Bad Blogger

I know - I am a bad bad blogger not having posted for more than two weeks. And that me who opens up the feedreader each second day - eager to read all my favorite blogs.
But often enough I forget my own blog since life is either too fast to be captured or there is nothing to tell.

Additionally at the moment I can identify with an article from International Herald Tribune that was printed June 13 2008. Anita Diamand wrote that article called "Rebuilding through cyberspace":

"Whenever I do post an entry, I feel silly; like I'm standing in my backyard in the middle of the night, humming softly into the darkness and waiting for someone to respond."

The full article can be read here.
Back in June I sat at the plane heading to the wedding of my cousin and tore it out of the newspaper to keep it for some blogging some day. This week I found it in my purse where it had stayed forgotten in the middle of some tickets and bills and this is just what happens with a lot of my thoughts about blog posts, too.

But today I am happy to announce some major achievements:

Meet my goddaughter who just got in school that month and I am so proud of that clever, self-confident and lively girl. This is my favorite picture of her from her first day in elementary school.



I made it into a museum. Not as a visitor, but some photos of me can be seen in a German Design Museum from December on. I have posted this photo back last November and the book it was published in, got a designer's award which means the book will be exhibited in a museum and this is my way into a museums glass cabinet.
There is a German word "museumsreif" meaning that some item is old enough to be stored at the museum and not to be used anymore. Obviously I have reached that age, too. *lol*

And finally have a look at what I did yesterday evening:



This is my first attempt ever to do Japanese cooking. So this is homemade sushi with egg, japanese beef (still mostly raw meet) and japanese rice which was a big part of the overall work. I will for sure try this again with other ingredients!

And now I will head back into real life, go out in the sunshine and read a good book.
Weekend time!

Still alive

What a crazy week.

First I had to fight a nasty summer cold for half of the week (and the complete last weekend!) and that made me want to go to sleep at 8pm each evening because the days just left me completely exhausted.

The weather in Germany was HOT most of the time. With hot I mean up to 93F. This is no pleasure. And it does not help with a cold. When I have a cold I do want to wrap a scarf round my neck and sit on the sofa with a hot tea.
Couldn't do any of this at 93F.

The week at work could be summarised as "a new trouble each day". The last two days made me feel that I was operating at 130% of my energy. In some way I liked it, but just now I am FINISHED UP.

I will spend the weekend without using my brains. I will sit in front of the TV and watch my hilarious new collection of 12 DVD's of "Tom and Jerry". And I might curl on the sofa (it is much cooler now) and read and read and read and sleep!

Maybe I have more brains left for blogging another week...

How German attitude ruined my flirt

Today I was in our cafeteria at work and just in front of me in line was a guy my age whom I would give best points for his amazing looks.

When he wanted to pay for his meal, he ended up having minus 10 cents on his cafeteria card. So I offered to pay that small amount just to get him through that situation. (Note to readers: of course I would have done that with everyone - not just good looking guys.) But of course I thought that I might have a chance of going for a coffee with him when I did that.

I was not prepared for the reaction of the lady at the checkout. "No", she told me. "That is not possible." The reason she gave for this: my card is a card from my company that gives me discount when I pay. His wasn't. The discount is about 5% off each meal, so you see, how much it would have been from his 10 cent that I wanted to take over. I am sure that would have ruined the cafeteria *blah*.

He thanked me very much for my offer and now had to run over to the station to load more money on his card which would take him a few minutes. Meanwhile I gave it a second try with the check out lady proposing to pay his dessert (so it could have been a surprise for him when he returned to his meal). She was still stubborn, so I finally resigned, paid my meal and left for the table with my colleagues.

So far for my chance for a coffee with him. Stupid German stubborness in following the rules!

To all the owners of blog music players...

... you are totally spoiling my blogging routine!

Reading blogs is a real treat for me. I get a coffee and sit down in front of my PC, opening up my Media Player first and searching for a nice music that goes along with my mood. Then I start with the business blogs / RSS feeds in my reader and then switch to private blogs I enjoy reading.

But all the time the following happens: I gladly hum with the tunes that come out of my boxes but suddenly the music I have started for enjoying, mixes up with another tune which most of the time sounds at least startling in that combination.
After a few seconds of surprise (that song has never sounded like this before!) I always realise that I have ended up at the one or other blog with a music player.

