Do It Anyway by Mother Theresa

(I bet you thought this was by Martina McBride)

 

People are often unreasonable, illogical,

And self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.

 

If you are kind, people may accuse you

Of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

 

If you are successful, you will win some

False friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway.

 

If you are honest and frank;

People may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.

 

What you spend years building,

someone could destroy overnight;

Build anyway.

 

If you find serenity and happiness,

they may be jealous;

Be happy anyway.

 

The good you do today,

people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.

 

Give the world the best you have,

and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

 

You see, in the final analysis

it is between you and God

It was never between you and them anyway.

Writer’s Block

Recently a very sweet friend on Facebook asked me why I haven’t posted anything on my blog lately. She actually said she missed me! It warmed my heart to know that at least one person in the blogosphere missed my ramblings on I Throw Like a Girl!

I got back to her and told her there were 3 very good reasons why I haven’t been writing much. One reason was that I just finished 3 1/2 weeks of full-time real estate school (which included full-time homework when I got home each day). 

The second reason is that College Son’s laptop is broken, so I let him take mine to college over two hours away, leaving me to fight for the use of our home computer with Darling Daughter who is taking classes at the local community college. Somehow college work takes priority over blogging.

Go figure. 

But the third and probably biggest reason that I haven’t written much lately is writer’s block. I usually have a whole bunch of ideas swirling around in my head about which to write, but lately, not so much.

I actually do have an idea for a new post, but I need my laptop for it because all my pictures from NJ are on it and the post needs those pictures from NJ or it won’t make much sense.

Another one of my Facebook “friends” (I use quotes because he doesn’t know who I am IRL – I read his blog, so I “friended” him) is a true, honest-to goodness writer. He has a book being published and everything. Anyway, he recently wrote about writer’s block. His advice was that when you have writer’s block, you should just write about it. 

So, here I am.

Writing about it.

Hmmmm….

So far, that’s all I got. 

Oh well, I guess I’ll just update you as to how life has been since we moved to Colorado in June.

For some reason I feel compelled to number my points. 

1. Colorado is great! For the first time in many years we live close enough to family to see them on a regular basis and I love it. Almost every weekend, we have a house-full of nieces and nephews and cousins running around. Priceless….

2. Colorado is great! But I still miss New Jersey. I miss my church, I miss my friends, I miss the familiarity of it all. I loved the fact that almost everywhere I went, I would run into someone I know. Here, not so much. Yet.

3. Colorado has given us a new hobby. My husband went crazy and bought some dirt bikes. He got me a four-wheeler because he knows how I fare on two wheels.  So far, this has only led to one trip to the emergency room and it wasn’t me! I suppose I could write a whole post about that, but I wasn’t there when the accident happened and the story really is very anti-climactic. 

4. Speaking of broken laptops, if you have one, I highly recommend NOT taking it to the blue and yellow store with a Squad who promises to fix it. $250 plus dollars later, the laptop is still unusable. It has a new hard-drive, and a wiped memory, but no internet capability or a backspace key. Grrrr….

5. As you may have already gathered, I am working on getting my Real Estate license. This is something I have wanted to do since my kids were little. I even went to a real estate career seminar once way back when my kids were about 2 and 5 years old. (Now they are 17 and 20 years old). The speaker started the meeting by saying, “If you are ready to work hard 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, you can have a successful real estate career”. At that point, I stood up and walked out. I think I may even have said, “See ya!” as I left.  Looking back, I think the speaker was trying to weed out people like me from the crowd. In my research, I found out it is possible to have a successful real estate career and still have a family and personal life. I’m going to give it a try anyway. I am almost an empty-nester, so I’m ready to find something to do with the next phase of my life.

That’s all for now folks! I’ll do my best to be back here more often with the high quality of ramblings you have come to expect from me.

See ya!

Please pray for Andrew

Dear Bloggy Friends,
This is not one of those chain emails that when you check it out on Snopes.com you find out it is false or way out of date. A precious woman who reads my blog and comments regularly, Melanie, has a 12 year old son, Andrew, with a life threatening brain tumor. To follow their story, please go to http://bellamella-melanie.blogspot.com/ and start reading at her August 25th entry.

I haven’t written much lately and I’m running off to my real estate class in a few minutes, but I felt this was too important to not ask my wonderful friends in Bloggsville to pray about.

Hugs,

Buffalo Chicken Wing Dip -It’s DipTacular!

BooMama is hosting a DipTacular Recipe Carnival. Since this is the most wonderful dip recipe I know, I am sharing it with all of Bloggsville . Thanks to my cousin Debbie for sharing it with me in the first place! Click here for more great dip recipes just in time for football season!

