30/365

Real eggs. From real chickens. Okay, I know that supermarket eggs also come from real chickens. But these eggs came from chickens with names, a gift from friends who are the most self-sustaining couple I've ever met. If the end of the world as we know it ever comes, I want to be with them when it happens.

29/365

Cleaning my spice cabinet has been on my to-do list for a very long time. It took less than an hour to pull everything out of this cupboard; evaluate, toss and consolidate, and rearrange the remaining items. All the spice blends and rubs are in front, where I'll remember to use them. The individual spices are arranged alphabetically in three tiers. I feel like cooking again.

P.S. After reading a hint on the internets yesterday, I grabbed one of our magnetic under-counter lights to illuminate the dark cavern of the cupboard. Cell phones and iPods work, too!

28/365

We haven't started using our "new" bathroom yet, because I'm not finished painting it. I did the cutting in yesterday, will do the walls and the first coat of the woodwork today and will finish it up tomorrow. I wouldn't mind extending this part of the project, because as soon as we start using it, I'll have to start cleaning it. Note the angle this photo was taken from: I was on the floor! The clean bathroom floor!

27/365

Okay, this is blurry, and kind of silly. While blurry is bad, silly is good, right? We surprised my dad with a party on his 75th birthday in 2005. His wife found black, white and gold confetti in the shape of stars and top hats. Of course I saved the leftovers! I sprinkled them on the buffet at our inauguration day party and I've been finding little bits of it ever since. Two good memories for the price of one!

26/365

That knitting project I showed you a week or so ago? C'est finis! Four strands of pencil roving, size 15 needles, cast on 40 stitches, knit garter stitch until you're bored to tears (five or six feet). Attach the last row to the first to make a tube, gather one end and secure, stuff with a couple bags of polyester fiberfill and secure the other end. Voila! (Don't you just love it when I speak French? Heh.)

25/365

My little dog, Hershey, always makes me smile. Except when she has mud on her feet. This is one of the best photos I've taken this year (IMNSHO); it's good stuff and it's not a bad portrait.

24/365

I hang my race numbers, finishers' certificates and medals on the wall behind my computer monitor, for inspiration and to remind me that I'm a runner. Not so much lately, but I have definite plans for 2010. (I promised my husband no races in 2009. I think he thinks I'll get over this running thing already. HAH!)

23/365

Why does remodeling one bathroom mess up the whole house? Here is the new porcelain tile, awaiting grout, which isn't being applied until MONDAY! It'll be great when it's done, though. (Yes, I'm getting a new floor vent. Probably brass. Or maybe plastic. Heh.)

22/365

Yesterday's sunrise, grainy as it is. It was much lovelier in person, of course. But here's the photo I started with:
Thank goodness for RAW!

21/365

I made my husband brave the cold this morning to get copies of our papers. Now to get some acid-free bags in which to store them. Good stuff? You betcha!

20/365

After more than two years (that's when I bought them), it's finally – finally! – time to retire this lapel button. Hallelujah and amen!

19/365

’Nuff said.

18/365

Pouf! While my stitches won't be quite as, um, big as the ones I saw in a magazine photo, they're still pretty big. Here's the inspiration for my new knitting project.

17/365

Party favors for our Inauguration Day party. I made a set of six post cards, each with a different quote, and tucked them into cardstock folders sealed with the inaugural logo.

16/365

A little fuzzy – I don’t (yet) have a macro lens – but you can certainly see the cuteness of these little snowman earrings. I described a pair to my granddaughter, who surprised me by mailing me her own adorable version. (She should open an etsy.com shop, don’t you think?) They make me smile!

15/365

My computer is on the second floor of our garage – an office/family room space that we don’t heat unless we’re in it. It doesn’t take long to get warm, but when it’s TWO DEGREES outside, these make typing so much more comfortable. Wool fingerless gloves: Definitely good.

14/365

This is a car magnet I bought at the Richmond Marathon expo. It's never been on my car, but instead lives on the side of the microwave, just inside the kitchen door. I see it every time I go through the kitchen or come in the house, it never fails to make me smile and it won't get stolen. (One of my neighbors had her pink ribbon car magnet stolen from her car while she was grocery shopping. The noive!)

13/365

I'm so glad I had my camera with me yesterday. This is a horrible representation of what I saw, and I'm not sure what I should have done to capture it properly. I was driving to a meeting at about 10 a.m. I came around a curve and the mountainside was literally sparkling. I pulled into a church parking lot to take the photo. Imagine sunlight glinting off all those frosty trees … it was lovely.

