I have a blogging friend, Corry, over at "Experiencing Rheumatoid Arthritis" who is a very good artist. Her medium is pencil and her works belie the simplicity of her choice. She has started a website for selling her works of art and for doing commissions for people of their children and families from photographs.
She appropriately calls her website "Scribbles" and I invite you to take a look at it. Check out her magnolia prints. After I said I collected things magnolia and admired her magnolia drawing, she very graciously sent me one for my birthday four weeks ago. Wasn’t that kind of her?! I intend to have it framed to use in our new house along with my other magnolia pictures and things.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Have y’all been keeping up with Patrick Mead’s online novel, Tribes? It is now finished and is a real – page turner. Okay, make that screen scroller. Anyway – if you like good murder mysteries, this one will grab you, so check it out, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Got some good bloggers’ comments yesterday about the difficulties and disciplines of blogging and we also all talked about the difficulties and disciplines of living a Christian life and having a spiritual walk. Some seem to think that blogging can interfere with their spiritual walk, but I feel just the opposite. I deeply believe it enhances mine. Frank Bellizzi (of the appropriately named "Frankly Speaking") gave some good reasons why blogging helped him. So, if you haven’t read yesterday’s posts and all of the comments, do so. You’ll be enriched – even if you aren’t a blogger.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We’ve got a big beef brisket out in the smoker today that we are smoking for a big family get together tomorrow evening over at Tom’s sister’s house in Slidell. Their brother, Jim Andrews, is down here in New Orleans from Bowie, Maryland for several days and they are driving out to Slidell to meet up with us and Tom’s sister and her husband and their house.
We’re doing the smoked brisket with some homemade "secret" BBQ sauce that is outstanding and Debbie, Tom’s sister, is doing all of the side dishes.
I really don’t know if I can wait that long. That brisket is smelling might good already out there in the smoker. I stuck my head out the back patio door while ago and umm, umm, umm.
Too bad it’s not summer already. Then we could be having this big shindig on our big back porch and deck. They got the screen put up on the back porch yesterday and our wooden screen door is there ready to be put in, so we’ll excited about that. Good old wood screen door that whaps loud when you shut it. Something really Southern about all of that, don’t you think?
You know – whap the screen door shut and then go fishing down at the creek . . .. Then come back up to the back porch to eat smoked brisket for supper on a lazy summer evening.
They also finished the sheetrock work yesterday so the house is ready to paint and hopefully they started on it this morning. We’re now making nearly daily trips out there to watch the house slowly progress day by day, increment by increment.
Do you realize we broke ground on this house the middle of last August?! Post-Katrina life flies in the face of the lazy Southern living ideal in some ways because everyone is so blasted busy all the time and can’t get the work on the house coordinated. What’s so funny about that is that it then slows down the project which is how you’d think it would be in the first place if it were truly slow Southern living.
We can’t win.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cheers, everyone! & Blessings to you today! Dee
Thank you so much for putting up the links, I really appreciate it
That brisket sounds good. Enjoy your family-gathering and have a wonderful and blessed weekend!
God’s Grace.
Your friend is truly a gifted artist. I may have her do one of Peanut if he turns out to be cute enough to spend that kind of money on him!!
I know you are so anxious to get into your new house. It’s beautiful and I love all the light from all the windows … until you have to clean them, of course.
So take a deep breath, relax, and realize it will never move as quickly as you want it to. I won’t charge you for that excellent advice.
Dee — Just finished a quick visit through all your posts since mid-March.
You asked about blogging — you know I’m an addict but I had to go cold turkey for past 2 weeks due to other commitments — of course I had to post a blog about that last week even though it meant working on some other stuff for half the night. Frankly, I don’t know how you do what you do — you write so well and you have such a wide range of places you visit — How DO YOU do it?
God Bless
Charlie
p.s. Really liked your piece on my favorite Mississipian preacher — JD is the best (of course he may be the only preacher I know in Missisippi
).
p.p.s. Re my “off-line sob story”. One of the best things I’ve found about blogging is meeting people like you that will be a listening friend with no strings attached.
I would say that blogging (although I’ve been a bit busy lately) with all of you enhances my spiritual walk. I’ve gained and shared insights into this life long love affair with Jesus and His people over the last couple of years. Hopefully after our “little announcment” yesterday I’ll be able to post with more frequency.