A Place of Reflections

Photo Credit: Adobe Photo Shop Art Tutorial   Being able to express your grief ~  The Challenge of Grief at Holiday Time ~ I    was based around being able to 'talk' or 'share' about departed loved ones to help a person process their grief, their loss, their impact. Expression is vital ~ especially with young children. A few years back I saw this film clip of a young widow being interviewed. She had three small children. I think her husband had been killed in the war. At Christmas time, she asked her children if they'd would like to draw a message to Heaven for their daddy. She had a particular wall she would put the Christmas tree at, around that tree, placed on that wall would be her childrens' drawings ~ EXPRESSIONS for their daddy, Jesus Christ, Heaven.  They were in their third Christmas season of doing this. She said she was saving and preserving their messages, they were precious to her and if at some point when the children were adults, and w

Photo Credit  Adobe Photoshop Art Tutorial  As a little girl, my maternal grandfather had a heart attack on Thanksgiving (we weren't there). He died on December 3rd. Four days after Christmas the same year (December 29th), my daddy died in an industrial accident. I briefly spoke about first being widowed young with a child to raise in  The Little Prayer Book That Could and Did . The massive and fatal heart attack that came upon him happened in December, (right after Christmas and before New Years). That particular blog post mainly focused on my late-in-life marriage, the loss of that husband who was diagnosed with terminal cancer one mid-November and died mid-January two months later and my grief.  I am not an expert in dealing with grief. I am quite an expert at having personally experienced the exquisite excruciating pain of grief.  Today, I want to focus on grief, children and the holidays. Little girl ~  looking back, singularly the biggest explosion in the Uni

Subtitled:  How Tammy Baldwin Got my Vote For Senate Photo Credit:  Edible Planet It's a given in my opinion in any election that candidates work hard to be elected.  I'm not 'in' with whatever the political 'in crowd' is.  I avoid most all of the political shows on television or radio because I find that most of the hosts are biased, slanted in one political direction or the other which means I am not getting 'the truth' but their truth as they know it which is often untrue, unfair and unnecessary. The trend continues in both politics and sports broadcasting of the 'rants for ratings' talking heads. It's less about the topics or the guests and more about the hosts getting market share ratings for their own network continuation. That about sums it up for me regarding mainstream media. With one big exception, (  Hoosier Daddy Pooped ) that also sums it up for me as far as the voluminous amount and voracious topics that full an

Photo credit: Edible Planet  The Yard Signs and The Neighbors ~   Personally, I have many post-election reliefs the 2012 elections are a completed process. One of my biggest reliefs is very tiny and important enough for me to blog about.  It's about the senior couple that live a block away, particularly the husband and their Obama yard signs. In approximately 14-16 neighborhood blocks, there were only three Obama yard signs. The Romney yard signs heavily outnumbered the Obama yard signs. To be perfectly honest, there certainly were not yard signs in each and every yard as I have seen in past Presidential elections. The senior husband (the couple are in their late seventies) put out his original Obama yard sign way back when.  It was taken. He got more. They were taken. He continued to get more.  I learned of this happening through my daughter. Much to this man's delight, my daughter sometimes seeks him out, specifically he is her advisor on the 'tinkeri

 Photo credit:   Big Big Forums arts crafts knit-spring-crochet-animals It's the end of one type of twitter era for me after two years, three weeks and three+ days.  Gone are the multiple listed people tweets for my primary interests   #GoPackGo Packers fans and   #WritersWednesday (authors and writers) and the first basic twitter tradition I ever learned #FF for #FollowFriday which now includes #FollowSaturday through #FollowThursday . (I was using -->  Follow Friday Helper  ~ I will continue to use it as a resource to see who shows up there for however long it may or may not last.) <---- December 9, 2012 UPDATE ~ I'm sad to report that Follow Friday Helper has now closed for good.  I want to thank their developers for always being a trustworthy application for me to have used. I can be suspended and permanently revoked by Twitter, THEY told me so on Thursday, November 1st, 2012. Twitter briefly suspended me for too many @replies and @mentions . Twitter ga