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Bispectacles

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 31, 2014| 2 Comments »

There is a momblogger the Bride turned me onto awhile ago. Her name is Glennon Doyle Melton and her blog is Momastery and her message is a simple one – Enough is Enough. Life is “brutiful” (brutally beautiful) and we are all in it together, a warrior tribe of women online doing the best we can with what life has dealt us.

Momastery is an open window. It’s a place to take a deep breath. It’s a place to drop out and tune in. It’s a place to stop striving, stop competing, stop suspecting, stop hiding. To hear and tell truth. Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that We Belong to Each Other.” If we find peace here- it’s because we remember.http://momastery.com

So imagine my surprise to see her being interviewed on the Today Show one morning while I was in Nashville. You may have noticed this year, if you still watch TV in the morning, that Today is trying to be less Yesterday by keeping or attracting younger viewers and being more interactive, opening up a Green Room on their set, and imploring the viewer to follow them on Twitter etc.

Now I’m officially a senior citizen, but I remember when the Rocker was in high school and I served on its board that we created a survey on technology. One of the questions we asked was where did our students get their news and they all said online and NOT on TV…that was about 15 years ago. So it’s good that Today is catching up with these Millennials.

Glennon talked about starting out with the typical mommy stuff on her blog until one day she shared a picture of her kitchen. That’s when the negativity started, she received tons of comments about her cluttered and out-of-date kitchen. Judgey, and sometimes mean, but often helpful ways to organize her simple kitchen with its picture covered refrigerator. Doesn’t everybody who ever entered anyone’s kitchen just stand and stare at the pictures hanging by magnets on refrigerators? It’s as if they can take in the soul of that house, that family, by looking at those pictures.

Well Glennon got a little pissed, although she didn’t say that. What she said was this was the exact problem with us! This striving for perfection in motherhood and it just had to stop! Look at her 1960s water faucet at her kitchen sink. Most people in the world cannot get clean, running water coming out of a faucet in their kitchen – it’s all in our own minds. Instead of thinking we have a crappy kitchen sink, we need to change our perspective and be thankful we have running water!

We have to put on new “Perspectacles.”

Anyway, did you ever feel like you were speaking a different language with another English speaker? I’m not talking dialect here, I’m talking Glennon’s Today Show piece which had been filmed earlier, so it was less of an interview and more about her philosophy. The hosts of the Today Show looked a little dumbfounded, gobsmacked in fact. There was a big pause, then they realized they were in fact live and had to say something. So Al Roker made a joke about putting on his “bispectacles” since you know he just turned 60…and then it was cut to commercial.

Glennon Doyle has written a NYT’s best selling book, “Carry On Warrior,” and she has many other social media platforms. She is starting to tour with her inspirational message, and will be in Nashville very soon.  She has done a TEDx talk

and has started a non-profit, “Monkee See – Monkee Do.” She is a phenomenal woman who speaks truth to our sometimes messy and always chaotic world.  10617054_284425955075742_12256534_a

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Awarded a Liebster

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on February 9, 2013| 9 Comments »

They like me, they really really like…wait. You thought I was eating lobster right? I’ve been traveling lately, but no, I was actually taste testing raw, vegan food. More on that later. Back to the award – Hip Hip Hooray and all that!

I’ve been awarded my very first blogging award. The Liebster is for very “…young blogs – usually of less than 200 followers but (http://tiggerrenewing.wordpress.com) stretched this a bit – and requires (you) to ask your nominees to answer some questions and I have now come up with those.. so here are the questions, and I’ve tried not to be too obvious but:” I know I was confused at first too, but it does say “young blogs” not young bloggers.

1) what is your first memory? My very first memory is of being bit by a bee under the clothes line in Victory Gardens. I was crying and called my foster mother, Nell “Mommy” for the first time. https://mountainmornings.net/2012/05/06/an-early-mothers-day/

2) what was your most embarrassing moment? Asking a rabbi’s wife if she had ever cleaned shrimp before.

3) as a teenager who was your role model? My cousin Bobby Ann. She had gorgeous, red hair and was studying speech pathology in college. She taught me to be fearless.

4) which book do you wish you had written? The one I’m still working on at the moment about the Flapper.
why? Because it will be a best seller, and it explains alot.

5) are there multiple realities? or just the one that we all experience the same? The scientist in me thinks we have the same experience, just different lenses. But sometimes I think time is fluid.

6) where [location] was your first kiss? On the Kindergarten school bus in Victory Gardens.

7) which island would you most like to live on? I’d actually love to live on Martha’s Vineyard. But then I’d be alone since Bob thinks it’s too cold.

8) when writing a thank you letter do you type or use pen and notepaper? Pen and paper.

9) paint or wallpaper in your bedroom? Paint

10) favourite nightwear? Cotton flannel nightgown. I know, too predictable for a nana.

Here is the fascinating thing about blogging. This award came from someone I don’t know in London. Which begs the question Great Aunt Bert asked me once, “Where does your blog go?” Now I must think of someone I’d like to nominate for the Liebster, and pass it on. Oh, and also figure out how to get a “meme” on my sidebar!
liebsterblogaward

So thank you Elayne, I’m truly honored.

