Happy Mother's Day!

Well if it weren't enough that my sweet daughter Jessyca bought me a whole set of my favorite Bath and Body Works scent "White Citrus" complete with bubble bath and body butter, and that my son and his wife had saved something special they'd bought for me on their honeymoon in San Diego, my stepdaughter Jessica gave me the ultimate in mother's day fare: a pair of baby booties, and a card that said such sweet, encouraging things that I got a little teary-eyed. I'm going to be a grandmother! In 7 months or so, I will be snuggling a teeny tiny new life that is a part of my precious husband, which has been a dream of mine since we met. These may be things the average mom expects eventually, but the step-mom... it's like winning the gold cup at some... well, event that hands out a gold cup for a prize!

There was of course the expected absence of my youngest son from my Mother's Day, but his silence makes me no less his mother. And as I move forward in life I know I don't have to subtract his whatever from the blessings and gifts and love I received. Yes, it hurts. But receiving the love of my daughter, my son, my daughter-in-law, and my step-daughter truly has my cup running over. I don't understand God or His ways, but He tells me, whenever I say I can't see or feel Him involved in my life, "Hey. I'm right here. Fear not." And that's how I will keep on.

Dreading Mother's Day

Today I woke up not feeling well. After resting and not feeling any better I wrote a letter to my estranged son and turned it into an art journal page. I don't feel any better but at least I did something. All the sad days in my life might be but a mucky blur one day but this one page will be clear. Let's face it. Not all our memories are pretty ones but we might as well accept them all.
Here's to Tylenol and an evening with Jessyca. Peace, Tam

Just to make it clear, we DID return safely from Boston, about a week before the marathon and the bombing, and we have watched it all unfold on TV along with the rest of the world...only Boylston Street meant something to me when I saw it on the news, something more than it would have had I not just been there. In fact it was the first street I became acquainted with our very first evening in Boston, because we stumbled on the cemetery there and the "mass grave" stone placed when the Boylston Street Mall was excavated in the late 19th century. Isn't that odd...it was this amazingly quiet spot in this really bustling city. Or it seemed quiet. And then just a week later, a few blocks away, the scene of such awfulness and noise and just EVIL. Humans planning the pain-riddled destruction of other humans...

I just have nothing else I can say. I have been unable to look at our pictures from the trip (and our trip was SO fabulous) because it seems to have this tragic post-script that will NEED to be attached. It's not that our time together and our adventure were marred, it just seems--at this point--that it would do such dishonor to those who were there and did NOT have the adventure they went for. Does that make sense?

Anyway there is a lot of other goodness going on, here at home and out in the world. I'm going to keep focusing on nourishing it, and making some where it's not.

Peace,
Tam

Boston Bound!

Well we're in the truck headed for an overnight stay in Austin before flying or in the morning for Boston. I'm so excited... it's our first trip alone with no other purpose but to be together.

One week to go

Next Friday evening I will become a mother-in-law. Of course, I am Clint's mother-in-law, but in a "step" sort of way.

I still don't have a dress, or a pair of dress shoes. I mean, I have the ones that look like they came out of my grandmother's closet (in style, not in age....they're just sort of, grandma shoes). But in looking back at Brittany's wedding picture, (of course I'm looking at ME in somebody else's wedding pictures. Where the hell else would I look?) I look very old and frumpish indeed. I'd rather look a little younger, and hotter.

So Jessyca and I went to the mall. Right off the bat we were drawn to the perfume counter. My favorite and signature perfume has always been Wrappings by Clinique. But they discontinued it over 12 years ago, which is my luck ("they" did that to Another World, too). A few years later they started putting out a limited number of bottles at Christmas, and I have 2 or 3 in the bottom drawer of my dresser, one in my medicine cabinet, and Jessyca has one. Other than Wrappings, Jessyca has a huge collection of Bath & Body Works scents. They almost knock Paul into full-blown asthma attacks. So ANYWAY. Perfume counter. We sniffed a few cards before coming across one we both LOVED.

