Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s turned out to be a busier week than I thought it would be at the beginning. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Mother’s Day Eve dinner. We don’t like to eat in restaurants on Mother’s Day because it is so crowded, so Jason and Mittu took us out to eat Saturday night. I think that may be the first time they’ve ever done that, so that was a treat in many ways.

2. Mother’s Day. Traditionally Jim and the kids have worked together to prepare lunch on Mother’s Day after church, and they did so again this year. It’s lovely to come home from church and have nothing to do.

I enjoyed the thoughtful gifts and cards and time with the family together (though Jeremy was there via FaceTime, it’s still nice he can be a part of it.)

Fun with Jesse.

3. Getting caught up on the housework. That may seem like an odd one. The last couple of weeks had been kind of a whirlwind, and I was heartily ashamed of the dust accumulated on horizontal surfaces. Housework isn’t necessarily my favorite thing to do, though I don’t mind it as much once I get started, and I do love the results. It felt good to get caught up — well, with the major tasks, at least. There’s always something more that can be done around the house.

4. Well-used leftovers. I don’t always plan for leftovers carefully and hate when I end up throwing them out when they’ve gotten old. Casseroles I usually just reheat for lunch, but some other things get neglected. We had had boneless pork chops leftover one night, more than I would probably use for lunches, so I chopped up the leftovers into a stir-fry dinner another night that was really good, if I do say so myself. Then we had hamburger buns, potato salad, and baked beans leftover from the Mother’s Day lunch, so I made Sloppy Joes last night to use them up.

5. Scoring a great deal. Jesse is going to a friend’s Junior-Senior banquet and wanted to find a shirt to coordinate with her dress, which was various shades of brown. He has a black suit, so we were thinking a brown shirt and then a tie that had black and brown in it to tie them together. We couldn’t find either of those. He suggested a new suit, and though he could probably use one, I wasn’t ready to lay out the cash for that, especially without talking to Jim first. But we walked over to where the suits were, looked at the clearance rack, found some suit coats, marked $25 and $36, found one he really liked, and when he tried it on, we discovered it was marked down to $15, originally $120. I could have done a happy dance right there in the store. Then we found some dress slacks on sale for $25 and a tie for $8. And he really, really likes it, so maybe he will wear it for more than those occasions when he “has” to wear a suit.

Update: Now that the banquet is over, here is a picture:

So, that’s my week. How was yours?

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been rather a heavy week here, as friends on several fronts are facing various battles. In our old church in SC, one friend discovered she had thyroid cancer and is facing surgery, another had a massive heart attack, and one of the star athletes from the school there died unexpectedly. In our own family, my nephew that I mentioned a few weeks ago as having multiple tumors and undergoing massive amounts of chemotherapy discovered a new “knot.” It’s hard to fathom that some new tumor could spring up with all the chemo he has had, so perhaps it’s something else. They can’t see the doctor til next week.

In the midst of all the heaviness, God has placed some bright spots:

1. Faith, hope, and grace. I’m so thankful that when we believe on Jesus Christ as our Savior, we have the surety of heaven, even though it is still painful to be separated from loved ones through death. It would be unbearable otherwise. And the grace God gives to endure as we undergo hardships is priceless.

2. Facebook has been great for disseminating news to large communities of people at once and for keeping up with what’s going on. Since we’ve moved, I probably would not have heard of some of these issues for a long time, if at all, without Facebook. It’s a blessing to be able to keep informed and to pray as soon as possible for each one.

3. Camaraderie. Jim’s first day back at work after his eye surgery, he faced this:

4. Less rain than expected. When I looked at my weather app on my phone at the beginning of the week, it showed not just rain but thunderstorms almost every day. Thankfully we haven’t had nearly as much as predicted, and so far it’s been mostly gentle rain rather than storms.

