Tag: postaday2011

daughter · recipe

A Day of Stationary, Parrots, Eggs and Movies

Joanne3 Comments

Yesterday was a long day.

Worked ‘til four, drove up the coast with my eldest daughter to buy stationary, called in at the supermarket for a few bits and pieces on the way home, made dinner with youngest daughter, watched a movie, checked the time to find it was 11.30 pm and I hadn’t written my blog post for postaday2011, attended to the post, had a shower and fell asleep as my head hit the pillow!

What is it about stationary shopping that makes it so much fun? I would rather shop for pens and notebooks any day, in preference to clothes or shoes!

Does that classify me as odd? Hmm…If it does, then my daughters are odd along with me! Neither of them would pass up an opportunity to browse through a stationary shop. I suspect they actually enjoy clothes and shoe shopping, so perhaps they are more normal than their mum!

Right next door to the stationary shop is a pet store. We popped in for a quick look around, leaving perhaps an hour later! Well, we did get chatting to a very friendly shop assistant, as you do, which eventually became a full-on conversation regarding the taming of parrots!

At home, my younger daughter and I tried out a new recipe that we liked the look of, burritos with spicy pork and pineapple with avocado sauce. Yum! We’ll remember to make that recipe again. Delicious!

We found the recipe in a cookbook that my older daughter recently discovered, chock full of healthy, weight conscious recipes. There’s a vegetarian section, along with healthy versions of meat recipes. They even suggest that eggs are a healthy choice in meal!

That just goes to show you how the wheel turns. When I was a child, eggs were regarded as healthy food, containing all known vitamins to man, except vitamin C. Those were the days when a healthy breakfast consisted of toast, egg and a glass of orange juice. The juice supplied the vitamin C that the egg was lacking!

Next thing, eggs were a no-no; too much cholesterol and said to add weight, not a healthy option for the health or weight conscious person.

Many years have passed and now the wheel has turned full circle. Eggs are back in vogue!

By 8.30 pm I had myself comfortably curled up in my favourite lounge chair, eagerly awaiting the beginning of one of my all time favourite movies…”To Kill a Mockingbird” on Fox Classics.

My family regards the movie as boring. I could watch it over and over again! It would have to be one of the most simply plotted stories, with the beginning of the movie set in 1932, and following through the events in the lives over the next couple of years of the Finch family; father Atticus, his son Jem and daughter, Scout.

Their mysterious neighbour, Boo Radley, features throughout, although we do not meet him until the very end of the movie.

My heart goes out to the genteelly mannered Tom Robinson, the victim of racial prejudice and wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit.

Before seeing the movie for the first time I had read the book, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, who based her novel upon events she had witnessed in her own home town, which took place in 1936.

The novel was published in 1960 and became an instant success, winning the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

Immediately following “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Fox Classics decided to tempt me to remain in my chair even longer, with “The Way We Were”.

I first saw “The Way We Were” at the cinemas in Coolangatta, Queensland, many, many, moons ago! It was after seeing the movie for the first time that I became a fan of both Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand.

How could I resist taking just a quick peek at the movie? Just watch some of the beginning, not for too long, just to remind me of how much I love, love, love that movie!

It did not disappoint. The magic is still there. Mind you, I could watch it any time I wish. I have the DVD!!!

What can I say? I’m a sucker for a love story. 🙂

music

A Beautiful Movie….A Beautiful Song

Joanne5 Comments

A commitment is a commitment, and yes, I did commit to a postaday2011.

So here I am at 11.30 pm, just to say today has been big.

And I’m tired.

If I talk about my day now, there is a danger this post won’t make it to being published before midnight, largely because my head will crash onto the computer keyboard and I will be asleep at my desk for the night!

It will have to keep ’till tomorrow.

I will leave you with a link to YouTube, to a song from a movie, both which hold a lot of meaning to me.

It’s A Beautiful Song….so until tomorrow, enjoy.

Australia · floods · friends

The Courage of My Friend

Joanne7 Comments

“Courage doesn’t always roar.  Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

As we bid farewell to the month of January I am reminded that the theme at NaBloPoMo all of this month has been “Friends”, therefore I believe it is only fitting that my final post for the month should include an amazing article, written by one of my online friends, Káren Wallace, at the Calm Space.

January this year was always destined to be a huge month in Káren’s life, with family birthday celebrations, Káren and her husband’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the looming excitement of the family moving into their newly built home.

What they hadn’t planned on was the turmoil their lives would be thrown into, along with hundreds of other families, during the January floods in Queensland, Australia.

