Trying something new!

I've been tinkering around with things on this blog and I think I've managed to make a slide show of family pictures. lol

Family slide show (Okay so you actually have to click on the button upper left to start a slide show. lol So much for thinking I'd figured out something cool. )

Today Howard's home on a furlough Friday and we have Jaiden and Charlie here. He's entertaining them with songs from Mama Mia. For some reason the little kids LOVE dancing and hopping around to the music from that awesome movie. That's left me with some time to play around with this blog thing. lol

After all the learning I did with html years ago, this seems far to easy and yet almost as perplexing to learn as the html was in the beginning. I remember Howard taking me to a book store to find a book on html. He handed me HTML for Dummies and told me to just open it and read a page. If it made sense and I thought I could understand it, that would be the book for me. I did as instructed ... looked up and my darling hubby and said, "Find me the book HTML for Morons, because I don't understand any of this!"

We eventually found me a book full of pictures. Pictures are good when they show you what you "should" be seeing. I realize now everything I know about computers I've learned on my own basically. Trial and error seem to be my mode of learning. My very first experiences with a computer were on a laptop that had no hard drive and everything had to be saved onto floppy disks. There were many many phone calls to Howard "Honey, I was trying to do this ... and here's what happened ... how do I fix it?" lol Poor Howard!

Anyway, kids are clambering to go to the park now so my time here is done for now. It's a beautiful sunny day so we're going to enjoy it completely!

Time flies, eh?

So, it's official and I apparently suck at keeping this updated. Perhaps now that it's the new year I'll work harder and making it a fun place to be.

Right now my heart is just to heavy to succeed at that and since it's late I'm headed to bed. Suffice it to say, sometimes you're the bug and sometimes you're the windshield ... and lately it seems I'm a bit buggy.

It's raining ...

Our first winter storm is here ... well fall storm, I guess. I'm wondering how this winter is going to be with kids in the house every day. lol How long will grandma stay sane? The blend of these kids is interesting to say the least. I marvel sometimes at how different my approach is compared to how I raised my kids ... I wish I'd been more "mature" when I had my kids ... maybe I wouldn't have broken so many wooden spoons. hahaha

This weekend we're planning a trip to Moonrocks, a place outside of Reno with Emily and Mikaela and the toys. It's hard to stay hopeful with so much wind and rain though. This is a new place and there's not as much sand as Sand Mountain or Winnemucca so we won't need to borrow Lesley and Bryce's truck ... but all this rain could make it difficult if it turned the roads to mud. We're keeping our fingers crossed, that's for sure!

Here's what our front yard looks like ... good thing we have a canoe, eh?

Melancholy time of year ...

This has been a difficult time of year for me for about the last 30 some odd years. It's never been a favorite time season wise for me because spring and summer were always my seasons. It wasn't until about 15 years ago that I found out that I'm one of those who are affected by the lack of sun throughout winter.

But 32 years ago my father passed away. It was and still is, the hardest thing I've ever tried to live through and recover from. I also lost my first horse in September. That was pretty devastating also. Add all those separate things together and it makes it easier to understand why this time of year brings about a case of melancholy for me.

My dad used to call this feeling the mully grumps. Mully grumps were something where you're just sad and a little lost. Sometimes you don't know why and that makes it very hard to understand where the feeling(s) come from ... sometimes you do know but it's still hard to understand.

This year is one of the years where I find myself having a true case of the mully grumps. I just got a phone call from my very best friend in the world that her husband isn't doing well. He's been battling health issues for the last few years and has given her (and me) a few scares ... but really had seemed to be holding his own more recently. So her phone call Sunday was an unwelcome bit of news. She was so upset ... scared ... lost ... worried about him ... worried about herself ... and I find myself totally falling back into old patterns.

I want to fix this for her.

I need to make it better and ease her worries. I find myself sleepless at night because ... I'm very sure ... I can't fix it. All I can do is be here ... try to be strong for her ... and love her. Do you ever wonder if that's enough? I do ... all the time.

I read an article in People magazine about Patrick Swayze. What a heroic person he was. He lived his life his way, right up to the end. My heart aches for what his wife Lisa must be going through right now. How incredibly strong she must be to have stood beside him throughout his illness ... how wonderfully blessed they were to have had each other.

It makes me take stock of my life ... my loved ones ... my husband. Does he know how much I love and depend on him for his strength ... his love ... his friendship. Times like this make me think about his parents and their health ... how frail they seem this year. Their 60th wedding anniversary is next week and I can't imagine what it must be like to have lived with someone that long. Howard and I are at 37 years, and I can't even begin to picture a life without him.

Where does the strength come from? Will I have the courage and faith that Patrick Swayze's wife does? That Howard's parents have?

The mully grumps ... they are visiting again. Maybe it's time to give them a new name.

Time flies!!

