#resound11

Prompt 1.  One word to describe 2011.

Growth.
Almost three years ago I signed up for Mission 101 in which I had to choose 101 goals to achieve in 1001 days. It was a challenge and I picked some stupid goals (unreached)  and some pretty good goals. One of my goals was to get out more. I worked pretty hard on that one in the last year and in achieving that goal I was also able to simultaneously reach many other goals on my list. I did a lot of travel, I got out to see my friends instead of always making them come to me and I made some changes in my life that were positive and growth oriented.
One thing I didn't do was to ever really finish the challenge by going in and posting my final results. I really should check back and see how some of the others did.
I highly recommend the Mission 101 as a way to really see what things are important to you and really see just how you can challenge yourself. There are many goals on my list that I didn't reach and that's ok with me. I realize that I didn't really take the time to prioritize things. I joined up to the Mission 101 at the last minute and threw my list together quite quickly.  Still, there were things on the list that were just things I needed to get done and accomplishing them helped me immensely with having time for some of the more personal growth style goals.     I'm proudest, though, of my social growth. I stepped out of my comfort zone many times in the past year and made myself go to new places and talk to new people and experience new things. It was nice to get out of the rut and I hope to continue in this vein for the next year, too.
Cheers to growth!

Last day of NaBloPoMo

The prompt for today is: What did you learn from doing NaBloPoMo?

I learned a lot from this year's NaBloPoMo.

1. I learned that I have changed and no longer feel excited to blog for the  month of November. That might be in part due to the fact that many of my blogging buddies are no longer doing NaBloPoMo. Most of them aren't even blogging at all.

2. I learned that I don't like Blogher

3. I learned that  forcing myself to partake in something because I "do it every year" is not a good idea.

4. I learned that I need a new and exciting outlet for my writing and a new direction for my blog. (or something like that)

5. I learned that I am not alone in being tired of NaBloPoMo and wanting to move on to something new.

6. I learned that I can complete a task (or series of tasks) even if my heart is no longer in it but that there is no real sense of satisfaction involved.


There are probably more things I could put down, but I'm tired now and want to go try my new Zelda game.

The prompt.

For today and tomorrow I am going to use the prompts. Today's prompt is "What is the last thing you do before bed?"
Before I go to bed I am usually on the computer falling asleep at the keyboard. I am usually drinking my last cup of coffee while I'm playing Farm Town and Gnome Town. While harvesting and taking care of my towns I doze off and sit here nodding around until I can't take it anymore and take myself to bed.
Of course, in the time that it takes to take my cup and whatever else to the kitchen, turn off all the lights, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth and get myself ready to get into bed, I come alive again and then don't feel sleepy. So I get my phone all hooked up to the table stand/charger and either read a book (Kindle App.) or play a game on the phone to get sleepy again. This seldom takes more than five minutes and I am out like a light!

Dragging to the end.

Only two more days of blogging and NaBloPoMo will be done. I don't feel excited to have done it. I am just glad it is almost over. I am posting this so that I can say I posted for thirty days. I have no idea why. I am truly sick of NaBloPoMo and all the blogging yuppies that it supports. I've already learned to hate Blogher. I can't say why. It's just too big and caught up in itself.   Blogher is a very difficult site with too many choices, too many ads, too much of everything and it seems the only goal there is to be 'discovered' and paid to write. I am tired of cutesy mommy bloggers, sick of the same people being highlighted over and over and somehow I feel like it's just high school all over again.
On another note...thank goodness for the undo button because a fly just landed on my touch screen and his motion made a little circle on my screen and  **PRESTO** my blog was erased. LOL
That's about how I feel about it, too.
Sigh.

November is almost out of here...

I hate how fast time goes sometimes. I also love how slow time goes on days like today. It was a very relaxed day of getting stuff done and enjoying my grandkids and cooking a nice turkey dinner. Other than the fact that I spend way too much of my time with my computer, it was very satisfying. Of course, the computer time was satisfying, too, but I just need to take less time with the computer and more time actually getting real work done. Imaginary work is a lot more fun, though.
 Honestly my mind is completely blank right now. I wanted to post mushroom pictures, but I can't find the names of some of them. But maybe I will just post them anyway. I want to get back to getting stuff done.

I have never seen these before.

This stump was covered in mushrooms.

Another odd variety that I haven't seen.

I thought this was some kind of rusted gear when I first saw it sitting on a downed  log.