What do I do then? Either I have to switch up the blog player (and they all work differently and are in the sidebar / at the top / at the bottom / in a post and therefore it takes a while to find it) or I have to stop my own music and start it again as soon as I leave the blog I am currently reading. *sigh* *SIGH*

Can't you all just put nice and quiet buttons on your blogs that I can try if I want to?
Have you ever tried reading ten blogs in fifteen minutes and meeting a new sound at each of them? I am sure I would get ADD within a minute - too good I already have ADD so no big change here.

But I have to admit one thing - that players also get me into exploring great new music...

One of the past Christmas' Autumnrose got me to order a lovely Christmas CD she recommended.
This was followed by Kristin who got me to order a CD from FM Static by listening to her blog player. I heard a song at hers that made me hum along for hours and I just had to return and find out what it was. - Btw - I just realised I haven't linked Kristin so far, which I am very sorry for, I just forgot it. Welcome in my blogroll :-)
And today I was at Danas Blog (please also see my post below) and ended up with this song (yes I just ordered the CD - that guy is marvellous with his guitar) - enjoy:




Read Lucky lyrics

Win a quilt...

Why don't you go and win this quilt? :-)

Just recommending it - it is SO beautiful and I won't enter the quilt since the shipping to Germany would be too expensive. But I wanted to spread the word...

Snapshots of a weekend

• Weekend started Friday evening with a loud fight with one of my housemates. We finished that only today (Sunday evening) but hopefully without leaving too much mess behind. I hate arguments :-(
  
  
• I spent all Saturday with cleaning a long neglected shelf in my room. Miraculously I now have one board in it completely empty *ha*. Room for new books - and for the boxes with Ebay-Sales that I just listed this weekend.
  
  
• I put about twenty audiobooks into MP3 so I can hear them with my portable player. I still have to do a list of all audiobooks that I own. I used to have a list, but it is not at all up to date.
  
  
• I made a great cheesecake with pears - we've just one piece left and this is sitting here and waiting for one housemate to come home and finish it.
  
  
• We have a good friend for visit this weekend and we spent all day doing all the little things that makes you feel relaxed... talking, laughing, watching stupid series on DVD, enjoying some sunshine outside, petting the neighbour's cat. That's a good start with fresh energy for tomorrow!
  

Have a good new week all of you!

The End of Hope

Ironically a former senator for the department of justice in Germany has started a campaign for so-called "autonomy at the end of life".
About the only news articles in English that I was able to find are here and here.

Those articles got me mad enough. There is that discussion again about life worth living or life not ('no longer'?) worth living which spreads through all of western societies in the last years.

I agree that there is a real necessity to discuss palliative treatment in todays health management.
I have seen my mother's suffering in her last days, since the doctors forgot to give her a decent pain medication and she could not address that anymore. If my Dad hadn't realised the problem and fought for her, she would have suffered for days without being able to ask for help.
I know that there are unbearable situations for dying patients as well as their relatives, but there must be another way of human passing out of life than getting hooked to an equipment that is more or lessing making one die as if on death penalty.

According to several German news (German article is here) he has now 'helped' a 79 year old lady to end her life and he recorded her death on video and later presented this to the news. Unlike his former press statements that he claimed being 'fighting' for a dignified dying of mortally ill patients, he now 'assisted' a 79 year old who was not terminally ill but was 'just' afraid of getting into a residential home and being an invalid soon.

As well as with the situation of palliative treatment I also see, that residential homes for elderly people can be really horrifying and I perfectly understand if aged people are afraid of having to go there. But is the answer of our society to that fear and that situations really offering 'help' in assisted death in the future?
Additionally - since that ex-senator is very careful that he does not get in legal trouble - the lady died all alone after taking several poison drinks, since he left the room for that time, so that he cannot be blamed for her death. Dying alone is a dignified and an adequate dead for a human being?!?

If that ex-senator is putting effort in the issues of 'end of life', there could be numerous ways of showing support and using his former political influence. There are great hospice instituations in Germany who try to limit suffering and assist patients and relatives in their way of saying goodbye and living their grief.
And there are a lot of initiatives working for dignified aging, like having senior citizens live in flats near to young families and have them 'adopted' as grandparents to get them integrated again.

What I see in the sad, sad example that was shown in the news this week is, that this ex-senator is doing nothing more than blowing out that little flickering flame of hope that is in each life. He is not reaching out with his hand - he is putting his hand over the candle and suffocating the light instead of opening a door for more air for the flame to burn on.

