Category Archives: Choices

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Happy New Year – 10 Years Ago Today

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Ten years ago today people were worried about what might happen as the clocks rolled over into 2000. I had bigger fears than Y2K back then, but even so I tried to focus on the moments and the experiences of my daily life placing more value on creating a portfolio of memories than banking it all for a mega big retirement plan. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done the traditional things as well, investing in property and my 401K, but by far the best rewards in my later years will be the experiences I’ve shared with the people I love.

This was Paris in 2000, with us standing under a damp winter sky in front of the Eiffel Tower where I took my daughter Miranda in hopes of adding to her portfolio of special moments and memories.

Here’s to creating new memories in 2010 and building a retirement fund of a lasting kind … our connections to each other and the fearless pursuit of life worth living.

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My Room Of One’s Own Is Almost Ready

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In the middle of all the baking, cleaning, and gift wrapping that goes with getting a house ready for Christmas guests, this house has had a great deal of renovation work happening at the same time. As some of you know, John has been working to finish up my studio space and while it’s not quite ready for its grand unveiling I wanted to give you a sneak peak at how it’s beginning to look. I’ve been picking out fabrics and painting the walls and you’ll see some of that in the preview pictures below.

This is my 11 ft or 340 cm closet/wardrobe. It is a pretty big closet by UK standards and I feel so lucky to have it all to myself. Since my studio has its own bath,I will  be able to use this mirrored area as a large dressing room in addition to a lovely space to do my creative work. (The garden/backyard is not as it will be … we’ll be moving a few things like the compost bin.)

The fabric you see laid across what will be a comfy daybed is some that I chose with the help of my friend Patrice when I was in Atlanta for Thanksgiving. I brought it all back in my suitcase. I love the colors and they are exactly what I had in mind. The framed artwork was made by my daughter Miranda when she was a little girl and it provided the color guide. For a closer look, you can see her sweet design here.

While the patten is bolder than I would normally choose and the green and oranges brighter, I have basically chosen what Patrice would refer to as “E colors” even though I was trying for a new look.

The orange striped fabric is intended for curtains on either side of the sliding glass doors. This shade of orange was my favorite color when I was thirteen and of course there’s a story for later in how I found my way back to it. Perhaps you can guess … if you’ve been reading my blog for very long.

I once had a deep purple bathroom, but in my last house I found I preferred a periwinkle blue that looked a good bit like purple, but didn’t feel overpowering or too Easter eggish. I love the design on the main fabric …. it reminds me of the artist Gustav Klimt.

(The Kiss by Klimt )

The lighting is throwing the color off slightly, but the green is still pretty green. I am recovering a chair with it and the orange bit is intended for pillows. I’m so excited by my fabric choices and think it will be such a great space to write. I wanted to find a shade of green like below in the photograph I took yesterday. You see this green everywhere here and I wanted to bring it inside. My choice is actually pretty close when seen in good light.

You can see the door below which is one of three that I painted. This is the entrance to my space from a hallway that was added for access. It will have a drop shade for privacy, but I doubt it will get much use.

John has done a great job on this hallway /corridor. The art is temporary. This space will be a photo gallery with same sized images lining the wall and lighting to highlight it.

This floor will continue into my space and bathroom. John put it down a few days ago along with the baseboards/skirting boards. I love the contrast of dark and light.

You can’t really tell the wall color as it was getting late in the afternoon when I took the photographs and I had limited light. It’s called Devon Cream and it is a soft creamy color that tends to pick up the color of all the fabrics. It mutes the stark white a bit and has a tiny hint of yellow to it. All of the fabric colors work well with it. (Thanks again to Patrice for being my sounding board and looking at endless swatches.)

I didn’t photograph the bathroom, but it’s coming along too. John has my bathtub in place as well as the sink and toilet. He’s been working so hard and doing a lovely job. The other day I told him that giving me this space was so special that I really didn’t need anything else for Christmas to which he replied with a quick smile, ” All right then, that’s sorted. ”

That said, every time I go up into the attic or loft as he calls it, he does say, ” careful … don’t look around too much.”  I wonder if he’s keeping something safe for Santa. I’ll be back later with some Christmas pictures. I’ve been making wreaths and Hello Dollies and a million other things.

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Malicious Intent – Destroying Something Special

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The big fish you see in the picture above used to be something Tina ( in red ) and I would pass when we were out for a run. It was a guidepost along the Camel Trail in Cornwall and something many people appreciated even though at first glance one might wonder what it was doing along the edge of the path used by runners, walkers, and cyclists. You can’t see it in this picture, but the River Camel is tucked in the trees not far ahead and a spot where you might see people fishing at times.

