Three end of season parties today. A birthday party yesterday. A lot of baking happening. Alannah inspires me. It's funny because she doesn't eat grains much as a rule, nor sugar. It's truly the creative process she loves. Who needs Hostess? No one in this house!
On Letting Go
author unknown
To "let go" does not mean to stop caring.
It means I can't do it for someone else.
To "let go" is not to cut myself off.
It's the realization that I can't control another.
To "let go" is to admit powerlessness,
which means the outcome is not in my hands.
To "let go" is not to try to change or blame another.
It's to make the most of myself.
To "let go" is not to care for, but to care about.
To "let go" is not to fix, but to be supportive.
To "let go" is not to judge, but to allow another to be a human being.
To "let go" is not to be in the middle, arranging all the outcomes,
but to allow others to affect their own destinies.
To "let go" is not to deny, but to accept.
To "let go" is not to nag, scold, or argue,
but instead to search out my own shortcomings and correct them.
To "let go" is not to adjust everything to my desires,
but to take each day as it comes and cherish myself in it.
To "let go" is not to regret the past, but to grow and live for the future.
To "let go" is to fear less and to love more.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
Anne of Green Gables
Moira and have had a big week. Dinner for 30 on Monday. Yep. Thirty. Alannah flew to Germany early Tuesday. There was a co-op class, several football practices and games, and a trip to a haunted house. There were cookies and cupcakes made, some tiny girl dress up days.
And there were pictures, because the season is changing and so is my daughter. Moira, working diligently through regular schoolwork as well as delving into a worldview class, trying to master the new steps at the new dance studio, and now training for a 10k. Seems like more than ample reason for some spoiling, to celebrate who she is right now. : )
It worked.
Turns out the phone wiring in the farmhouse needed to be reconfigured, so that was done today. And here I am, images virtually flying onto the screen. I hardly know where to begin. So much has happened. Since we have been all about apples lately, and because these make me smile, I am sharing the "pretty" orchard pictures of the little girls who daily want to gather more into their baskets and beg big boys to take them over to the trees.
These were taken earlier in the season before the cold set in. Like I said, so much has happened. It will be fun to catch up.
A cloudy day in Ely. First stop, the cathedral.
Right this way…
Summer made a late appearance in England this year we are told. When we arrived last month it was so cold we had to turn the radiators on the first night due to the damp chill that had settled into the old, empty house. While our American friends were sweltering, we were carrying jackets and umbrellas. The word on the street was that summer was over.
They spoke too soon. : )
This has been the second weekend of near perfect summer weather. It is quite hot for Northern Europe but just right for us transplants. We have been outdoors for most of it, coming in reluctantly when dark falls, children dropping into bed sunkissed and thoroughly exhausted.
I felt a little bit guilty not working on the last bit of sorting and shelving. But not enough to come inside. The rain will fall soon enough. You only get so many opportunities to sift the sand together. They won't always squeal when the waves chase them up the shore after all.
A big project around here lately has been scanning all the shoeboxes of old pictures. There were a lot of them. I am ashamed to say we are just now doing this. SO many disasters could have befallen them over the years. I shudder to think. 15 houses, 10 babies, 5 states, a couple countries, and a fair number of miscellaneous crises in the intervening years kept me preoccupied. Being the poster child for biting off more than I could chew didn't help either. Which brings us to date and saddled with all these vulnerable pictures.
My solution was to pay the 12 yr old to sit here and scan pictures while watching netflix. Brilliant. <g> He was happy as a lark and more than qualified to move pictures from box, to scanner bed, to another box. A couple movies and several hundred pictures later we are nearly done. If you find the prospect daunting I suggest tapping your young people. No willing workers? There are national scanning services and many local printers or photography shops will do the job as well.
I am sharing some links with tips for scanning your old photos here and here Basically you want to be sure your scanner is set to 'photo' vs document and at 300dpi.
When you are done scanning consider saving copies of the files to an external hard drive. Cpu's fail. Hard drives fail. One copy is unwise.
And don't forget the whole point of having these pictures is that they are part of your story. Tell it. The most important book you will ever write is the one you write for your family. What happened? When? Where? and more importantly – how did you feel about that? This is what I am working on now.
It's ok to document random memories out of 'order'. If they come to mind when you see an old picture, write it down. If you don't have photoshop, start a photobook at Shutterfly and drag an old photo over to your project here and there as the mood strikes. They keep your stuff saved a long time. (another back up)
Starry Sky Journal 