5. A good helper. I feel for Jesse being the only son left at home sometimes, but he has been a great help as Jim is still not supposed to do any lifting or straining. He just spent his first morning of summer break cutting the grass. He changed his first flat tire last Saturday – I had meant to mention that as a fave and forgot, that it went flat in the garage and not while I was driving.

Happy Friday!

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been…a somewhat stressful week, actually. As regular readers hear have already heard, my husband had a detached retina earlier this week and had to have surgery on it. My head was spinning with the coming and going to different doctors’ offices for three days in a row. Things have been a bit more peaceful the latter part of the week. We won’t know for about three weeks how much vision has been restored, but we’re hoping for the best. The highest highlight of the week was God’s peace and help during Jim’s surgery, as well as many expressions of people caring and praying. Here are a few others:

1. A church ladies’ fellowship at a restaurant in town. We only have them about once a quarter, and I had missed the Christmas one. It’s easy to skip these, especially when life is busy and hectic, but I do always enjoy them when I get there. The testimonies were a special blessing.

2. Chocolate pie. I had planned to get dessert to take home at the restaurant after the fellowship, but they had closed and were just waiting on us to get done. I had really been set for a piece of chocolate pie, so I stopped at a store on the way home and bought one to share with the family.

3. At-home visits. Our church started an at-home ministry a few months ago to encourage and coordinate visiting some of the church members who can’t make it out very often, and my mother-in-law is on the list of those to visit. They took the Sunday night church service to divide the whole congregation into groups to go visit the various at-home members. They had done this at Christmas and decided it would be a good idea to do it through the year. We had about ten people go to see Jim’s mom, and not only was she blessed by the singing, but another lady in the room sang along as well, and many staff and residents stopped by to listen.

4. Finishing the cabinet for my sewing/craft room.

5. Talking with an old friend of my mother-in-law’s on the phone last night. She’s a dear lady: she and my m-i-l have been friends since childhood. It was good to catch up with her.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been another very pleasant week! I know in a month or two it will be so hot I’ll be parked in front of the AC as much as possible, and I see several friends online have mentioned snow, so I am very much enjoying and soaking up these nice spring days. Here are some of my favorite parts of this week:

1. My husband’s help with a couple of projects. I was trying to spray paint something (pictures next week when we get it put together! ) I see all these DIY projects online where people have remade something by spray painting. It’s as simple as pointing the can and pressing the button, right? Wrong, at least for me: drips, spatters, puddles, and uneven coverage had me pretty frustrated, and then trying to correct those caused worse problems. My husband came home in the middle of all that and showed me how to sand off some of the problems and then how to use the spray can. I had been holding the button down continuously: he took short, quick back-and-forth strokes. Numerous coats covered up the imperfections of the first one. He pretty much finished it up for me. Then I wanted to plant a row of white petunias in front of my pink rose bushes. Toiling away with my little trowel wasn’t getting me very far: the ground was way too hard there. I asked him if he’d break the ground up for me, and he did and helped me plant the flowers as well. I don’t know what he had originally planned for his Saturday, but I’m grateful he willingly gave a few hours to rescue me.

2. Blooms. I mentioned a week or two ago putting new flowers in this planter, but they weren’t blooming when I took a picture. They’re filling out nicely now.

We discovered a couple of rogue purple petunias in with the white ones.

We even have some rose buds!

(BTW, if anyone knows what those white spots are on the rose leaves or what to do about them, I’d love to hear it.)

3. Discovering Mitford music. I’ve been revisiting Jan Karon‘s Mitford series via audiobook, and I was poking around her site and enjoying the music when I saw at the bottom of the page “Music courtesy Bill Leslie, www.billleslie.com.” I clicked over and discovered A Midnight Clear: Christmas in Mitford, complete with a Mitford Carol and a song for Father Tim and Uncle Billy, and promptly bought the whole album with an iTunes gift card from Christmas!