When you're having fun, right? I can't believe it's been so long since I remembered to update this. Real life has just been so darn busy. :D

Christmas came and went in a flash of light it seems. We had our last family get together the middle of January with our "rent-a-daughter" and her family near Santa Rosa. Talk about a zoo! Howard and I took our trailer, Lesley and Bryce took theirs, and we had Doug, Tara, Elliot, Charlie, Emily, and Mikaela with us. Add that to Blaine and Joe with their four Peter, Brie, Jordan and Tessa and you have a real life zoo. Kids running everywhere, parents trying to keep track, oldies like Howard and I trying to keep up and block out some of the noise and confusion. (Pretty much 100% impossible though. lol)

Now that spring is here and the weather is finally turning nice, I've found that the new knees have opened doors that have been firmly shut to me for years and years. I'm outside almost every day mowing grass, raking leaves, playing with the horses, taking turns around the back pasture in my Rhino to run some of the energy out of our "puppy". Yesterday she (Willow the 120 pound *cough* puppy) decided that two laps around the back pasture deserved a side trip into the water trough. Apparently it's warm enough that she can only run for about 5 minutes without needing to take a dip. I'm seriously going to have to get a camera out and take her picture when she does that. She leaps in and then just sinks down til only her nose and eyes are out and there she lays, in all her glory. :)

Lesley and Bryce (our youngest daughter and hubby) are finding out what it's like to have a houseful of their own. About a month ago they had two sisters placed with them. The older one is 4, younger one is 16 months old. About the time they were settling in with those two, the little girl they had last summer was brought back into the system and they got the call to see if they would take her again also. /faint !! So now they have a 16 month old, a 2½ yr old and a 4 yr old. Poor Bryce is surrounded by females! (Even their dog is female hahaha) Lesley is finding it a challenge sometimes to get out of the house in a timely manner and has said more than once "Mom, I don't know how you did it!". I think it's a bit easier to deal with when you don't get three all at once. As hard as it was for me when they were all little ... at least I had a few months in between to learn how to cope.

Last weekend we took the trailers to the sand dunes just north of Winnemucca, Nevada and had an absolute ball with the ATV's. I just love my Rhino and now that Bryce has added the back seat, gramma races all over the hills with the grandkids. The funniest part of the weekend was the baby falling asleep in the back seat, not just once but twice. Bouncing around all over the sand dunes ... all the noise of the different engines and she just zonked out. Lesley said she wished that happened in the truck as easily. hahaha

Time for bed, but I plan to try keeping this more current again! lol

Things you find when looking for something else!

I'm a packrat. I'm not sure when exactly it started, but it's for sure gotten worse as I get older. I've seen shows on Oprah and Dr. Phil recently about "hoarders" and quite honestly, I'm not sure what the difference is between that and being a packrat ... but it's for sure I'm probably both. hahaha

Anyway, I was looking through the stack of small notebooks I've kept for the last about 10 yrs and actually came across my first attempt at a blog. I didn't even remember starting this one. I'll probably try to combine it with this one but until that day, here's a link with several of my dolls.
http://www.angelfire.com/blog/cassiopea/

I've rediscovered the joy of doll making and will try to keep updates with my finished projects. I might even try to do an "in progress" as I attempt to learn the art of reborning. Here's a link that explains what it means to create a reborn doll. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reborn_doll I have two kits sitting in my craft room, waiting for me to get brave enough to dive in and learn this new skill. I'll still be working with porcelain dolls but these vinyl dolls really appeal to me also.

But, the start of this post was about being a pack rat and in order to start this new direction in creativity ... I must excavate my craft room yet again. Seems that it's still in a shambles from all the card making and sewing I did before my knee surgery. Which translates into the fact that every surface is about 2' deep in the left overs from summer time. lol I should make that my first "in progress" project, with pictures and everything. Maybe I'll start that tomorrow.

In the mean time, before I fall into bed, here's a few more pictures of our Oregon trip in October. These were on Lesley's camera so it took a while to remember to get them from her. :)

Here's the four of us out at the ocean. I've never in my life seen so much sand. I think the dunes there are about 7 miles long and at least a mile wide. It was incredible!

Here's dare devil me leaping hills like I knew what I was doing. At the time it felt like I was flying through the air ... lol ... it's sort of a let down to see I was barely leaving the ground. :)

Here's a great picture of Howard with his toy. He's a lot braver than I am ... which also got him in a few spots he had to have help getting out of. Seems he liked falling into deep spots. lol

Christmas is coming?

Rumor has it that Christmas is on the way ... and our family has made the move from store bought gifts to those needing more thought and creativity ... ie, hand made or home baked. I have a ton of sewing projects slated for all the grand kids and kids, etc ... and yet I've spent the last week in a frantic rush to finish a doll.

This is a doll I started probably well over a year ago and just never stuck around long enough to finish. It's hard to progress when you go to class for 2-3 weeks in a row then drop out of sight for 6+ months. The mystery to me is why there was such a driving need to finish her, when there's so many other things that need to get done. (Like excavating my craft room from the last crafting blitz, which was prior to August and the knee surgery. lol)

This last week I spent 2-3 days just shopping for the *right* shoes for her. Thursday I spent the day fighting with her body. I'd gotten the pattern but no instructions and I figured I could wing it ... I just didn't realize how truly frustrating it would be. However, all obstacles overcome, aside from missing eye lashes, she is done. And here's her photo.