The giant aluminum fish sculpture was the creative work of a well known sculpture artist Richard Austin. Mr Austin worked with the children of St Tudy Primary School who envisioned the design that he built for their school project. As you can see by the marker above and the smaller fish on the signpost below, this unusual feature was a popular art piece which never failed to come up in conversation especially when giving directions for places to meet along the trail.

Last Thursday morning, Tina and I set out on a morning run. I was excited to be back in Cornwall having returned the day before from my trip home to America and was shocked when we got to the place where the big fish always helped to mark the milage on our run. What you see below, was what we saw.

It seems just a few days before someone decided to destroy the art work we once enjoyed and set it on fire melting the big fish into an unrecognizable pile of metal. This type of  behavior is really uncommon for our peaceful area and I was shocked to learn of its destruction.

The vandals have not been caught yet, but one can’t help but wonder as to how small and hard hearted someone must be to find joy in the destruction of something that many were proud to create.

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Sticks & Stones: More Venom From My Online Stalker

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Many of you who have been reading my blog since it began in 2008, know that for some time I’ve been harassed by a woman named Maggie Namjou, aka Margaret Powell, Margreta Kerr, Maggie Kerr, and Maggie K Namjou. After months of endless phone calls, including four on our wedding day where she left screaming obscenity laced messages on our answering machine which John saved for the police, multiple nasty comments on my blog posts and more deluded emails than I could have imagined anyone might send, I finally changed my blog to a WordPress site so I could moderate comments.

After receiving nightly phone calls until 3:00 a.m. and calls throughout my work day I was forced to change my cell phone number as well. I made the changes, married the man I loved and went on with my life.

Given that I had closed several of the ways she could reach out to me it appeared as though John and I had dropped off her radar. Not surprisingly, like most stalkers she has a pattern she follows where she bombards the people she harasses with constant email and phone calls for three or four months followed by three to four months of silence so that just when you think she has moved on to her next person, she comes back to start all over.

After a few months of quiet, she seems to be back trying to create chaos in our lives. Recently, she sent John an email and later she sent one to my email address which was addressed both of us. We chose to ignore them.

Now it seems she has decided to focus on us again and is trying to inflict damage to our reputation by way of several blog posts where she goes on and on about things which are just not true. She quite tragically portrays herself as an innocent victim who has been harassed and slandered by me. I find the whole slant of her story quite funny given the abuse that has been heaped on us.

I think that most rational intelligent people would be able to see her lies for what they are, but I am linking back to my earlier posts on another site at http://stalkerupdate.wordpress.com so you can have fair balance should you see any posts by Maggie Namjou or Margreta Kerr writing fiction about John or myself. I’ve seen her newest posts and it’s just more of the same.

With this recent harassment on the internet, I feel I must at least direct my readers to an explanation. I’ve written about how she tried to bully and control us with her behavior in the past and I’d rather not write it all out again here. Please click on the highlighted links if you need more of the back story.

I’ll be happy to answer questions and if you’ve had an online stalker or have been in a similar situation, please feel free to share it here.

People like this only win when we let them. I will not allow Maggie Kerr Namjou to trash my reputation. She can write whatever crap she wants and I will continue to post the real story.

For the record, even after months of harassment by her, I did not use her name on the internet until she left it herself. (see the Maggie comment)

* Since posting this message Maggie Namjou has changed the two initial blog postings of hers that had prompted me to write the Sticks & Stones post. Those changes make appear as if I was some big bad meanie who decided write the above alert to anyone googling my name simply in response to an email she sent me in November. If I were indeed the person she describes me to be and truly intent on destroying her life, I could have posted any number of the awful emails or photographs she sent to us as well as my correspondence with others who have been affected by her outrageous behavior in the past.

She mentions in detail on the post below in the second paragraph from the bottom, a woman who she had words with having forgiven her (I know the whole story and it is much more shocking than just words) I know this woman having commiserated through emails about our mutual problems with Maggie Namjou and emailed her after reading the post below. She informed me that she’d had no contact with her and had removed her comment from her own blog because she did not want to see it on there. So once again, no contact, no forgiveness as she indicated, just one more lie to try to make me look like an ogre.

