Thankful Thursday #4: music & more

I've decided I'm going to shake up the Gratitude Challenge - sometimes I'll follow the prompts, sometimes I won't. Sometimes prompts can be so constricting.

This week I've been especially thankful for:

-a husband who is very handy and can fix things (even when I did something stupid that made them break to begin with)

-friends who can laugh off my embarrassing moments better than I can

-Spotify. Yes, I'm a little late to jump on that bandwagon since I have been a loyal Pandora listener, but I love getting to create playlists and listen to them repeatedly. Nothing says "Good morning!" like some good coffee and good tunes. This one's been on repeat most of the week.

-Sunrises. Even being able to travel in the daylight again has been delightful as we gain a few minutes of daylight back each day, but this week the colors have been stellar.

-Time to create fun things with the Cricut, like this:

Gratitude Challenge: Things You Like About Winter

Okay, so I missed this past Thursday...but here we go.

I wanted to jump to this prompt because last week we had ice, ice, ice, and more ice. We already had Monday off of school, but we also had Tuesday off as an "ice day". We were definitely in the throes of winter!

Prompt 49: Things You Like About Winter

• Weather that makes you layer on the warmth and cozy on up into blankets
• Christmas season! The music, the decorations, the smells of special baking and cooking, EVERYTHING!
• Time to recharge with family on Christmas and New Years
• Using the fireplace
• Crocheting warm things
• The way a layer of snow muffles the world to create a quiet surrounding that makes it easier to think, breathe, and be still. 
• SNOW DAYS - they are made for PJs and hobbies to be shamelessly enjoyed.
• The beauty of fresh fallen snow and layers of ice on trees
• The delight and excitement of kids when it snows and the dreams of all they can do outside
• Seeing yards full of snow creations

Added bonus: here are a few pictures from around our yard after last week's winter storm.

Future Project?

So there's this website where people take photographs back to the exact place where they were taken, and they take another. It's not recreating it, it's putting it back in context...but in the future. Check it out, and you'll see what I mean.

Basically...it's awesome.

And it has me thinking that I'd love to do something like that.

~"We try to grab pieces of our lives as they speed past us. Photographs freeze those pieces and help us remember how we were." [-Gene McSweeney]~

Exploration Yields...

bubble tea.

the bookstore of my dreams.

a place where i could lose all sense of time.

surprises.

[Sidenote: I looked up Operation Beautiful as soon as I got home. Great mission. Excellent use of Post-Its. Beautiful way of drawing attention to beauty.]

[Another sidenote: It was time to change up the layout of the blog...but it may need more work yet. I'm not so convinced about this one yet. And adding a picture was tough and did not go as planned. Some research may be required.]

~"Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit." [-Frank Borman]~

Embracing A New Hobby

A big weekend meant loads of pictures.

The last 2 times I had loads of pictures (the trip to NC and the trip to Kemah) led to some dabbling in editing.

This time I plunged into editing. Last night I spent hours on it...because it was fun, and because I could legitimately waste time without feeling guilty about it. I'm taking some legitimate summer vacation time before beginning work on my summer class.

Anyways, here are some of the results:

A lot of my favorite moments of the weekend were captured in photographs, both of other people's and my own. That makes me smile.

~"Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever...it remembers the little things, long after you have forgotten everything." [-Aaron Siskind]~

And one more quote tonight...

"To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place...I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them." [Elliot Erwitt]