MIA but not Missing in Action

Just thought I'd pop in today and explain why I have been MIA the last little while.  Truthfully, while I have been "missing internet action" I have not been "missing in action!"  In fact, the very reason I have been less faithful with my blog lately is because I have been more active in real life.

This past summer, I have really struggled with anxiety issues for the first time in my life.  I am generally a very happy-go-lucky kind of person who has floated through life feeling pretty good most of the time.  So when I started noticing this past year that I was becoming a real "worry wort," I simply told myself that I needed to stop worrying and make some changes and things would improve.

One of the changes I made was that I started this blog.  In one of my first blog posts, that you can read about here if you are so inclined, I expressed the hope that I would start feeling better as the summer went on.   And I did most definitely benefit from all of the sunshine we received this summer!  I soaked it up and reveled in all that incredible Vitamin D.   And blogging helped me to make new connections.  I've met some wonderful encouraging friends whom I hope get a chance to read this so they know how much their kind words mean to me.  But at the same time, my anxiety levels were not going down, but rather seemed to be getting worse.

I decided it was time for further action!  And by action, this time, I mean literally ACTION!  I did some research and came to the conclusion that at 43, my body seems to be going into that awful "perimenopausal" state that so many women struggle with.  My hormones are a jumble, I'm having bad PMS, I've gained way too much weight, and it is time for me to take better care of myself physically.  I wasn't sure where to begin to make things better, but I knew I had to starts somewhere. There are few things I knew had helped me in the past so I thought I'd start there.  They are as follows:

 - make sure I have regular meaningful quiet time everyday where I read a portion of the Bible and spend time meditating on it and talking to God.

- make sure I get enough sleep every night but not too much sleep.  Get out of bed at 7 am every day!

- make sure I take a good brisk walk every day.

- make sure I eat regular meals that are healthy and supplement those meals with fresh vegetable juice made in my juicer.

- make sure I take my multivitamins, Vitamin D supplement, Vitamin B6 supplement and Estrosense supplement daily.  (Estrosence is a natural health product for women.  You can read more about it here if you are interested.)

As a result of the changes, I am feeling much stronger and healthier, both physically and emotionally.  I am walking 4 kms every day and have lost 20 pounds.  Although I know that I need to lose more weight, I am feeling like it is now a manageable task with reasonable goals rather than an impossible uphill battle that I can never win.  My pattern of "worrying" is being broken as I am working to renew my mind through reading more of the Bible and disciplining myself to turn off the negative thoughts by handing them over to the Lord whenever I start feeling anxious.  I picture myself handing Him all the things I'm worried about, and receiving a soft, fluffy comforter back in exchange.  It's a visual that helps to remind me that He offers to give us peace and comfort if we will turn our burdens over to Him.

Daily exercise, eating proper meals, juicing everyday, spending quiet time with the Lord --- all of these things take time and so I find I am not always able to fit blogging into my schedule as well.  But I will keep checking in here at least once a week, to keep you all up to date with my life, and check in to see how you all are doing.  It's so great to know I am not journeying through life alone, but have many wonderful friends along for the ride!

Blesssings,

Ro

An Award for Little ole Me? Why, thank you! *blush*

Recently, I received two blog awards.  I love getting awards!  Seriously, I love it - probably stems from the fact that I was such an under-achiever growing up.  My older siblings all got awards in school but I didn't get nary a one!  I drifted through school, pretty much happy-go-lucky, with fair-to-middling scores in everything except math which tended more towards the lowest end of middling wherever that might be!   So, if I really love getting blog awards now, it's probably in part to make up for my early lassitude.

Judith, over at Unexpected Gems decided to pass on to me the "One Lovely Blog Award."

And Robin, over at Your Daily Dose bestowed on me the "Beautiful Blogger Award."