He claims that he is going the 'hard way'. I say that he is going the easy way - ending the suffering and leaving - and not sharing it and staying. The answer to fear (of suffering / loneliness / invalidism) is hope, comfort and reachout - not offering a fast and 'clean' solution that seemingly 'fixes' the situation.

When my Mom died, a friend of our family sang a song at the funeral - the text is (translated):

Some end is like beginning,
Some night ends in dawn,
Some death is new life,
And in despair there is new trust.
Go the way till the very end,
Go each step through the night,
Go with me through dying till the end.

Summer Reading

Is anyone out there who loves the Julia Spencer-Fleming books, too?
Those are thrillers with Reverend Clare and Chief of Police Russ van Alstyne - both of them great 'stars' of the books.

The one at the right hand is book no 6 in a series. The complete series is

- All Mortal Flesh
- To Darkness and to Death
- Out of the Deep I Cry
- A Fountain Filled with Blood
- In the Bleak Midwinter

and I have read all of them during the last years as soon as they were printed.

The stories are totally unpredictable (besides from the little romance maybe ;-)) and whenever I got one of the books I just could not stop reading. Unfortunately the beginning of this book makes me think this might be the last in the series *argh*. It also implied that this book might not have a very happy ending and this keeps me freaking out, so I am reading-reading-reading in the hope that my assumption is wrong.

So this week I have been GETTING UP 30 MIN EARLIER EACH MORNING to have more reading time. Go and get those books and you'll know why.

Sorry for the German readers - only volume one till three are already published and four is going to follow in October. That slow translating sucks!

--------------

Off topic:

If you were American and you came over for a business visit in Germany and it was your birthday... (that's what will happen in two weeks with one of my most beloved customers). Is there anything that you believe Germany (or Europe) is famous for and you always wanted to own it?
Is special German chocolate an option or can you get it in the US in each store?
The customer is MALE and about 60 years old and that is my problem. Never had problems with all the girls coming over, that was really easy all the time.

Someone please stop me...

Looks like I am hooked in the middle of a cooking flash. I guess I was inspired at a cooking event we joined with our company lately. It was so much fun and we ended up with great taste and looks like that:


We also made noodles ourselves with a fancy Italian noodle maker and this inspired me to get one, too. Last Saturday I spend several hours in the kitchen doing fresh noodles. Together with a great salmon-vegetable-sauce they were just delicious.

Sunday I did a few lovely and easy peach muffins to take them for a coffee with friends in the afternoon. Monday I ended up baking a big carrot cake just because I thought of it a minute and I happened to have carrots in the house (which were originally for our rabbits and I was really sorry for them).
Tuesday I did a Mushroom Quiche with fresh cheese and tomatoes and it was so tasty. I just ate the rest of that.

And something tells me that I want to use that noodle maker again - this time maybe for really-really self-made lasagna.

I am sure my housemates are not complaining if this flash holds on for a little while. But actually everytime I have started up with that huge cooking sessions, I regret it at some point - especially if it is right in the middle of the week and its 11pm and I still need to clean all that mess.

Worse: I have started buying cookbooks again. One with cake recipes especially for big baking trays. Another one with recipes for noodles. And a third one for making potatoe salads and noodle salads.
About a year ago I have reduced my cookbooks from over hundred (better do not ask how that happened) to exactly fifty, but it looks as if I am on my way back up.

Giving a home away

When I had already moved out from home, my parents built a new house. That house finally carried all of their dreams of living and they were overjoyous to move in after all the time of construction.

My Mom used all her heart to design the house interior and the garden and make it a home. Parts of the garden changed into a lovely rose bed together with lots of lavender.

For me the house was HOME since my parents were there and I could come over and stay there for the quiet evenings at our dinner table, seeing the sun go down in the near woods and listening to the silence, the birds and everything that comes with a house that is in the outskirts.

When my Mom got cancer and slowly lost her fight, we had the saddest but also the happiest and most precious times of our life together here. The times when you just pass love and everything that is important to leave a heritage. When meaningful things are the center of all moments and you know that you are at peace with everything that might have stood between you in the past.

For me the house is kind of a symbol of saying goodbye to her. For my Dad it is as well. So when my Mom passed away and after a year later my Dad got known to my lovely stepmom, it got more and more clear that we would sell the house so that they could just start all over at a new place, a new home and leave the sad and bittersweet memories.