Once Káren’s electricity, telephone and internet connections were restored, she wasted no time at all in sharing her “adventure” with her readers.

I already knew Káren to be a true woman of substance, of integrity, strength, wisdom and grace. But it was in her article published late last week on “Courage” that Káren revealed another side to her personality.

Here we find the vulnerable and very real lady, who has endured, along with her family, the heartache and pain brought about by the harsh realities of the Australian climate.

In speaking of courage, Káren tells us that she is “daring to be real and vulnerable and show my real self to the world.”

And that, she does.

But perhaps Káren shows us a very large smattering of psychic intuition in writing this article also. You would think, for all the world, that she had written the article “The Courage to be Me, The Courage to be Real” after picking herself up and brushing herself off after the recent floods.

In actual fact, Káren wrote the article last October, during the month of the theme “courage” at the Calm Space. And for some reason, she didn’t publish it back then.

The timing wasn’t right. It was too early for these words to be revealed to the world. This article needed to be published now, in the aftermath of the floods.

I do hope you will read and enjoy “The Courage to be Me, The Courage to be Real” and join me in sending my friend Káren, along with all the other Queenslanders who suffered in some way during the January floods, calm thoughts of strength and love.

“May the sun shine, all day long,
everything go right, and nothing wrong.
May those you love bring love back to you,
and may all the wishes you wish come true!”

~ Irish Blessing

Photo credit.

freedom · spiritual

Where the Mind is Without Fear

Joanne2 Comments

I’m sharing with you today a poem that I have come across, by a poet I had never heard of before today. Rabindranath Tagore, I have discovered, was from India, perhaps explaining the spiritual note to his poem.

I enjoyed this poem on so many levels. I trust you will enjoy it too. 🙂

Where the Mind is Without Fear ~ Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

daughter

A Reminder of a Priceless Treasure

Joanne2 Comments

Further to last night and my post “A Time for Silence”…..

After completing my post, I wandered off to have a browse at what was on the television. I felt rather “brainless” and needed something to amuse me, without having to concentrate, before I turned in for the night.

At first flick through the TV channels I found nothing entertaining at all. Surely there must be something worth watching on the fifty-million channels available?

Fox Classics was the big winner. How did I mange to miss this, during the first flick through?

I had missed the beginning of “The Sound of Music”, but that’s okay. Hadn’t I seen this movie enough times during my life to know where I was up to in the story line?

With my body constantly breaking out in goose-bumps, I sailed along on my cloud of reminiscing, recalling most of my favourite songs from the movie; “Edelweiss”, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”, “The Lonely Goatherd”, “My Favourite Things”, “So Long, Farewell” and of course, the movies signature song, “The Sound of Music”.

As the wedding scene began, I instantly recalled that Maria walks down the aisle of the abbey, to marry her beloved Gaylord, (played by the dashing Christopher Plumber), to the song, “Maria”. I remembered the post I wrote here last year, in July, noting that my own daughter, Emma, reminded me so much of Maria in “The Sound of Music” (played by Julie Andrews).

At the time, I gave the post the title of “Miss Seventeen”. Emma is now eighteen, is definitely still my “Maria” and still makes my heart dance and sing, every day!

If you would like to read the post, you can do so here….

As I re-read the words I had written about my daughter less than twelve months ago, it became evident to me that she has matured. Oh, for sure, she is still my “Wild Child”, but my girl is learning new lessons of life, every day.

It seems like only yesterday, when she was just fifteen years old and I worried myself to a frazzle over her. Wanting to protect her, I tried to hold her down, just a teeny-weeny bit.

She announced to me one day, with the most solemn look on her face, that she knew I was only trying to protect her, but she wanted to make her own mistakes.

How could I argue with her? They were the very same words I had spoken to my own mother, as a teenager!

Emma reminded me that it is impossible to live someone else’s life for them. You can only ever live your own life.

So here we are, three years down the track from that most memorable of conversations. There are still times when I worry myself to a frazzle over my beautiful girl, but what else can I do? I’m her mother!!!

Emma is living her own life and learning from her own mistakes. She has grown in maturity since July last year and she is happy; oh, she is very happy!

Some things remain the same, though. Her bedroom is consistently messy, there are times when she is far too outspoken for words and as I write this post, late at night, she is not at home.

My Moonbeam is still sparkling, still shining her light of individualism and still making choices full of wisdom far beyond her years.

And as for me, I just keep on loving my Moonbeam, just as I have every day of her life, and since her conception.

How appropriate that my need for silence and watching an old movie has reminded me of how much I treasure one of my life’s greatest gifts ~ My daughter, Emma. 🙂