The funny thing is that both Robin and Judith have blogs that I appreciate so much, it seems like I should be giving them the awards, not the other way around.  You two ladies inspire me both in completely different ways.  Robin, I so appreciate your honesty.  It helps me remember my own frailties and faults and struggles in a way that reminds me to stay humble and recognize my need to not just "settle in" but keep pushing for better in my own life.  Judith, you, on the other hand, help me to remember God's goodness, His love and care and grace in my life, in a way that helps me to remember the "peace that passes understanding" - that gift from God that comes not through my own work, but simply because of how wonderful our Heavenly Father truly is.  So one of you seems to encourage me to keep pushing on, and the other one of you seems to encourage me to rest, but I appreciate both perspectives for their own unique place in my life.

So thank-you to both of you for passing along awards to me, and I hope you don't mind that I've decided to combine them both in this one post.  My little recovering feline patient is keeping me very busy with her demands so posting has become a bit of a luxury at the moment.   

The rules for accepting the blog are:

1).  Thank the person who gave you the award
2).  List 7 things about yourself
3).  List 7 inspiring blogs to whom you would like to pass the award.

So, Judith and Robin, please consider yourselves thanked!  It was particularly encouraging to receive these awards this week because it has been such a difficult week for me to even get to my blog.  So thank-you for your kindness!

7 Things About Myself:

1).  My eyes are not exactly brown, not exactly hazel, but sort of a tawny yellowish colour, but they change too depending on the light and what I'm wearing.  My youngest brother has exactly the same colour eyes - if they happen to be the same colour at the same time as mine.  :)

2).  I am the shortest person in my family and I am 5'6" so I'm not exactly short.

3).  I was named after two aunts - my mother and my father both had sisters with my name.

4).  I didn't get married until I was 34 and I really had no confidence that I would be "better" at marriage than any of my friends and relatives whose marriages failed.  I thought marriage was probably going to be the hardest thing ever and got myself all worked up about it - and then discovered that marriage is the most amazingly wonderful joyful experience ever!  I can't imagine life without my husband now and am so thankful for him.  He makes every day so much better by laughing with me (and yes, sometimes AT me), by holding me when I cry, and being the best life partner day-by-day that I could ever imagine.

5).  Some of my very best friends include my parents and my siblings even though we also can fight like crazy at times.   Must be an Italian thing.  :)

6).  I really love bookkeeping.  I know it should seem boring, but honestly, I just love taking the time to make sure everything adds up neatly and that it all falls into place where it's supposed to.  Very little in life fits so neatly into columns, it's kind of a relief to work with numbers that belong in specific spots and can be ordered there by the stroke of a keyboard.

7).  My name isn't really Ro Magnolia.  That is a nickname that was given to me many years ago and stems from my maiden name.  Maybe someday I'll share my real name but for now I just love the sound of "Ro Magnolia" - it has a certain southern belle kind of sound that I love and I have often thought I would use it as a pseudonym if I ever decided to write romance novels.

7 Inspiring Blogs:

I've chosen these 7 for such totally different reasons, but each one brightens my day with their posts - either by making me really think, or making me really laugh, or making me really smile, or even sometimes, making me just take a moment and breathe in a thing of beauty.

So to you 7, please feel free to collect either one or both of these awards.  You deserve them!  My life is enriched by your blogs on a daily basis and I feel like you have become part of my network of friends even though we've never actually met.  :)

Never Growing Old
Fill My Cup...with Beauty
Bringing Pretty Back
Two Knit Monkeys
Life by Chocolate
Australian in Athens
Beyond the Kitchen Window

What I Like About You ....

Finding my way around the blogging community has proven to be an absolute joy.   This morning I decided I would like to start a new blogging tradition, a regular "What I Like about You" post that highlights one particular blog that I have really come to enjoy.

Today's featured blog is:  Farmgirl Fare

What I like about Susan's blog is pretty much everything!  A baker turned farmer, Susan dishes up wonderful recipes, incredible photos, and little glimpses of her life on the farm.

Yesterday, I baked up one of her recipes, an Orange Yogurt Loaf that Susan recommended as a great accompaniment for fresh strawberries.

