snow

Simplicity: Appreciating Your Circumstances

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simplicity

I mentioned on Friday that we’ve had a crazy amount of snow. Of course, here in the Pacific Northwest, any amount of snow can be classified as “crazy,” but honestly, we’ve broken records for February snow in Oregon this weekend. In our front yard, we measured 9 3/4 inches. That’s a lot of snow! While the children love it (even ours, who didn’t get a single snow day completely off from school), it’s a bit harder for adults.

My husband works about half the time from home, half away. His main gig is selling comic books (ones that he writes), but he also does book layouts for up and coming self published authors (that’s fancy talk for “combining words and illustrations to prepare books for the printer”). The selling of the books is what takes him away from the house for work, while the layouts are done from his home office. He was scheduled to sell books last week from Wednesday through Saturday, but when the snow hit on Thursday morning, he had to come home early and cancel the Friday/Saturday event. Right now, we’re just waiting for the snow to melt so life can get back to normal.

You can’t always control the situations taking place around you, so it doesn’t do any good to dwell over them or stress about them. We could have freaked out when the book selling wasn’t able to happen, but we didn’t. Hubby focused on getting some of the layout projects done, and then took the rest of the unplanned long weekend off. We played with the kids in the snow. It was Small Fry’s first time experiencing it.

snow baby pic monkey

Without our focus on keeping our lives simple, we wouldn’t have taken the time to appreciate the beauty of the landscape around us. We would’ve been stressed out and angry at being put a whole week behind on our book-selling goals. Instead, we remembered our values and why we feel the way we do. We enjoyed the unusual weather, and allowed our children to do the same.

Life was very good.

Blessings,

Wendy

Picture of the Week: Snow!

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Snow

We don’t get much snow where I live, so when it happens, it’s a big deal. Especially the amount of snow we’ve gotten the past two days. It’s crazy! We don’t have a TV, and I don’t spend that much time researching weather forecasts (this close to the coast, they’re usually wrong anyway), so the snow seemed to come out of nowhere. It started snowing around 10 yesterday morning, and it hasn’t stopped! The last time we got this much snow was in December of 2009. It’s better this time around, though, because we have the dry, powdery stuff. In ’09, it was a very wet snow, and we got around 12 inches, then it rained for a day, then it snowed again. So we had several inches of snow, a layer of ice a couple of inches thick, topped with more snow. You can imagine how awful that was! But this year, it’s just cold, not awful, so the kids have enjoyed playing in the winter wonderland they only see once every few years.

It was Small Fry’s first snow, so it’s been fun watching him watch out the window as the flakes fall from the sky, and this morning, we let him out in it for the first time (he and I had already gone to the store before it started yesterday, and I’m not much of a snow person, so I didn’t take him out yesterday). That’s the picture on the upper right. The lower right is Small Fry wearing Seahawk’s snow jacket. Too cute!

Is your winter wonderland as white as ours??

Blessings,

Wendy