Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Another week has flown by. Whew!  Here are some of its highlights.

1. A game night. This is actually from weekend before last but I had forgotten it by Friday. Jason and Mittu came over for a game of Settlers of Cataan, which we hadn’t done for a while. It ended up being about the closest game of that I ever remember playing.

2. Crescent rolls without seams:

I have a couple of recipes which use crescent roll dough rolled out, and you’re supposed to press the seams together. They rarely stay pressed, so this was nice to see.

3. Annette’s Snickerdoodle Bars, made when my friend from last week came. I think I have mentioned them before: they’re a highlight any week I make them. 🙂

4. A nostalgic breakfast. My friend who came through last week on her way to see her daughter came back through last night, and we went out for breakfast this morning. We were headed out to one place when we saw the sign for Shoney’s breakfast bar. That used to be our go-to place when our kids were babies: they’d have regular coupons, and kids ate free. So we went there for old time’s sake, and they had many of the same features I remembered.

5. An eventful phone call. A man in our church has been on a list for a lung transplant and just got the call last night to head up to PA for surgery. I haven’t heard any word yet as to how everything went, but we’re hoping and praying for the best.

I may be scarce this next week as I have family coming in from out of town.

Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Another busy week — I thought things were supposed to slow down in the summertime! 🙂 Here are some favorites from the last week:

1. Getting a couple of projects done: curtains and a remade bulletin board for the sewing/craft room. I’ve had both in mind for a while, so it was nice to finally decide what to do and get it done.

2. A rest day. I was not feeling well Sunday – nothing horrible, but just enough to stay home from church. I spent most of the day resting and reading – got a whole book read in a day! It felt so luxurious.

3. More light. I enjoy having more light in the evenings this time of year.

4. A visit from a friend. A good friend since early married days 30+ years ago and her daughter stopped by for an overnight visit on their way to visit another daughter. It’s always so good to catch up with them.

5. A husband who knows what to do. My friend’s car was leaking gas really badly. She had just gotten it back from the shop where they were supposed to have fixed the problem, but evidently the fix didn’t work, and she had another 8-hour drive scheduled today. Everyone was tired last night and decided to sleep on it, but then my husband came up with a plan of action that would take care of the car but still get her where she needed to go. So many times in our lives he has been able to come up with a practical plan of action when I’d still be in a muddle of not knowing what to do. I so appreciate that.

Bonus: It’s National Doughnut Day at Krispy Kreme, and they’re giving away one free doughnut per customer. We don’t have one right near us (which is good, because I’d be there much too often: their “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign is an irresistible magnet), but I may have to go looking for one. 🙂

Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Here are some highlights of the past week – I think many of them are “repeats,” but it’s good to be thankful for blessings every time they happen, not just the first time: 🙂

1. A three day weekend.

2. A cookout with the family including grilled hamburgers and chocolate pie.

3. A leaky toilet fixed, and a hard-working husband willing to tackle it. He had Jesse work with him this time – figured it was one of those life skills he needed to have. I’m thankful, too, that we have more than one bathroom so it wasn’t much of a problem to have one out of commission for a day.

4. God’s help reaching a goal. I’ve been working on the church’s ladies newsletter and hoped to get it finished yesterday so all I had to do today was proofread it one last time before getting it printed (as opposed to racing against the clock Friday afternoon to get it done), and, thank the Lord, that happened.

5. Good visits with Jim’s mom. Since she is not speaking much any more, and when she does try I often can’t hear or understand her, it makes visiting a little harder. Sometimes she nods or shakes her head, but sometimes you just don’t know how much she is getting. Two days ago she actually laughed at something I said and then teased Jim back a little bit, and yesterday when I asked her if she’d had a good lunch, she asked me, “Did YOU have a good lunch?” Then she was able to speak quietly, but still out loud, for the rest of the visit.

Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Here are some highlights of the past week:

1. A good report from the eye doctor for my husband three weeks after his surgery for retinal detachment. Everything is still very blurry, which is discouraging, but we’re assured that is normal and it takes time for the nerves involved to heal.

2. Better weather than predicted. We’ve had thunderstorms forecasted for much of the week, but have only had a little rain here and there.

