Charter for Compassion

One night last week, Brit Boy and I were channel surfing and stopped to watch Christiane Amanpour’s new show on CNN International called Amanpour. I've loved her reporting from all over the world over the years, and now she has this where she does work from the studio. Anyway, the discussion on this episode was about the Charter for Compassion that was unveiled this past Thursday. The discussion was very intriguing. Here’s a video to explain what the charter is about.



We have a lot of problems in our world today and some days I just shake my head at how things are. We are continually told how dark things are and they are in some ways, but there is also light still in our world. I’ve had to remind myself of this a lot lately :-) So when I heard about this, I took a look at their site and I have to say, it has lifted my spirits.

When you go to the site, you can read about the acts of compassion that others have committed, like this one and many others. Then it gets you to think about what we all can do. Some may ask, why do I need a website or charter to make me do something that I already do or something that we should do anyway? Well the answer is, we don’t need this site or a charter…compassion is free and available to all of us every day :-) But I’ll tell ya, personally, I’ve been a bit down lately and seeing this space where you can go and find people showing their true hearts and then sharing it is powerful for me. We get fed such nonsense and negativity every day, so it’s nice to read something that lets us see the true beauty of human beings. I think sometimes we forget :-)

This is what has me smiling today. I hope you enjoy checking it out. Have a great rest of the weekend!

Happy Birthday Sesame Street

I want to say Happy Birthday to Sesame Street today!!!! :-) Today marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street premiering on our television screens.


Photo credit: Richard Termine/Sesame Workshop


I, like many others who grew up in the 70s, have fond memories of Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Ernie & Bert, Grover, The Count, and all of the other great characters who live on that wonderful street. I used to want to live there so much when I was in elementary school :-) But getting to visit them each day in TV land was great too. That show opened up a great deal of my imagination and taught me so much. I remember songs from that show to this day, and when I hear them and hum along, I get the same happiness that I had as a kid. What would I and so many others have done without Sesame Street? :)

The beauty of this show is that I enjoyed it when I was a kid and then my nieces and nephews enjoyed it and then it just goes on and on over the years. It has stood the test of time for my family and countless other families and I’m so glad that it’s still around. It is a part of the cultural DNA now :-)

So here’s to Sesame Street and what it has brought to all of us kids and kids-at-heart! May it go on and on :-)

Fountain Friends

I’ve written before about my love of pens and fountain pens in particular. Well, I’ve been using my Parker pen exclusively for a while now, since I love how it feels in my hand. However, the other day I was cleaning around the Yellow House and came upon my other favorite fountain pen, my Levenger. I haven’t been using it for a long while. The Levenger is at the top of the photo and the Parker is the one below.

Here’s the story of my reunion with an old friend. When I put my Levenger aside a good while back, it needed cleaning, therefore it got put aside for what I thought would be a day. Well, life intervened and that day got lost in the shuffle as I prepared to change gears and countries at that point. My Levenger got packed away in its case…got carried across the Atlantic Ocean with me…and it’s been living in its case since I moved here to England over three and a half years ago :-) It’s had a long nap. It got lost in the shuffle with my transatlantic move. It’s a strange life sometimes…I feel like I’m still unpacking sometimes :-)

So I let out a squeal when I laid my eyes upon its simple little case. I know this may sound corny, but it was like seeing an old friend after this long time. It’s funny how the little things from home can just make your day when you live a life like mine :-) I love the adventure of living here, but as I’m only human, I get homesick sometimes too. Finding my pen was like a tiny snapshot of who I was before I came here. I’m still me…the same sense of humor, etc., and that'll never change, but a lot has happened to me since I closed that pen case those years ago. And like any other person, my experiences have shaped me and it's revealing to take stock sometimes. So it was cool to have a think backwards. It’s intriguing how certain objects or certain songs can take you back so much. Life's an interesting trip :-)

I had to do a thorough cleaning on my Levenger, and now it’s back in action. Long live both of my fountain pens! Now I’ve got to go and see what else I can find! :-)