Here's a picture of my finished product:

It turned out to be an absolutely delicious, moist loaf that was just bursting with orange flavour!  And it did indeed taste wonderful with fresh strawberries.

If you like to bake and try new recipes, or if you just want a regular "dose of cute" in photo form, you really should go over and check out Susan's blog.  You will not be able to resist the sweet little lambs, gorgeous white fluffy Pyranees dog, or the unique faces of her many donkeys.

Sunshine Award!

I'm so thrilled ... I got another blog award!  I've been savouring it for a few days, just enjoying the sweet kindness of Dawna over at Hiccups in Time for granting it to me.

I particularly love that its called the "sunshine award" because who doesn't need a little bit of extra sunshine in their lives?  Living in Canada, I particularly love sunshine because, let's face it, there are many long months of grey stormy skies and wet slushy snow that seem to last way tooooooooooo long.  Sunshine is life to me!

As an aside, I've recently started taking Vitamin D supplements and I really recommend them.  After about a month of taking them, I am feeling a tremendous boost in my energy levels.

This award has given a little boost too - a little boost of encouragement!  So thank-you Dawna for thinking of me and passing along this sweet award.

The rules of acceptance are:

1. Put the logo on your blog.
                 No problem there, I adore gerbera daisies almost as much as I love sunshine!

2.  Pass the award on to 12 bloggers.
                 Hmmmmm .... let me give that some thought.

3.  Let the bloggers know that you have given them an award.
                 Definitely will do that once I narrow the list down to 12.  Really, you people all have such WONDERFUL blogs, how am I supposed to choose?

4.  Share the love by linking back to the person who gave the award.
               Already did that but here she is once again!  Dawna at Hiccups in Time  Thank-you Dawna!

So, now on to choosing the 12 bloggers I'm going to pass this award on to.  I wish I could choose you all, because honestly, I have so enjoyed getting to "know" each one of you, benefiting from your creativity, insightful writing, lovely photography, and growing friendships.  You are all such special people and having a little glimpse into your lives is something I treasure.

However, since I do have to narrow it down to 12, here are 12 of the many special bloggers I enjoy.  Some I've known for a little while (little because I've only been blogging for 2 months) and others I've just recently "met", but all of them are proving to be special!  Hope you enjoy visiting their lovely blogs.

Java at Never Growing Old

Heidi at Tales of Snow Drop Cottage

Sandi at Rose Chintz Cottage

Carolyn at Aiken House & Gardens

Bertie at Bertie Meadows

Rachel at Three Butterflies and a Monkey

Elizabeth at The Crafty Charlestonian

Susan at Blackberry Cottage

Robin at Your Daily Dose

Rebecca at Rebecca Bakes Cakes

Sophie at Sophie Honeysuckle's English Decor

Gesine at Confections of a (Closet) Master Baker

Sugar Doll Saturday!

Robin over at Your Daily Dose has given me my second blog award!  I can't help it, but I get ridiculously giddy when I get one of these awards.  Maybe it will wear off in time, but I seriously doubt it.  : )

This award comes with the following rules:
1.  Thank the person who gave you the award.
2.  Share ten things about yourself
3.  Pass the award along to 10 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic!
4.  Contact the bloggers and let them know you've picked them for the award.

So, first off, let me say a resounding THANK-YOU to Robin, not only for giving me this award, but being such an encouragement with her comments on my posts.  I really appreciate the effort you take to stay in touch with your followers and the sense of community you are developing on your blog.  I love reading all of your blog entries, but I especially love your Here's To You Thursdays.  If you haven't checked out Robin's blog, scoot over there right now and check it out!  Every Thursday, she picks a few of her followers and finds a special youtube clip that she thinks will be meaningful to them.  But really, the clips she finds are meaningful to all of us, so we all benefit from her taking that extra time to make her blog extra special!

