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Goal Update for September

I usually post my goal update at the end of each month, but September’s is running late. October was sneaky and arrived before I knew it. I even forgot to say Rabbit, Rabbit.

At the end of each month, (or beginning), I review my yearly goals and spend some time reflecting on how I’m doing in living the life I want to live ~ a way of becoming my own accountability partner and having frequent check-ins to evaluate my progress. I’m still in the process of revising some of my goals as I encounter successes…..and setbacks. New goals have asterisks for the month of October, when I will report on them in a few weeks. For the month of September here’s my goal reflection:

CategoryGoalsMy Progress
LiteratureRead for Sarah Donovan’s Book Group








Send out Postcards


Blog Daily




Write a proposal for
writing group’s book		I participated in the September book discussion with Sarah’s reading group and look forward to reading October’s book – Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. I’ll participate in this book discussion this month. Fellow blogger Tammi Evans recommended a book by Elizabeth McCracken entitled The Souvenir Museum, and I hope to explore this collection of short stories as well this month. I need a spooky book, too, to bring on the chills of October.



I mailed 10 postcards this month from Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

I continue to blog daily, and the daily writing and reflecting is a wonderful habit for me. I don’t feel complete without some form of daily writing, and the blog is a way of continuing the habit.

My writing group is writing a series of new books, and I will spend time editing the chapters we have written. I will continue to add chapters as we receive feedback from our proposals. We are each sending our proposal out to some publishing companies.
Creativity

*Decorate the house for fall





*Create Shutterfly Route 66

I am working on decorating. It’s a slow process this year. I picked up an orange and a bronze mum today from Home Depot, and I’ve also made the instant hot spiced tea and put it in Mason jars for the fall. I have added a couple of new pillows and a throw for the living room. Our decorations are simple around here in the country – – we have a lot of natural foliage, and I like using it in some wine bottles I’ve wrapped with twine using double-sided tape as vases.

I have been trying to get to Shutterfly since July, so if I haven’t accomplished this goal by the end of October, I may give up on this one.
SpiritualityTune in to church



Pray!



Keep OLW priority		We have been tuning in to church. With Dad preaching every Sunday in October and a few Sundays ahead of that, it makes the church home hunt take a back seat until my childhood church gets a new preacher, since I have the opportunity to hear Dad.

My car is still my prayer chamber for daily prayer, and there’s so much to give thanks for. I continue my conversations with the good Lord each morning and afternoon.

I’m still keeping my OLW my priority: pray!
ReflectionWrite family stories

Spend time tracking goals each month		I have shared family stories through my blog this month and will continue this month to do the same.

I’m tracking goals, revising, and considering some new categories as I look at my goal table.
Self-Improvement*Reach top of weight rangeThis is a setback for me this month. I’ve hit major stress and gained weight, despite joining WW. I need to set a firm date and get the mental mindset that it takes to stay on track. I have work to do. Update: every day, the diet is starting “tomorrow.” I seriously need a good mindset to start back.
GratitudeDevote blog days to counting blessingsI begin the days this way and end them giving thanks as well. I enjoy tea on the porch, taking time to meditate on all that I have been given. And all that I have not been given, too. I’m grateful both ways.
ExperienceEmbrace Slow Travel




Focus on the Outdoors


I’ve taken a trip in September to Augusta for a work meeting and to Kentucky to visit family. We visited Mammoth Cave National Park and the Bell Witch Cave – two caves in two days.






I’m still focusing on the outdoors with birdwatching adventures and camping. It’s the best time of the day to sit outside on the porch (in the shade) and just listen and watch what is going on around me. I have also come to an interesting resolution: I like my own backyard for birdwatching. Over time, I begin to know where each bird lives, its hours of activity, and its preferred seeds and feeders – and there is a powerful science to the perch on a feeder. Take cardinals, for example. They will come to a hanging feeder, but they prefer platform feeders just like mourning doves do. I’m learning by slow birding.
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A Spooky Season of Caves

Mammoth Cave National Park – Cub Run, Kentucky

I have a family member who celebrated a birthday in September, so we enjoyed a trip up to Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky this past weekend.

Last spring when I visited her, she mentioned that she’d loved exploring the colorfully-lit caves at Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, Tennessee so much that she’d wanted to visit more caves. So we headed over to Dunbar Cave in Clarksville, Tennessee back in April but were disappointed when all the tickets were sold out. I promised that when I returned in the fall, we’d tour a cave together.

