thanks Roald Dahl

picnic, pie, homemade ice cream, fishing

happy monday.

happy thing 34

my fan

this summer i've become one of those people who always sleeps with their fan on.

{also, who DIDN'T love doing this as a kid? i have many fond memories of our un-air conditioned house in broken bow, with one of those big square fans in the living room window that we loved to go "ahhhhhhhh" and hear it vibrate off the fan blades}

happy thing 33

the movie Emma is one of my favorite movies, if not my very favorite.

{also, i love the book. i think its my favorite Jane Austen story}

it's my go-to if i'm sick or sad or just need a little Mr. Knightley.

happy thing 32

crayons

happy thing 31

i like to make celebrations out of ordinary things. there were many days, especially in the early spring that we had a celebration of some sort when the warm sun was actually shining. i think it makes life seem more fun when you love the everyday events.

happy thing 30

a bath

i LOVE this bathroom above, also the baby in the tub below, adorable. My friend Carrie has a tub kind of like this in her bathroom and it's so adorable. so so so so so adorable. i love the old-fashioned white tub with feet. it would be so cute for taking a bath in :)

also, oh my goodness, i want this!!

Côte d'Azur

"The French Riviera. The name evokes a coastline of shimmering beauty, of small mountain ranges plunging into the blue Mediterranean, of lush gardens with exotic trees and heady perfumes, a charming backcountry. A superb climate, with warm Winters. How can one help falling in love with its dream landscapes, its sun, its colours, its rocks and its beaches, its gardens, its picturesque inland villages and its wild, rugged scenery?"

the movie we watched yesterday begins in Nice, France and so i decided is should probably look up images of the South of France. obviously it did not disappoint (however the pictures here do not do it justice). i found the above description on a website. and i have indeed fallen in love with it. good thing i'm moving to Europe so i can vacation here :)

today

i met Christine at Village Pointe

browsed the farmers market

went to Sephora

had lunch and coffee at Whole Foods

wanted to purchase everything at Anthropologie

bought a new dress

had a cookout with Linds and Larisa

good Saturday

{except i miss Blake. he needs to come home now.}

yesterday

i woke up at my parents

met Jill for coffee and conversation at the Mill

then we laid by the pool and got some sun

later we went to Noodles

got a beverage at Starbucks

Went to see "Killers" (which we loved)

had a long talk in the car

while listening to the entire Lady GaGa CD straight through.

great friday.

the way to end a weekend

a relaxing lavender bath

listening to lizz wright

and a thunderstorm

finishing a good book

LETTUCE!!

I just harvested my first batch of buttercrunch lettuce and I'm so excited!!! Also on my garden round tonight I noticed that one of our little cherry tomatoes has turned RED, the cucumbers are flowering, the beans are growing nicely and the peppers finally are starting to grow.

I had a bit of a surreal moment standing there inspecting the garden. Realizing it's actually growing and making food, with fireflies dancing around, purple sweet peas cascading down the fence and a thunderstorm rolling in over a beautiful sunset.

It made me think of this quote:

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. ~John Burroughs

It certainly takes a lot of intentionality to slow your life down, but it's so worth it. To put aside distractions and let God remind you of who He is, what He has made and how He intended for us to enjoy both Him and His creation.

garden: mid-june

here is the garden update as promised.

some tomatoes-

buttercrunch lettuce

garlic

green beans. look at the little beans!!

broccoli

and, ta-da! everything else including more tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet corn, carrots, green onions and cherry tomatoes.

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." - Hans Hofmann

happy thing 29

happy thing 28

thanks to erin w. my dilemma has been solved!! and that makes me happy. also, so do these. they're called Ranunculus!! and i'm in love with them! why does my back yard not look like this? because it should. i think i would like to have them everywhere.

this is a happy video

happy thing 27

we have the world's largest supply of pears in this house right now... so i decided to make some pear crisp last night to use some of them. for some reason the pears plus brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg just smelled like Christmas when i pulled it out of the oven. then i felt very nostalgic for a few minutes. i love Christmas time so that is my 27th happy thing on the list. i feel like i didn't enjoy the season this past year as much as i normally do. perhaps because it was so inhumanely cold for most of the winter or perhaps i was just trying to keep the emotions of "this is my last Christmas with my family for awhile" under control. at any rate, i still love Christmas and this is turning into a long rambling paragraph about it.

happy thing 26

Harry Potter.

I could completely dork out about this but I won't...too much...yet...

