hold your friends up

I’ve been doing an arm workout that involves holding them out at shoulder height for four hours. Not really. It only feels like four hours because of the burning in my shoulders after the first ninety seconds. It’s only seven minutes total, and they’re the longest...

failure is not an option

Yesterday my husband asked me to re-hem his suit pants. It’s an easy enough task on the sewing machine, but it wasn’t cooperating. The thread became such a tangled mess that what should have been a ten-minute repair turned into over an hour of troubleshooting, trying...

speak life

Proverbs 18:21 “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” I’ve read that humans need to experience praise three times as often as criticism to maintain a positive mood. I would counter that the ratio is actually much...

where you lead

In 2020, we got a new puppy about six weeks before the dark time when all there was to do was sit through Zoom meetings and walk our dogs seventeen times a day. Back then, I wrote about how my stubborn puppy refused to walk if anyone but her was holding her leash....

lessons from turtles

I accidentally started a worm farm. It’s not as weird as it sounds. I added some red wigglers to my compost bins to aid decomposition a few years ago, and their population exploded. It’s been a win-win situation because I have great compost, and my four box turtles...