Good for the soul

Okay, they say confession is good for the soul. Well, I think for me it needs to be cleaning is good for the soul. Painful but good.

Some of you know that I have trouble with clutter and piles of stuff. Here a pile, there a pile, everywhere a pile, pile.....(am I the only one?)

So after an emotionally hard week last week and the same this week (a story for another day) nothing will cleanse my soul like some good cleaning.

Started with my closet. Nothing like spending an evening trying on jeans/clothes after storing up for the winter all summer....Yikes!! Painful but good. I got several bags of stuff ready for Goodwill.

Next night, on to the laundry room. Now, at times the top of my dryer gets so piled up you cannot see the bottom of the pile much less the top of the dryer. Also at the back of the laundry room there is a pantry. Well sometimes the pile of stuff in front of the pantry is too big to get to it much less find something in one of the piles of stuff inside the pantry. A little painful. How do you save so much stuff? So check -- got that cleaned. I can find things in the pantry and close the doors! The dryer is cleaned off as well.

I took a break the next night and watched a movie. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Fun chick flick movie, I liked it. Also read some in the book I am re-reading. A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter. I had read it as a child and am reading it again. As good as I remembered it being. (Lynn, here's one for your Book Review)

Last night I worked in my spare room. We refer to it as the "junk room" at times. I keep all my Mary Kay stuff in there, my stamp/craft stuff, gardening magazines I cannot bare to part with and it is also the office where the computer is. The computer table is now clean enough to stamp cards on if I'm feeling creative and the daybed is cleaned off so that I can curl up and read my book or take a nap after all this crazy cleaning. My office things are in place as well as my stamp stuff. Inventory of MK has occurred as well. No pain, just time consuming.

Whew!!! Confession -- cleaning -- whatever!! I'm done for a while until I get mad again and have an emotional guilt session and feel the urge to clean like a mad woman!! It was good for my soul anyway.

Thanks for letting me "confess".
Love ya!

Smoke in my hair

It was such a good holiday weekend. We went camping at Honey Creek State Park in Grove, OK. We stayed from Friday night until Monday mid-day. My sister, Suzanne, and her son camped with us.

On Saturday we had a family day outing to Har-Ber Village in Grove. My brother James drove my Mom and Dad over and met us there as well my niece and her husband and two daughters. This place is so fun. It was created by Harvey and Bernice Jones of Springdale , AR. It is a village/town setting with time depicted places such as a jail, bank, school house, church, blacksmith,mercantile, post office, dress shop, dentist office,eye doctor, etc., each with antique items displayed from times gone by. It was so neat to see these things and remember the times past with our Grandparents and things that we recognized that they had and things that we had even on our farm growing up. Great memories. What a wonderful family field trip.
Lots of neat old dishes & furniture too.

We came back to camp and had a fish fry. We also had a "over the hill" party for my nieces' husband. He's only 30 but in our family we start them down the hill early! What was funny was that he was our cook for the fish fry and then we rewarded him with a b-day party. Everyone in our family gets whammied at some point with the "old" items.... real dentures from a yard sale, fixodent, spare marbles for when you loose yours, corn pads, fiber pills, arthritis rub etc....it's great!! Anyway...there were 18 of my family there to eat, laugh and enjoy the party!

So all in all it was a great weekend of visiting with my family, sleeping in until the camp noises woke you up, eating & cooking outside, taking walks down to the boat dock and watching the boats, watching the boys kayak, talking my dog Tico on walks around the camp, sitting by the camp fire at night and getting smoke in my hair, looking at magazines with my sister. It was all good, so good!!

So now it is back to the real world....