A Simply Good Weekend

Over the weekend, Brit Boy and I went down to the market town of Devizes and did some errands. We like it down there. It’s a nice little town with cozy little walkways between the shops. As we did our errands we picked up some food at the supermarket for our lunch. Then we walked back to our car. We sat in the car underneath a beautiful canopy of trees and listened to the radio as we ate our lunch. We shared a pasta salad and had sandwiches…we hadn’t had breakfast so we were hungry ;-) It was really good! I think that the combination of good food, good music and the scenery were just the right way to spend our day. I love days like that. It just reminds me that the simple things in life are indeed the beauty of life. Here are a couple of photos I took from the car after we finished eating. The trees were beautiful. Here’s a bit of our view.





On Sunday, I was in a baking mood and autumn always makes me muffin crazy, so this was my snack on Sunday afternoon and it was so good :-)




I made apple cinnamon muffins. The house smelled great as they were baking. I just love those apple cinnamon aromas during this time of the year. Don’t you? :-) It just smells like autumn.

Brit Boy has been having a couple for breakfast every morning and I’ve been having them too, so we’re starting to run low. So now I’m off to replenish the supply. Talk to you later!

Circle of Friends

Today I'm going to post the other award I received. I posted the inspiration award a couple of days ago and today I want to pass along the Circle of Friends Award. I received this from a great new friend at WAHM Resource Site. Please check it out over there :-)



This award is a great one. I like this award because to me, reaching out to new friends is one of the best things about blogging. I'd like to pass this one along to:

Health Nut Wannabee Mom
Mama Asid's Entrepod
Theresa's Treasures
WillOaks Studio
Regina's Family Seasons
From Ohio With Love

And also, I'd like to pass it along to all who visit my blog. This one should be really passed around, so take it and enjoy! :-)

Inspiration

Yesterday I turned in my latest assignment for my course. I have a few more to go and then I’ll be done. It’s been interesting and I’ve certainly learned a lot about article and feature writing. It has been an eye opener. My next assignment is to write a package for a tv or radio show and a treatment for a half hour television documentary or feature on a particular topic. I have to outline the packages and write out a portion of the actual shows, not the whole thing. This is the part of the course that I’ve been looking forward to most. It will be a challenge, but it will totally take me out of my comfort zone, so this will be a good learning experience. Wish me luck! :-)

In other news, recently I’ve been given two awards from bloggy friends and I wanted to finally highlight them. I was so grateful to receive them, but haven’t had the chance to mention them with all my school work. Well today I have that chance :-) I’ll do one award today and the other one tomorrow.

The first one is the Most Inspirational Blog Award that I received from June at Cen’s Loft. Let me just say, she inspires me with her creativity. She has a great blog on scrapbooking and crafts mixed with stories from her everyday life. Please check her out!



It was hard to decide who to pass this award on to because there are so many blogs that I read that inspire me. Here are my picks, even though the list could have been twenty or more blogs long :-) This is why they inspire me....

Getting Busy Living – because this is my Brit Boy’s blog and the title of his blog is our shared philosophy in life. My husband inspires me every day!

People You Need To Know – because this blog highlights inspiring people who inspire me to do more

Necessary Room – because her blog simply exudes calm whenever I visit...that’s inspiring

Writing To Survive – because her truly creative writing inspires me to look deeper

Operation You – because she celebrates self-love and love for the world around us...truly inspiring

Red Pine Mountain – because her words inspire beauty and her photos do the same

I hope that you enjoy visiting them all. They are truly great. Have a great day everyone!

Halloween at the Yellow House

Just wanted to check in and say hello...so Hello! :-) I've been working on a couple of school work assignments this week and it's going okay. The leaves are finally changing color more around where we live so I'm happy about that. I do love autumn/fall best of all :-)

We were out the other day and picked up a new decoration for the season...we love our decorations. We don't have a whole lot of them for Halloween, but we figure we will add them as the years go by. Anyway, we found this little jack-o-lantern figure and he's rather cute...don't you think? :-)




He's made out of metal and kind of bounces around when you poke him. He's kind of like a bobblehead. Let me tell you, I enjoy making him bounce way too much. LOL. We're all set for Halloween.