Mammoth Cave

If you’ve ever been to Mammoth Cave, you may already know it’s the longest cave system in the world and that it gets its name from its immense size. We chose the self-guided tour on the last day of September so we could enjoy the cave at our own pace, but we only saw one small section of this natural wonder since the entire cave is 426 miles in total length and growing by the year as more discoveries are made by cave explorers. The lantern tour was recommended as one of the best tours, so we are planning a return trip to see it by lantern light the way that early spelunkers would have seen it – – without electric lights.

To set the spooky tone for the month on the first day of October, we went to The Bell Witch Cave in Adams, Tennessee to hear the historical accounts of the Bell Witch’s terrorizing of the Bell family back in the 1800s, even sending a United States President running from the place. We toured the replica cabin and the actual cave where she was said to have frequented. It is said that she saved a child when he got stuck in the cave one summer. For all the evil she is said to have caused, she did do something good, apparently.

Inside the Bell Witch Cave, full of tight squeezes and ledge climbing

Please share the most fascinating caves you’ve visited in the comments. I’m adding to our list, so I’d love to know which ones would be recommended and which ones would not. I would highly recommend Mammoth Cave for its balmy temperature and fascinating history, but I would not recommend the Bell Witch Cave unless you are very steady on your feet and do not mind squeezing through tight spaces on rocks with a cold-water creek running underfoot. You have to sign an accident waiver, which should have been my first sign – – especially since last year at the end of September, I missed the last step at work and broke my ankle (redefining fall break). I lucked out this year and walked away without injury, but I’m starting to admit that my age may need to be a risk factor in my adventure assessments going forward. I’ll also add that Fantastic Caverns in Missouri is my favorite cave adventure to date (it was discovered, in part, by a lost dog) because I appreciated being driven through the cave in a jeep instead of having to crawl or walk through it – or swim.

Both recent excursions were fun, though, especially as we have long sought reprieve from the brutal heat of summer. There’s nothing like the 54-degree-year-round cool of a cave to welcome the balmy feel of fall!

Cheers for sweater weather!

A ledge climb inside The Bell Witch Cave
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Dream Bags

I’ve finally done it.

I dreamed up the perfect bag for writers.

Since I’ve been taking Meno to ease the symptoms of menopause (namely hot flashes that are like wandering the dungeons of hell in the middle of the night, after just crawling out of a shower of hot baby oil and syrup boiled with dead bugs and toads), I’ve had some colorful and interesting dreams. I think there is a mild sleep agent in it, but at least my dream recentl had an upside.

I invented a purse.

I was wandering with my late mother and her parents through these stores, and I don’t even know what we were doing or where we were, and they had wandered on up ahead. There was no conversation – I just knew they were there.

The stores were big rooms, that connected, but there was no middle-of-the-room merchandise. It was all lined along the walls.

I picked up a pair of flexible toe shoes, knitted like a slipper on top but soft rubber with floor grippers on bottom, and put them back. I walked on into the next connecting store and started making my way along the walls, looking at merchandise. We all looked like creeping mice, never going into the center of the huge rooms.

Then I spotted it.

The price tag: $81. It was splotched black, with intermittent patches of turquoise and shimmery champagne, a shoulder bag with a hinged lap desk that let down from the top and came off, allowing a writer to have a hard surface wherever inspiration struck, to journal even in the middle of nowhere with no desk or countertop space.

Another bag, a mahogany square tote, had a side sleeve that held a thin lap desk for a writer and gave support to one side of the bag. I didn’t look to see if there was one on the other side and the two pieces could connect like a puzzle and become a bigger piece, but hey – there’s another idea for the invention of my dreams.

I’ve had to cut back from 2 Meno gummies to 1 gummy to 1/2 of a gummy to restore some more logical and peaceful dreams without the lingering haunting feelings, but I must admit …..I’m curious about what other inventions I may have made by now if I hadn’t.

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Zeno inspired by Margaret Simon

My friend Margaret Simon from Louisiana challenged her writing friends to write Zeno poems this week. It’s a 10-line poem with the following syllable count: 8,4,2,1,4,2,1,4,2,1 where the single-syllable lines rhyme. I’d held a family engagement session this week at a local church’s preschool center, and as I was leaving, I heard the unmistakable caw of a fish crow directly overhead. I snapped a photo, not realizing at the time that it would become my zine photo for a poem! Thanks to Margaret Simon for a fresh, new poetic form. I feel a lot of zenos coming on!


