Random Act of Beauty

My sisters, Meg and Cassie, after snowboarding

I know I've come down off my vacation high from the cabin because I've been fighting a bad mood each morning and I've been smarting all week about it. I was feeling particularly snarky and grumpy this morning--moaning about my hard-knock life, my woes and wounds, and wishing I was far, far away from the messy, ordinary, dailiness of my life.

Then I came across my sister's entry from yesterday. She took some sweet pictures of a bouquet of flowers she received and then shared those photos on her blog. And suddenly I was reminded of one of the small pleasures in life, one of the bits of beauty, one of the reasons I do like to wake up in the morning.

And just like that, the dailiness of this day shined a little brighter.

Super-Duper Tuesday

I hope everyone voted on Tuesday. I didn't get to the high school to vote until 7:00 pm. I knew it was going to be crowded at the school and the parking lot was INSANE. When I got into the school I found out it was going to be an hour-long wait. Yikes! Fortunately, I found a few friends to chat with as we crawled ever closer to the voting booths.

I'm so grateful that people are willing to volunteer to help us vote. What I think needed better planning in my voting district was how many voting volunteers were needed. After waiting in line for over an hour, I got to a table where one woman had me sign my name, another woman gave me my card to vote on, and a third woman wrote my entire name out in pencil, in long hand, in some blue book. It took 2 to 3 minutes to process one person. Voting took all of 15 seconds.

I'm glad I did it. I'm just sorry I didn't bring a book to read while I waited.

So, are you happy with how the voting turned out?

Snow Day

We had an excellent weekend up at the cabin this year. We actually got snowed in!!

I guess I shouldn't be that excited about it but it added to the frolic and fun of our annual cabin vacation and I liked it.

The photo above is my favorite photo of the entire weekend--that includes all 222 shots that I took. And I didn't even take this picture, but I'm glad my sister-in-law seized the moment.

This is a picture of the three 3-year-olds in the family. It was late Saturday morning and it had snowed the night before. I was not totally conscious of this fact because I had caught the lovely, vicious, 12-hour bug that somebody brought to the cabin and passed around.

This bug commenced with intense stomach pains and passed in a fiery trail either up or down the victim's digestive system. I was in the beginning stages of the misery and I had gone to lay down in the little room I slept in. Not long after G, D1, and D2 came bouncing in my room and decided that my bed and I looked like a great trampoline and in typical 3-year-old fashion they commenced trouncing on me and all my bedding. This did not help the fiery bug in my stomach but it took a while to convince this excited crew about that fact. What finally persuaded them to leave me and my bed to our moanings and groanings was the window above and the bench beneath it. When they all climbed up on the bench they had a perfect view of the winter wonderland and it kept them fascinated for about two minutes.

Fortunately, my sister-in-law Jenny happened by just as they were perched up there and she found my camera and snapped the picture. I had been staring at these three thinking that I needed to take a picture but I just didn't have the energy to do it, so I'm thrilled that Jenny came along.

Here are some pictures of the winter beauty we got to enjoy.

The roofline of the cabin--the kids were sledding off the roof into the snow.

A front porch view

A side of the porch view

And the actual snow coming down

There were 33 of us packed into the cabin this weekend--16 adults and 17 children. Lots of people and lots of snow. Our little viscious bug hit about 10 of us, so all in all it made for a low-key weekend. That bug is also why on Sunday morning half of the group left to go to church and the other half stayed. It had started snowing early that morning and the group that left before 6:30 am made it down the canyon safely but by 7:45 am there had been avalanches on the road and we were snowed in all day Sunday and part of Monday morning. That was the only sad thing about our snow day was that half the group was down the mountain and could not come back up to hang out with the rest of us. We missed them.

But I will say, I hope we get snowed in again next year. I didn't mind it at all.