Books, movies, all of it. I love it.

Last spring Bobbi, Jayme and I went to Chicago to the Harry Potter Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry aaaaaaand it was incredible.

Also i wish i could go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, (just opening in Orlando like...now-ish) before i leave for Spain. Guess I'll have to schedule in a trip home in the next few years with a stop in Florida.

June 13- Oswald Chambers

"Come ye after Me." Mark 1:17

One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is the excuse of temperament. We make our temperament and our natural affinities barriers to coming to Jesus. The first thing we realize when we come to Jesus is that He pays no attention whatever to our natural affinities. We have the notion that we can consecrate our gifts to God. You cannot consecrate what is not yours; there is only one thing you can consecrate to God, and that is your right to yourself (Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you. God's experiments always succeed. The one mark of a saint is the moral originality which springs from abandonment to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing wellspring of original life all the time; the Spirit of God is a well of water springing up, perennially fresh. The saint realizes that it is God Who engineers circumstances, consequently there is no whine, but a reckless abandon to Jesus. Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.

If you abandon to Jesus, and come when He says "Come," He will continue to say "Come" through you; you will go out into life reproducing the echo of Christ's "Come." That is the result in every soul who has abandoned and come to Jesus.

Have I come to Jesus? Will I come now?

oh the cuteness with the polariods...

happy thing 25

twinkle lights

hello daydream

this might be kind of hard to read, it says:

hello daydream:

a claw foot tub

a sunny yellow kitchen

a belly-up kitty in the late sun

a painted wooden porch swing

slow dance in the backyard

a cheerful goldfinch song

fireflies in the grass

banana bread and chamomile tea

a sleeping puppy

an old barn for a studio

the baby in a wash tub

the prairie morning's dew

it's like someone wrote down my daydreams...

(minus the cat, sorry Linds)

and made a pretty picture out of them

these!

mother what are these??

or anybody, does anybody know what these flowers are?

because i love them and i must have them!

i feel like they might be two different kinds....

coming soon!

a garden update! pictures soon. it's growing like crazy!!

happy thing 24

my mom got me this book and i'm in love with it.

happy thing 23

this is kind of a weird one, but i kind of really like doing things that are just a little bit annoying. :)

on our way to Halsey we stopped for some dinner and the lady at the counter had given Jill this ENORMOUS cup for unknown reasons. Then she asked me to get her pop while she was in the bathroom so i did, but i thought the teeny tiny coffee straw would be more entertaining than a normal one. and it was. especially because it was about half way through dinner before she noticed.

happy thing 22

camping! i love camping

this past weekend went camping at the Nebraska National Forest in Halsey, NE :)

we "horse camp" in basically the middle of nowhere and it's great. a whole weekend with my parents, BOTH sisters and the best friend kitters!

life lessons

This is an excerpt i pulled out of an interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. My sweet friend Tabitha passed this along and you can read the whole article here.

Q. What other leadership lessons have you learned?

A. One very important partner I had in life was my father. He was a senior managing director of Nippon Steel Corporation and was one of the architects of the reconstruction of Japan after the war. He negotiated the first World Bank loan to Japan after the war to the steel industry, and it helped develop heavy industries in Japan. His outlook was always international. Very early, he sent me to the United States. I was 15. He sent me to a boarding school, Andover.

His whole idea was that you can’t possibly be competitive in the world unless you actually go outside your own geography and learn the way other people live and think. That probably was the most important lesson I learned — that what’s out there is more important than what you already know, and that you’d better go out and learn what it is out there that you don’t know.

Q. What else?

A. A second key lesson was from a doctor named Marcel Tuchman. He was the most compassionate person I have ever met in my life — I mean, full of human kindness. And every time he met somebody, you had the sense that he cared more about them than anything else in the world.

So what I learned from him is that when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical.

So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.

happy thing 21

there is a part of me that is a little bit dork. i kinda like sci-fi. and i kinda like marvel comic-like things. needless to say, this is adorable. i don't even know what this is from but love.

happy thing 20

i think it's no mystery, but the kids make me so happy. i love those two. they are such a delight.

happy thing 19

i love it when meetings or classes get cancelled unexpectedly. we decided not to have a team meeting tonight because our numbers were scarce and the weather is tornado-ish. now, i happen to be rather fond of my team and enjoy our time together however tonight, it's thunderstorming and i felt like i needed to be home and beth just got home from vegas and i wanted to stay and hang out with her and bobs. and i got to :) and that makes me happy.