Monthly Archives: February 2016

Every month I have been setting a handful of goals for myself for the month.  I share these on Listing Lists.

Things I’m Working On In February, is where I shared my February goals.  Take a moment to go read over my goals.  I’ll wait.

Now, here is how well I fared on them:

1.  I did cook some this month.  I did not make any Candied Orange Peels.  I did bake more bread.  I made cupcakes from scratch, that didn’t turn out so well.  And I make chocolate chip cookies that were EXCELLENT.  (and they are also gone.  lol)
2. I did not start my new blog.  I can’t settle on a name for it.  The name I really wanted (Simple Happy Home).  I’m also playing with the idea of buying some hosting and trying a wordpress blog to see if the earning potential is any higher.
3.   I didn’t do any more cleaning of my desk drawers.  In fact, the top of my desk is a hot mess, an avalanche just waiting to happen.On the bright side, none of the drawers I already cleaned have gotten any new junk thrown in them, so they are still clean.
4. Likewise I didn’t touch my bookshelves at all.  And the mess is overflowing off of my book  shelf onto the tiny shelf in front of it that we put our library books (and dvds) on to keep them separate from the rest of our books.
5.   I also did not get anything listed in my etsy shop.Every time I would think about sitting down to make something, those horrible little critics in my head started their “nobody is going to buy this” chatter.  So I never did make anything to list.

So, there you go, what happened with my “To Do”  list for February.

I’m a little sad that I only accomplished 1 out of 5 goals this past month.

Keep your eyes peeled for a list of goals for March on Listing Lists

(image used from morguefile.com.)

Has your whole life become a series of wants and wishes?

Image used from morguefile.com

When I was a child we used to say that if you made a wish and blew on a dandelion puff that the wish would come true if you could blow all of the seeds off with one breath.

Also, any unique old bottles found had the sweet promise of the possibility of a genie inside.

Wish. Want.  Dream.

All of my life I have been chasing wishes.

People often say that if you want it hard enough and work hard enough that you can make your own dreams come true.  I tend to disagree.

But maybe that is just because I’m a failure at life.

Other people give rousing speeches about how they started at the bottom.  Now they are famous actors, actresses, sports stars with multiples mansions and holiday homes in Europe.

I started at the bottom and have barely pulled myself halfway out of the hole that life plopped me into.

*sigh*

Can you tell I’m not in a place of light and sunshine tonight?

There are so many physical things I want.  So many things, less physical, that I wish were different in my life.

And what those two things have in common is that they will never become mine.  Those wants and those wishes are just the daydreams of a poor child who still blows on dandelion puffs and rubs bottles.

Life is what you make of it, people say.

Well, you can hand someone a pile of poo and tell them to make a chocolate pie with it, and the result might look like chocolate, but if you smell it or taste it you know exactly what you get.

Or, as my granny used to tell me, “Wish in one hand and spit in the other, see which one gets full first.”

Alice In Wonderland Art Poster Available on Amazon

Today I was thinking about how so many children today seem to have lost their sense of wonder.

The thought came to me as I was reading Go Set a Watchman today.  In a flashback in the novel a young Scout is afraid she is pregnant.

At her age in this novel children today would have no fear that a tongue kiss would make them pregnant, because they would know all about how babies are created.

But that is not the only place where wonderment is missing.

I will show my son things I find in nature.  I have shown him a feather, an interesting rock, the shell of a cicada left behind when it molted.  To me, at his age (he is six) those were amazing treasures.

He did briefly collect red leaves in a box, but even grew out of that.

His wonder is in the screen.  Right now he is obsessed with Minecraft.

Last night his dad had the TV and he couldn’t play.  He was wandering around huffy and puffy.  I asked him what was wrong he said, “I don’t know anything to do!”

“Boy!” I told him, “You have a whole room full of toys back there, don’t tell me you don’t have anything to do.”

Which is not to say that I didn’t say the same thing when I was his age.  I was bored plenty. But I didn’t have cable tv.  I didn’t have video games.  I didn’t have cartoons at my fingertips, or a whole room of gizmos and gadgets.  I had a few toys, a few books, and the whole wide world outside.

As an adult I want to go back to childhood.

I look at the world through a glass darkly.  I want to be able to look at it through the looking glass again instead.

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Image in this post is a poster from amazon.com.  Click it if you think you’d like to purchase it!