As some of my faithful readers know, I’ve been going through my house and purging in order to put our house on the market later this spring and move. This month I decided to attack my home office and my beading area, as well as continue to weed out our storage area downstairs. I have…
Inquiring minds want to know, are you a puzzle person? Recently, puzzles have made a re-entry into our life. Although our family always enjoyed puzzles, we had gotten away from doing them. Now, our interest has been sparked once again! We just completed a 1,000 piece puzzle last night and I already have a new…
In my blog post yesterday (I write daily here at The Apples in My Orchard), I wrote about a pair of cardinals that had been visiting our yard. You can check the post out here: Cardinal Story. My poem today focuses on the same pair of birds, just put into a poem. Cardinal Story: A…
I’ve forgotten how nice it is to talk to someone (anyone, really) about my conservation work for monarch butterflies. This morning I got to do just that for half an hour! I cannot tell you much yet, but I was interviewed for an upcoming article by a conservation organization. This was something that just came…
Yesterday, I did something that I’ve been putting off. If you read my blog regularly, you know we’ve been cleaning out in anticipation of moving later this year. Sometimes cleaning out is easy. You look at something and think, why did I keep that piece of sh_t? Or, sometimes cleaning out is hard. We all…
It’s Saturday morning and we’re sitting around talking about our cadaver lab experiences. What else do you do on a Saturday?! My husband had this experience in medical school. Our son visited such a lab in high school for his anatomy class. I, while a nursing student, had to dissect cats, frogs, and sheep eyeballs…
It seems I’ve been all over the place this week, starting it in Iowa four hours from my home and ending it at our cabin, back home, and then three hours in the other direction to our cabin. It’s a snowy day here in the upper midwest. There’s a lot you can notice when you…
Lately, I need to be reading an enjoyable book. It provides me a few minutes of downtime during busy days and a few minutes to wind down at the end of the day, as well. I’ve always been a reader but during the years I had a demanding career as well as the time we…
Obviously, there’s enough here to bring us back three times since 2009. The first time we stayed we were “feeling our way along” and our three boys were young at the time. Their age and worries about their safety limited some of our activities but we still had the chance to do some special things….
This week I am vacationing on the Hawaiian Island of Maui. It is our fourth visit to the Hawaiian Islands and our third to the island of Maui. This vacation was planned quickly, less than two and a half months ago, but came together despite the fast timing. Our previous visits have taken six months…