Embrace Hope

This may perhaps be one of my mantras for the new year.

Thoughts and a Request

Pictures taken at Sam Houston Jones state park with my new camera. There is still very much a steep learning curve involved in learning to make the camera do what I want it to do. I like much better using it out of doors than I do trying to take indoor candid shots of people. Hopefully I will get better at that with practice. I have been reading the owner's manual and bought a DVD and an extra book on this specific camera. My inner geek is struggling!

I do plan on coming back to my blog and posting on a more regular basis than what I have been doing. I think I am going to at least commit to putting up a new post once a week and see where that leads.

One more thing, if those of you who pray could remember to pray for my son and his aunt, the one he is living with, I would appreciate it. He is at the moment without a job, but has prospects for one after the first of they year. He met a girl earlier who was not the best influence on him and that is about when things started getting rocky again. Anyway, he is at a place of temptation and is a bit stalled at the moment.

We were fairly close to the geese. They are accustomed to people being around so that is why I was able to get such decent shots of them.

She Lost All Her Recipes

A STORY:

She mentioned that she wanted to make fudge, the kind with the marshmallow creme. I told her my mother makes that fudge all the time for Christmas.

She did not say, and I did not ask, why or how she lost all her recipes. I figure when a woman loses all her recipes it's due to a traumatic event. Besides, she was the cashier at the drug store, and I was a customer. No time for life stories on the job, especially in retail, at Christmas-time.

I had another store to walk to and when I finished that I came back to my car and called my mother for the recipe. I wrote it down on the back of my receipt and took it inside to her. She was very excited and mentioned again that she had lost all her recipes. And she was going to go home tonight and make the fudge.

Such a little thing. And yet, I think it made her day.

A CARD:

I did not mail Christmas cards this year. I just never got around to it. Here is what I would have mailed. It's been such a rough year for so many, for so many reasons. And yet, still, there is Hope.

Merry Christmas...

I'm Coming Back! (Hopefully!)

I do want to come back here and start posting again. I am not sure anymore in which direction I will go so please bear with me as I try to regain my footing around here.

I (finally!) got myself a digital SLR camera and I am loving it! It is a bit of a learning curve, getting used to the settings and trying to see what I can do with it, but it has been fun so far. This photo of a cypress tree was taken at our local state park. I love cypress trees. I have more pictures to post later.

My employee of over 16 years (co-owner of the local sporting goods store, yes, I am a sporting goods maven!) died a week ago today. She was a fine Christian woman who influenced my life in many ways. She and her husband both were good influences on a long line of college age employees. Her death was not totally unexpected but it came at such a hard time, right as the holidays are cranking up.

I read somewhere this week that the holidays are often a time when we remember those who will not be with us to celebrate. I know grief makes Christmas hard for many people. And this year has not been an easy one for so many people, for so many reasons. But still, Christmas is a time of hope and light if one has eyes to see.

Chaneling Tim

Tomorrow will make 15 years since my brother died. We were visiting my parents the other day and my mom had his boots out. I think she was seeing if my father or my nephew could wear them and use them but they couldn't so I suppose she will put them back wherever they have been all these years. Seeing them made me miss my brother so much and I just had to put the boots on for a little while. Obviously they were entirely too big, but that was not the point.

I've always said about grief that you do not "get over it" so much as you learn to live with it. We have all learned pretty much to live with it but days like tomorrow and his birthday in January still cause us to pause and remember what might have been. He would have been 50 on this coming birthday.