Now for 10 Things About Me:

1.  I am really the most ridiculously unsophisticated wine drinker in the world.  Yup, I admit it.  I love the sweet pink stuff (aka Rosé) and although I do like an occasional glass of Merlot with a nice steak dinner or a glass of Riesling or Gerwurtraminer, I really, REALLY dislike Chardonnay.  So sorry to all of you wine connoisseurs and Chardonnay drinkers out there.  I’m a plebeian - very, very much a wine plebeian.  J

2.  I change my words before I speak.  I do it automatically.  I was exposed to a lot of literature at a young age that was classic and old-fashioned in nature and had big words.  Unfortunately, I seldom knew how to pronounce the words even though I knew how to use them in context.  So either I mispronounced them and people who knew what the words were laughed at me, or I mispronounced them and people who were not familiar with the words thought I was speaking a foreign language.  Either way, it was disastrous. 

3.  Which brings me to #3 - the first time I spoke the name “Penelope” out loud.  I was in Grade 3 and the teacher asked me to take a turn reading.  There was a little girl in the story named “Penelope.”  I pronounced her name to rhyme with the word “envelope.”  I had been pronouncing it that way for many years in my head and had no idea it wasn’t correct.  My teacher laughed hysterically.  I was mortified.

4.  I read The Complete Works of Shakespeare through for the first time the summer after I was in Grade Three.  I didn’t understand it was a play so I thought you had to read the names of each actor and all the stage directions out loud along with what they said.  It made for slow reading.

5.   I read The Complete Works of Charles Dickens the same summer.  Dickens was much easier to understand than Shakespeare.  And actually, I think his writing was very much on the level of a Grade Three student – so much caricature and all those lovely mysterious settings that intrigued my childish mind.  And so many of his characters were children.  Now when I read one of his books, I’m not sure why I was so enamoured of him, but I think it was partially because he appealed to my understanding of justice and injustice and how badly I wanted to set things right in the world so that there was fairness for everyone.

6.  My Italian grandmother lived with us until she died when I was 9 years old.  She and I did not always see eye-to-eye (I did not like dusting her house plants) but I have lovely memories of lying in bed with her while she prayed through her rosary.  She had a beautiful rose-coloured reading lamp beside her bed with which I was absolutely fascinated.  I really wish I knew where it was now because it would make a lovely vintage lamp if it was rewired. 

7.  I had a British accent when I was a small child.  My Mum is English and of course my siblings and I all learned to speak from her, so we all had English accents until we started school.

8.  The house I grew up in is the same house where my father was born.  My grandparents bought our farm in 1919, moving out from Toronto once they had saved enough to buy a farm.  My dad was born in 1926 (the 13^th of 14 children) and back then women didn’t go to the hospital to have their babies unless they were wealthy.  My parents live in a new house on the same property but the old house is still standing.  My dad has never lived anywhere else other than that farm.  I think it would kill him if he ever had to move.  Knock on wood, he won’t ever have to!

9.  I am completely enthralled with the beauty of fresh fruit.   I can get positively rapturous about the beauty of a perfect ripe peach.   And don’t even get me going about shiny black sweet cherries and bright red strawberries and lovely clusters of grapes … and I could go on and on, but I’ll try to restrain myself.

10.  Wherever we travel, we always try to find:  good music, good food, beautiful gardens, and a good farmers market.  We have found this is the perfect combination for a perfect holiday in which both my husband and I will be content.

And now for 10 Blogs Recently Discovered that are Fantastic!  This time I won't go into detail about why I love each one of these blogs, but I encourage you to visit them and discover them for yourselves.  Each unique, and each fantastic!  Thank-you to each one of you bloggers who is enriching my life with your writing.



Fearless Nesting

Bringing Pretty Back
The Single Nester
Sisters of Season
Like a Wink and a Smile
Middle Passages

Hiccup in Time
Haup Light
This is Katie
Adventures in Paradise

Blog Award!

I got my first blog award today!!

Thank-you Java over at Never Growing Old for making me feel extra special today.  :)

In order to receive the award, first I must list ten things that I love:

1.  God - cuz, um, well He made me and saved me and loves me, etc.

2.  My husband - I really do think my husband is the most amazing man in the world! I suppose there are some of you who might think your own husband should hold that title, but I can't really begin to think how your husband could be any nicer, kinder, sweeter or loving than my own.

