Amazing FREE online art gallery...

I am not feeling well today, so this post will be short and to the point! I am enrolled in a class called "Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies for Your Classroom" via Coursera, and another participant shared this amazing resource: Google Cultural Institute's Google Art Project. If you love art, are teaching art history, can't get to a museum, or whatever else the case might by, check out this project!  It brings art and major museums right to your computer.

Trust the universe...

Lately, I've felt like just about everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.  Nothing major has really happened, but things haven't been going the way I hoped for.  Woody Allen once said, ““If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” And, I feel like I've been making God laugh a lot lately.

Then, two nights ago, as I was stirring a pot of soup, the phrase, "Let go, and trust the universe" popped into my head.  I don't know why.  What I do know is that when I gave into that idea, I felt better.  Yesterday, whenever I began to feel stressed, I went back to that thought, closed my eyes, focused on my breathing and meditated on the meaning of this little idea.  My day went significantly better than expected.

So, if you are feeling stressed, worried, anxious, here is a little PDF poster I created for you.  Feel free to download it and use it as you need to.  All I ask is that if you share it, you give credit where credit is due.  Thanks.

Let Go and Trust the Universe

May, June, July 2013 reading

Today, I am focusing on:

Let go, and trust the universe.

This is a hard one, but I think it is necessary.  The line came to me last night as I was making dinner and fretting about money.  Once it popped into my head, and I didn't argue with the thought, a weird thing happened ~ I felt calm and at peace.

So, this morning, my mantra is let go, and trust the universe.  I am a control freak, so this is a hard task, but I am doing my best.

In other news, I was looking back over my Goodreads.com book list, and realized that either I didn't read as much as I thought I had over the past three months, or I didn't update my list for every book that I read.  Not sure which is the case...  I'm usually really on top of things like that as you can see in these posts:

• Blame Nick Hornby for this post
• Update to Blame Nick Hornby for this post
• Reading update, still blaming Nick Hornby
• The "Gilmore Girls" reading list
• December 2012 and January 2013 reading

To say I read a lot would be, ahem, an understatement.

Looking over my Goodreads list, I am sure there are books listed that I didn't list, or rate, or mark as finished, or something.

July 2013 reading:
In progress:

• The Hit by David Baldacci
• The Butterfly Hunter by Chris Ballard
• The No Asshole Rule by Robert J. Sutton
• The Owl and Moon Cafe by Jo-Ann Mapson
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg
• And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Finished:

• The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green by Joshua Braff
• Meet Me At Emotional Baggage by Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella
• The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain
• Celia the Dark and Weird by Karen Finneyfrock

June books finished, according to my Goodreads list:

• Blue Nights by Joan Didion
• Open Heart by Elie Weisel
• Marley: A Dog Like No Other by John Grogan
• School of Fear (book #1) by Gitty Daneshvari
• Go Your Own Way: Women Travel the World Solo by Faith Conlon

May books finished according to my Goodreads list:

• The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
•  Hold the Cream Cheese, Kill the Lox by Sharon Kahn

I am SURE I read more than that in both May and June though! SURE OF IT!

Deleting old posts, updating my focus, and moving forward

I haven't posted regularly in months, maybe even a year.  Life wasn't fun.  We were always too busy, too rushed, too broke, too unhappy.

The past two or three months, I've had a huge amount of time on my hands and it has been an adjustment.  It has been a period of reflection, deep thought, zoning out, and regeneration.

I'm cleaning up this blog, deleting posts that no longer seem relevant, narrowing focus, and making changes.

The first thing you'll notice is that I'm deleting Etsy tags on posts, and deleting posts are that are 100% about Etsy.  I haven't quit Etsy, but I've dramatically shifted my focus away from that forum as a creative outlet.  I found that I was focusing more and more on the business side, and losing my joy in creating as a result.  So....pretty much no more Etsy on this blog unless it is super relevant to something else, and not at all my main focus.

Secondly, I'm eliminating some posts that were relevant at the time but are no longer relevant...things that had time lines, for example.

Thirdly, we moved.  Like, we literally no longer live in that craphole of an apartment with the poopy landlords who never fixed anything unless I withheld rent and threatened repeatedly to sue them (those of you that donated a bit of money to help...THANK YOU!!!!).  We live in a mold FREE, pretty, fairly new house now! YAY!  We are still renting, but this is so much nicer!  We even have enough room for a second dog! DOUBLE YAY!

I've put myself on a schedule, and outlined blog posts for the next few weeks.  My goal is to blog DAILY so that it becomes habit, and to view this as part of my daily, right after morning coffee but before morning yoga routine.  I could really use some cheerleaders though.  If you see me lagging, PLEASE NUDGE ME!  PLEASE!

I want to bring my focus back to things I love -  homeschooling my beautiful son (he turns 15 this August!), literature/reading, writing, drawing, and building my dream life.

I've missed you all, my blogging friends!

In our HOUSE, I no longer have to worry about bothering downstairs neighbors with noise when I jump around exercising; however, the dog thinks my mat is a good spot for a nap.  Haha!