Loose Leaf Notes

 The bird feeder Joe got for Christmas is three times the size of our old one. We like to feed our bird neighborhood of mostly chickadees and sparrows in the winter when the frozen ground makes it hard for them to forage. But this year we haven’t had a hard frost yet. It’s warm enough […]

I believe in the blue bird of happiness, which is why my journal has a picture of one glued to the inside cover. My latest journal is three years old. It’s fraying at the edges, putting on some pounds around the middle from me stuffing it full of ink marks, scraps of paper between pages, […]

Even a shopping list is interesting once it’s a few years old. ~ Colleen talking to Josh about collage journaling. Unedited Journal entry from January 3, 2003: The New Year doesn’t excite me, in the same way a birthday doesn’t anymore. It signals the passing of more time and a new number to get used […]

1. No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. ~ Zen Proverb. 2. As far as writing goes, I’m a late bloomer because I’m self-taught and I spent the majority of my adult years as a stay-at-home mother. 3. In Floyd, we have homebirth, homeschool, homegrown, and homemade. I guess I fit in pretty good […]

The sadness is already there; the crying just lets it out. ~ Colleen – from the Jim and Dan Stories. I read through tears from the July copy of the Time magazine that my husband brought home from the eye doctor’s office. The cover, which read “How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are” by […]

SOME DAYS FEEL LIKE THAT. OTHERS FEEL LIKE THIS. Photos: 1. Clean up after a game at my house with Mara yesterday. 2. Rosemary was counting out the letters that go with the Cafe Del Sol game last week. They often get dropped on the floor when kids play with them. For more Scrabble photos […]

Days after former American President Gerald Ford passed away, a Reuters newspaper article titled “Ford Speaks from the Grave, Criticizes Bush on Iraq” caught my attention. Apparently even Ford thought the invasion of Iraq was not in the best interest of our national security. He told journalist Bob Woodward in a July 2005 interview, which […]

AKA: PHOTOS that never got posted. 1. Best outfit worn at a cookout 2. Best tattoo 3. Best attitude 4. Best view 5. Best blue view Photos: 1. My mom at the cook-out Joe and I hosted after my son Dylan’s wedding in July. 2. Mara’s girlfriend, Leah, shows off her tattoo during a summer […]

We think the earth could be transformed, if somehow you could lift people up to the moon. Or even out into space and let them see…We think that the bickering and fighting and hostility is a big waste of man’s inner energy. ~ Astronaut James Irwin No taxes No traffic No parking lots No malls […]

1. This is a great quote by John F. Kennedy (re-discovered via Rick) to begin the New Year with: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient — that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent […]

The two most significant events that happened in the year 2006 and continue to stand out for me as I enter 2007 actually happened to my sons. I would be remiss in keeping up with the part of my blog that serves a journal if I didn’t mention them. At the ages of 24 and […]