Everything is going to be okay

Today's card: The Sun.

From the LWB: "All good things are coming to you now. Open your hands to receive them. Sweet happiness is yours for the taking."

Key concepts: Joy, supreme success, health and wealth.

Basically, every little thing is gonna be all right.

Fall in love with as many things as possible

I plan to pull one card from the Ceccoli Tarot each day in November.

Today's card: VI The Lovers. "A choice is offered to you that could change everything. Listen to your heart's guidance. Follow the path of love."

Key concepts: Sacred or profane love, moral choices, soul mates.

(From the Ceccoli Tarot LWB.)

Generally, The Lovers card is not about romantic love per se, but about choices, or it could be about being in love with some*thing* rather than someone.

My theme for the holiday season is "Fall in love with as many things as possible," so it is apropos for the first card of the month.

This year has been really hard, starting with Bob's hospitalization in January, and since then it's just been one thing after another. This time of year is hard for me at the best of times, but lately it's seemed worse than usual. So I'm going to make a real effort to enjoy the holiday season, starting right now, with my birthday month. I'm going to take a lot of pictures, and hopefully blog every day. I guess we'll see. I've got a good start!

And I'm definitely in love with this deck. I had heard about it months ago, but since it wasn't out yet, I had forgotten about it. Then I saw someone else post something about it, and immediately went to Amazon and ordered one. There is a mini deck coming out in February, and I have already pre-ordered it. I prefer the mini decks, they're easier for me to shuffle and carry, but in this case, I will want both.

Sock Yarn Addict

With enough sock yarn in my Ravelry stash to make sixty pairs of socks--enough to knit a pair a month for five years--I should probably just give up and say that I have a Sock Yarn Collection instead. (Click for larger version if you're curious.)

The current plan(ner)

I was reading a "mommy blog" post the other night about buying school supplies. I would post the link, but I can't remember where it was. It was about spending a fortune on school supplies, not being able to find leftover ones from the year before, having to conform to school lists, etc., but, as is often the case, the comments were as interesting as the article. One of them struck me so much that I took a screen capture so I could copy it. It said:

"Mostly, I just think about how with every pen or notebook I've purchased (or that has been purchased for me) I have also consumed hope. Hope for organization, for uniqueness, for a clean slate, for the ability to be ready when the world (surely) imparts some knowledge upon me. And should that knowledge require a protractor or gel pen to understand, I will (by god I swear) be ready."

I have purchased SO many notebooks and pens over the years. So many different configurations, Franklin Planners, Levenger Circa, Moleskine, Piccadilly, and on and on. I might be a little OCD about it . . .

And planners. I've failed so many times to keep up with a planner. The closest I've come is the Franklin Planner binder with a Daytimer filler that I just happened to have started in January before Bob went into the hospital. It was great then, and as I've said before, I think it saved my life, because I wrote down everything that happened, everyone I met, everyone that visited, all the doctors and nurses and all the test results, and while I would never have been able to remember all of that information, I had it written down and could access it easily.

I kept it up for awhile, but it's so big and heavy, I started leaving it at work, and now it resides in a drawer there. It's just too big and bulky to carry around every day. So I downsized within the Daytimer universe. Many years ago I went to work for a commercial real estate company. When they hired someone new, they routinely ordered a monogrammed Daytimer wallet of your choice, which thrilled me! I got a burgundy leather one, and it's stayed beautiful for about twenty years.




I decided to try it again, and ordered a years' worth of monthly filler books. I've discovered that one of the reasons I love, and tend to stick with, monthly planners with either loose leaf pages or separate monthly books, is that if I mess something up, I get a new chance, a new start, every month. I choose the two-page per day kind, with the left-hand page dedicated to to do lists, expenses, and appointments, and the right-hand page is blank for notes.




So that's the current plan(ner).

What I'm reading now

I was reading this article today: The End of the Ambitious Summer Reading List, and it started me thinking about the books that I've read throughout my life.

There were the school libraries, of course. I read my way through the Dick & Jane books, working up to Dr. Seuss. I particularly loved "Harold and the Purple Crayon."

When I was growing up, we lived within walking distance of the public library, which was huge for me. You could check out ten books at a time, and I spent the summer walking the couple of blocks to the library, getting my stack of new books and bringing them home to read, reading them, and going back for a new stack. I remember sitting on a lawn chair in the garage, watching over a garage sale on the driveway, reading hard-boiled crime -- Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. When I got my weekly allowance I walked to the drugstore and agonized over which Agatha Christie novel to buy next, until I owned them all (or at least the ones the drugstore had in stock). I read James Michener ("Hawaii"), and Arthur Hailey's "Airport" and "Hotel" honed my love of stories set in discrete, confined spaces.

High school saw me reading Anya Seaton's historical novels, and I still remember the thrill of discovering J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy on the library shelf. The first Stephen King story I read was "'Salem's Lot," serialized in Cosmopolitan Magazine, as I recall, of all places. And I eventually read my way through all of them. Ray Bradbury and Clifford D. Simak introduced me to science fiction.

I'm not really sure how I became such a voracious reader. My parents didn't read novels. They both read the newspapers, and my mother read some health-based nonfiction. We had a complete set of the "Happy Hollisters" books, and when I didn't have anything else to read I would pick a volume of the encyclopedia off the shelf.

I have always read purely for enjoyment, but I think my attention span has gotten a little shorter than it was when I was in high school. My interests have changed, certainly. I do occasionally think it would be fun to re-read The Lord of the Rings, but I no longer find historical romance interesting. In order for me to read romance, it has to involve some sort of paranormal element--vampires or werewolves or dragons--and even then, I have a fairly small interest range. I tend not to read anything set in the past; the setting needs to be present day or future.

I love discovering a new author, and will sometimes read my way through a whole series, one after the other. I read Thea Harrison's "Elder Races" series that way, immersing myself in her world of shapeshifters. I actually got the first book in the series, "Dragon Bound," quite awhile ago, either for free or for $.99. It didn't really interest me--a book about a man who can shift into a dragon?--but for some reason I started it, and absolutely loved it. I ended up reading all 8 novels, plus several novellas and shorts, and then listening to the whole series in audiobook form.

Lately I've been reading a lot of "cozy" mysteries; currently it's a series called "Maternal Instincts" by Diana Orgain about a new mother who gets involved in solving mysteries. Like most cozies, it's not really based too much in reality, but if I can suspend disbelief in order to read about men turning into dragons, I guess I can read about a mother with a newborn solving murders.