Loose Leaf Notes

1. Click HERE for my Virtual Christmas Message brought to you by the Auburn School Choir, of which my great-niece is a member.
2. My husband Joe, a counselor, recently expressed to me that he was glad our relationship was strong and that we didn’t need to see a counselor. “But you are a counselor,” I said, and then I told him whenever he gets overbooked and I start missing him, I’m just going to whine, “I need a counselor!”
3. Joe is the Program Director for Earthsong Teen Meditation Retreats and has been super busy lately getting ready for a New Year’s retreat. The Natural Awakenings Magazine of Southwest Virginia (whose publisher lives in Floyd and who I wrote about HERE) just published a story on it. You can read it HERE.
4. Summer camp is an all-American tradition for many teens. But what kind of camp teaches kindness as part of its curriculum, or instructs campers to disconnect from their high-tech, high paced lives in order to sit still and listen? ~ Excerpt from the story I did on the summer teen retreat for the Floyd Press. The rest can be read HERE.
5. Hey, LOOK what $12,000 spent on Christmas lights can get you.
6. I recently began to wonder if Bob Dylan ever recorded a Christmas song and if he did how would he pull one off, so I googled around and found THIS, close enough I suppose.
7. Two of my favorite creative artists and influences have come together. Natalie Goldberg (author of Writing Down the Bones and more) has done a documentary on Bob Dylan called Tangled up in Bob. She traveled to the town where Bob grew up and interviewed those who knew him and draws on generational commonalities between her upbringing and his HERE.
8. My great-niece Samantha is not pictured in the photo above but a family friend named Molly who I was wasn’t expecting to see is on the far right. Unfortunately, Samantha was never visible enough for me to get a good shot of, but HERE she is front-and-center performing a different sort of talent.
9. The end of an era: First Michele ended her longstanding Meet and Greet (soon after Netchick decided to host it). Now, after three years, The Thirteen Thursday Meme Hub is closing down. I posted my first Thirteen Thursday on October 10, 2005 when it was hosted by its founder Leanne, and this is my 165th one. Even though the site is closing down, I’ll continue to post 13 on Thursday because stream of consciousness list writing suits my writing style and doing so helps me tie up each week. I also get a lot of material from my TT lists and sometimes read a selection of one-liners taken from them at Spoken Word Night Open Mic, which is as close to stand up comedy as I get.
10. When our dog is finding and eating too much raw deer meat during hunting season it gives her diarrhea, which is when I start calling her a “bad ass.”
11. I forgot to mention that after dancing to The Kind at the Pine Tavern awhile back, Joe and I went to our car and found a single serving box of Kellogg cereal on the windshield. I’m still wondering about that how and why it came to be there, especially when I go into my pantry and see it on the shelf, which is where it is now.
12. I recently realized that the word USE is in the word MUSE, which gives me encouragement that the Muse is available to be used rather than playing hard to get. The MMMM sound (mother, mana, milk, and manifestation) preceding the word USE also speaks to my sense of divined support for my creativity.
13. This is my very favorite interactive Christmas card, well worth the click HERE.
And so … as my current answering machine messages says: Leave your Kris Kringle after the Jingle.