one thing after another

sometimes I find these beautiful moths all over my front door in the morning!

It wasn't just my computer that needed surgery.  My grandmother has been in the hospital since last Sunday.  She had open heart surgery, and her recovery has been tentative and grueling.  Which has made me not care at all about my computer probably being un-fixable. I am able to update my blog because I'm really lucky and have a good friend who is a computer genius, and is very kind.  Not only is he letting me borrow a computer from him while I'm saving to buy a new computer, but also he was able to transfer everything from my old computer onto this interim computer.  Of course, I'd trade all the computers in the world for my grandma to get well.  And did I mention that my cousin is also in the ICU recuperating from a terrible car accident? Even with all the suffering in the world, there is beauty right along side it, and mixed right in it.

Lettuce is coming up in my parents' vegetable garden...

 

Irises and poppies and roses are blooming in my mom's flower gardens...

all of these irises came from a single clump I gave my mom for
 mother's  day when I was nine! (And there are LOTS more beyond the
confines of this picture!)

 

I've spent a lot of meaningful hours with my family in the hospital.  And my brother even taught me how to milk a cow today.  Her calf was born sick and we're trying to nurse it back to health.   We were kneeling down in the mud and rain and the cow came close to peeing on us.  But we were laughing.

And last week before all of the recent emergencies happened, I read a really nice decorating book.  The Perfectly Imperfect Home:  How to Decorate & Live Well by Deborah Needleman.  It has charming watercolor illustrations by Virginia Johnson, it reads super-quickly, and you can learn things like the correct names for different styles of couches and the approaches of various designers and decorators of note.  However, I think I liked Deborah Needleman's introduction the most of all for the simple way she justifies decorating as a meaningful and important part of life.  Here is an excerpt:

Embracing imperfection in a home does not mean that anything goes.  Here it means aiming for beauty tempered by reality.  If real life involves mess, accidents, memory, and the incidental, then so too must decorating account for serendipity, and even embrace it.  

The point of decorating, as far as I can tell, is to create the background for the best life you can have...

Decoration can be life-enhancing.  It can make dinner parties more fun, kids happier, relaxing easier, talks more intimate, guests at ease.  And to think decorating is often considered frivolous.  Making a charmed and happy home is a noble endeavor.  The simple secret is making sure that every decorating decision contributes to the creation of beauty and comfort.  Beauty to uplift our senses (to transcend the mundane) and comfort to make us feel taken care of (to embrace us in the mundane). 

        

     - Deborah Needleman, from pages 14 - 15 of her introduction to The Perfectly Imperfect Home: How to Decorate & Live Well, published by Clarkson Potter of New York in 2011.

PS - Does anyone else want to enter the raffle?  I'll try my best to draw and announce the winner one day this week.  To enter, either leave a comment or become an official follower of the blog!  Thanks to everybody who has entered already!

a raffle!

some of my spring/summer 2012 fabrics

My computer is undergoing surgery... and I'm still hopeful it's going to make a full recovery.  In the meantime, I'm stuck using the public library computer, which really isn't bad, but makes me extra sluggish about updating this blog.  So I had an idea... while I'm not writing, I could do a test raffle to see if anyone is even noticing that I'm not writing.  If you do read my blog, please become a member if you'd like, and/or just leave a comment.  I think it would be fun if you'd say where you were born and where you now live (and you can mention any places in between too if you want!)  Also, please specify whether you would like to win a set of postcards or minicards with my paintings on them, or if you would prefer to have a lavender-rice pillow.  In about a week, I'll put all the names in a big mixing bowl and draw out the name of the winner.