One of my goals this year is to smile more, and I’ve been sharing quotes and thoughts about smiling every so often.
Today, I stumbled across this little video. This is what love is and it made me cry and smile all at once.
P.S I don’t know much about operation: smile itself, and don’t necessarily endorse it as a valid charity out of lack of experience and knowledge, but the heart behind this video is beautiful and well worth the time it takes to watch.
+ sleeping in. It felt luxurious
+ starting to write up a post about my first experience with no knead bread, but getting sidetracked with most of the following:
+ discovering that some of the design techniques I’m only just mastering are already going out of date. It’s the nature of the business.
+ reading relative mountain loads of techy articles about <*div> based sites and liquid layouts; I think my mind expanded a good deal, in spite of feeling like at least 3/4ths of of it zipped right over my head. Discovering later, I actually did know what they meant most of the time, just not what they said. Why must everyone use such technical terms for everything?
+ talking recipes with a sister and adding another successful crock pot experiment to my list
+ (almost) finishing a book
+ having fun with creating ylcf graphics, and deciding that I’d better make myself a calendar…or something, if I ever plan on keeping things straight.
+ cooking up supper
Now, I get to snuggle with my sweetie and call it a night. <3
I am a simple, ordinary kind of girl. There are a lot of things in this life that honestly, I don’t really “get”. Sometimes I think I fumble through the motions, trying to not look as awkward as I feel, trying to find my place and where I fit in this world.
I don’t have a lot of big dreams, big plans for the future, or for how I want the rest of my life to play out. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps a part of me has never grown up—a part of me that just wishes that life was as uncomplicated as it was when I use to spend my days hard at work in the little garden I made all by myself, or climbing into my trees to read a book and to watch the birds, or anything except face the politics and confusion of a normal day “out in the working world.”
I don’t know much about how it is going to all play out, or if the dreams I do have will ever be a reality.
All I know is that I want to live this one life that I have in such a way that I don’t miss any of these real moments. All I know is that when I get to the end of my life, of this year, to the end of today, I want to have taken time, no matter what I am, to truly delight the things that in my simple days He has seen fit to give me.
If these days are easy or hard, LORD, just teach me to not just live, but find delight in your perfect plan for my life.
written for five minute friday
I suppose one can’t help but think of books when they wake up looking at a little pile beside the bed, and when there’s books in just about every room of the house. (It helps to have a tiny house, and lots of books, of course.)
But more than because of the pile of books beside my bed, or all the books in my house, I’m thinking about books because March is almost here.March brings spring time and garden planting. It brings a lot of family birthdays and more importantly, our third anniversary!
It also brings YLCF’s 2012 edition of the March of Books.
It so happens that the March of Books is pretty much my favorite yearly event that we host on YLCF, and as we’ve been talking about it this year, I’ve gotten more and more excited about all the amazing book reviews, link up opportunities and the hordes of giveaways that are planned for this month of March. If you love books, what could be more exciting than a chance to get one for free? Nothing that I can think of, anyway.
What I really love, though, is reading about what everyone else is reading. If you’ve been meaning to finish up a stack of books, meaning to write some book reviews on new and old favorites, join us in making March the month of books on your blog, too!
And now, I’d better get reading!
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile…If you just smile.
even when it is just exhaustion and a long to do list that make you feel a touch blue, there’s more power to those smiles than we can ever really know until we get to the end of the day and find that it was indeed a beautiful day.
In the middle of what felt like the end of all that I had hoped for, He asked me to believe that the broken pieces could one day be a masterpiece.
When my plans fail, He reminds me that I know His plans are perfect.
When the fears and unknowns of the future feel overwhelming and dark, He asks me trust that He is still Jehovah Jireh.
When I think I need answers, when I think that I must know it all know, He asks me to wait. To trust.
Trust or fear-the choice is mine.
But patiently and gently, using the moments of this life is an opportunity to teach me what it means to really trust Him.
I grew up using the crockpot quite a bit—to keep things warm and to cook beans in. It was usually our weekend helper, as we drove a good hour to church, and with hungry company in tow, everyone was usually famished when we got home. Somehow, I never really thought of using it for much else, until I saw a cookbook about vegetarian slow cooker recipes.
Since getting married, I started experimenting a lot more with my crock pot (or is it slow cooker?), and have discovered how useful it is, particularly for busy days and when I’m working a lot!
Well, the other day I heard of Paelle for the first time. (A long line in walmart + a cooking magazine=random ideas) It wasn’t a vegetarian recipe, but it sounded basic, and I decided to try it in the crockpot. I didn’t have a pen, but when I got home a few google searches provided me with several to base it on, and as a whole, the experiment was a success. My rice didn’t stay together very well (Basmanti Natural White rice…which I think I stirred a few too many times!), but it tasted very yummy!
