This Perfectly Imperfect Life

In spite of the challenges throughout 2014, (right up until the end in fact!) I have so much to be thankful for and appreciate. Truly blessed!  And I wish all of you a new year full of many blessings, silver linings when the bad seems to out weigh everything else, good health, joy and prosperity!  Please be safe if you're out & about tonight.  I'm already looking forward... Welcome, 2015! 

Each year I try to pick a word that hopefully encompasses my overall intentions and goals for the new year. I begin thinking about it around Christmas and journaling on it after Christmas and through New Years Eve. My word for 2014 is " Focus ." It may be something that seems to go without saying, so to speak, but it's something I have a lot of trouble with because of my unpredictable health and uncooperative body. Living with disease is anything but simple or easy. I thought it would get easier handling it with time as I get older, but I've been inexplicably wrong about that! It's been getting progressively difficult.  Now that I'm over the shock of it, and out of fear that none of my dreams will ever some true, I've been trying to learn to work with it as best I can. I want to figure out a way I can focus on my overall goals more which works with my unpredictable health and uncooperative body so that by this years end I can hopefully see more pr...

Cheers to the New Year and to the blessings of the one just ended. May 2014 be a healthy, safe, prosperous & happy one for us all! Sent from my iPhone

As many of you know, I have a second blog, a photography blog, which I originally began as New Jersey Through My Eyes in 2010.  I started off with gusto, but lost steam and reached an impasse with the blog quite some time ago.  But, (there's always a but), I haven't wanted to let the blog go. I recently started toying around with the idea of changing the name, hoping it would re-inspire me and open up my possibilities for the blog.  This morning, while journaling after breakfast, I started jotting down different possibilities for the new name keeping "Through My Eyes" part of it to tie the original focus of the blog with the new. Through My Eyes From My Camera ? Through My Eyes From My Heart ? Through My Camera ? From My Camera ? **Through My Eyes 360** As soon as I looked at Through My Eyes 360 on my journal page, I had a Charlie Brown "That's It!" moment and immediately I left the table for the computer! NJTME is now Through My Eyes 360...

Happy New Year, friends! I hope 2013 is off to a good start for you and your holidays were lovely!  On Saturday, December 29th, one of my dearest, longtime best friends G & I had our annual Christmas visit. I look forward to this every year! We exchanged gifts and along with a novel called The Language Of Flowers, she gave me two skeins of drool worthy yarn in brilliant shades of pink & green. I later set those skeins in my knitting basket and decided it was time to finishing an unfinished knitting project before I would even contemplate what to do with them. That unfinished knitting was a piece I started back in 2010, sometime after I got home from the hospital in July to begin a very long road of recovery after a near-fatal infection damaged my muscle tissue, memory, heart function and put my left kidney in jeopardy. I was on bed rest for over three months, and in such emotional shock, I could barely do more than watch television most of the time. Around the time ...

Taken after we arrived home earlier this evening from our '6pm is Midnight - Happy New Year!' celebration with a few friends. I want to share with you my deep appreciation for all of you who share my journey with me here and have been with me through this another challenging & often heartbreaking year with my mother's stroke & recovery, my beloved father.in.law's illnesses & passing, Hurricane Sandy, and, as always, my unpredictable health.  Thank you for letting this be a place I can turn to when I don't know where else to go.  I look forward to another year of sharing with you as this blog is one of my great joys in life! The wheel of the year is about to turn again.  As we begin life anew once more, I wish for you joy & contentment, prosperity of heart, mind, spirit & comforts, good health and peaceful blessings in 2013!  Be safe if you're out & about tonight.  Happy New Year! Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my Black...

That's not our car, it belongs to one of our residents, but that is our front porch. No injuries, no structural damage overall. Apparently just a scary accident. Very scary. I fully expected to find a car in our livingroom from the incredible amount of noise & movement the impact caused; our whole place shook, creaked and groaned. Scared the hell out of me! But it could have been so much worse and thank God it wasn't!

