Just A Minute

Wrapping up April even tho there are some days left. I will be busily engaged this last week so this is coming a bit early.

WATCHED: Changeling, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Doubt, Rendition, The Tale of Despereaux, My Brilliant Career

READ: Collage Discovery, Road to Nab End, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes, While I Was Gone, Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, Will You Take Me as I Am

PLAYED: with my Artist Way peeps and in a collage class with Claudine Hellmuth AND with my new Photoshop Elements 6 (Mac)

CELEBRATED: Easter with local son and his family, and later dh's 70th birthday.

LOCKED IN: a lower mortgage rate from our already low one, and felt very blessed to be able to do this amidst troubling economic times

WONDERED: what the rest of the year will bring, feeling a change ahead as dh considers options

PREPARED: for a wonderful cruise to come with the usual wonder of how many climate changes will we have???

PRACTICED: JinShinJyutsu with a 5-day class taught by Muriel Carlton starting...Today!

I'd love to hear about your month...was it filled with things that give you joy? If it wasn't, a sorrow shared is halved you know. This meme was started by August Street so you may want to go check her list of players too.

Just A Minute

Just a minute to remember March. A minute or two to look back and reflect...all thanks to August Street for this meme.

original

• Exhaling -because it was so good to be back home again after a long but good trip.

• Wondering - if it would take a month to get the house back to a relatively clean state. It did.

• Enjoying - the slow and steady arrival of spring flowers without the often accompaniment of hot and humid weather. March stayed cool enough to feel like it was spring without rushing into summer.

• Reading - lots of books that were left before our trip and finding new ones at the bookbuying trip to Charlottesville. What struck me as I looked back on March's reading list was that there were 3 books about strong friendships between women during a time of life crisis. Best written was Australian Helen Garner's The Spare Room. Really well written and no holds barred in realistically discussing the dying process. Anita Diamant's Good Harbor , by contrast, examined the struggles in learning to recenter one's life after a period of upheaval. I liked watching the friendship develop between the two women. Sadly, the third novel eludes me right now since it didn't make it to my Good Reads list.

• Watching - more movies than usual. Slumdog Millionair, Milk, Body of Lies, American Gangster, Rachel Getting Married, Broken English, The Good Shepherd & Mamma Mia. At two movies a week, that is a huge amount for me. (No wonder the cleaning has gone slowly.)

• Enduring - the seemingly endless time it takes to post-vacation 'process' the digital pictures. Without either the net connection or the digital software on a trip, this is getting to be too much of a slog for me. Sharing dh's laptop in the odd time he isn't using it for $$paying work on a trip leads me to see a laptop in my future. Maybe. I wonder about lugging just one more thing while we travel.

• Noticing - the things that don't fit in my life so much anymore. This is one of the better aspects of travel for me. I come home, and my old routines aren't set and I get a clearer picture of the parts that I want back and the parts that seem to have lost their importance. I think this is also a part of the seasonal spring awakening. btw, I love that term for the full moon in March - Full Worm Moon. I'm ready to wriggle into the new season. How about you?