3. Good news from OK. My daughter-in-law’s mother as well as family friends live in the area affected by the tornado, and though some in their church lost homes, everyone is safe physically. Our hearts go out to all of those experiencing loss and grief.

4. My first shower here – baby shower, that is. There are been bridal and baby showers at church since we moved here, but for various reasons I haven’t gone until last night. For some reason I have been “cocooning” at home more since we’ve moved, but it’s good to get out and mingle every now and then. I enjoyed it, particularly getting to know a couple of ladies a bit better.

5. An improvised casserole that turned out well. Wednesday nights we have to eat earlier due to prayer meeting, and usually I just fix something really simple, like grilled cheese sandwiches. But this day, all day long I couldn’t decide what to make. I ended up tossing together some leftovers and some new ingredients, and we liked it! I couldn’t tell you the proportions, but it had chicken, cream of chicken soup, sour cream, rice, bacon, corn, and onion.

Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s turned out to be a busier week than I thought it would be at the beginning. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Mother’s Day Eve dinner. We don’t like to eat in restaurants on Mother’s Day because it is so crowded, so Jason and Mittu took us out to eat Saturday night. I think that may be the first time they’ve ever done that, so that was a treat in many ways.

2. Mother’s Day. Traditionally Jim and the kids have worked together to prepare lunch on Mother’s Day after church, and they did so again this year. It’s lovely to come home from church and have nothing to do. 🙂

I enjoyed the thoughtful gifts and cards and time with the family together (though Jeremy was there via FaceTime, it’s still nice he can be a part of it.)

Fun with Jesse. 🙂

3. Getting caught up on the housework. That may seem like an odd one. 🙂 The last couple of weeks had been kind of a whirlwind, and I was heartily ashamed of the dust accumulated on horizontal surfaces. Housework isn’t necessarily my favorite thing to do, though I don’t mind it as much once I get started, and I do love the results. It felt good to get caught up — well, with the major tasks, at least. There’s always something more that can be done around the house.

4. Well-used leftovers. I don’t always plan for leftovers carefully and hate when I end up throwing them out when they’ve gotten old. Casseroles I usually just reheat for lunch, but some other things get neglected. We had had boneless pork chops leftover one night, more than I would probably use for lunches, so I chopped up the leftovers into a stir-fry dinner another night that was really good, if I do say so myself. 🙂 Then we had hamburger buns, potato salad, and baked beans leftover from the Mother’s Day lunch, so I made Sloppy Joes last night to use them up.

5. Scoring a great deal. Jesse is going to a friend’s Junior-Senior banquet and wanted to find a shirt to coordinate with her dress, which was various shades of brown. He has a black suit, so we were thinking a brown shirt and then a tie that had black and brown in it to tie them together. We couldn’t find either of those. He suggested a new suit, and though he could probably use one, I wasn’t ready to lay out the cash for that, especially without talking to Jim first. But we walked over to where the suits were, looked at the clearance rack, found some suit coats, marked $25 and $36, found one he really liked, and when he tried it on, we discovered it was marked down to $15, originally $120. I could have done a happy dance right there in the store. Then we found some dress slacks on sale for $25 and a tie for $8. And he really, really likes it, so maybe he will wear it for more than those occasions when he “has” to wear a suit.

Update: Now that the banquet is over, here is a picture:

So, that’s my week. How was yours?

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been rather a heavy week here, as friends on several fronts are facing various battles. In our old church in SC, one friend discovered she had thyroid cancer and is facing surgery, another had a massive heart attack, and one of the star athletes from the school there died unexpectedly. In our own family, my nephew that I mentioned a few weeks ago as having multiple tumors and undergoing massive amounts of chemotherapy discovered a new “knot.” It’s hard to fathom that some new tumor could spring up with all the chemo he has had, so perhaps it’s something else. They can’t see the doctor til next week.

In the midst of all the heaviness, God has placed some bright spots:

1. Faith, hope, and grace. I’m so thankful that when we believe on Jesus Christ as our Savior, we have the surety of heaven, even though it is still painful to be separated from loved ones through death. It would be unbearable otherwise. And the grace God gives to endure as we undergo hardships is priceless.

2. Facebook has been great for disseminating news to large communities of people at once and for keeping up with what’s going on. Since we’ve moved, I probably would not have heard of some of these issues for a long time, if at all, without Facebook. It’s a blessing to be able to keep informed and to pray as soon as possible for each one.

