Blogging

you have to click on the cartoon so that it will become big enough to read, but it gave me a good laugh...

today i was on my way home from an appointment with my doctor driving down foothill drive heading southbound toward the freeway and i looked over and noticed that the foothill Marie Callender's is no longer there...this specific restaurant is a place that is significant to me in a negative way and because of the piece of personal history that i associate it with i have never been a big fan. i can not see a marie callender's and not be reminded of the painful childhood experience that it represents to me. now it is gone. good riddance.

...and again i find myself awake when i should be far off in dreamland...tomorrow dave and i are meeting with a reproductive endocrinologist and i am a ball of nerves anticipating the appointment...i don't really know why i am feeling so apprehensive, probably just fear of the unkown. i remember when i first started feeling pain in my abdomen and i knew that something was amiss, and then came my surgery and they found endometriosis and ovarian cysts...i can't help feeling fear about what we may discover tomorrow and then another part of me is concerned that they won't be able to give us any information and it is back to the drawing board and i get to start shopping for a new doctor again...dave is patient with my fears and knows how to calm me and give me hope with his steady nature and his faith that everything will work out...
i am trying to muster all my courage, even though i am afraid of what the outcome may be...after all, courage is doing what you are afraid to do. without fear, there could be no courage.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. -Mark Twain

diet coke plus

i love diet coke, i'm a huge fan...but does anyone else find this new product odd and highly amusing?

no use crying over spilled milk, or should i say, broken glass...

So I am again failing to find sleep and I just walked into our spare bedroom in search of a book to read when i came across the framed art piece that was broken today when Dave bumped it off the wall…I found it odd because I had completely forgotten that it had happened at all.

Dave took the day off work and we went to lunch with my parents, my brother and my nephew and then to see Shrek the third. The frame had been broken before we left the house to meet for lunch. The reason that this struck me as strange is that a few months ago we had hosted a dinner for Dave’s family and I had pulled out our nice glass water pitcher that dave had purchased for me while we were engaged and the day after we used it, but before I had the chance to put it away, I bumped into it and it came down and cracked, the handle broke off and in one fail swoop I had ruined something that was valuable to me…this was not a little thing that I forgot about…this is something that caused me stress, something that I berated myself for, something that made me feel bad all day until dave came home from work and I confessed and started crying. Dave, being the amazing husband that he is, went out with me that evening to drive to several different stores in search of a new glass water pitcher to replace the one I had broken earlier that day. We were looking for hours and didn’t make it home to eat dinner until about nine in the evening and we came home empty-handed…of course we didn’t find a pitcher as nice as the one I had broken…

When I looked at the framed art picture tonight I realized that I had forgotten about the broken glass immediately following today’s accident, but had let the broken pitcher that was caused by my accident let me feel bad about myself. What was the difference? Was the pitcher more special than our framed art? No, that was not it. I would like to say that I have learned a lot about life since then and while this is true, I have learned quite a bit, that was not it either. I realized that I am hard on julie. I expect no less than perfection from myself. I think about what I tell Dave…that stuff is just stuff, and he is what is important to me.

For Christmas one of the gifts Dave purchased for me was a beautiful new glass water pitcher from Macy*s and it is far nicer than the first one that I broke, and i love it...but I don’t know that it was the pitcher that I was frantically searching for that day after I broke it. I think it was forgiveness. I think it was acceptance. I think that I just wanted to restore what was lost to me in the intangible sense, the part of me that I beat up and expect so much from. I wanted to find a new pitcher the day I broke it so that I could let myself off the hook. I need to pull out that glass water pitcher more often, because it is beautiful and I should use it and let it be a reminder to me of how much easier it is to replace material things that it is to restore my self acceptance.

my husband is good to me...

Dave gave me stargazer lilies for mother's day. they are so beautiful, i just had to take a picture...

creating something beautiful...

i love learning new things about myself. tonight i spent my evening making mini cupcakes for a party we are attending tomorrow to honor Dave's mom. as i was frosting each individual cupcake i realized something...i love to bake. i love making sugar cookies and decorating them. i have fun baking poppyseed bread. i thoroughly enjoy baking cakes and decorating them with fruit, candy and icing. i know i have always found pleasure in baking, but tonight i think i realized why. i love to bake because i love creating something beautiful. Baking is a simple and inexpensive way to create a masterpiece. i associate baking with holidays, parties and people that i love. i bake when i am celebrating something or someone i love and do my best to present it in a beautiful way because it represents the love i have for the people i am celebrating.