She speaks of my desire to destroy her all because of her behavior during a difficult period in her life and nothing could be farther from the truth. She is a bully who tries to controls people with her nasty behavior and then pleads for forgiveness based on the premise that she was unwell at the time and in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Let me just say … this is not the first time she has used a nervous breakdown as an excuse for bad behavior. She cites several breakdowns in previous emails to us.

She has been telling everyone about her most recent suicide attempt over at her posting and how I am reveling in it. Again, she’s written endlessly in the past about previous attempts enough to recognize her as someone who uses a variety of ways to manipulate people including suicidal talk.

I certainly have no desire to see anyone harm themselves and would feel sad to see anyone take their life. I will not however be bullied into taking down my posts which protect my reputation. She has written about me before and as she points out on her posts about my words lasting forever, her lies about me can also be found on the internet.

Having been through this before, I had enough foresight to email her posts to myself because I know her pattern. I had an idea she would go back and change them in an attempt to cast me in a more negative light than she already has. So I’m posting them here to have truth in reporting. I am so sorry to sully even for a moment my blog site which is a place of delight for me to share bits of my life and photographs.

I know that those of you who stop by and have in some cases become friends would never believe her lies, but a stranger googling my name might not look for more information if it were not already out there and might assume there was some truth to her accusations so I feel I really must address it.

I’ll return to my normal posting with something more pleasant later and I hope like everything you never have to deal with someone like this in your life.  It’s a gorgeous day here and I am going to enjoy it secure in the knowledge that I have done the very best I can to deal with this intrusion into my life.

The two images below are the postings that prompted me to write this post.


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Paying Less For More

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In my last post I asked which light cost $698 and which one cost a more sensible $65. I took the picture of the boy above last Saturday night just before my friend Tina’s big birthday bash and he happened to be looking in the direction of the correct answer. He’s looking to the left which is the opposite direction that most people went. The bulk of my commenters guessed the light on the right was the one we had dangling from the ceiling. Interestingly, people thought the less expensive one which we choose was the pricey designer model. John emailed a picture he took today of ours as it looks in the master bedroom. Thanks to everyone who took the time to offer a guess.

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Resurrection Sunday – Flighty

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Resurrection: Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin resurrēctiō, resurrēctiōn-, from Latin resurrēctus, past participle of resurgere, to rise again.

or this

The act of bringing back to practice, notice, or use; revival

I’ve been thinking a bit about my first blog site where I left a few things behind that were important to me. Intimate and personal, they just sit there now waiting for someone to stumble across them. Sometimes, I feel a need to go back through my memories and resurrect some for another look. I find it interesting that my feelings haven’t changed much since I wrote the post below about year ago. This seems a bit silly on reflection because while I haven’t done everything on the list of ” shoulds ” that nag at me for attention, I really have accomplished quite a lot in the last twelve months.

I’m going home to America in a few days and while I usually rent a car at the airport, this time my daughter will be picking me up. This is the longest amount of time we have ever gone without seeing each other and I am so looking forward to spending time with her. Six months seems to go by so quickly when there’s a laundry list of goals you want to complete, but when you’re away from the people you love, it can feel like forever.

There’s a song from my teen years that was a hit for an English band you may remember called Bad Company, it’s a remake of a Little Feat song and it’s been more recently associated with Alison Krauss. When I hear it in my head, it’s always the rockin version that Bad Company sings, but the best I could find was the version below by Alison Krauss. It’s a good one too, but a little tame for the amount of excitement I’m going to feel stepping out the doors of the airport.

If you have a minute, take a listen to the soundtrack that keeps running through my brain today … because as confused as I get going forward sometimes, my heart still knows the way back to Atlanta.

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Flighty

October 17, 2008

Like these birds, who could not seem rest for more than a minute or two, I feel flighty and unsettled. I watched them yesterday as they duplicated the same pattern over and over. Back and forth they went, flying across the same piece of ground never going more than a few feet from where they started before going back to the beginning. Appearing as if they were assembling for a grand take off on an important journey, they would lift off in mass with a great flap of wings only to fly around for a minute and go back and start over.

As the seasons change, I feel a sense of anxiety to get certain things done. None come easily and all require a fair amount of self education. I struggle with the need for perfection and I’m never quite satisfied with my writing, my photography, or the pace at which I allow myself to develop. It’s about fear really, fear that there won’t be enough time to do everything before the seasons change, both literally and metaphorically and I am out of time.