Christmas

I don't decorate for Christmas the weekend after Thanksgiving. I like to leave my decorations up at least a week after New Year's. Sometimes I leave them up even longer. I have been known to still be taking them down in February. As much as I hate getting them out to put them up, I also hate taking them down and putting them away. Heck, time goes so fast these days, I think we should all just decorate for Christmas year round. No muss, no fuss. I usually start decorating around the first week of December. Well, I guess, to be more accurate, I actually start thinking about it then. It takes me another week to decide which things I am going to use. I used to put things in every single room of the house. That was when I was young. I had energy and time and less stuff. Now I use those things that appeal to me as I look through my boxes and mostly only decorate the living room and sometimes only decorate the tree. Sometimes I feel just a little bah! humbug!~ This year I am going to put my tree up around December 10th and then have my grandson's over for the weekend and let them decorate it. I will enjoy that and so will they. We will have to put only kid friendly ornaments on the bottom this year. Daelin is almost two and I know he will want to help and touch. Maybe I will just do the tree this year. Everything has been somewhat chaotic at my house for several years now. I can't keep up with things and I feel overwhelmed by stuff. Part of this is due to the fact that my stuff can't be where it belongs because my spaces are taken up by other people who are using those spaces for their stuff. I am not complaining. I am stating the facts. Just saying. When kids are moving in and moving out it is not always easy to just have your spaces. My house is not tiny, but it is not a huge castle where we each can have our own wing. Stuff can really start to become a problem sometimes. I have watched Hoarders. I don't want to be a hoarder. But it's complicated when you have stuff around that isn't yours and space that should be yours but isn't. I don't mind getting rid of stuff. But first I would like to have my own place so I can see just which of my stuff I really want and which of my stuff can go bye-bye. Even with that, I still give stuff away constantly. Bags and boxes of stuff leave this house monthly. But I still never run out of stuff. I have finally decided that the stuff is obeying a simple biblical law that I have forgotten to remember. "You reap what you sow." I remember back when I used to give away appliances. I somehow ended up with a surplus of certain things and so I gave them away. Big mistake. I was getting appliances for years. I finally realized I had to quit giving appliances away and I stopped. Now I only get given a few appliances now and then. The same thing happened with the boys's t-shirts. It was like they multiplied in the drawers at night. They would go to bed with a few t-shirts and in the morning you could barely open the drawers. Where did all those extra t-shirts come from? I realized I was always giving away their extra shirts. With five boys you just end up with extra shirts that either no one likes or they don't manage to fit anyone. So I gave them away. As soon as I quit giving them away...no more multiplying. It's a simple law really. If you don't sow, you can't reap. So now my question is...what do I do with all that stuff I want gone. I hate the process of selling it. I keep saying I will have a garage sale. Sigh. But that seems like so much work. I hate throwing good stuff in the garbage. And if I keep it to avoid sowing it, then I will just become a hoarder, right? Sigh. There is no easy solution. So I will start decorating for Christmas and in the meantime I can figure out how to get rid of stuff without getting stuff back. Wish me luck. (but not stuff).

Almost forgot.

I almost forgot to post today. I'm tired and need to go to bed. I will post a few pictures. No captions tonight. Just pictures.

Wow....day 24.

The prompt for today is "Do you enjoy being alone? Would you rather be around other people?"

I love being alone. I love the solitude and the ability to do just what I want to do and not think about who else is there and what their needs are. I have always loved being alone and have even been somewhat of a loner at times. I am sure if I had not had children I would live up on a mountain somewhere and eke my existence out by the land.
I like being around other people sometimes, especially those of the super short variety. The ones that are between their 1st and 5th year of life. Those are some of my favorite people. I love their energy and innocence and their lack of concrete reasoning skills. I love that you can stand behind a three year old and be hidden from view. I love that you can put your hand over your face and be gone. I love things like when a friend's five year old wanted me to hide behind the couch with him, because obviously if he fits there, so do I. haha. I love that they love singing silly songs and dancing to silly songs and giggling and falling down. I love that you can break a graham cracker into four pieces and magically give them "more". haha. Toddlers and pre-schoolers are the best. I love their screaming temper tantrums (especially if they are not my very own toddlers) and I love their little voices when they are being earnest and I love to hear them laughing.
As far as being around other people...the non super short ones...yeah, it's ok some of the time. And other times it just makes me hate people. I'm not really a people friendly person, although my friends would often disagree with that. I am amazed at the stupidity of people and disgusted by how mean and awful they can be to one another. (not that I've never been stupid or mean)
I super enjoy being with my friends. But I like people in very small doses and in small groups or one on one. I am not comfortable around big parties or gatherings. I am not one to want to go spend time with a huge group of people even in someone else's home and even if I know most of the people at the gathering. I will go to things, but I'm usually very self conscious and even shy. I will usually focus on one or two people. Sometimes I get so self-conscious that I will sit there with an empty glass when I really want to refill it, but I am too nervous to actually get up and walk across the room. I'm not sure why that is. I know I lack confidence so I'm sure it's related to that. I will find a spot to sit and sometimes I will sit in that same spot the whole time I am at the gathering. That's just how I roll.
So, the short answer if that I truly enjoy being alone. I am dying to try out this empty nest thing I've heard so much about. And yet, I can really enjoy being around other people, too. There's no easy answer to this question and I'm starting to fall asleep. This is kind of a rambling blog, I guess! So goodnight and I'll see what I can come up with for tomorrow.