4.  My family.

4.  My pets. I could list them all individually, but then they'd end up hogging practically the whole list.  So they're going in once but please consider all of them included.

5.  Sunshine.

6.  Flowers.

7.  Fresh fruit and veggies.

8.  Cooking/Baking

9.  Songbirds.

10.  My church family.

Now I'm supposed to choose ten blogs that I love and pass this award along to them. The problem being that I will have a very hard time narrowing it down to ten. So if I don't include you, I will try to catch you next time (if I ever get an award again that is!)  And I didn't include Robin over at Your Daily Dose since Java already gave her this award today.

Ten Blogs I Love:

1.  Two Knit Monkeys because seriously, what could be cuter than knit monkeys and the antics they get up to?  You really need to check out Guillermo and Bernardo over there.  I can guarantee they will make you smile!

2.  Killing a Fly with a Ukulele is probably the Wrong Thing to Do - Okay, so Givinya de Elba has the longest blog title ever - but she is so funny, I love to read her posts. Also I'm dying to see how her sister is going to retaliate for the witty little poems "honouring" her that Givinya has recently posted.

3.  Dancing Mouse for several reasons. First of all, Mrs. Brown Mouse has the cutest cats in the world (with the possible exception of my own). Secondly, Mrs. Brown Mouse manages to write interesting posts about the most trivial of items, always reminding me that humour can be found all around us. And Thirdly, because  Mrs. Brown Mouse when short-formed is Mrs. B.M. and really, I think she deserves an award just for putting up with that sad fact.

4.  Our New Life in the Country because I love following the adventures of this family and their animals, and especially the photos that Sue regularly posts.

5.  Australian in Athens because I first fell in love with this blogger's name "The Purple Cow" which caught my attention, and since then have learned to love her blog a little bit more each day. I love that I never know what Purple Cow is going to post next. Will she write about politics? Will she discuss the economy? Or perhaps she will give us a little glimpse into her family life? Or maybe her workplace? Each post is different but ever so thoughtful, and intriguing. And beneath all the words, I suspect there is a woman who would probably become one of my best friends if she happened to live just a wee bit closer.

6.  Teeny Tiny Hopkins because little Lucy is the sweetest child imaginable and you only have to pop over to that blog to see what I mean, and you will instantly fall in love with her yourself.

7.  An Enchanted Cottage because I'm pretty well convinced that I want to move into her garden shed so I can enjoy the birds and chipmunks and flowers that all seem to gather so beautifully in the yard of her cottage. It really does look like an enchanted cottage!

8.  Farmgirl Fare because I love the combination of phenomenal recipes and incredible farm-life photography and narrative that Farmgirl so creatively presents in each of her blogs.

9.  Amos the Lion Heart because she really does have the heart of a lion, as courageous and fearless as you can imagine! And also because she is one of my few friends in blog-land who was first a friend in real life and  one of the best friends a girl could ever find!

10.  Cherry Hill Cottage because, yes, as you have probably realized by now, I'm a bit of a sucker for any blog with the word "cottage" in the name, but also because Tina always posts the most beautiful photos and her blog is so colourful. I love to visit it just to see what new picture she will have for us and for inspiration for my own home.

Resisting the Urge to Babble

So here I am, standing at a crossroads, wondering should I or shouldn't I give in to the clearly narcissistic urge to sign up for a blog? Does anyone really want or need to hear me babble? Do I think my words will be so profound or perhaps so very humourous that they will add some unique splash of colour to the global internet mosaic? Somehow I doubt they will make much difference to anyone but myself. I could just write for myself privately, as I usually do, but perhaps the idea of scattering my words like seeds, hoping that one might find a cozy warm spot of soil on which to land, fills me with a little gladness. So I have passed the crossroads and made a decision, started down the blogging path ... and hopefully will resist the urge to randomly babble about nothing. But no guarantees, understood?