Buffalo Chicken Wing Dip

• 3-4 chicken breasts
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• bottle of blue cheese dressing (small)
• Mozzarella cheese to sprinkle generously on top
• 1 bottle wing sauce

Boil chicken until cooked. Shred chicken and simmer in the wing sauce for 30 minutes. Spread cream cheese in baking dish. Add chicken with wing sauce. Top chicken with blue cheese dressing – about 3/4 of bottle. Top with a couple of hand fulls of mozzarella. Stir until mostly mixed. Bake at 350 degrees until hot and bubbly about 30 minutes. Serve with Frito chips scoops.

What I want to be when I grow up…

I just took a quiz on Facebook that says I should be a Prime Minister. Hmmm…I suppose that means I need to leave the country since we don’t have a Prime Minister here. I think I will choose a tropical island nation to rule. But I think I prefer the title of Queen instead of Prime Minister.

How hard could it be? I mean, the quiz asked me things like what my favorite color and numbers were.  If liking the color green and the number 7 qualify me to rule a nation, what am I doing here at this popsicle stand? I probably will also need to choose a cabinet of advisors. Any volunteers? I’ll take you into consideration even if you don’t like the color green.

Since it might take me a while to find a tropical island nation willing to give me a chance, I need to figure out what I want to do in the meantime here in Colorado, USA.

For a while, I considered trying to get back into pharmaceutical sales. Then I remembered how much I hated that job. I think that kind of rules pharmaceutical sales out. Not hating the job is an important quality an employer is probably looking for in a candidate. 

So, that leaves something that I have been thinking about for a very long time. Real Estate.  I have actually been thinking about this from the time my kids were pre-schoolers (now they are old – one in college and the other in high school). I am on the verge of being an empty nester and until now, I have never felt the time was right for me to attempt to build a real estate career. One reason was all of our own moves. It didn’t make sense to try to get a license in one state, knowing that at any time, we could be asked to move to another. But now that we are in Colorado, it would take an act of God to get us to move out. As my husband says, he is “dug in like an Alabama tick”.

Yet it is my own experience both buying and selling more than our fair share of homes that has me interested in helping others through the process.

I have to decide what I want to do about this soon. The next round of classes starts mid-September. They are four weeks long and are not inexpensive. I know the market is slow right now, but there are signs that show it may be beginning to turn around. Plus, I’d rather learn in a slow market, than one that is going crazy. 

But I’m still open to ruling a tropical island. Any takers?

Got kids leaving for college for the first time?

My son left for college in the fall of 2007 for his first semester. He went to a college far, far away from home. The best way I can describe how I felt is “mourning”. I was mourning the end of the time he would live with us full time. Now that he’s been at college for a few years, and we’ve moved a whole lot closer to where he attends, and since we’ve replaced him with a Shih-tzu, I am doing much better.

A few weeks ago, Adrienne Carlson contacted me about writing a guest post for I Throw Like a Girl. So, I asked her to write an article on how mothers feel when their kids go off to college for the first time. I think she did an excellent job and I hope her advice will help those of you who are experiencing an empty nest or almost empty nest for the first time. Please thank Adrienne for me by leaving her some comments and by visiting her website!

Here’s Adrienne:

Mothers’ Emotions over Children’s First College Experience

You carry them in your body for nine months or so, nourishing and nurturing them as they get ready to be born into this world. You then spend the next 17 years taking care of their every need, cosseting them when they need to be pampered, taking them to task when they need to be disciplined, offering them a shoulder to cry on and words of wisdom when they’re emotionally distressed, and tucking them in to bed every night with a kiss even though you’ve just yelled at them for not keeping their room clean.

Parenting is a tough job, but one that offers a great deal of joy in return. As a mother, you love your kids more than anything else in the world. Maybe it is because they are a part of you, maybe it is just the way motherhood is – the moment you know they are going to leave home for college, you are torn between two conflicting emotions. On the one hand, you are filled with joy because your child is now an adult, all grown up and off to college. But on the other, your heart feels heavy because your young one is now ready to leave the nest and you’re going to have an empty room instead of a messy one.

It’s hard to take when your child is moving away from home, even if it’s for a short span of time. You know that things will never be the same again and that your son or daughter is starting their journey of life, on a path that is now going to take a different route from the one you take. You know that your paths will cross every now and then, but from now on, your baby is on his or her own.

Once your child has settled in college, you’re going to have to prepare yourself for many changes – from calling home often in the first few months, he or she is going to almost forget you when they’re busy with their friends, lessons and other social activities at school and not call for many days together, unless it is to ask for money. It may be difficult to cut the apron strings loose, but that’s just what you have to do if you want your child to be independent and responsible.