Today, while my head is filled with flighty unsettled thoughts, my spirit, like the birds going back and forth, is struggling to stay focused and serene. Instinctually, like the birds, I know the direction of my journey. Lord knows, I’ve been working out flight plans in my mind for years. Today, I resolve to just be grateful for motion, even if it’s scattered, and tomorrow, well, maybe tomorrow will be a day filled with full flight.

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Choosing The Path

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I saw the surgeon today for a follow up appointment concerning my hip. In case you missed my news about the big decision I’m facing, you can go here to catch up.

Go on … have a look and I’ll be waiting when you get back.

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Right … so now that you know all the gruesome details, let’s get back to my doctor’s visit. First, I want to explain for any American readers that in the UK, a surgeon is addressed as Mr, Mrs, or Miss instead of Doctor. After so many years of calling on physicians in my professional life, it’s tough to break the habit of saying Doctor when addressing my surgeon. Today I had an appointment to discuss the findings of my MRA and Mr Surgeon repeated how this surgery could make it possible for me to continue doing the things I enjoy. I went in with a ton of questions along with a good bit of research including this useful article.

Because I had spent so much time reading about the procedure, I went into the appointment thinking that I would not have the surgery, but just tough out the pain instead … knowing that eventually I would need to have a hip replacement at about sixty or so. I am a long way from sixty though and my conversation in the surgeon’s office made me reconsider the possibility of having the surgery.

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John and I walked 105 miles of the TMB last year through the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps and we have been planning a return trip in September when I turn 50. These pictures are some of the images I captured last year. The surgeon thought without the surgery, activities like this along with running would need to be shelved and replaced with the more sedate form of exercise … swimming. Have I mentioned how much I really dislike swimming?

I’m including a few more pictures from the TMB (Tour du Mont Blanc) for you to see … while I go back to my research and try to make up my mind.  As always, your thoughts are appreciated.

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Veterans Day – Family Extensions

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Extending my tour of duty

In 1978, I stood with a group of strangers and holding up my right hand, I promised to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” I went on to raise my hand two more times when I extended my military tour for six months and later when I joined the National Guard under a program called SMP.

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Being sworn in for SMP National Guard and ROTC

Soldiering is never easy, but it is particularly difficult now when so many face the possibility of life altering injury and death everyday. I enlisted during peace time and although I was trained and ever ready for the possibility of battle, my daily life was relatively peaceful with my biggest threat to my safety coming from the sexual harassment from others who wore the uniform. To borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens, it was the best and worst of times for me in many ways and while there are many stories I could share on another day, today’s post has a different purpose. This is the day that Americans honor our living veterans.

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Basic Training - Ft Gordon, Georgia - 1979

Today, there are many wearing the various uniforms that make up the different branches of the American military family. Men and women who fight every day committed to the words they repeated on the day they volunteered to serve, ” I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.”  I use the word family with great intention because once you have assembled, trained, and lived with people in anticipation of a life threatening mission, you begin to see them as an extension of your family of origin. For many who grow up in less than ideal situations it may be the only family they know.

There are three veterans in particular that I like to think of as part of my family and while we never served together, I have heard bits of their individual stories over the years and have an understanding of the collective cost of their time in service. While my path was easy, these three men who fought in Vietnam, Jamie, Joe, and Bill have a different story to tell. I know what it’s like to be ready, but they know what it means to go.

Today, as advertisers hawk big sales on various goods or you sit in frustration outside a public office closed for the day, please remember the real reason for Veterans Day and offer those currently serving or those who have served, a much needed and simple…thank you.

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More From Dartmoor

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The other day I gave you a little teaser when I talked about our big walk around Dartmoor.  So I took a break from sewing to pop a few pictures up today. I’ve been asked to post some pictures of my repurposing projects and I’m making good progress so look for a few photos towards the end of the week. Back to Dartmoor...

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The moor has a great deal of variety in the look.

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We passed a fair number of cyclists that day. Ray and Mij said they’d never seen so many on the path there before.

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Me eating my standard moorland meal of American peanut butter and English ginger jam.

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Ray and Mij having their lunch.

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Pausing for a hug.

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Checking the map just to be sure.

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A walk through the woods just before climbing through the rocks.

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Hill climbing past the moorland ponies.

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Classic English countryside…sheep and stone walls.

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Patchwork beauty.

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I love the lone tree in the curve of the tor. ( Tor – large hills with outcrops of bedrock)

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Pausing for me to catch up…I always lag behind taking pictures.

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Nightfall on the drive home.