12/365

My favorite way to eat pasta is, of course, how my mother used to make it. She used ground beef, because ground turkey wasn’t available back in the day. Here’s my version, which will serve six (or me, my husband and leftovers for lunch the next day):

Sauté a chopped onion in a little olive oil, then throw in a package of ground turkey (my Kroger sells ground turkey in 20-ounce packages), broken into bite-sized pieces. Season with a little salt and as much pepper as you like. When the turkey is brown, add two cans of cream of mushroom soup, a small can of sliced mushrooms, a soup can of milk (I use fat-free and it tastes fine) and let it simmer for, oh, 20 minutes or so. You can start the pasta while the sauce simmers. About five minutes before serving, melt a cup of shredded cheese into the sauce – whatever cheese you have on hand will do fine. (Mom used Velveeta – that’s what all the cool moms used in the ’50s and ’60s.)

This is so yummy, especially on a cold winter day. Like yesterday!

11/365

I prefer listening to some kind of game while I’m driving – baseball is best, with football a close second and basketball a distant third. (I’m not much for hockey at all.) When I can’t pick up a game, though, thank goodness for the iPod. Not only does it entertain me when I’m driving through the mountains between Tennessee and West Virginia, it also completely disguises the annoying rattle that has recently cropped up somewhere in the car.

10/365

My favorite socks. At least they were my favorites yesterday. Since I started running my feet spend most of their time clothed in cotton, so it was a real treat to pull these bright pink wool socks on yesterday.

9/365

Why I love Hobby Lobby: the sale wall! How could I not toss these sports-themed canes into my basket when they’re reduced to almost nothing?

8/365

Okay, don’t tell me you don’t love an empty dishwasher. Since they’re usually only empty for the briefest of moments, I had to shoot quick to get this shot.

7/365

An iTunes thank-you gift card from my daughter – new music is always a reason to smile!

6/365

These are the tassles on a lamp on the bedside table in my daughter’s guest room. The lamp is old, old, old; she cinched some fabric with the tassles and created a lovely accessory.

5/365

I spent most of my away-from-home time with my grandchildren who live in Tennessee. I could fill this year’s blog with photos of them, because there’s nothing like grandchildren to put a smile on your face. I prefer not to plaster their images on the internet, though, so here’s just a hint of the crown my grandson wore at his eighth birthday party. I altered the photo with some fancy-dancy filters in Photoshop and I really love how it looks now.

4/365

My room was at the end of the hall. As I started down the stairs to load my luggage into my car, I thought this was a great image for my “good stuff” theme. It was early in the morning and there were no maids, no messy room-service trays littering the hall, no kids running up and down – just a lovely, quiet, carpeted hall.

3/365

In my opinion, hotels are places to sleep, nothing more. I never go for the big luxury places; I’d rather spend my money elsewhere. So imagine my surprise to find liquid creamers next to the in-room coffeemaker in Elkhart’s Sleep Inn, in addition to that nasty powdered stuff! Suh-weet!

2/365

I left home January 2 in what The Weather Channel called a “wintry mix.” The first good thing of my trip was four-wheel drive. When we bought this car (a Ford Escape), the last thing we thought we’d ever need was 4WD, our thinking being that if it’s that bad out, we’re staying home! But I felt better having that extra layer of safety on iffy roads.

1/365

This is a close-up of a leaf from my lime tree. I live in southern West Virginia, so the tree lives in the house during the cold-weather months.

The lime tree is “good stuff” for several reasons:

• It was a gift from a lovely couple I just met this year while working on the Obama campaign.
• It’s still alive, four months after I repotted it.
• The leaves give off the loveliest fragrance and, I’ve heard, so will the blossoms.
• It should, someday, actually produce limes.

Project with a purpose

This year I’m going to try something different. As you can see, I lost interest in this project in mid-March of 2008. I didn’t have a goal for the photos – I just told myself to take a picture every day and after a while I ran out of pictures to take. Not really, of course, but without a purpose it was easy to just quit.

2008 was a difficult year for me – lots of illnesses with family members and the death of my best friend. There were a couple of good things, and they were very, very good, but all in all, if I could do 2008 over again without the bad stuff, I would. In a heartbeat.

And so, the purpose of this blog for 2009 is to document something good every day. I won’t be able to post every day. In fact, the next photo won’t be posted until January 12, as I’ll be traveling until then. But I’m happy to get the year started off right by posting 1/365.