pretty designs

Look at the pretty design I had left over after cutting out my facings the other day. I love kind of circular, symmetric designs. This especially applies to pretty sunburst-y things like these gorgeous sparkly underpass decorations I saw when I was in DC last weekend. So pretty and perfect for the space.

Birthday dress!

So I put off making that other garden dress until tomorrow and instead made one for me, because . . . it's my birthday! I made a new pattern which I almost goofed up. Who'd have thunk you needed so much allowance for pin tucks? But I got it fixed well enough and I think I know how to change the pattern for the shop now. This will be the weekend dress I believe. What do you think of it?

A garden dress waiting to be born

Here's what I'll be working on tomorrow! Check my etsy shop for the finished product: livelovelydressshop.etsy.com

Anniversary no. 2

What a fun anniversary we had yesterday. I am so blessed to be with my fun, funny, sweet and super husband. Here are some snapshots of the day:


We picked strawberries at a berry farm a little ways out into the country. It was a gorgeous day!


Some of Paul's grandmother's doilies my mother-in-law sent us.


The front of the card my mom sent. So pretty and so true. It was a beautiful day!

Froggy

Look who Paul found living in the hole Lucie dug near the compost bin! Our back yard is so exciting these days. What was the name of that old kids magazine? My Big Backyard? Between the garden, the bridge over the creek(drainage easement), the compost bin, the raspberries ripening, and now the froggy, my backyard feels very big indeed even if it is technically kind of little.

Morning sewing

I am such a morning person. It's definitely the happiest and most productive time of the day for me. So I love it when I can start out doing something I really love. Today was a sewing day! Here's what greeted me after breakfast and a beautiful walk with Lucie.


The dress came out great too. I'll post it this evening sometime. But until then there's lots of lovely living to be done: fold clothes, grocery store, wash dishes including nasty tupperware that lay forgotten at work for waaay too long. It was nice to have such a sunny start to the day though!

the Live*Lovely Dress Shop

So I have a new hobby. I really have to give credit to Mike for inspiring me to pick a couple of hobbies to focus on this year. It was a great idea and has helped me know what to do when I have a little time on my hands. Thanks Mike! I picked piano and sewing. I have really been enjoying playing the piano. But I have gotten a little out of control with the sewing. I started doing some projects from a book I had, but there were no dresses in the book and that is what I had really wanted to make from the beginning. So I cut some of the pieces up and made some new pieces of my own and made a couple of dresses. They came out great! Then the wheels started turning in my head. A year or so ago I started dreaming of opening up a little boutique with cute, feminine and casual clothes for everyday life. I thought, and still think, that there is a lack of supply in that category. Everything is trying to be trendy, sexy, and flashy, which is ok in its place. But most of the time I think women are just trying to get their stuff done and feeling bad because you can't wear a sexy top to the grocery store, but you look a little shlumpy in a t-shirt and sweats. I wanted to sell clothes that filled that gap. But I sort of let the idea go when I realized that finding inventory for a store like that would be reaaaaally tough. Flash forward to me discovering I am able to sew cute and simple dresses myself. Tada . . . the live*lovely dress shop was born. Check it out at livelovelydressshop.etsy.com.

Spiffed-up kitchen

So I have probably mentioned to most people I know that I love to read design blogs. They are so inspiring! I think the best part of them is the lovely photography of creative people's homes in tip top shape. I like to imagine that when not staged they look a little more like mine and that with some professional photography mine could appear more beautiful like theirs, but anyway it is so fun to see things decorated so nicely. Does reading design blogs make me focus too much on possessions and appearances? Maybe. Probably. But I am so happy to read in the Bible about how God himself had specific design ideas for his temple and fashion ideas for the priestly robes. Now my home is not a national temple and I am not a priest, but I do like to think that since he dwells in me as a Christian, he can be glorified by a place (my place) becoming more beautiful. I also love to think that I can use the creativity he shares with me as his daughter by decorating my humble abode.

All that to say, Paul and I undertook a pretty big polishing up of our kitchen in the last few weeks. I love it now. Here are some before and after pictures:




Fun!

b b b b b bad

Today I am not at work and it's not night. Seems like an unlikely time to post if you go by the pattern of the rest of what I've put up. But the other day when I was talking about how I love reading my blogs, my friend Beth said "you should blog, Emily." I told her I didn't think I could put up much worth reading and that I didn't like being in the spotlight, but apparently that was a lie because here I am again.

I think what would help this be worth looking at is pictures. So let's try one.

This picture is super nerdy, but also, I think, fun. Paul and I had an incredibly nerdy and fun time on this thing in Roatan. Underneath the picture in our album it says "b b b b b bad" which Paul said made things even worse. But seriously, aren't we? We took this thing all over the island of Roatan visiting things like deserted beaches, roadside mango trees, touristy ziplines and an iguana farm. I loved it.

That was before our anniversary. Now we are lightyears (2 weeks) past our first year, and life is
good. And that is definitely worth blogging about, right? : )

Sunday Nap

Wow, it's been just about exactly a year since my last post. Something about fall that makes me want to be reflective and eloquent, I guess. In a years time I've had a lot to reflect on, too. But what I wanted to say today was that it's extremely qu*** (real as can be nursing superstition) on the unit, and I was sitting here reading and resting but feeling a little guilty about not doing my job. So I went around to check on my patients and all of them are peacefully sleeping! That has never happened to me before. In the hospital, you hope for healing, but it is really rare to get sleep. And for 5 people at once to be snoozing away in the middle of the day is just about unheard of. I realized, it is the sabbath. How wonderful. So I quietly came back and sat down here for my own rest. Praise God for giving some sick and sore people and their tired nurse some peace today.

