blog links

Links around the internet that have nothing to do with You Know What

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 24 Comments

Escapism is the name of the game for many of us already prone to anxiety who are in the midst of all this world craziness, so I thought I’d share some blog posts and other links from around the internet that I have found this week that have nothing to do with You Know What. If you need info on You Know What, you can always look to news and medical sites, but we should always have a few places we can go for escape as well.

I could relate to this one by Mama’s Empty Nest about smells and how they trigger memories of our loved ones. 

I always love the photos from Derrick and his wife Jackie and I’m glad he’s able to get out in his rural setting and still take some beautiful images. I also love reading about what they are eating because half the time I have no idea what they’re talking about. Ha! I’ve been following this blog that offers the most encouraging posts for Christians and others.Just One Robin has been keeping the topics on her blog different than the news to give people something to escape to and she offered this one about her art journey earlier this week.Bettie G shared about the guilt many of us have over asking for prayers for ourselves.Our Little Red House shared about making over pretty mugs to hold things, such as cute plants.Michelle at Blessings by Me always shares great DIY projects and this one is about a cactus flower pot, which then reminded me of Our Little Red House’s blog post about cacti in Arizona, which she called Walking with the Giants. I’ve been following some serial fiction stories, including:Pond People on Writing WrinklesQueen of the Garden at The Lily Cafe.Alice and the Warden by Autumn Rain.and some short fiction on this Pete’s blog and this Pete’s blog.For my own blog, I’ve been trying to stay away from commenting on all the news with some (mostly) unrelated posts:

A blog post about using the thesaurus more when writing. I swear it is more interesting than it sounds;Faithfully Thinking: When the Church Disappoints You;Sunday Bookends: Light Romances in book and movie form.And of course the continuing chapters from A New Beginning. We’ve also been distracting ourselves from things by watching this goat farming family from Arizona.


This post has some to do with what is going on, as it was put out for that reason, but it can also be a good one to save for moments of high anxiety.



For comedy, we’ve been binging Foil, Arms and Hog  (be wary they aren’t always appropriate for children, so just screen them.) They are very Irish with very Irish translators so you may need closed captioning. 😉 

We have been out of the house, um..some, but mainly to my parents because we only have one car right now and my husband is using it for work.

So what have you been reading and watching that aren’t related to You Know What? Let me know in the comments. And if you have any similar links to blog posts or other sites, please let me know in the comments as well.

Tuesday Blog Roundup: Catching up on my blog and the blogs of others

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 4 Comments

It’s that time of the week when I like to catch up on some other blogs I’ve been reading and share what you might have missed on my blog in the last week or so. I also love for you to share any good blog posts you’ve read or written as well so please be sure to do that in the comment section.

First, some favorite posts from other bloggers from this past week (or so);

Christmas Tree Tea from Mama’s Empty Nest where she writes about her “hodgepodge” Christmas tree and how it brings up many memories from her past, but especially the time she held Christmas teas after she retired from volunteering with the local PTA groups.

Brenda from Becoming His Tapestry had a timely post just this morning. 10 Ways to Destress This Christmas. My goodness, could I relate. Not because we are busy in this family with Christmas parties or extreme decorating (no one invites us to parties and we barely decorate). I related when she talked about avoiding going into debt during Christmas because God never intended us to celebrate the birth of his son by going into debt. Preach it, Brenda!

Our Little Red House always has some awesome craft ideas and she’s doing 12 days of Christmas crafts for, well, Christmas. This one interested me because it uses old toilet paper rolls and anything that uses up toilet paper rolls interests me. There are only four of us in this house but we seem to fly through toilet paper sometimes.

Mama Duck had a sweet post about “One of the Best Christmas Gifts I Ever Received.”You’ll have to check out the post to see what it is.

I enjoyed this post by Jenni at Housewife Hustle about sleeping goals for her children.I could relate to this one since I’ve had sleep time challenges with both of my children, especially the youngest since she doesn’t yet have her own bedroom. (That will change when we move.)