3. Camaraderie. Jim’s first day back at work after his eye surgery, he faced this:

4. Less rain than expected. When I looked at my weather app on my phone at the beginning of the week, it showed not just rain but thunderstorms almost every day. Thankfully we haven’t had nearly as much as predicted, and so far it’s been mostly gentle rain rather than storms.

5. A good helper. I feel for Jesse being the only son left at home sometimes, but he has been a great help as Jim is still not supposed to do any lifting or straining. He just spent his first morning of summer break cutting the grass. He changed his first flat tire last Saturday – I had meant to mention that as a fave and forgot, that it went flat in the garage and not while I was driving.

Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been…a somewhat stressful week, actually. As regular readers hear have already heard, my husband had a detached retina earlier this week and had to have surgery on it. My head was spinning with the coming and going to different doctors’ offices for three days in a row. Things have been a bit more peaceful the latter part of the week. We won’t know for about three weeks how much vision has been restored, but we’re hoping for the best. The highest highlight of the week was God’s peace and help during Jim’s surgery, as well as many expressions of people caring and praying. Here are a few others:

1. A church ladies’ fellowship at a restaurant in town. We only have them about once a quarter, and I had missed the Christmas one. It’s easy to skip these, especially when life is busy and hectic, but I do always enjoy them when I get there. The testimonies were a special blessing.

2. Chocolate pie. I had planned to get dessert to take home at the restaurant after the fellowship, but they had closed and were just waiting on us to get done. 🙂 I had really been set for a piece of chocolate pie, so I stopped at a store on the way home and bought one to share with the family.

3. At-home visits. Our church started an at-home ministry a few months ago to encourage and coordinate visiting some of the church members who can’t make it out very often, and my mother-in-law is on the list of those to visit. They took the Sunday night church service to divide the whole congregation into groups to go visit the various at-home members. They had done this at Christmas and decided it would be a good idea to do it through the year. We had about ten people go to see Jim’s mom, and not only was she blessed by the singing, but another lady in the room sang along as well, and many staff and residents stopped by to listen.

4. Finishing the cabinet for my sewing/craft room.

5. Talking with an old friend of my mother-in-law’s on the phone last night. She’s a dear lady: she and my m-i-l have been friends since childhood. It was good to catch up with her.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been another very pleasant week! I know in a month or two it will be so hot I’ll be parked in front of the AC as much as possible, and I see several friends online have mentioned snow, so I am very much enjoying and soaking up these nice spring days. Here are some of my favorite parts of this week:

1. My husband’s help with a couple of projects. I was trying to spray paint something (pictures next week when we get it put together! 🙂 ) I see all these DIY projects online where people have remade something by spray painting. It’s as simple as pointing the can and pressing the button, right? Wrong, at least for me: drips, spatters, puddles, and uneven coverage had me pretty frustrated, and then trying to correct those caused worse problems. My husband came home in the middle of all that and showed me how to sand off some of the problems and then how to use the spray can. I had been holding the button down continuously: he took short, quick back-and-forth strokes. Numerous coats covered up the imperfections of the first one. He pretty much finished it up for me. 🙂 Then I wanted to plant a row of white petunias in front of my pink rose bushes. Toiling away with my little trowel wasn’t getting me very far: the ground was way too hard there. I asked him if he’d break the ground up for me, and he did and helped me plant the flowers as well. I don’t know what he had originally planned for his Saturday, but I’m grateful he willingly gave a few hours to rescue me. 🙂

2. Blooms. I mentioned a week or two ago putting new flowers in this planter, but they weren’t blooming when I took a picture. They’re filling out nicely now.

We discovered a couple of rogue purple petunias in with the white ones.

We even have some rose buds!

(BTW, if anyone knows what those white spots are on the rose leaves or what to do about them, I’d love to hear it.)

3. Discovering Mitford music. I’ve been revisiting Jan Karon‘s Mitford series via audiobook, and I was poking around her site and enjoying the music when I saw at the bottom of the page “Music courtesy Bill Leslie, www.billleslie.com.” I clicked over and discovered A Midnight Clear: Christmas in Mitford, complete with a Mitford Carol and a song for Father Tim and Uncle Billy, and promptly bought the whole album with an iTunes gift card from Christmas!

