Make The Best Of It…

Snuggle up.. What are you Thankful For?

Want something fun to do today, stay out of the cold, find a snuggle blanket, something warm to drink, and get out the picture book’s. Many times I often wonder, where all of my school friends are at today.. Some times I can locate them on FB, but some are not. Some times I can look back at old pictures and realize that, life was good.. Grateful that pictures can create memories, of past time experiences, good and bad. I believe that every one has some one special that comes into their life’s, maybe to stay awhile, and maybe just passing through.. SO much I have learned from many of them. Pictures always seem to bring me back to that time, was it something I needed to learn at that time, or was it a time that I could reach out and touch some else’s life!! Never the less, I love the pictures that can make me LOL, or the ones that remind me of the love someone shared with me.. Grateful today for all the experiences I have had through out my life… Some times just making time for yourself, being alone, helps you to become more comfortable just being with you. So many times I see other’s that struggle with being alone. I use to be that way. Now as I get older the more I want to just be alone…

Reading a great book, can be so relaxing.. Have you ever just snuggled up in a blanket all day, and read an entire book? Well I have. Maybe not as often as I could have, but it sure sounds like a relaxing way to get your mind off your troubles, read about someone else’s.. LOL Just kidding… One of my most

favorite author’s would be Anita Stansfield. her books are so hard to put down… Now she is one of my addiction’s. Look her up… Have a super weekend, enjoy the ride…

 

 

What are you Thankful for?… Julie

What It Feels Like to Stop Getting Noticed

A few months ago, I spent an afternoon helping out an art dealer friend at a print fair. At a table in front of his display, I sat on one side of him while his assistant sat on the other; we greeted prospective buyers as they walked by. “Hi there!” I would say with warmth and (what I thought was) a touch of modest charm when I saw one coming. Time and again, from the men, I got a limp, dismissive “hi” in response, occasionally a nod. It wasn’t the Whistlers or the Chagalls that were diverting the art lovers’ attention; it was my friend’s lovely assistant. She wasn’t flashy or glamorous; but she had a smooth, milky, 20-something complexion and the sweet, expectant, wide-eyed look of youth. Thirty years ago, I might have been her.

Today, however, I’m 58 and I look it, by which I mean that I haven’t had any work done to make me appear younger. I’m trying to get down with the aging thing, to accept it—at least till I’ve decided that I can’t. Almost every morning I discover some other small reminder that I am growing older: an age spot, another wrinkle or wisp of gray in my (thinning) brows.

If you’re going through this, you already know that watching your face mature is not the most gratifying spectator sport—because no matter how constantly or enthusiastically you root for the home team, eventually age will win the game. Which is a good way to think about it, because the bottom line is that the process of aging involves a certain amount of loss. And what I discovered at that art fair is that if you have benefited from the currency of your looks, when that currency loses its value, you can end up feeling pretty bankrupt. Entering a room of mixed company—a meeting, a party—or walking down a crowded street, I’ve learned to expect that I’ll attract a little attention. I don’t mean that people stop in their tracks, open-mouthed, and stare (as they have when I’ve walked down the street with my 6 2, striking young niece), but I’ve been banking on appreciative glances for a long time. They make me feel pretty, which makes me feel happy. Not in the way, certainly, that motherhood has made me happy, or my work, but there is a small feeling of satisfaction attached to receiving these looks; it’s as if, at least on the face of it, I know how to do this female thing well.

So I guess it shouldn’t have been shocking to me how difficult it was to be distinctly ignored. I hadn’t been aware that the glances I’d been accustomed to had been falling off. That afternoon, I felt as if I had been stripped of all color and was the only gray-and-white figure in a richly tinted painting. I was Marion Kerby, one of the ghosts in Topper, all dressed up and nowhere to…be seen.

A New Way to See Yourself

There’s a moment when a friendship is deepening that a face changes before your eyes. It feels like a kind of shimmer, as if a veil has dropped away, and you can suddenly see the face behind the face of the person you’re getting to know. If you spoke a language like French, it would be the moment you moved from formal to familiar, from vous to tu. Whatever language you speak, it’s the moment when the person before you, and the connection between you, becomes more real.

It’s a moment I’ve always loved. But the sad thing is, I can’t seem to get to it with myself. No matter how often I’ve seen my own face in the mirror or in photographs, I always approach it with the gaze of a stranger—a suspicious stranger. Or, worse, I approach it from the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, as if in the very moment when a close connection shatters. It’s the sort of moment one writer so chillingly captured in a passage I read years ago and have never forgotten: A man is having tea with the woman he has passionately loved for quite some time. She lifts a teacup to her lips, makes a slight smacking sound—and suddenly he finds her unbearably coarse and common, drained of any redeemable features. There’s something particularly bitter about such moments, a quality of betrayal: Someone for whom we had such hopes has turned into an object of disgust. Isn’t it true that, on really bad days—and perhaps especially as we get older—many of us look at ourselves this way?

Just the other day, I was having a cup of tea with a friend when I looked up and noticed a photograph of me on her kitchen bulletin board. The moment I saw it, I could feel myself recoil. It’s a photograph in which I am outside in the full sun, my eyes crinkled tight and my cheeks about to burst in a fit of laughter.

“Why on earth do you have to display that hideous picture of me?” I asked. “It makes me look like a squirrel with mumps.”

Irrational as it was, I actually did feel as though she must have put the photograph there with the intention of humiliating me.

“It isn’t hideous,” she said—and now it was her turn to sound hurt. “When you laugh, you have a way of losing yourself in the laughter. And that’s something I’ve always loved about you.”

Her words made me see something I’d never seen before. I saw that, in blurting out my dislike for the photograph, I had rejected a gesture of affection: as though I’d tossed away a gift, or turned up my nose at a gracious invitation. Even more than that, I had invalidated the moment we’d long ago passed through together, the moment our friendship deepened, when the social veil dropped and our connection became more real.

Suddenly it struck me that several of my close friends kept, somewhere in their houses, an image of me dissolving in laughter. I’ve always preferred a rather wistful, pensive image of myself. Now, for the first time, I let it sink in that maybe my friends appreciated something about me that didn’t penetrate my self-critical radar. As I’ve begun to ask other women about their ability to see themselves, I’ve heard the sound of this “if only” again and again. Just the other day, I heard it in my aunt’s voice when I showed her the photograph of herself that I had come across in a box of old treasures. “Gosh, I was pretty then,” she said. She and I looked a few moments at the long wavy hair and dark doe eyes of the young woman she had been—and then she thrust the photograph back in the box. “I really had no idea. My three best friends were classic beauties, and I always compared myself with them.”  Find article here

Wealth

“Wealth is neither money nor gold. Nor is it knowing important people or being highly intelligent or having ambition or thinking positive thoughts. If wealth were any of these things, lots of my mentally impoverished critics would be rich and happy, instead of poverty stricken and bitter. So if wealth is none of those things, what is it?

The answer is value, accumulated value.