Fish Crow In the Know

high overhead, perching on a 

church steeple, caws

a fish

crow

giving off strained

vibes of

Poe

raven-like eyes

in the

know

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Princess and Hero Night on the Zebulon Square

As the District Literacy Specialist for Pike County Schools in Zebulon, Georgia, I get to be a part of some amazing events put on by businesses in this county by offering L4GA grant partnerships to provide books and other literacy materials to put into the hands of families who attend the events.

One such event is the Princess and Superhero Night on the Zebulon Square, which happens on a Saturday evening at the end of September. Our Chamber of Commerce organizes the event and gets permission from the City Council to block off the road directly in front of the courthouse to make a safe zone for families to visit the characters that are each sponsored by businesses and stationed all around the square. This brings people into our local businesses and provides opportunities for people to meet new friends and get new books! 2,000 books, to be exact.

This is where my passion and my career intersect for the most fun I could possibly ever have in my work! I meet with our local businesses in the spring of each year to design a Community Partner Literacy Plan. Instead of coming up with new ideas, I ask each business to share with me the events that are already happening as part of what they do – whether they are providing workshops, celebrating certain holidays, holding festivals or hosting events that bring people together. Once we have their events listed, we imagine all the ways that grant funding through L4GA can be used to bring books, reading clubs, writing workshops, poetry readings, or other literacy-related benefits to our community. Then we put the dream on paper and make it happen. The cherry on top is when we network between and amongst community partners themselves. This particular event showcases how all the dots connect to create a magical night!

I often think of my work as a year-round Hallmark Literacy Movie, because if I took any Hallmark Christmas movie and substituted the festival that always seems to be part of the plot for any of the events held in our county, with the constant smiles and joyful spirit of all the characters, that’s the setting where I live and work – – in a dozen or more Hallmark Literacy Movies, where people fall head over heels in love with books.

But please don’t tell anyone. I need everyone to think that no one would want this job (I have a few fake complaints stored up just in case anyone realizes I’m getting paid to do what I would, most days, do for free). The truth is that I work with amazing people every single day, from the state department of education and the broader network of schools throughout the state, to the local schools and businesses throughout my own county. The Princess and Hero Night is one of my favorite events, but it is only one of many that draws families and gives us opportunities to distribute books.

Just look at all these smiles! In the words of Judith Viorst and her adorable Alexander, these moments make this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad job the most rewarding work I do!

All photographs are used with permission of families!

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Savoring Saturdays

My husband and I savor our Saturdays together by doing something together in the right lane of the weekend, where the slower traffic dawdles. Truth be told, we had a blue light warning on the way to breakfast Saturday, but that’s because we were humming along to Anne Murray’s Could I Have This Dance? and the one of us who was driving was lost in the moment……speeding, it turns out, through the tiny town of Molena, Georgia.

We’d decided to take the back roads and go deeper into the country instead of over to the city north or south. We needed a place with a great breakfast, an uncrowded grocery store, and a spot for birdwatching.

We knew just the place.

Woodbury, Georgia is one county west of us, and Smitty’s makes some of the best food around. Southerners can tell, too. We see the proverbial “hole in the wall” restaurant and our right foot slips from the gas pedal to the brake. A friend of ours and his brother runs Smitty’s, and they come from a long line of southern cooking.

We’d been too late for breakfast, but we caught the first lunch. My husband ordered a hamburger, and I ordered a BLTPC (Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato with Pimento Cheese). As soon as the waitress turned to take our orders to the kitchen, we heard the rumble of motorcycles. A dozen Harley-Davidsons.

They all parked and entered the restaurant in black leather vests and motorcycle boots. This crew of bikers with head wraps pulled four tables next to us together and sat down to eat. One white woman, one black woman, five black men, and six white men did not claim separate ends of the table but sat among each other talking, sharing their observations of the beauty of their drive through the rural countryside and things they had seen. We recognized the points of their descriptions and went there in our minds, envisioning these places so familiar to us.

We listened, pretending not to eavesdrop, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

“Wouldn’t our world be a better place if we could all talk about the beauty we see every day and share moments around the table regardless of race or religion or political affiliation?” I asked my husband.

He shook his head. “Yes, that’s something we don’t see often enough. Can you get a picture?”

I snapped one on the down low and noted they were riding with a club out of Fulton County, north of us near Atlanta. When we don’t want to stare but we do want to see people or situations that interest us, that’s how we people-watch without being rude.

When we left, we admired the parked bikes. There is something about seeing a row of motorcycles that inspires me to want to get out and let the breeze blow through my hair and breathe in the fresh air of the countryside with a band of biker friends.

Give me the 3-wheeler!