Today we succeeded. We found a lovely family that fell in love with the house at first sight. This morning we met and signed the contracts and the house will be theirs very soon.

They are beaming of anticipation and can't wait to move in and they are so thankful that we sell it to them. Their teenage son loves the thought that the house has a small appartment and there are some chances that he is allowed to move in there - having something all of his own...

I was moved today by the thought that the house is passed to loving hearts with their own new dreams - our prayers and blessings follow them that they may not have to go the long and hard way that we had to go. That the house will be filled with deep joy and life for long years and that all their dreams will come true right here.

You've got mail / part 2

I just have the feeling that the universe has lost control over the black hole for a moment and this is why all that lost mail from the past appears back at my home.

With the letter from 2001 arriving last week, I could not believe my eyes yesterday: I found a parcel from February 2007 at our house.
Back then I had bought some fancy new shirts from Ebay and they never arrived, even though the postal company claimed the parcel had been delivered.

Yesterday one of our house mates walked into the basement, where we have a window made from thick, brown glass blocks right beneath our front door steps (it is very dark there). He saw a red box shimmering through that window, told me he believed this to be a parcel and I crawled into our narrow air duct below the stairs.
The postman must have thrown the parcel in there last February - which should have taken some effort - and who knows, what he thought how we would ever find it there.
But there was the missing parcel: 1 1/2 years old, dirty and dusty. Believe it or not: the shirts were in perfect condition and will be shining and new once I put them through the laundry.

You have missing shipments, too? Don't worry, the postal universe will give them back one day sooner or later. Just see that you never move houses... ;-)

You've got mail...

Yesterday I received a letter from a German Post Office responsible for delays and damage. They regretted - they wrote - that they had to hand a letter back to me that had been delayed and damaged (= opened). They had found the letter "outside our postal distribution ways" which I interpret as maybe the flat of some postal employee?

The next lines informed me the person responsible for that didn't work with German Post anymore and he'd be charged for mishandling mail. Hm?!?
The letter ended with the wish that I - despite that unfortunate event - would further on put my trust in German Post.

With this cover note there came an envelope in my handwriting, adressed to a good friend.
Anyone want to make a guess how old this letter was?

---------------------------

The letter was exactly 7 years old - from April 2001 sent to a friend that has moved twice, married and had a baby daughter inbetween. I now send this letter again - hopefully it will arrive this time :-)

Welcome

Dear Couch!

Wow, I can hardly believe that you really decided to move in today. Welcome to our house! I hope you feel at home and like the place we have chosen for you.
I thought it was just fair to tell you something about the way we live here, so that there are no surprises.

The good old buddy that just left us, stayed with at our home for 12 long years and he was already 20 years old when he moved in.
His days with us were really entertaining since we never neglected him. I guess he has seen a million movies with us (he had the prime place for looking at the screen), he listened to hundreds of audio books (at his prime place in the middle of a dolby surround system) and of course, dear new couch, we are proud to declare that we have all that luxury available for you as well and we hope you appreciate it.

You will be able to have a look out of the French Windows in the garden all day long (the window is south side so you will have sunshine all the time) and you can enjoy watching our famous reed growing about an inch each day in its flower bucket.

You will have 6 people constantly on top of you - sometimes more. I might warn you that your former colleague also made acquaintance with a rabbit whose way of showing affection was to gnaw on the cushions.
Talking about pillows - we love that you have more than enough pillows and we hope you don't mind that we throw them at eachother as soon as we are kidding eachother which will only happen about five times a day.

I am not sure what snacks you like, but we prefer giving you fat-free and dry diet, which can later be removed by the vacuum cleaner. The former couch tried to get a good sip of red wine every now and then but I am proud to declare that in 12 years of usuage we managed to keep him sober.

By the way - good old buddy found a lot of new friends on the street today and just now they are all together waiting for a ride to what is hopefully a good-old-buddy-couch-heaven... he sent a postcard from just outside on the street (see below) and says he's delighted to finally travel the world.

Welcome new friend - I am looking forward to get known to you!

Helen

How many shoes to buy till I turn 30

I turned 29 this month and a nasty friend of mine commented this with "oh I can't wait till you turn 30 and are not so bloody young anymore". Such a sweet remark!