Hope you all have a great weekend! :-)

A Sunset and A Viewing Sunday

We had a nice quiet weekend around the Yellow House and sometimes that’s just what you need :-) Brit Boy did his Saturday cooking and I just loved that ;-) On Saturday evening we worked on a little project that we’ve been working on…more about that in the future :-) And then on Sunday we just took it easy on the couch. We also enjoyed a beautiful scene like this as the sun went down.




We usually have our DVD time on Sundays. We will sometimes watch a movie, but usually we watch a couple of TV shows we like on DVD. This started out as our West Wing DVD Sundays, but now they are The Waltons and West Wing Sundays :-)

Brit Boy is a full-on West Wing fan and has all the seasons on DVD. We’ve had the final season for a while, but have only recently started to watch it. Brit Boy wanted to savor it so we’ve delayed it a bit and watched the previous season again. This was good because in the past I was an in and out West Wing fan before, but now I’m all in :-) So this way I can catch up and follow the stories better.

I mentioned The Waltons. Well, Brit Boy bought me the first season DVD set of this a couple of Christmases ago. I’ve always been a fan of this show since I saw it as a little kid. Some people make jokes about this show, but I don’t mind. I love it. I love it because it reminds me in many ways of my own growing up and I loved that John Boy was a writer. The Walton family had seven kids and I was one of seven kids and their gently simple rural life reflected parts of my own. So whenever I watch this show it instantly takes me back to a time and place that is long gone now, but through this show I hear echoes of my life as a child with my parents :-) This way, how I grew up is never far away. I grew up decades after the times that this show is set in, but the story of family goes on forever.

Interestingly enough, Brit Boy likes watching too and I was a bit surprised by that in the beginning. However, I realized that even though he grew up across the ocean from me, the ties of family and tradition and nostalgia are universal. It’s like they say, we are often more alike than we are different.

So we watched an episode of The Waltons and then we watched an episode of The West Wing and it was great. We had a snack and I kept wishing that we still had a couple of slices of that cake that I made last week :-)

We had every kind of weather yesterday...we had rain, wind, and then a glorious blue sky in the afternoon. And that gave way to some amazing clouds that were lit up orange by the setting sun. Brit Boy and I just stood at the window and watched the show :-) We were mesmerized.

My 200th & Some Cake As A Bonus

This is my 200th post and I’m very excited to have made it to this milestone. I know that many people have more, but I wanted to mark this day because it reminds me of what blogging has taught me…the value of sticking with something :-) Continually showing up here at the computer has definitely helped my discipline. Also this whole wonderful foray into blogging has given me a great creative outlet that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. And best of all, I’ve made some great friends. Who knew 199 posts ago that so much of my world would open up :-)

I look forward to many, many more posts in the future and they will certainly become more frequent again once I finish my course in a couple of weeks. Brit Boy and I are planning more outings coming up, so I’ll have lots of stories and photos to share about our adventures :-) Thanks everyone for continuing to visit me.

In other news, I made a cake this weekend and Brit Boy and I have been enjoying it over the past few days. It started out as an ordinary box cake mix and then I decided to rev it up a bit. So I ended up making a cake from scratch with cake mix incorporated into it, if that makes any sense :-) It was wild. It was like science in the kitchen. It ended up tasting very good and I’ll probably never be able to duplicate it again. Sometimes the sublime comes from the totally farcical. LOL.




Here’s my culinary invention. It’s a vanilla flavored cake with vanilla frosting, served with a dollop of ice cream and strawberries. It was so GOOD! It kind of ended up tasting very strawberry shortcake-esque. Now, I think I’ll go and see if Brit Boy is ready for round three of cake at the yellow house ;-) Talk to ya later!