Since rice on the stove is usually a 2:1 ratio of water and rice for white and 3:1 for brown, I estimated my liquids based on that, and then added just a touch more for safety.
Here’s approximately what I did. Measurements are all estimates, but are close!
1-2 cups of water (or liquid from canned veggies, if you use instead of fresh)
1 cu rice
1 small onion, minced
2 cups diced, canned tomatoes (I love home canned, but a can of store tomatoes would be just fine)
Veggies of your choice: bell pepper, green beans, asparagus, summer squash! You can use fresh, or canned, or frozen…whatever you have! :) If using canned, save the liquid and use in place of the water.
Diced artichoke hearts (optional-but yummy!)
1 tbs olive oil (optional-but it adds a yummy flavor)
garlic
bay leaf
salt
sprinkle of crushed red pepper
and a tiny bit of basil or Italian seasonings, to taste
If you want to add some protein, add some dark red kidney beans (precooked) or some seitan or even tofu.
Dump everything into the crock pot. Stir and let it cook for about 4-6 hours (depending on how soft you want everything).
If you followed all that and understood, good for you. This is a fairly good example of how I cook a lot of times: I look in the cupboard and start putting things in the pot.
So… Feel free to be creative! Change it up. Add different things. Vary the seasonings. Cook it on the stove top. Cooking doesn’t have to be complicated and rules are always a little bendable, or entirely optional. I think that is one of the reasons why I like it as much as I do.
P.S I meant to snap a picture, but discovered dead batteries in the camera and no charger in sight. Next time, I reslove to do better!
Well, here we are. It is time for our first checkpoint of Reading Challenge 2012!
I’ve been excited to get comments and emails from different ones, sharing reading goals and I’m sure that 2012 is going to be another great year for reading.
According to my goodreads reading challenge widget, I’m ahead a little in my reading. The truth is, I’m pretty much right on track. I only had two chapters left in Beneath the Lilacs, a book I started in 2011, and so it doesn’t exactly count. I’ll be reviewing Relentless very soon. It has been a good, challenging sort of book, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about it!
While my completed book list doesn’t exactly reflect it yet, it has been a great reading month for me! I currently have no less than four books in progress and I should be finishing one this weekend. It is a book from my childhood that my parents brought over with them when they visited us at Christmas time, and I’m having fun reliving some of the happy days I spent reading as a child. Books have always been like friends to me.
Right now my reading stack is like a rainbow of categories: Semi Fiction (children’s book), Self Improvement ( a book on writing) and Spiritual Encouragement (about never giving up). I also have a history of hymns in there. This is a pretty good example of what my stack often looks like. I like reading more than one book at a time because it gives me enough variety to choose from that I’m never lacking for just the right book to fill the various moments of my life with. If one category is too light, or too heavy, there’s always something else to choose from. My mom always said I was a little crazy, but I guess that’s just the way I read.
By the way, I am sure I am not the only one here who reads more than one book at a time. If you are one of those people, tell me why you read several books at a time.
There is one thing, though, that I’m particularly excited about, and that much of February revolves around for me, and that is YLCF’s upcoming March of Books! It is probably my favorite event on Young Ladies Christian Fellowship, and the inside scoop is it is going to be one of the best this year! You can certainly expect to be hearing a lot more about that in the days ahead.
But now, it is your turn! What have you read this month? You can leave a comment or write a post and link up below. I’m looking forward to hearing all about it!
As always, if you are reading about this for the first time, and would like to join, check out some of the guidelines here and drop me a note. It is never too late to jump in.
I want my life to be filled with what is real.
It is too easy to try to mold and shape my life and my circumstances to fit the pictures in my head and the ways I want my life to look. It is too easy to try to get ahead of God and convince myself that He opened doors, and really believe it, even though it was my own persistence and impatience that forced them open before His time.
It is too easy to focus on what isn’t and to loose what is.
And when plans fail, and things break—and they always do eventually—, it hurts. If I could only learn to accept what is real, and let God move the pieces to complete the picture of my life.
“How often we may understand a little of His plan, only to rush His time, selfishly bringing pain and needless sorrows to others and ourselves at some point to mar the beauty of the good thing that He was doing.”
Lord, may I only want what is your reality, what is true, for my life, even if it means the failure of my most cherished hopes and dreams.
written for five minute friday
The birds have been singing spring songs for a few weeks now. Our grass is turning much more green again. I didn’t expect to see the daffodils blossoming already! It is not even February yet.
But there they were, looking as much like sunshine as they always do. I know I say it every year, but I love these first blossoms of spring, and each discovery is like finding another gift, just for me.
This morning, after taking unusually long to start the car, Scott came in with a bouquet for me. Now, even though the sun is hiding behind some rather rainy-looking clouds (oh, wait—there’s laundry still on the line!) we have sunshine sitting on our table.
How could this not be a beautiful day?
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