You know, there are some things you just have to look at a while to fully appreciate. I really enjoy beautiful things, and as I have gotten older, and hopefully wiser, I’ve learned to find the beauty in new and different things, including things I would not have called pretty at a younger age. Especially now that I take my photography more seriously, I’m seeinig beauty in color and texture that I never noticed before. For instance, yesterday, DH planted some trees here, and it was the potting soil that caught my eye. I kid you not, when the sun hit it, it just looked like black diamonds, and I suddenly realized exactly what they meant in Gone With The Wind. It escapes my mind just who was talking, but they held the dirt and talked about how precious the earth was.

Another such thing is china tea cups. Once you know the care and labor that goes into a fine china cup, you never quite look at them the same again. Recently, I saw something pretty to go into a teacup, and that was interesting enough to go into a blog post.

These tea blooms are made by fullbloomtea.com. When they arrive, they are small hard balls, and look pretty unremarkable. You put them in a glass teapot, or a large glass mug, and pour the hot water over them, and they bloom into what you see above. You can reuse them two or three times. It takes several minutes for them to fully bloom, but I just think they are stunning! I’ll never look at tea in quite the same way again.

Technorati Tags: beautiful things, black diamonds, fine china, tea

For someone that you love deeply would you be willing to move to a foreign country knowing that there would be little chance of seeing your friends and family again?

If you could spend a year in perfect happiness but afterward remember nothing of the experience, would you do it?

I don’t think I could move away from my friends and family. I moved away once, and it took far too long to get back. I’m probably just not willing to do that again. Perhaps it helps that I am happily married, and my husband is here, eh?

The second is a bit harder to answer, but I think probably not. What good is it to be happy if you don’t remember it? And are you ever really happy without at least a touch of the bittersweet? Isn’t it the small portion of unhappy that defines for us what happy truly is? And isn’t it the memory of happy that keeps us going when times are tough? I think I’d settle for content and remembering than happy and not.

Technorati Tags: happiness, moving, manic monday

You know that song by BNL, right? That is so me today. Last night about 8, I was ready for bed, but I stayed up so DH would not have to put the kids down alone. That was a mistake. By the time I was sleepy again, it was 2am. I crawled into bed just as the baby started her middle of the night fret, and there I was until well after three, awake and angry. As a consequence, I then overslept. Sigh. You know what I need? I need a vacation. I need to sleep. Or I need to get the best diet pills for my need to sleep, and then not sleeping will be fine. Do you see this post that doesn’t make sense? This is what happens when an insomniac tries to write after a bad night.

And not only that, it’s Monday. Monday means laundry. I thought I was caught up. Haha, joke’s on me.

As soon as my husband walks in the door, I am going to bed. I hope.

If you visit this blog today, and it is an ugly mess, please don’t write me off, just go look at some vacation rentals and come back later. I need to do some work on the theme, and things are liable to get a bit jumbled at times.

My friend Kat was interviewed on her blog, and graciously consented to interview me. I say graciously, because I was late to read her blog interview, and she had closed her comments. I mentioned in commenting on another post that I wished I had not missed the chance to be interviewed by her, and she sent me questions. I wanted Kat’s questions specifically, because I know that she never pulls the punches and therefore she would ask the important things, even if they were the hard things. I was not disappointed. I got the questions on Tuesday, and I have been thinking about them since.

So, here are the questions:
1. How did you and your husband decide how many kids to have? 8 is quite a large family.
2. You are one of the very few Christians I have encountered over the years who preaches the love side instead of the fear of eternal damnation. I admire you for having such strong faith. When did you come to find Christ and just ‘know’ that this is the life he planned for you?
3. Why do you have so many different blogs about so many subjects?
4. How do you have the time to blog on them all with such a large family to tend to as well as knitting?
5. Do you have any regrets? (this is just a great question for everyone)

To answer question 1, I am going to just point to this entry I made some months ago on Quiverfull. I’m doing that because question 2 will be a book in and of itself.