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Falling for Nature

In recent days leading up to the first day of fall, I’ve been intentional about getting out and soaking up some nature time – driving, walking, sitting to just observe and appreciate the beauty of where we live and celebrate the changing season. My friend Margaret Simon commented this past week that she’d noticed many were lamenting the end of summer while I was heralding the onset of fall, and she inspired me to share some of the reasons I could live in the world of autumn year-round.

Ours is a small, rural county in middle Georgia with huge orange sunsets that dip down between the rolling hills, nuzzling down into an heirloom quilt for a good night’s sleep. Sometimes, we are “those people” who really do take Sunday afternoon drives with nowhere to have to be and no time to have to be there – just so we can take it all in!

A family of deer come along their path daily, walking along the edge of the trees. Their darker winter coats are starting to come in, and the babies are losing the last of their spots.

Mushrooms are growing along the rocks, and leaves are dropping in shades of red and yellow from the trees, spinning down to blanket the ground.

And spiders are becoming more plentiful – the big ones, spinning webs between trees, setting traps for unsuspecting prey. Somehow, they give off a Halloweenish vibe, especially as our resident bats circle overhead in the evenings.

The most hopeful time happens as the day begins when the sun is rising and the light infiltrates the trees, pounding down on the grass like a warmed oatmeal breakfast with a multivitamin and a glass of orange juice, turning on the light, greeting us all with an enthusiastic “Good Morning!” as it peels back the covers of night.

Redbirds lurk and loiter, running off the last of the small songbirds from the feeders as they migrate south. They’ve already laid claim to the feeders that will get them through the freezing winter ahead.

Monarchs and Black Swallowtails feast on the last remnants of the withered figs.

Fish Crow

The American Crows and the Fish Crows, too, become more abundant. They sit on church steeples, thanking their maker for a reprieve from the brutal heat of the summer. Their caws stir in a dash of Poe.

Our pair of Great Horned Owls was visiting every night, but now they are in a different spot on the west side of the farm. We can still hear them, but they haven’t made themselves evident lately.

Even if I only spend ten minutes each day outdoors, I notice the small changes that are happening around me and feel grateful to be able to admire the transition from summer to fall. I’m choosing a tree this year to photograph every 5 days so that I can see the change as a time lapse once the leaves have all let go and the summer-to-winter transformation is complete. I can learn much from trees that shed worn leaves and bloom again fresh in the spring.

I take pictures and count the blessings of each magnificent and microscopic moment of beauty. How do you celebrate the changes as fall approaches? I’d love to hear all the ways we welcome the season!

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Signature Pedicure Night with Hot Rocks

My sister-in-law and I treat ourselves to a relaxing pedicure together once a month. We like to sink down into the massage chair, plunge our feet into the steamy footbath, and breathe in the aroma of the bubbling pool.

The health and wellness benefits are immediate – a pedicure works wonders for the stress level, and it gets the leg circulation flowing just right.

Even though we know we overindulge in the comforts of the kneading and percussion of the massage chair combined with the leg massage, we splurge by going all out on the hot rocks, too. I first had a hot rock massage while on a cruise, and it’s been my favorite kind ever since.

According to the real experts on various sites on the internet, hot stone massages are beneficial for anxiety, back and leg pain, depression, insomnia, and osteoarthritis and can also reduce muscle spasms, tension, and chronic stress. I once had a friend whose doctor recommended them for all his female patients over 50 with desk jobs to help with circulation.

In fact, my brother called about a month ago and shared that he had enjoyed his first-ever pedicure and was feeling the benefits. HIs girlfriend took him and introduced him to a whole new vista of foot pleasure. I encouraged him to try the hot rocks next time.

The leg masque time is soothing. My sister-in-law and I both picked the eucalyptus for its relaxation and amazing scent. They apply the masque and wrap your legs in steamed towels to help the moisturizers set in, and it’s a few fantastic minutes of heaven.

September – 508

Next comes the pop of color. I went from Hazelnut in August to Tropical Teal (508) in September, and next month I’m thinking of Queen of Grape as a deep purple frost for Halloween.

We always carry our flip flops or slides along with us so we can get home or to dinner without any dings on our polish. It’s fun to watch reactions when you walk into a restaurant wearing professional clothes……and flip flops. We’ve considered showing up somewhere in the complimentary pedicure flops somewhere just for kicks, like when we are meeting the family for dinner afterward.

I need a good November color – – a color of Thankfulness and Gratitude. I welcome your suggestions in the comments. The color choice is more difficult than an ice cream choice for me, because at least with flavor, I know the few I like best. Color is different, though – I love them all! Please help me choose!