4. Quick bake cookies. I love those Toll House already-made, just break apart and bake cookies some times. It gives each of us some home-made tasting cookies quickly without having a whole regular batch around the house to tempt us. They’re not quite as good as made-from-scratch, but they’re close.

5. Found treasure. I’ve been looking for curtain fabric for the sewing/craft room, and had a certain color combination in mind. I’ve seen it before, but evidently they’ve stopped making it — I haven’t been able to find anything I liked in various fabric stores or online. I looked through some fabric I’ve kept in our shed, and voila, found something I think will work perfectly.

Happy Friday!

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been another lovely spring week here: we had a bit of rain, but the temperatures have been just perfect, and more and more things are blooming. Such a respite between winter and summer! Here are some other favorites parts of the week:

1. Hanging plants and replanted pots. We got them a little earlier than usual.

Lowes had these all together in one pot, so it was handy to just transfer it all over. It has some pink and blue flowers, too, though I happened to catch them at a moment when they’re not blooming.

2. Cleaned patio. Because we live in a humid area and had a lot of rain, we had a lot of mold and just general crud, I think, on the patio out back. We hadn’t been out there much all winter, but I wanted it cleaned up before we started doing much outside. My dear hard-working husband pressure-washed and then bleached it last Saturday, and it looks so enormously better.

3. New shoes. I have such a hard time finding shoes I like that fit well and don’t cost an arm and a leg. My favorite “buy one, get one free” place has gone to “buy one, get one half off,” but I found a few pairs and a new cute purse, too. An added bonus: for various reasons I haven’t been able to wear sandals since having TM: something about my muscle tone or something caused them to slip around on my feet. But I’ve missed them during the summer as my feet get so hot. I found some that seemed to work really well in the store: hope they continue to!

I realized later that a purse with a pattern is not going to be as versatile as the generic all-black one I bought it to replace…but it is too cute not to keep.

4. A Josh Groban concert. No, not live, but on Live From Lincoln Center on the PBS station. I don’t like just every little thing he sings, but he has such a gorgeous voice with quite a range. I didn’t know until I turned the concert on that he’s one of my husband’s least favorite singers, but he indulged me (major points for hubby there. )

5. Sorting and organizing. I got my bookshelves in good shape when we moved 2 1/2 years ago, but I had accumulated more, so I had s few shelves with double rows. We put a small bookcase in our bedroom, so I put a couple of categories of books in there, and now there is space for everything and they’re more organized. Plus some things are finally coming together for my sewing/craft room, and I got to do some organizing in there that felt really good.

I almost listed a funeral. That sounds odd to say…I don’t like funerals per se and hate death, but funerals can be very good for putting things in perspective. I mentioned here that someone I didn’t know terribly well but had interacted with and respected online, a young mom of five, had passed away, and the camp ministry her husband worked for had the recorded service online for those who could not attend. It was a comfort and a blessing in many ways.

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It has been a delightfully springy week. Here are some of the best parts:

1. Glorious spring weather, not too warm or cool. So refreshing.

2. Blooming trees and greening lawns and hills. It’s so good to see color come back to nature.

3. Row boats. The route to my mother-in-law’s place passes a lake and part of a river, which are often beautiful to look at anyway, but this time of year there are rowboats scattered throughout it. UT and other schools use it for training and meets. It’s kind of funny to see the rowers working hard at it and the coach skimming along in a motor boat with a megaphone. It all looks very peaceful, though I am sure it is a lot of hard work. I’ve been wanting to stop and take a picture, but haven’t yet.

4. The Wilds Ministry Team. The Wilds is a Christian camp in NC where all of my kids have spent summers. Besides the camp ministry they publish beautiful music. They have recently formed a ministry team that travels around churches, and we had them at ours last week and very much enjoyed them.