Blogging for blogging's sake, part two

I'm trying to decide if I want to give up blogging or at least give up NaBloPoMo. It was gads of fun while I had friends doing it with me and we read and commented on each other's blogs. But part of the reason my blog title says, "comments optional" is because when I first started blogging outside of Myspace, I found that there were lots of bloggers who seem to be people who need lots of attention and comments on their blogs are practically required and they snub you if you don't play along. Wow...that was a long run-on sentence, but I guess it's ok.
 I did not know at first that there was etiquette involved in the whole comments thing. I usually did my reading of blogs while lying in bed before falling asleep and because I usually had my laptop up on it's end, reading it while I laid on my side, it was very difficult to comment. Commenting required sitting up and typing and then lying back down. I only commented on those blogs which really made me think or struck a nerve. I was blissfully unaware that I was breaking any rules or etiquette.
That first year in NaBloPoMo I was surrounded by a bunch of "mommy bloggers" that all thought they were the cleverest, funniest, smartest mommy bloggers around. Many of them were quite caught up with themselves and my question was always the same....where are your kids. Those delightful kids that you write about everyday are obviously not sitting on your lap while you are spending hours on the computer making the perfect blog. And I started to feel quite disdainful toward these perfect strangers who somehow while running a house and family found time to write blogs and comment on blogs and live, breathe and eat blogs. Were they all hoping to make money? or? I never knew because I eventually distanced myself from them. I got tired of seeing their pictures that were starting to seem contrived and having them beg for votes for this or that and then I got really annoyed when they started showing pictures of the mess the children made while they were blogging their lives away. I was a stay-at-home mom while my kids were growing up and I'm not sure I would have ever had the time to blog while my children were babies and toddlers.  I barely had time to myself to go to the bathroom. I did pursue some artistic things, but after the kids were fast asleep in bed.
Over the years I have continued to blog, mostly because I like to write and it's good typing practice, writing practice, grammar practice and hopefully will keep my brain nimble and free from dementia as I grow older. I  don't really write for others and I say I still don't care about comments, but I do think that comments at least let you know that someone is reading your writing. But then do I care that someone is or isn't reading my blog? I often think I don't care, but sometimes I find I do care. So I have no idea what I want to do now with my blog. Do I want to try and start reading other people's blogs again and commenting in an effort to make myself "known" and therefore generate a reader base, or at least an occasional reader base? Will that put me in that same category of the bloggers that annoy me with their needy ways? Do I want to change to just journaling for journaling's sake and leave the reader base out of it all together? I don't know. But I do wonder if this will be my last NaBloPoMo. They have moved to Blogher, which at first I thought was a great idea. Now, I'm not so sure. I don't think I like Blogher. It is way too much stuff on the page with way to many ads and I really have a hard time knowing what to do when I get there. It just seems all jumbled up to me. I have tried several times to go there and make sense of it, but it is much like reading a catalog to me and I've never been able to really read a catalog. They just make my head hurt. I have to look for a specific item if I want the catalog to make sense. And, in the case of Blogher, I have no idea where to start. None. So that is my blogging for blogging's sake tonight. Do I really want to continue with NaBloPoMo? It's just not as much fun as it used to be.