White rice

Tonight, for dinner, I am eating white rice. And that's it. Just rice. And I don't mind. I'm actually looking forward to it. These are the kinds of things single people can eat. I don't think I would tolerate it if someone was cooking dinner for me and we were having white rice. I would be like, rice? with what? But since no one is asking me that, I don't have to worry about them. I can enjoy my white rice by itself in peace. My parents tell me that rice is the only food I would eat when I was a baby. So tonight I am returning to the tyrrany of infancy. It's all about me tonight folks. Me and rice. Mmmm.

Falling

Well, another day spent in the hospital. A shorter and cooler one. The older I get, the more it stresses me out that seasons are a metaphor for life and death. Do I really have to be reminded of this and check off another box in the allotted time for life chart ever three months? Maybe not. Maybe I should just not think about it like most people. Probably.

So today in the hospital, I took care of two men--hospital neighbors--who were both mentally retarded and had both come from their usual group residence because their brains had started bleeding. Wierd, huh? I thought so. I felt sorry for them. They were both old and had probably had hard lives already, so I wonder if this was almost a merciful end for them? Death. Hard.

Darn it we're back on fall again.

Life-gum

Happy fun things: seeing two of my best friends ever dance with the loves of their lives to beautiful bluegrass music; watching Lucie falling over and running around in circles for joy because Mom came to visit; flower arrangement of tiger lilies, red roses and cool pink berries left for me by my boyfriend; cheering for same boyfriend while he outswam, outbiked and outran everybody else at the beach.

It's been a good few days. And the memories are delicious and long lasting. Like really good life-gum.

Birthday Gift

My how the thoughts are flowing this night shift. I had to go eat because I was starting to get sad again about my brother leaving us so soon. It is a happy thing. It's just hard to remember it's a happy thing sometimes. But it all got started when I was trying to think of the perfect birthday present for him and realized it had to be meaningful since he is leaving. But it all wound up happy when my lovely design blog friends helped me find a fun and non-meaningful gift. I can't say what it is 'til tomorrow.

So then I got going on fun little materialistic things from the design blogs. There are many pretty things out there and somehow on night shift it seems like little pretty things make life complete or at least exciting. I think it's just the hint they give towards towards capital "b" Beauty though.

I have not yet started to plan an apartment renovation, my wedding, or my life mission yet, but perhaps those will be next. I'll keep you posted.

Ahhh, night shift.

Night Shift

Well, as expected, I let my blog rot. Maybe night shift will revive it. For those of you who never stay awake for the both sides of the light around "all night long," I could share some thoughts about how it is. It is (knock on wood) boring up here tonight. They turn the lights mostly off which helps people sleep. Only nobody here is technically allowed to sleep. Either you are a patient who has their vital signs and neuro status checked every 2 hours or you are a nurse who has to do the checking. So the dim lights just remind us all what we wish we could be doing.

But there are cool things about being up all night. Like . . . well it makes you seem a little tough. Or maybe at least tougher than you were before you had never stayed up all night before. Like me before I became a nurse. Night shift itself is also nice and serene, and for the most part, people are less likely to disturb your blogging and make you go do anything yucky. There is also frequently a ready supply of junk food and magazines--things best enjoyed in the middle of the night. And there is this crazy phenomenon that affects me in the middle of the night in the hospital where I get very ambitious and hungry for daytime and write out fabulous lists of things I need to do to get my life in order. I do sometimes follow through on these lists too. Like when I made beaded brooches for some family members for Christmas. That was born on night shift. I think Lucie likes night shift better too. She does wonder what the problem is when I sleep the day away afterwards though.

Anyway. It's night shift. The blog has taken another breath.

I'll fly away

Today I watched my silver-haired little old lady wheel off down the nursing home hallway in search of home for the last time. Gerontological nursing clinical is over! For me that is. But Mary will just keep wheeling up and down the hallway, occasionally asking politely for directions home, probably for the rest of her life. It is heartbreaking when you think of it that way. But me and Mary also had some good laughs together. For instance, when she was trying to offer bites of her dinner to "Daddy" who is long deceased, and after persistently holding the spoon out to him despite my encouragement to eat it herself she finally concluded, "I don't think he's going to eat it." We both laughed long and hard over that one. She was also quite amused one morning to find that I was her student nurse. When I introduced myself and told her who I was, she burst into a smile and said, "That's funny!" I didn't get the joke, but her little chuckle is quite contagious. However, I think my favorite memory of her is a little more serious. I was trying to convince her to let me push her wheelchair for a walk outside one morning. She was courteously declining because she was in such a hurry to get home and didn't think she could stay for that long. I said, "Oh come on, just let me push you outside," to which she replied, "Why don't you push me home?" We laughed about that too, but as we were going down the hall, Mary began to sing. "One glad morning when this life is over, I'll fly away. To a land where joys will never end, I'll fly away." I had never heard her sing before that morning and she hasn't done it since. I hope and pray that soon she will get home to Momma and Daddy and a land where joys will never end.

One more check on the road to nursing list is done! But that is what it's all about.

get rich scheme

Get it . . . ? Haha. Paul says I am dorky, but I still think it is kind of funny. So you owe me at least one penny by now. And I am serious. Forget nursing. Blogging is where it is at. Ok well I will let you know if I think of anything else.