5. Sleep. Last Sunday afternoon I had a 2 hour nap — it’s been a long time since that has happened! I thought it would then keep me awake late, but it didn’t much. Then last night I fell asleep about an hour earlier than usual, and feel refreshed and much more awake than usual. Though I know the restorative power of sleep, I tend to like to stay awake much later than I should.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

I was sorry to miss last week’s “Fave Five”: we had out of town company and there just was not time. But it is good to be back with this week’s highlights:

1. My husband’s brother visited us for the first time ever. The logic has always been that the rest of the family lived on the west side of the country and it was better for us to go there and be able to see everyone than for one family over there to come East and see us, which was understandable, but, still, it’s nice to have someone come here. It was a rough visit emotionally in some ways as he and Jim visited their mom, knowing the last visit in particular was probably going to be the last time he saw her. But we also had a lot of good time visiting around the kitchen table and got to show him around downtown Knoxville.

2. A table next to the river at a favorite restaurant, hard to come by on a busy Saturday night.

3. Easter was kind of low key this year in many ways since it came just after the above visit and Jim and I were tired, but it was still good. Our church always has a special Easter morning service, the meal was delicious, and it was good to spend the rest of the day relaxing with the family.

4. Movie nights with the kids. Jason and Mittu hadn’t been over for a few weeks for various reasons but came over weekend before last for pizza and a movie and then spent much of last weekend with Jim’s brother here. We rented a couple of movies from iTunes: finally saw the new Les Miserables (though we skipped past the “Lovely Ladies” song and everything from the time the innkeeper wakes up until his song is over as I had heard that was where most of the objectionable content was). I had seen the tenth anniversary special years ago and still prefer those voices for the songs, but it was good seeing the story fleshed out and acted. We also saw Wreck-It Ralph this last weekend. I could have done without the “duty” jokes (play on words to mean something else), but otherwise it was pretty cute and I liked it better than I thought I would. It had many video game references and cameos that Jason and Jesse were familiar with, so that was fun.

5. Springy days. It’ still been a little on the cooler side, but it’s finally started to look and feel more like spring. I think I heard it is supposed to warm up this weekend.

I have a newsletter to finish up today but then can look forward to a relaxing weekend. Hope yours is good!

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

I saw this on Facebook — it about sums up the weather situation this week:

We do have some snow in the forecast in the next few days. But here are some highlights of the last chilly week:

1. A visit from a dear friend’s daughter who was passing through and needed a place to stop for the night. It was wonderful to be able to provide that for her and to catch up a bit with what was going on in her life.

2. A long phone call from the above dear friend. We saw that we were both on Facebook at the same time, and she messaged, “Do you have time to talk?” We’ve known each other since early married days and haven’t had a chance to really catch up with each other in a long while.

3. Spring break. No alarm clocks!

4. A new chair and end table. I’ve been wanting a chair for our bedroom ever since we moved here, for various reasons. Finally found a nice swivel rocker at a very good price. And I mentioned getting a new nightstand a few weeks ago: we got one for Jim’s side as well. Though I have never felt everything had to be exactly matchy-matchy in a room, it’s nice if things balance and coordinate. Our room has been a hodgepodge just about the whole time we’ve been married, and it’s nice that it’s finally looking a little more put together.

5. Mini Pie Bites. After learning that March 14 was Pi Day, I really had a craving for chocolate pie. But these days I pretty much save such things for company, because it is too much temptation to have a whole pie or cake in the house. Then I came across these in the store…perfect!

Have you have a great weekend as we all look ahead to when it will really feel like spring!

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.
– Proverb from Guinea

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Five

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been kind of an up and down week. I had thought about doing an “up and down” or family update post yesterday, but time got away from me. But here are some of the “ups”:

1. Jim’s birthday was last Wednesday, but he had to be out of town that day, so we celebrated Saturday.

2. Wednesday night Coffeshop Apologetics. A man in our church has been doing a series called Coffehouse or Coffeshop Apologetics on Wednesday nights basically talking about ways to talk to atheists, agnostics, moral relativists, etc. Evidently God has given him a real ministry in that regard that we hadn’t even known about, but what he’s had to share had been very interesting.