2. I have known about Christ all my life, and accepted Him as My Savior as a child. But it was not until I was in my mid-20s that I really began to get to know Him. And only in the last couple of years that I have begun to understand what grace, mercy and love really are. For many years, I read “there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus”, and while my head read the words, my heart did not grasp the meaning. Life in Christ is life in freedom. He loves me. He loves me. He loves me. Yes, even me. With all my failings, and all my sins and all my shortcomings, He loves me. It is His strongest desire to give me life and give it to me more abundantly. It was when I began to understand this, the enormity of it, that I understood that all those promises in the Bible were for me. Not for other people, good people, but for me. Just as I am, right now. And the beauty of it is that even though He loves me just like I am, He loves me too much to leave me that way. I’ll direct you to another post about My Best Friend.

This is not to say that I don’t believe in a literal hell. I do. But I also know God doesn’t want to send us there, and that in fact, He died so we could avoid that. Read that again, and grasp it. That’s the part that took me so long to understand with my heart and not just my head. He DIED so I could live. So often we hear in movies or what-not (no, I’ve never heard it in real life) “I’d die for you”. He really did it. He was “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”. How can I not love Someone who loved me so much? How can I not tell others about that wonderful love?

3. I have so many blogs about so many subjects, because I have a lot interests. I use blogs like some people use notebooks: to organize my thoughts and take notes. When you live with many little people, papers have a way of getting….damaged. My niche blogs are as much for me as they are for readers, with the exception of one that I started at a request from a friend. But even that one I am finding is becoming more for me. I hope it still serves the purpose she had in mind when she asked for it. A couple are ones that reflect things I want to learn more about, and I just record things I learn.

Additionally, I am a teacher, a sharer. It’s just a part of my make-up. It seems egregious to me to have knowledge locked up in my head where it can’t help anyone but me. That’s just selfish! To post about everything that interests me on one blog would simply overwhelm that blog. My solution was to break the content out into different areas so people could find what they are looking for without having to wade through stuff that is irrelevant.

I know many people think that I started those blogs just so I could put opps on them, and I’ll admit that I will probably register all of them with the paid blogging companies eventually. But niche blogs are niche blogs. So far I have 3 narrowly focused blogs registered with PPP and I have taken 0 opps on one and just a handful on the other 3. I don’t stretch those blogs to put opps on them. But if something comes along I think my readers would benefit from, I’d be a fool not to get paid for it, right?

4. Schedule, schedule, schedule. Delegate, delegate, delegate. I try to get all my “work” done during quiet time each day. Somedays it works better than others. I’m woefully behind on everything from school, to chores, to blogging, to networking, to showering, to sleeping. I only get 24 hours a day, in spite of the fact that I have 36 hours worth of stuff planned. I’m working on a way to twist the space-time continuum in a way that better suits my needs, but so far, I’ve not had much success.

5. Not really. There are several things that I wish had turned out differently, but what’s done is done. I’d rather learn my lesson and move on than spend time regretting. I cannot change the past, I can only affect the future. Ok, one. I regret that I can’t spend all day playing with my kids, get all my work done at night, and give up sleep. See number 4.

And that’s my interview. Kat, again, I appreciate so much that you did this for me And, yes I will keep the interview going. So, if you want to be interviewed:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

I’ll take up to 5 commenters.

Do you know how good it feels to be clean? What about if you’ve felt really grubby for quite awhile? I think the only time I have felt dirtier than I felt earlier today was when I was in the army many moons ago, and we would go to “the field” for a couple of weeks at a time. But even then, they’d arrange for hot showers now and again. Not every day of course, because there is much work to be done when you are living that way, but certainly not a week. I was about desperate enough to try a bath in something like this picture, which I found in the Beaufort NC real estate listings. Luckily, it didn’t come to that, I’m no longer grieved at my internet friends who continued to shower mercilessly, and then inform me of it, either. All in all, life is pretty good with hot water.

But, here’s a funny thing. I got so used to heating water on the stove to do the dishes, that when it was time to do them tonight, and the new-to-us dishwasher didn’t fire up, I started to heat the water again. Umm, no. Just turn on the tap, Cass. Oh, the bliss!

And ya’ll this will catch me up!

Rox was the featured blogger on Saturday. That’s right, the one that just passed! She blogs at Dragons and Dreams, and enjoys blogging for the written record it gives her of her life. She grows tulips! And she’s from my home state, too. And she home schools!

Thanks, Colleen for introducing me to a neighbor!