The lady at the counter said it was "mandarin and coconut." Oh, and it wassssss. Then when I wanted a bottle, she put it on the counter and the name was "Sensuous Nude." Like....how did I not know that before? Hate the name. LOVE the perfume. I ended up buying a large bottle to share with Jessyca. Funny, she wanted it to sit on her dresser with her 50 bottles of B&BW fakies. I think not. It sits with my bottle of Wrappings, and a nearly empty bottle of Elige (Mary Kay, also discontinued, which I stumbled over at a thrift store).

Well that was the end of shopping success. In the whole mall I found only one dress I liked, it was sort of matronly but very classy, just needed a pair of sleek heels and some coral jewelry. Screw blue. I don't want to wear blue. But it was $240 and I said to Jessyca, "Let's keep looking and come back if we find nothing else." Well I found nothing else, and in the end could not find my way back to the dress. At some point I began to panic and wanted nothing more than to get out of the mall. So at long last (after wandering around and taking the wrong exits and my phone beeping constantly telling me I was about to begin incurring "roaming charges" which is complete crap) we got out of there and I convinced myself that when we got to our next stop - the seamstress shop to get Jessyca's dress altered - I would open an art magazine and reboot from my panic attack. And I did.

Tomorrow we are going out to some nice, small, consignment shops.

So here are some photos.

This Monday we had a CRAZY windstorm. It blew open and removed boards from our fence (which we had bolstered earlier with a 6-foot-long 1-1/2-inch-thick iron rod, de-shingled the roof, had car alarms going off every few seconds, knocked the electricity on and off, sandblasted our faces while we hammered the fence back together, knocked out (and over) stop lights all over town. I wore this hat that night to do check-in at Fuel/City Youth (haven't acclimated to the new name yet) and when the wind began to die down, the air got really cold. Down into the 30s, even. South Texas weather is SO screwy.

Here's Trudy demanding to be "in the mix" of our morning coffee routine. She did NOT take "no room for you here" for an answer.

Today I sat at my serger and turned a whole bunch of old towels into washcloths and little round coasters for my nightstand. I washed the dogs' dishes (they get SO nasty) and made a tablecloth for their table, with serged edges and shoelaces sewn onto the corners to tie around the table legs. Now when I wash their dishes (which I try to do on Mondays) I can just shake the tablecloth out outside, then throw it in the wash with a load of whites.

After a long shift at work tonight, I came into the bedroom, followed by my Nicky (who always waits next to me until 11:58). He promptly gathered all his toys on the floor next to his couch, then sacked out, drool and all.

Nitey night!

Free wood!

This afternoon I absolutely HAD to go to Walgreens for something for back pain. It was SO bad. On the way out I saw this at the entrance of our neighborhood.

so I sent a quick message to Paul asking him if he wanted me to ask for the wood when I came back through. He said yes. Amazingly, by the time I got back into the neighborhood, they had that long piece down to about a 4-foot-high stump and were carting the pieces to a large truck that would haul them off. Looonnnnng red light. Then I shot around and hollered, "Hey. My husband wants to know if he can have that wood!" These very happy men said, "Where is he?" and I said, "Doesn't matter. I have the truck." So they delightedly loaded almost all of it into my pickup, telling me this was SO much easier than lifting it (3 or 4 feet higher) into the other truck. So now my truck is in the driveway with all this luscious wood (Mesquite? Oak. Not positive.) for Paul to turn into something beautiful.

Brave Girls Club -- Soul Restoration Workshop

Yup. Doin dat. I saw all those broken windows and peeling paint on the walls and I said, "YES! Show me how to find the beauty underneath all that NASTINESS!

Plus as we all know, I really love, for the sake of themselves, old, forgotten, unused items set aside for new, shiner items. I always buy an antique with the plan of bringing it back into the world and using it for its intended purpose or giving it a new one. Who knows whose hands turned that mixer, or what they were mixing up, or for whom. Don't EVEN get me started on chipped porcelainized dish pans and the like. THEY NEED new life!

So in that vein, "New Life? Yes, new life. I would like some moh' please."