The Porch Postscript

I read a quote the other day that made my mind wander: Give until your heart is full. How much giving is that?  Two years ago I started sending happy mail.  Giving away what I made.  Spending my own money on postage.  Daydreaming about the smiles that were happening on the receiving end.  Touting that I was doing this project to make myself happy, and no one else.   The truth?  Two years later and I felt empty.  I felt like I gave and gave.  The end result was most often a hollow Facebook message that says "thanks for the cards."   Not what I imagined would happen.  This was not part of the daydream.  I had visions of pen pals and letters dancing in mailboxes.  All the returned messages weren't hollow, but the heartfelt ones didn't feel like enough.  I didn't feel like I was on the right path.  So.  I quit.  I quit sending happy mail.     This isn't the first time I've felt this kind of empty.  I'm a giver, I give and give and give

Getting personal really wasn't my plan when I started blogging again, but it's just kind of started happening.  More of an evolution if you will.  If I'm going to be true to my heart and mind with my desire to write more, this blog has to grow and expose more of who I am. The Porch Postscript - a place to hang around, sip coffee, chat with a neighbor and enjoy the summer sun, even in the dead of winter.    If I really believe that, then I need to move forward, change my writing style and create more post that are more porch chats and long visits with friends.  I think most of you who are reading this blog are people I know personally in my daily life.  Some of you might be strangers, but new friends are always welcome.  While it's only 5 degrees this morning, pour yourself a cup of coffee and settle into a comfy chair.  Let's get real and be personal here. My claim to fame is being born in Wyoming.  I lived the first 28 years of my life there.  I wear tha

What is a feed reader?  Simple answer - a feed reader is a place to gather and display RSS feeds or web feeds if you will.  Translation - This is one page you can visit daily that will contain all of the blogs you don't want to miss stories from, and it eliminates the need to visit each individual page.  There are dozens of feed readers out there - Feedly, Bloglovin', Feedbin, Flipboard and many others.  There are even extensions for Chrome users to add to your toolbar.  Do some research, experiment, you'll find the one that fits your style and needs.  I'm a Feedly user, more on that later.  Let's talk about why I use a feed reader first. 1. All Your Blogs in One Place I don't know about you, but I don't have the desire, nor the attention span, to click and read dozens of different blog pages.  I follow 53 blogs.  Don't judge.  By putting it all in a feed reader I open one page and read all my blogs in one place. 2.  Full Article Feed Now,

Struggling with: My Weight - Yes, I'm opening that door.  I started this battle, and yes I see it as a battle, in January.  It's  now October and I've yo-yoed my way to a total loss of 7.6 pounds.  Hubby and I are working on this together, and I think many days that's the only thing keeps me going.  I will continue to move through this battle and move toward my goal.  I will also accept that there will be bad days and maybe even bad weeks.   Blogs I'm Loving: The Healthy Maven - I read this post first , which hooked me, and then this morning I read her post about Knowing Your Value .  Loving this blog.  Lots of foodie goodness, but also a good bit of real life too.   Shutterbean - I stated following Tracy when I first started writing my own blog in 2008.  I love her recipes, her photography and her unapologetic writing style.  You know if I've been reading for eight years, and I'm still reading, she's got it going on. Recipes I Need to

Our everyday lives are so full of negative.  We're conditioned to focus on the negative, the can't, the not enough.  Think about it.  You're standing in line at the store, reading the magazine covers - Lose 30 pounds fast, Look younger, Look sexy now.  What does this do?  It paints the picture that you, as you are, isn't enough. The news media spends most of their time focusing the stories that talk about a torn world; if it bleeds, it leads.  There's political mudslinging on the TV and radio.  Don't even get me started on the condescending, mean memes on social media. I've been fighting my own battle in my head, focused too much on how hard it is to make the changes that I need to make to get to where I want to go.  Over the past couple of weeks, the universe has been dropping some subtle messages, which I've been hearing, but not listening too.  These are the quotes that I heard, but silently left standing on their own.   I found the foll

Yesterday's post was pretty intense, so let's lighten things up today.  It's Monday, the day most people like the least.  Let's savor our morning coffee and be thankful for the day.  Spin things in a positive light to set the tone for the week. What I'm Reading: Woman Code - reading small chunks of this at a time.  Too much of it at once is really overwhelming.  (Kindle book) Rising Strong - haven't picked this up in a few day, but it's on my list of things to pick back up this morning.  (Real book) Present Over Perfect - I grabbed the Kindle sample of this and after reading a few pages last night I'll be grabbing the full book. (Kindle book) Curly Girl - Bought this over the weekend.  While I'm not into all of the "bible" steps they talk about I've been meaning to read this one so I can add some curly coping skills to my bag of tricks.  (Kindle book) What's Happening in the Studio: InkTober - Daily drawing in

Let's go way back into the halls of a Junior High School in the wilds of Wyoming.  I took one art class in seventh, or maybe it was eighth grade.  One, yes just one.  I honestly can't tell you why I didn't do more as I went into High School, but I didn't, High School is where I fell in love with photography, a story for another day.  I doodled on the side always but found other ways to express my creativity and left drawing behind. Fast forward to somewhere around two years ago, I picked up this book about zentangling.  I pulled out a sketch pad and dug out a few nice pens from my art stash, along with a fountain pen from Hubby's stash.  While I did do quite a bit of doodling and playing, but never really caught the zentangle fever.  The book ended up on a shelf in my studio.  I was never going to be a zentangle guru.  It did, however, inspire me to start drawing again. Playing with pattern ideas The spark really began to glow when I created the "

Power outages happen at certain times of the year in our part of rural Interior Alaska.  This window into an outage that happened in September of 2016.   This week has been one power outage after another, literally, accompanied by a two-day windstorm that sounded like a runaway freight train. Let's start at 11 pm Tuesday night.   The Hedy dog got us up to go potty, at which time we discovered the power was out.  Plan of action - let dogs out, set cell phone alarm.  No big deal.  Glad the Hedy got us up. Fast forward to 5 am, still no power, really glad we set alarm on phone.  No power, no coffee for Hubby's drive to work.  No power, no morning computer time for me.  No power, no electric dog fence.  The largest problem of all - two cars stuck in the garage.  Yes, there is a manual release, but we aren't to that part of the story yet.  I convince Hubby it's not a big deal, surely they will have the power on soon.  I tell him to just take the truck and get to work, so

Believe it or not, I do really use my DSLR camera, but not as often as I should.  For me it's about shooting with the best camera I have with me, which more often than not is my iPhone.  I do love my DSLR, but I've gotten out of the practice of carrying it daily.  Add in the factor of a 64 GB SD card, that I bought a few years back, and you don't have to download your shots very often.  This morning, after shooting a less than stellar pic of the moon, I decided I should really clear off the card - 216 photos, shot between January 2016 and today.  Here are a few of the shots I rediscovered. Sunrise - 11:50 am - January 6, 2016 Sunrise - Alaska 2016 Hoarfrost - 1:44 pm - January 15, 2016 Hoarfrost - Alaska 2016 Fox Kits - 9:50 am - June 22, 2016 Fox Kits - Alaska 2016 Queen Anne's Lace - 1:52 pm -  July 1, 2016 Queen Anne's Lace - Alaska 2016 Moose Siblings - 11:22 am - July 15, 2016 Moose Siblings - Alaska 2016 Mushrooms in the Woods