Dawn raised a concern about blogging that I also have on her blog Every Small Voice in a post entitled Blogging Popularity.

PMeyers writes about Navigating Christmas Without Momon her blog Mind Heart Matters. She lost her mom to a brain tumor this year and she has been writing candidly about that horrific journey in such an uplifting and encouraging way (the way her family handled this situation was amazing, but I wish they hadn’t had to).  Get out the tissues for this one, but please know there is some joy here too and if you are so inclined, leave the blogger an encouraging message.

As for my blog this last week, I was as eclectic as always in my topics.

On Saturday of last week I blogged about how to Tune out the ‘Negative Nellies’in our lives.

On Sunday I continued with the new weekly Sunday Bookends post where I talk about what I’m watching, reading or doing for the week. I used to hook up to a book blogger for this post, but I’m not really a book blogger so I’m just doing my own thing now (although still reading the book blogger posts).

Later in the week, I rambled about theChristmas romance movie binge I’ve been on. Read this weekend about how that binge ended.

On Friday of last week, I shared Chapters 6 and 7 of A New Beginning, my continuing serial fiction that I post on “Fiction Friday” (incidentally, Friday is my worst blog traffic day, but I like the alliteration of Fiction Friday so much, I don’t have the heart to change the posting day.)

Then Sunday I posted another Sunday Bookends, where I talked about Dick VanDyke and my lack of reading lately.

So how about you? Any favorite blog posts of your own or others you’d like to share? Please feel free to share the links in the comments!

Lisa R. Howeler is a writer and photographer from the “boondocks” who writes a little bit about a lot of things on her blog Boondock Ramblings. She’s published a fiction novel ‘A Story to Tell’ on Kindle and also provides stock images for bloggers and others at Alamy.com and Lightstock.com.

 

 

Catching up: What was on the blog last week and some favorite posts from other bloggers

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 19 Comments

It’s very possible you have a life beyond the blog world, like I do, and may have missed some of my posts and some great posts by some other bloggers the past week or so.

I thought I’d compile them in a list for you, in case you are lazy, like me, and don’t want to scroll back on the blog or search the web for the posts of others. Oh wait, maybe I’m not that lazy since I’m compiling this list for you. *wink*
On the blog here last week:

Sunday Bookends: House selling, snowstorms and rediscovering art

This just got real (more about house selling)

Faithfully Thinking: Is it true God only blesses you if you give money to the church?

Creatively Thinking: Like Breathing Again

Fiction Friday: A New Beginning Chapter 5

Some of my favorite blog posts from other bloggers last week included:

Love at First Light from Pete at Lunch Break Fiction. It’s such a sweet short story about . . . well, you’ll have to read it.

I read two posts this week about anxiety that I could completely relate to. The first was from Jenni at Housewife Hustle entitled Coffee Talks: Confession of a Scrooge Mom.

The second was A Letter to the Church about Anxiety and Depression by A.E.I. Writes, in which she reminds the church they aren’t doing the best job when it comes to helping those with mental illness. Trust me. I can relate to this.

This post by Alethea’s Mind about a group called anSpoken that helps people of all walks deal with their pain and not feel ashamed of the tough times they have walked through, but especially those who feel their church has judged them because of situations they have faced that were not in their control.

I absolutely loved this post, Waiting with Jesus, by BettieG but I love everything she writes. What a sweet, Godly woman with a chronic health condition that she has let bring her closer to God.

The Manitoba Mom Blog wrote about Why You May Feel Sad at Christmas and I can say I could relate to just about all of the reasons and how to deal with them.

So how about all of you? Any favorite blog posts of your own or others? Let me know in the comments.

 

 

 

 

 

Looking back at October ahead to November, reading and otherwise

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 20 Comments

I actually managed to finish a couple of books in October and start a couple more.

