Snippets from today:

On constant rotation:
Sigur Ros - Med sud I eyrum vid spilum endalaust
Church of the Beloved - Hope for a Tree Cut Down
Sun Kil Moon - April
Red House Painter - Song for a Blue Guitar

Reading:
Knit Two, Kate Jacobs
From Stone to Living Word, Debbie Blue
Oxford American Music Edition
Paste Magazine, February 2009

Doing:
Learning to purl and trying not hate circular needles
Little bit of writing
Revising the ‘about me’ on my sidebar
Organizing photos
Making cupcakes

Orphan Girl 2009 - Take One

Heading back of Denver from Estes Park after a fabulous weekend in the mountains. Stop at Starbucks for some coffee for the drive. What's playing at Starbucks? Emmylou Harris' Orphan Girl. Yep. Why, oh why, can I not escape that song?

looking ahead

with 2008 in the books, here’s what I’m shooting for in 2009, creatively:

reading. goal of 50 books. averages out to approximately one per week. ambitious? yes. achievable? i think so.

writing. I’m not going to set a goal of a specific number of days this year. i have some ideas about what I want to write about and will focus on that.

photography. increase my photoshop skills. take another class or two at working with artists. take pictures consistently. and do something with them. get a macro lens, duaflex camera, and build a contraption so I can take thru the viewfinder shots. work on the plastic jesus series.

learn the mac. 2008 saw me move from being a pc girl to being a mac girl. great move. still have a lot to learn about the mac and all i can do with it. i’m signing up for apple’s one-to-one program so i can get the most from it. how can you go wrong with the option for an hour’s worth of one-on-one instruction for $99 for a whole year?

more knitting, collaging, random hand-crafting and d-i-y projects.

looking behind

2008 was a challenging year in a lot of ways. lost my dad in march. spent the first part of the year growing into my new (at the time) job. people insisted on playing emmylou harris’ orphan girl at every live music venue I frequented. moved on from a church I had tried to make fit for me for quite a while to one where i am finding real community. had my faith stripped of a lot of certainty along the way. still being forced to reckon with uncertainty. had to get reading glasses.

looking back at my first blog entry of 2008, here’s what I hoped to accomplish:

Read 40 books. the year-end tally was 41.

Write 5 days a week, or 20 days a month. it is almost laughable how short i fell of this goal. i did far more talk about writing than i did writing.

learn photoshop. off to a good start on this one, but there is so much to learn. doesn’t feel daunting any more, though.

take a jillion pictures and learn how to organize them. fell just short of a jillion pictures. figuring out the best way for me to organize them is an ongoing project.

develop the plastic jesus series. the plastic jesus series did not grow very much in 2008. definitely an on-going work.

take some creative risks. took a photography class at working with artists. went to the glen workshop in santa fe. collaborated on some creative worship experiences at a couple of different places.

drop a few pounds. dropped a few. more to go.

get my money’s worth out of my gym membership. used it more than in 2007.

simplify. ongoing. life does feel less chaotic.

be a little more free. let go of some stuff that was not life-giving. so, yeah, a little more free.