Prehistoric Whales

This is one of the most interesting news articles I have read in a long time. I want to see the models when they finally get these fossils to the museum and can display them properly. I want to see the dolpin with tusks and the bird with the 17 foot wingspan.  There was also an aquatic sloth, which fascinates me. Do they mean aquatic like a sea otter is aquatic or like a dolphin or whale is aquatic? All these things interest me and I often wonder why I didn't pursue anthropology, since I love it so much.

Anyway, that is my blog for tonight. I had a busy day and really felt busy tonight but looking around me, I realize I accomplished very little. I think I'm saving all my energy for my three day weekend. I'm hoping I will actually get some things done. I feel a little like a car stuck in the mud.

In case you want a daily picture, here you go:

These are of Trenton when he was little and he was licking the bowl. The bowl was quite big. I love the one where it is completely over his head.

Blogging for blogging's sake.

That's what I'm doing tonight. Blogging for blogging's sake. The prompts they provided are too deep for my shallow mind tonight. I am tired. I took my mom out to dinner for her birthday, watched a couple of episodes of Hoarding and crocheted a row on my afghan. Then I played my gnome game, my Wordscraper (like Scrabble), and now I'm waiting for the girl I hired to finish my farms. I'm going to go finish up a little bit in the gnome game and go to bed. I can plant tomorrow, or, if I get too awake by getting my morning coffee ready and shutting the house down, I will plant on my netbook from my bed.
So that is all I have. I could post a picture, I guess. Let me see what I have.



How about this?
They used to have a color named "Seafoam Green". I've seen lots of sea foam and I have yet to see any that is green. This is part of a big long chain of seafoam that was on the beach near where we saw the seagulls at Long Beach. I see no green.

CoHasset Beach Homes

There's a place in Grayland that Becky and I would really like to live. The homes there are nicely done and look like they belong on the beach. Of course they are totally out of our price range at 899,000. We like to go visit there, though, and walk down the nice wooden boardwalk to the beach and breathe the air and feel the mist. There are benches built into the end of the boardwalk just before you go down to the beach. Eventually there will be stairs down to the beach, but they aren't done yet. But I can so see myself just walking down and sitting on the benches at sunset. Sigh.

On our October visit to the ocean this fall we went again to visit the development. As I was looking at the sign a man drove up. I decided to ask him some questions about the place. Turned out that he was the developer and due to the current state of the housing market  he is dropping the price considerably in an effort to make more sales. It was a very informative conversation in which he shared his current progress on the other half of the development how it would differ from the original part. He is offering some pretty nice deals and trying to make his development a little more affordable without losing sight of his original ideas. Very nice guy and I would love to be able to afford one of his homes, but I don't see myself in that position any time soon. He has actually dropped the price to 499,000 with no points. (I'm not sure what the no points thing means...I"ve never looked it up, but I know as real estate goes, no points is a good thing for the buyer.  He went on to talk about the difficulties the buyers have been having and told us that he has one model that the sale fell through a few times and he has a friend staying there as a guest. Oh me, oh my...I would love to be that friend! haha  I'm not a sales person or anything but let me tell you, these are very nice homes.
So, yeah....Cohasset Beach Homes. Check it out if you have a half a million hanging around and want a really nice beach home. Here are some pictures to show you just what I mean. I didn't think to take any pictures of the actual homes. But here is the boardwalk and the ocean view from the boardwalk.

The beginning of the boardwalk.

At the benches.

Where the stairs should be.

The view.

Another view.

Sigh.

The grasses.

More grasses.

Look closely and you can see a whole line of pelicans.

Looking back to the street.

Blustery weather makes rough seas. 

Almost a sunset.

The info. 

Sigh again.

Young buck and blustery weather.

The weather in the Ilwaco area was true to form for this time of year at the beach. Windy and rainy were the themes for a lot of our weekend. Of course, that is the main reason I go there this time of year. I love that weather. I love standing out on the beach in that cold, blustery stuff. I have  no idea why, but I do. Here are some pictures taken during the blustery part of the 12th of November. These were mostly taken in Cape Disappointment State Park from the Benson Beach area. 

We saw a young buck when we headed back into the main part of the camp. We wanted to look at the cabins in case we might be interested in renting a couple of them this summer and taking our grandkids to the beach with us.There was a young buck in the yard. It was hard to get his little antlers to show up because he kept moving toward the fence. I also found a way to fix the eyes in these pictures. Most photo programs have red-eye removal, but for some reason it doesn't work on the bright yellow or white that often appears when I take pictures of animals and forget to disable my flash. I discovered that if I use the "remove blemish" tool, it works pretty good.