Continuing on with my reflections from having a garage sale and rereading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s  Gift from the Sea I am also struck by how quickly our weather has turned to the cool crisp air of Fall.  It is fall that is the time of slowing down, shedding , preparing for the winter.  Since I am approaching 50 (next year) maybe that’s why I am...

Another busy afternoon in the kitchen.  After a morning of cleaning up computer files and sorting things for the upcoming garage sale, cooking seemed like a good break.  John wanted something light for dinner – soup and salads.  At first thought that seems like it wouldn’t take too much time to put together.  Not so, not so.  One of John’s...

Today I went shopping for the first time for a homecoming dress with my 14 year old daughter, Mary Mac. Yes, my baby has a date to a homecoming dance. What a day! Mary Mac loves to shop. She could spend hours in a mall just trying on clothes. It takes her a long time to make up her mind. I, on the other hand, don’t shop for more than an hour at a time, usually...

met my daughter, Lindsay, at IKEA today to get her the kitchen table she wanted for her birthday. This was my first trip to the massive retail store. IKEA is a Swedish based company. This strikes me as really being out of whack since the Swedish are not mass consumers. I think I wrote about the Swedish concept of “lagom” meaning “enough” or...

When I was growing up people used to stop by the house just to visit. They might stop by in the evening and end up staying for a hour or they might stop on a weekend afternoon and stay for several hours. They might bring something from their garden or just themselves to say hello. In our hustle and bustle world today this really doesn’t happen much. Impromptu...

We are reading this book for our book club at the office. It was written in 1938. I was thinking it was not going to be very good or very relevant to today. Amazingly it was not. Much of what Madame Wu struggles with is very relevant today. She’s looking for purpose. She is weighted down by her responsibilities in the household of more than 60 people. She longs...