentines and love letters are found, sometimes grocery lists....who knows. But, that tiny snippet of someone else's life is a treasure!
4. Now for something someone "borrowed" from us....our two trash cans were stolen this past week! We were gone from home a mere three hours one morning and when we returned someone had taken both the trash can and the recycling bin from our yard! Now, unless you have an account with RAD, how would you use their trash cans? So, we are surmising that perhaps some yard workers didn't have enough containers to put their weeds and brush in, and they took them for that reason! That was the only thing we could figure out! We called the company and they happily replaced them....said having their trash cans stolen was really unusual! Of course, we'd be the lucky ones! :-(
5. One night as the moon began to rise I thought how it looked like a huge egg in it's "waning" state, and decided it would be an interesting thing to shoot. We always go for the full moon, or the crescent, and you rarely see shots of the waning moon.
Though I'm not getting out to get any new shots of birds, occasionally I have an opportunity in my yard. Joining in with Stewart's Wild Bird Wednesday and later in the week with Anni's Bird d'Pot.
You can see the little red patch on the white winged dove's abdomen from this angle