The visits home are going to become rare because your child is going to want to go away with friends during vacations or better still, secure positions as interns in order to get a head start on their careers. As a mom, you must also brace yourself for major or minor disasters when your child comes home distraught because of an affair that has gone wrong or any other emotional problem. You may have warned them beforehand, but even so, when it happens, offer comfort and constructive advice instead of saying “I told you so”.

Throughout all this, it is your responsibility as a mother to pray for them and with them, talk to them about their concerns and activities, avoid interfering in their lives unless you’re asked to, and reassure them that you love them and are there for them, no matter what.

By-line:

This guest article was written by Adrienne Carlson, who regularly writes on the topic of online christian colleges . Adrienne welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: adrienne.carlson83@yahoo.com.  

Our New Neighbor

Several of you have asked me to tell  you more about our new home and to post some pictures. That’s a good idea. But, first I thought I’d introduce you to our newest neighbor.

He’s a bit rude, comes over uninvited, and does not clean up after himself at all. In fact, that’s how we knew he was here – he started using our front porch as his bathroom.

I was able to snap a picture of him, however. He doesn’t seem the least bit camera shy.

My kids think he’s cute, but I’ve told my husband, either the bat goes or I’m selling the house.

It’s almost like there’s a cow in my backyard – only not.

As I have mentioned many times before, my family and I have lived in 7 different states. If you count the first 3 months of our marriage when we lived in Colorado for the summer while waiting for my husband’s job in Illinois to start in the fall, this is our 3rd stint in Colorado

The last time we moved here, our children were 1 and 4 years old and we lived in Colorado for 4  years. This time, our kids are 17 and 20 years old – you do the math – it’s been a while since we were Coloradans.

Even though it’s been 12ish years and 4 states in between, it’s nice to see that some things have not changed since we left. One of those things is a dairy that delivers milk, eggs, cheese, and many other necessities right to your front door once a week.  And since they come in the middle of the night, when you wake up in the morning it’s as if the Dairy Fairy stopped by. I used this service the last time we lived here, and I just set up my standing order and got my first delivery from them yesterday morning.

Yes, I pay a little more for the things that the Dairy Fairy delivers, but that is a small price to pay for never being out of milk, eggs, bread and cheese.

If you have a Dairy Fairy or any other grocery delivery service in your area, I highly recommend giving them a try.

For more great kitchen ideas and recipes, check out Saturday Stirrings at FiddleDeeDee! And be sure to leave comments when you visit the other links – it’s the nice thing to do!

You don’t call, you don’t write – What’s up with that?!

Beginning several months before we moved to Colorado and continuing to this day, I have been in a bloggy dry spell. I blame it on the move – the physical and emotional upheaval that moving across the country (or even across town) causes.

But now we’re here. We’re all settled in. Mostly.

Just don’t look in my office – I haven’t organized that yet. Almost every file was dumped out somewhere between New Jersey and Colorado and I still need to go through about 20 years’ worth of papers and save what we need and shred the rest.

Ok, I’ll show it to you.  It is actually much worse than the picture shows, you can’t see the area in front of the desk!

But other than that, I really want to get back to this blog. I miss it and I miss my bloggy friends. Problem is even though one would think I would have a ton to write about, I can’t think of a blessed thing.

So, last night on Facebook, I asked for suggestions and one of my younger friends said I should write about how much I love and miss her.

Good idea. Thanks, A!

Because the truth is part of my bloggy dry spell is being caused by homesickness for my friends in New Jersey. I am so thankful that we got to move to Colorado and live near family, but New Jersey was our home for 10 years!

I miss my church family at CBC so much that it’s hard to feel at home at church here. I miss my many friends that I could just pick up the phone and grab lunch or coffee with at any time. I miss my friend, S, that I could goof around with and then share my heart and pray with.

But, I know God has moved us here for a reason and He is using this season when I am the new girl to teach me to depend on Him for all my needs. When I am looking for a friend to talk to, I need to turn to Him. When I am frustrated with my kids and need advice, I have to turn to Him because there is no one here who I am close enough to to be that open with.

This newness hurts, but it is good. It is good for me to have only God. Of course, I have my husband and extended family, but I know God wants me to learn to look to Him first – to need only Him.

Soon enough, I will have a full calendar again and a church and girlfriends to go to lunch and coffee with. But for now, Jesus is teaching me some lessons that I could only have learned by being taken way out of my comfort zone of the familiar and plopped down across the country in a beautiful new place full of His possibilities.

Wordless Wednesday

‘Cuz I really don’t have that much to say today…

Happy Summer!