I'b geddig a code..

So not only did I blow my blog to bits, I came down with the cold that Traci has been fighting for about 5 days. Talk about crummy luck! I'm sitting here, sipping on a vat of Market Spice Tea, trying to breathe, and hoping I finally repaired this silly page. That'll teach me to get all confident and artsy! I'm almost to the point of having someone create a template for me that would incorporate books, coffee, old maps, retro pictures, garden-y things, French stuff....maybe an antique-retro Parisian cafe' theme. With cows. I'm guessing that's why I haven't found anything that really suits my style! How does one incorporate ranch-y things with French things?

Moving on...I'm going to lay my soul bare...do you think you can take it? I've found myself, during the winter, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my abode and the size of it. I feel like the kids and I are constantly all over each other and that it causes us to start chewing on one another, like too many lab rats in too small a cage! So each time I go to town, I get a "Dream Kitchens and Baths" magazine or "Floorplans for Fabulous Homes" and drooling my way through them. And instead of helping, it's making me more covetous of big houses! One recent day, after thumbing once again through the kitchens of my dreams and imagining what grand food I could prepare with 6 burners and a double oven, AND the manditory prep sink, I picked up an old Reader's Digest to throw away.

Now, I don't know about you, but if it's print, I read it. Even old stuff. Even shampoo, syrup and ammonia bottles. Where two or three letters are gathered, it's an opportunity to read. So instead of throwing the dang magazine away, like I had intended, I thumbed through it and accidentally(by God's hand) read an article about some women in an African village that had to gather fuel for their cooking fires everyday, and in doing so, were raped and beaten and their children harmed. A woman in the U.S. found out about them, somehow, and developed a simple solar powered cookstove for them to use. She found a company to design and manufacture them, and sponsors to pay for the stoves to get to the villages that needed them. The village women's lives were transformed, because they only went to get firewood about once a week, and had been able to cooperate with each other to protect one another. So much good!

I guess you know that I had a change of heart about my warm, safe little kitchen on the prairie, and a huge kick in the butt to start thinking of AND doing for others. I'm not sure what I can do; I'm still praying about that. I can tell you this: those magazines were donated to the library, and I'm treating my four burner propane stove a little more tenderly.

All the lessons I've learned this week include:

1. Don't fix a blog that isn't broke.

2. Faux giraffe purses really are worth $49.95, and oddly, go with everything.

3. Defrosting a deepfreeze will take all the backbone you have.

4. Good friends share everything; germs, danish, laughter, tears, and seeds.

5. If you ask a two year old what he's doing, and he responds with "Nofing, mama...", it's going to be somefing and you will need some of that deepfreeze backbone.

6. Little houses just mean you get to see more of the people you love. A LOT more.

7. There IS a world beyond the porch, and I need to invest more in it.

That's about all the philosophy I have for today. The tea is gone, and I hear somefing going on in the boy's bedroom.