I don’t read as fast as others who share and link up on Readerbuzz’s Sunday Salon and Caffeinated Reviewer’s Sunday Post and The Book Date’s, What Are You Reading post, but I enjoy the books I do read so I figure it’s all good. I read them in between working on my own stories, homeschooling a 12-year old and 5-year old, cooking dinner, editing photos for stock photography, and occasionally cleaning the house (being a housewife is not necessarily my calling).

I won’t have as much time for reading this month since I’ve decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month and hopefully finish the sequel to A Story to Tell and maybe even make progress on Fully Alive.

I’m ahead of the game for NaNoWriMo since I already have 27,000 words for A New Beginning and about 14,000 for A Fully Alive but both books need a lot of work, plot and character development.

But I do plan to read some books this month and on the list to either start or finish include:

  • The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (to finish)
  • Light from Heaven by Jan Karon (to finish because I just started it)
  • The Misadventures of Tumbleweed Thompson by Glen McCarty (starting. It’s a middle school book for my son’s homeschool group book discussion).
  • The Hobbit (I know! I’m still reading it! I’m pathetic!)
  • All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot (to finish)
  • The Dog That Whispered by Jim Kraus (to start)
  • Just Me On This by Donald Westlake (to start)
  • Leota’s Garden by Francine Rivers (to finish)

Books I finished in October:

  • In this Mountain by Jan Karon
  • Memphis & Me by Diane Moody
  • The Runaway Pastor’s Wife by Diane Moody

I’m also reading Paddington Marches On by Michael Bond and Stuart Little by EB White with my 5-year old daughter at night. I love when she asks me to read to her to help her fall asleep, though it is frustrating when she falls asleep in the middle of the story and I want to know what happened. I can never figure out if I should wait to finish the story with her the next night or finish it. (Both books are broke into individual stories.) Sometimes I just go ahead and finish it and read it again the next night.

Our autumn leaves were pretty much completely annihilated by heavy wind and rain this week but we found these cool leaves I have never seen in my life in Pennsylvania at a playground near us.

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I have no idea what tree they are from but they were awesome. My daughter wasn’t really into throwing the leaves up in the air for me to take photographs but my son helped a couple of times.

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We had stopped at the playground after a funeral for my husband’s great aunt, who passed away at the age of 90 last Sunday. I was ready to go home since when I drove to the funeral I realized I had forgotten some photo albums my husband’s cousin had wanted and had to drive 15 miles back to my house and 15 miles back down to give her the albums. But my children don’t play at playgrounds as often as they used to so I took some photographs of them and then sat in the van reading Jan Karon while they played with a couple of little girls who had come to the playground as well.

Coming up this month my son and husband both have birthdays (my son will be 13 on Thursday and my husband will be … a certain age .. later in the month) and my brother and his wife celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary (on the same day as my husband’s birthday). We don’t have anything super exciting planned for November beyond recognizing those milestones. We will be plowing forward on homeschooling for both children and hunting for a house closer to my husband’s job and my parents during the month as well. I am planning a post later about house hunting. The post will be entitled “The soul-sucking process of house hunting.”

As for what I was watching in October, I watched a lot of a British sitcom called One Foot in the Grave (but Amazon only offers up to season three thorough Britbox so I may look for a DVD collection that can be played on American DVD players) and also watched Paul: Apostle of Christ, which I rambled about here.

On my blog in October, some of the subjects I rambled about were: autumn, a little about books and movies, and a bit about writing fiction.

I also blogged about:

For Fiction Friday in October I shared:

On my blog this month I’ll be continuing to share A New Beginning, the sequel to A Story To Tell, for Fiction Friday every week, or at least every other week. I’m sure I’ll ramble some more about my children and I’m sure I’ll share more photographs of whatever I see throughout the month. I’ll probably blog about what I’m reading or lessons learned during NaNoWriMo and maybe even some insights on God (because, you know, I’m someone people turn to for thoughts on God. Har. Har.).

So, how about you? What are you reading, watching, or up to?