3. These stands were on sale half price at Hobby Lobby:

Aren’t they cute? They are smaller than normal, only about 8″ or so across, but I have an 6″ cake pan that will make the perfect small dessert for it!

4. Finally getting this project done. It was originally supposed to be a fall wreath, but I got stuck trying to make burlap roses — I never could get the hang of it. Then I was going to do a winter wreath in neutrals. But as we’re getting closer to spring I decided to throw some pink in there, and I think it’ll work, even though felt is more wintery in my mind.

I made the pink felt roses using this tutorial but bought the other ones, gluing a button in the middle of a couple of them.

It had been a long time since I had fired up the ol’ hot glue gun, but I enjoyed it!

5. Getting some things hung up around the house that had been sitting in the sewing room for months in some cases. Indecision is my biggest road block! But I finally decided to just go with what I had been thinking about, and I think it pretty much works. I guess I could have taken pictures of those…but no time just now as I’m off to a meeting at Jim’s mom’s place soon.

In family news, Jim did get the pathology report back from his kidney surgery, and the mass was indeed cancerous, which is pretty much what we expected, but there’s no sign of it in the lymph nodes or lymphatic system, so that is very good. He has a follow-up appointment with an oncologist next week just to see if we need to do any other scans to make sure there is nothing else lurking around somewhere. He’s continuing to do well, though still a little tender in places.

Happy Friday to you!

Read Full Post »

Friday’s Fave Fives

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It feels like we’ve had winter and almost-spring in the same week, with snow one day and bright sunshine today. Here are some highlights:

1. Sunday dinner at Ruby Tuesday’s. We don’t usually go out to eat for Sunday dinner after church for a number of reasons (it usually takes longer, is crowded, and I feel bad about people not being able to go to church on Sunday in order to make a meal for me), but last Sunday Jesse had an activity with his class, and as church is close to Jim’s mom’s place, it made sense to eat over there and then go visit her rather coming home and going back over. I’ve only been to Ruby Tuesday’s maybe 3 or 4 times — Jim doesn’t like the one near us. I tried their Smokey Mountain Chicken and it was wonderful (barbecue sauce, cheese, and bacon on a chicken breast) — I’ve been trying to justify going back again for more. Plus their white cheddar mashed potatoes and grilled green beans were excellent. Plus we had a $10 off coupon! It was so nice to come back home after eating and visiting her to just rest for a bit without having to bustle around to get dinner ready and then clean up.

2. A “moment” with Jim’s mom. This is one of those mental pictures I hope will always stay with me. When we visited her Sunday afternoon, a church we were familiar with was having a service in the dining area. We decided to take her down just to see what it was like and to see if she seemed to enjoy it, as she hasn’t been able to come to church with us since she was in the hospital. She has had trouble speaking lately, but when they sang, “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” she was holding Jim’s hand and smiling and mouthing the words.

3. A productive Saturday. Not that other days aren’t productive or Saturdays usually aren’t, but this last Saturday I got a number of things done I had been wanting to do.

4. An especially good book. I could list books as a favorite almost every week, but The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (linked to my thoughts) will go down as one of the best of the year, maybe one of my all-time favorites. And though sick days aren’t a fave, having one this week allowed for spending extra time to finish it.

5. Snow that didn’t impact function. People laugh at us Southerners for closing down when it snows, but really, cities here can’t invest in snowplows when we only get snow maybe 1-3 times a year most years. They do put stuff on the roads to help, but still advise people staying home during snow. We had maybe an inch or so of snow Wednesday, but it didn’t stick much to the roads at all, so people were able to do what they needed to do. My favorite part of snow is when it is falling, so it was nice to see that while still knowing I could get out if I needed to.

Hope you have a great weekend! Though Jim’s birthday was Wednesday, he actually had to be out of town that day, so we’re looking forward to celebrating this weekend.

Read Full Post »