Doesn't "30" just sound HUGE? It has that smell of having to be resonsible, serious and finally grown up even though there are days when I ask myself, if anyone those days is ever grown up.
However - it makes me want to do a list of things that I want to do till I turn 30. Crazy things, careless things, things a grown up probably would not do anymore. Any ideas - welcome in the comments. What do I need to have done till I turn 30 next year?
(Warning: Anyone who posts the word 'marriage' will be banned from my blog forever, I promise!)

Since January I realised another change that still scares me. I have NEVER cared about shoes. Actually I was probably the dream of all men: just about four pairs of shoes in my dresser and out of my point of view shoe shops resembled torture and I just entered them when I had to.

The photo below is the result of the last TWO months only. And right now I see shoes everywhere I go and I want to have them all! Oh dear, I don't hope this means that now I will have to make up for all those years I have not followed the female determination of having to be a shoe-lover.
But those red shoes just make me feel very girlish and female - maybe I need some more like this.

A friend of mine told me on the phone those days, that - after he packed up two complete shoe shelves of his wife (they are moving houses) - he found about 30 pairs more in the basement and hid them away in a big suitcase hoping she might not remember them anymore.
Could anyone please tell me how to stop this before I end up just like this :-) ?

Expectations and Surprises

If I try to build up any relationship – being friendship or partnership, private or professional, pals or love – I always want to do it ‚right’ without hurting someone or being hurt. Some relationships just ‘happen’. You meet people, feel like you’ve known them all of your life and it stays like that forever.
With others it might be a lot more work and sometimes I end up worrying if I might have lost a friend or done something wrong, because we don’t seem to speak the same language of bonding.

In the last weeks I have had a lot of surprising moments reflecting different ways of bonding and all that times made me think a lot during the last days. Let me share two of the surprises with you…

----------------------------------------

I met Brian for the first time a few years ago. He is a customer of our company and a very important one. He is about 30 years older than me and all the time we meet it is doing a tiny bit of business and afterwards having a great time chatting about nearly everything.

Sometimes in the past he was calling me from Chicago at what I knew was about 4 am on this side of the ocean and I teased him about that at our last evening out, saying something like ‘hey you don’t like your collegues if you tend to work at that time, right’. But he sincerely answered ‘oh no Helen, this happens since I have no life and I can as well go to work at this time of the night’.
And then for the first time he told me some stories about his life for several hours and we forgot the restaurant and everything else for the time being. One of the stories was the death of his son (younger than me) of cancer and what it did to his marriage and several others followed, summarising sad and exhausting years.

I was moved by his trust and his being so frank and without all ‘cover’ that evening. Even though we are from different nations and age, something like a friendship has grown out of a business relationship here.

----------------------------------------

"Sisters function as safety nets in a chaotic world simply by being there for each other."
-- Carol Saline

I have tried very much to make our new patchwork family work in some ways and it seemed like it worked out really good. For my birthday I invited my two stepsisters and their partners. They could not come since they were on vacation that weekend – no problem so far. But for my birthday: no call, no card, nothing. Yep, that really made me think! And it made me feel like all efforts I had done to make this feel like ‘real’ family probably had not worked out.

Until I received a lovely email from the younger sister which ended with the words “hugs from your little sister”. This for sure taught me to be a little more patient and to learn understanding different ways of showing affection.

----------------------------------------

A lot of flowers grow differently once planted and end up with different unexpected beauties.
I have learned to patiently look at the relationships around me and wait how they come out by themselves without expecting too much at a certain time.






By the way: the picture below might show our new studio couch and coffee table. We are bidding on that one at Ebay. Way to go, but I so much hope it will be ours by next Wednesday. It has just the perfect size for our living room and the price is about the amount that we have been saving for the last two years.

Spring Fever

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

Mark Twain

No friends left

Each year at the same time in May I get that strange feeling that I have no friends left.

No one is calling, no one sends me an Email. When I come home, my mailbox is EMPTY (except all the nice Ebay purchases).
Emails - sometimes even calls - are not returned and just everyone around me seems to be vanished from the earth.

Ever had that feeling?

I know what this is: 11th of May is my birthday. And the two weeks before I know there is some parcel-packing, cards writing, secrets-keeping.

They think I don't know that - oh I do - I know because I hear the silence of suddenly hidden friends :-)

Maybe this gives me a chance to get up to date with the about 20 emails that are still unanswered so far from the last weeks.

Actually I should be very sorry...

... for not having posted so long.

I have been reading all of your blogs and my list of things to blog about is long enough. But I am not too sorry, since all that interfered with my blogging was 'just life' and having a precious time.