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Druthers

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , on October 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

“One’s own way, choice, or preference.” This is the Word of the Day on dictionary.com today. I open up this site whenever I sit down to write so that I can effortlessly check spellings or meaning. In the old days I had a huge Oxford English Dictionary by my desk, which sat in a corner of my dining room. Now I can blog (aka write) on a bike at the gym, upload photos, even video, and post (aka publish) all at the same time, while working out, on my iPhone. And for this I have Steve Jobs to thank!

Which brings me back to “druthers.” Everyone knows he was a college drop-out, that he started his own movie company when he was booted from Apple (in part for his “abrasive personality”), and that he continued to design and innovate after a liver transplant and a devastating cancer diagnosis. What rings true to me about Steve, and most other inventors who were told that “it” can’t be done, is they pressed ahead. In some way, sticking to doing something their own way, going against the fold, being abrasively focused on a goal, is what got them to the next big thing.

The iPhone I’m using is my very first Apple product, but it was love from the get-go. Still getting to learn its innermost secrets, it has now, three months later, been replaced by the iPhone 5. But that’s OK, Bob has the older model iPad too, so we are limping toward the technological future together. He can’t skype, but I can do facetime. So if I had my druthers, the word of the day for me is “Intuitive.” I was showing a fellow knitter yesterday how I text my kids on the iPhone, she was worried it would be too hard to learn. I watched as she slid a keyboard out of her phone and went through the next few steps in order to text.

So thank you Steve Jobs, for daring to dream big, for never giving up, for your incredible intuition.

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Blah Blah Blogolicious

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , on August 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

Yesterday I attended a book signing at a beautiful new salon in town, Avina Natural Nails. I had met the author of The Power of Slow at our town’s Blogville Conference in the Spring and got the invite via Facebook. All that interconnectedness got me thinking – why not blog about the blogs I love? So this is for my MIL, who asked me once, “Where does your blog go?” And for my NJ friend Eve, who was so excited to hear I started doing this since she’d been “…looking for a blog to follow.” And of course for my oldest friend Lee in MA, who started me on this writing journey by introducing me to her friend the newspaper editor, saying, “You have to read her stuff!”

Local Virginia Blogs:

http://powerofslow.wordpress.com/ Even though the above mentioned author actually lives in Germany, let’s start with Christine Louise Hohlbaum since she grew up here, and her inspiring Mom still lives here. Just talking with Christine makes your heart rate slow to a more even rhythm. She offers lots of strategies to break time-wasting habits and increase time for more purposeful pursuits.

http://www.cvillefashion.com/ Dana put together this beautiful, local style blog that keeps calling me back time after time. She featured the Bride’s vintage gown this year and also alerted me to a benefit sale at Scarpa, our town’s best shoe store. She finds the latest deals and trends long before other fashionistas, and I love her Foxfield summer dress contest! She is a style sleuth.

http://www.asthegoatworldturns.com/ I met Anna by chance at the checkout at Whole Foods. We started talking, one thing led to another and then I’m showing her my Facebook pic of me kissing a baby goat….it’s often occurred to me that I could be a character in an Anne Tyler novel because some of my most serendipitous encounters tend to be life changing. Well, if you’ve ever thought about hobby farming, and making your very own goat cheese, (hello?) this picturesque and perfect blog is for you!

http://www.deedeeslivingwill.com/ Denise Stewart wrote a play called “Dirty Barbie and Other Tales.” She will star in this one woman show at Live Arts this November. She also runs workshops for teen girls on how to live a healthy and meaningful life. This blog will make you laugh and make you cry since she touches on all our hot topics. I love a post she did recently on her friends. I met her, and Marijean Jaggers at Blogville and felt I’d known them all my life.

http://www.marijeanjaggers.com/ Marijean Jaggers is my blogging Yoda. She was an instructor at Blogville and anyone with a business who understands they must get out on the web in some compelling way should speak with her first. Her last workshop was titled: “Don’t be a Weiner-How to Use Twitter Like a Professional” Wednesday, July 20th. Love it!!

http://www.younghouselove.com/ A friend of the Bride and Groom went to UVA with the husband of this DIY blog from Richmond. This is an amazing story about a young couple, with a new baby, who buy mid-century modern houses and step by step turn them into beautiful and functional contemporary homes. This blog IS their work, it’s not something they dabble with at night. And it’s fantastic. I told Bob if they had such a thing as blogging, we could have done this type years ago.

http://latebloomerbride.com/ Speaking of love, did you find it after forty? Here is an excellent trip along the funny and never too late road to marital bliss. Or, “…consider this blog a memoir with a purpose. It is for all the late bloomers out there – especially the newly married kind who are trying to figure out how to take a fully formed life and merge it with someone who finally turned out to be Mr. Right.” Right!

Some are inspirational, some are instructive, but all are well written and worth your time. And because there are so many, I’ll have to save my other family and out-of-state favs for the next post! If you’re wondering if I got a manicure yesterday, a once or twice yearly indulgence, can you say “Pink Lemonade?”

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