May it be a healthy, prosperous and all-around good year for us all!

A Blessed, Healthy & Happy New Year to you and yours!

In all honesty, for me, 2010 is ' the year that wasn't ' - months of blank pages in my planner and journals. (Makes me so sad, I've put them away). But it's time to move on and start anew. For the last couple of years I've focused on " Simplicity " as my overall goal for those years (my word for 2009 which I carried over to this year) and the mantra I created to go with it ("Simplicity brings Clarity brings Harmony") and I was unsure as to what my overall goal for 2011 would be; would I focus on what I had been for the last couple of years? As I've journaled on what my word of 2011 will be (since last week I've been trying to sort this out), I've come to realize that " Simplicity brings Clarity brings Harmony " has become a part of my thinking pattern and overall desire for my life so I'm moving on to " Create " as my word and overall goal for 2011 to help me focus on my writing which I deeply want to ge...

Written at 4:28pm It's been snowing about half an hour. Cardinals are out back, along with other dark brown House Wrens & Finches, eating up the seed which was replenished yesterday, their Red and Taupe bodies standing out against the tan frozen dirt now touched with white. Snowflakes are racing past the windows. Occasionally one hovers for a few moments to look in on us, as curious to catch a glimpse of our lives indoors as we are of it. The wind Roars, reminding of an angry ocean rolling in and crashing against the rocky shore during a storm. How Do the trees hold up against such force? The light is starting to turn blue, signaling the end of another Winter's day is fast approaching. Our first Sunday of this new year has come and gone. Where did this day find you?

I hope the New Year is treating everyone well! We awoke to snow on New Year's Eve morning and a sinus infection for the Hubb's, so we stayed here at home instead of heading up north. Yesterday, New Year's Day, with him feeling better, we headed out to a local park for a long walk. (A semi-annual NY'sD tradition it seems). It was beautiful! Quiet, the only sounds were of trickling water and birds. (So many birds there, of all different types!) Then we returned home to each do our own things around the house. I watched the NHL Outdoor Classic (Philly Flyers vs Boston Bruins) while he flipped between old movies and Twilight Zone episodes. We were both reading at times and I was doing a lot of journaling throughout the day. I had wanted a simple, quiet, calm, 'at one with nature' transition from 2009 to 2010 and I do believe I got just that despite not having been able to get to our place up north. It's bitter cold here today and the wind is roaring. A f...

A Blessed, Healthy & Happy New Year in 2010!!!

Awoke to a Winter Wonderland this morning courtesy of Mother Nature which makes me very happy being the Snow Lover that I am! Not too disappointed in not getting the chance now to head up to "home away from home" especially since Hubby awoke today with a sinus infection (and he's had to do snow removal here at the complex). While the Twilight Zone Marathon on the SciFi Channel has been on, I've been doing a little cleaning around the house and reading book #30 of 2009 ("Gift From The Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh) which I hope to finish before midnight. An incredible book and a wonderful one to be reading as one year ends and another begins. (I highly recommend it to all of the women who read my blog, regardless of age!) Now to finish straitening up so I can get back to reading before we begin making dinner. I hope everyone has a Safe and Happy evening no matter your plans! PS, I'm adding the following to my overall goals for 2010: Continue saving...

As 2009 winds down and 2010 beckons, the dreaded New Year's "Resolution" is beginning to nag & haunt at many! I've found I avoid calling any of my goals or plans for any given year "Resolutions" because I feel doing so dooms them before the start, no matter how good my intentions are to follow through with them. My main things to focus on throughout the coming year (2010) are Writing Every Day , editing past manuscripts , Exercising and managing my time (instead of flying by the seat of my pants!) in addition to whatever my seasonal goals will be. These are both difficult things for me but it's a necessity that I become better with both of them. Also, I would like to re-read at least one all time fave book each month along with whatever new books I'm reading. Way before vision boards became so popular, I used to create what I called vision or inspiration journals for myself. I'd take any images or words that struck something inside of...