So maybe you'll forgive me, if I share some photos with you about that time. Right after two eventfull weeks at work I travelled through Germany to visit the 'oldest' friend that I have.
We have been knowing eachother since school times and she is expecting her third child now, so we wanted to have some time with eachother before life is getting even more busy ;-)

Her daughter (the oldest child) is a whirlwind full of life and there is never a dull moment having her around. This photo caught her in a quiet moment:



You might remember one older post of me (too lazy now to find the link), where I wrote about my friend's brother naming his daughter after me.

Now I finally got my hands on 'little Helen' and she's adorable.



Her big brother demanded his share of Auntie Helen as well, so they kept me busy with multitasking.



And little Helen already understands the little tricks that Auntie Helen is playing to her and kept giggling all the time with me.



This is my friend's stepmother with three of her 'adopted' grandchildren. I loved watching her and it felt like some kind of fastforwarding in my future. My friend also lost her Mom years ago and - like me - she was blessed with a loving and caring stepmom later.
So I was watching her stepmom and thinking that my kids will one day have a stepgranny, too and it was a warm and comforting thought.


Now I will start in a new and most likely exhausting week at work - will be posting some more soon... Wade was tagging me, so I at least have one homework left to do.

... there has been no mistake....

"... there has been no mistake; and there shall be no mistake."

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington


Boy, what a day!

Just imagine you go to work and the first email you read in the morning is saying (summarised) that you (and you alone!) did a big mistake that will cost your company about 10k (no matter if this is Euro or Dollar). ARGH!

That is exactly what happened to me this morning and it got me scared to the bones. We VERY rigorously misplaced a lot shipments of a special customer. This went by unnoticed for seemingly 6 months and the customer had added up all costs that arose out of that mistake and wanted us to pay for that.

Since the customer is more or less my customer I felt guilty-guilty-guilty and first thing I did is going to our management and confess. Management was lovely and told me not to worry and most likely we would get the customer towards a compromise (like us paying half of it) and everyone was allowed to happen mistakes and I shouldn't worry... (Did I already mention that I love all my bosses?)

But actually this talk did not comfort me very much. See, mistakes happen, but sure not to me, do they? I hate-hate-hate when I do something wrong, especially when I believed to do my tasks carefully and double-checking before I implement some new process - first of all with THAT special customer.

At noon I asked our IT guys to get me all data from that customer in Excel. With that data I wanted to check if the damage really added up to 10k or if it was maybe hopefully a bit less.

When I opened the file after lunch break I about started to dance on my desk. The mistake had not happened for 6 months. This meant what I did 6 months ago had worked absolutely fine and I did everything right when I started up the new business. This was running well till December last year and only then the mistake had taken place and was not repared until March.
And when I checked the date from when on the problem occured, I ended up with a Saturday in December - a day when I had not even been near the office. Yay :-)

Probably the best thing is, the mistake is now reduced to only about 5k and the customer owes us about 5k since a few months, so this will add up nicely to the non-paid bills. Additionally no one will really be able to find out what happened that special Saturday and who actually did the mistake, so no one else in our company will have to have a stupid morning like I had today.

This was for sure a valuable lesson in coping with mistakes...! Even if it did come out in such a good way - it could have easily been my mistake.

Have a look

I haven't been working at my blogroll for a long time, since I don't use that list at all, but include all the blogs I read in my feedreader and enjoy and read them there (much easier). But lately I realised that I do not share the blogs with you anymore, so I'd like to introduce two blogs to you, that I both found a few months ago and stayed hooked since then.

• Meet the Cornish Family. They have been adopting two precious special kids from Ukraine which adds up to a family of four kids.
  Their blog tells an amazing story of God's plans and spreads so much love!
  Go over and visit them!
  
  Wow, I was just about to publish this post (it was already finished) and now Meredith has provided a beautiful button over at her blog so that I'll now be able to share the blog in a very special way:
  
  
  
  
• And go and meet Emery Jo at Moms are for Everyone. Her blog is a great read, she has beautiful photos and last week she got me amazed once more with sharing two of her songs - that lady is talented! She even has a fashion blog which makes me want to add a million accessoires to my clothes.
  

Both blogs are added to my blogroll :-)

And if you haven't been checking out some other 'older' gems in my blogroll before, why don't you take the time now - there are so much great friends to find there! I just specially announced the new ones with this post here.