4. Quick bake cookies. I love those Toll House already-made, just break apart and bake cookies some times. It gives each of us some home-made tasting cookies quickly without having a whole regular batch around the house to tempt us. They’re not quite as good as made-from-scratch, but they’re close.

5. Found treasure. I’ve been looking for curtain fabric for the sewing/craft room, and had a certain color combination in mind. I’ve seen it before, but evidently they’ve stopped making it — I haven’t been able to find anything I liked in various fabric stores or online. I looked through some fabric I’ve kept in our shed, and voila, found something I think will work perfectly.

Happy Friday!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been another lovely spring week here: we had a bit of rain, but the temperatures have been just perfect, and more and more things are blooming. Such a respite between winter and summer! Here are some other favorites parts of the week:

1. Hanging plants and replanted pots. We got them a little earlier than usual.

Lowes had these all together in one pot, so it was handy to just transfer it all over. It has some pink and blue flowers, too, though I happened to catch them at a moment when they’re not blooming.

2. Cleaned patio. Because we live in a humid area and had a lot of rain, we had a lot of mold and just general crud, I think, on the patio out back. We hadn’t been out there much all winter, but I wanted it cleaned up before we started doing much outside. My dear hard-working husband pressure-washed and then bleached it last Saturday, and it looks so enormously better.

3. New shoes. I have such a hard time finding shoes I like that fit well and don’t cost an arm and a leg. My favorite “buy one, get one free” place has gone to “buy one, get one half off,” but I found a few pairs and a new cute purse, too. An added bonus: for various reasons I haven’t been able to wear sandals since having TM: something about my muscle tone or something caused them to slip around on my feet. But I’ve missed them during the summer as my feet get so hot. I found some that seemed to work really well in the store: hope they continue to!

I realized later that a purse with a pattern is not going to be as versatile as the generic all-black one I bought it to replace…but it is too cute not to keep. 🙂

4. A Josh Groban concert. No, not live, but on Live From Lincoln Center on the PBS station. I don’t like just every little thing he sings, but he has such a gorgeous voice with quite a range. I didn’t know until I turned the concert on that he’s one of my husband’s least favorite singers, but he indulged me (major points for hubby there. 🙂 )

5. Sorting and organizing. I got my bookshelves in good shape when we moved 2 1/2 years ago, but I had accumulated more, so I had s few shelves with double rows. We put a small bookcase in our bedroom, so I put a couple of categories of books in there, and now there is space for everything and they’re more organized. Plus some things are finally coming together for my sewing/craft room, and I got to do some organizing in there that felt really good.

I almost listed a funeral. That sounds odd to say…I don’t like funerals per se and hate death, but funerals can be very good for putting things in perspective. I mentioned here that someone I didn’t know terribly well but had interacted with and respected online, a young mom of five, had passed away, and the camp ministry her husband worked for had the recorded service online for those who could not attend. It was a comfort and a blessing in many ways.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week,  wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It has been a delightfully springy week. Here are some of the best parts:

1. Glorious spring weather, not too warm or cool. So refreshing.

2. Blooming trees and greening lawns and hills. It’s so good to see color come back to nature.

3. Row boats. The route to my mother-in-law’s place passes a lake and part of a river, which are often beautiful to look at anyway, but this time of year there are rowboats scattered throughout it. UT and other schools use it for training and meets. It’s kind of funny to see the rowers working hard at it and the coach skimming along in a motor boat with a megaphone. 🙂 It all looks very peaceful, though I am sure it is a lot of hard work. I’ve been wanting to stop and take a picture, but haven’t yet.

4. The Wilds Ministry Team. The Wilds is a Christian camp in NC where all of my kids have spent summers. Besides the camp ministry they publish beautiful music. They have recently formed a ministry team that travels around churches, and we had them at ours last week and very much enjoyed them.

5. Sleep. Last Sunday afternoon I had a 2 hour nap — it’s been a long time since that has happened! I thought it would then keep me awake late, but it didn’t much. Then last night I fell asleep about an hour earlier than usual, and feel refreshed and much more awake than usual. Though I know the restorative power of sleep, I tend to like to stay awake much later than I should.

Hope you have a great weekend!