Stick with the Good Friday

Happy Good Friday! Fridays are all good, but Good Friday is the “goodest” of all. The above picture is a sticker that you can purchase from Zazzle. I LOVE that stickers are making a big comeback. My sister and I shared a carefully curated sticker collection when we were little girls. Now my twenty-something kids purchase stickers all of the time. Recently, my eldest son’s girlfriend purchased one of the neatest stickers that I have ever seen from one of our local touristy towns. It had the depiction of an old-fashioned postcard but it also had a QR code on it that opened up to a slide show of all of the highlights of the town. So today, my favorite for this Friday, is stickers. Aren’t they grand? I might have to start up a collection of my own, to rival my childhood album of stickers.

*****Every single year since I started writing this daily blog, I have taken Easter weekend off from writing. I try to practice what I preach. I truly believe that Easter weekend is the ultimate RESET button and pressing this button, is exactly what I need to do. On Easter, I take time from my “typical” daily, routine life, to just be. I use Easter weekend to rest, rejuvenate, reflect and restore. Easter is the ultimate reminder of true, unconditional love. Allow this pure love to flow freely to you, all weekend long. Come back to your everyday life on Monday – reset, rested, restored and revitalized. See you then!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

932. Is there any experience that you regret not having had yet?

Good Friday

Good morning, my beautiful friends and readers. Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for “hearing” me. I love you. I started this blog in 2018, when my eldest of four children officially left the nest, by graduating from college and moving to a whole other city. And every year since then, I have written a blog post almost every single day. This blog is one of my own favorite things of all time. It has become my lifeline back to me. However, consistently, I have taken Easter weekend off from writing, since the day that I started the blog.

This is a holy time of year. Easter, Passover, Spring. This time of year is the biggest, most gapingly open portal to hope which we receive in any given year. It’s the perfect time to press the “reset” button. Whatever your spiritual beliefs are (or aren’t), you can’t help but to feel the renewal of life and hope all around you. This time of year, is the best time of year for me, to quiet my thoughts, and to let the good of life, just soak in. I hope that you are able to do the same.

Here are a couple of bonus favorites (for Favorite Things Friday), to tide you over. I hope that you are eager to come back to the blog on Monday. I know that I will be more than eager to write it.

L’Oréal Paris Age Perfect Satin Glide Eyeliner with Mineral Pigments – Oh my gosh. I can’t believe I forgot how much I love this eyeliner. I recently randomly pulled it out of a cup of eyeliner pencils that I keep by my bathroom sink, and then I instantly remembered how great it is, the minute I started putting it on. This pencil is so rich, so smooth, and so long-lasting. I love eyeliner, like Cleopatra loved eyeliner. I have a lot of eyeliner pencils. This one is the best!

Good & Gather Crushed Garlic Cubes and Crushed Ginger Cubes – I purchased these wonders at Target recently, and they have become flavor game changers. You keep them in your freezer (they look like small ice cube trays). Then, when you need to put something on the skillet, you just blop one of the frozen cubes on to the pan and it turns into the perfect mix of oil and flavor, to help to make whatever you are cooking, taste divine.

Have a wonderful weekend friends. I hope that the weekend ends with us all feeling refreshed, renewed, relieved, revived, rejuvenated and reoriented to living our lives with excitement, hope and energy. I will see you back here on Monday.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Good Friday

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Dear Readers,

I started this blog in the summer of 2018, and I have written at least one short post practically every single day since then. However, every Easter weekend, I take the weekend off from writing on the blog. I consider Easter to be my annual reset button. Easter represents hope, and renewal, and fresh growth and life, like no other time of the year does for me. It is a reflective time for me. And taking this time off from writing has been a tradition that serves me well, even when I still feel the (sometimes even fervent) urge to write.

As always, thank you for being here, reading and supporting the blog with your time, understanding, love and comments. This blog is sacred to me, and you, my readers, are a vital part of that sacredness. Thank you. I love you.

I will be back on Monday. Sending blessings your way!

“Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.” – Gertrude Stein

“God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.” – Vance Havner

“The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child.” – Paul Gauguin

“There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.” – Thomas Merton

Good Friday

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

My husband said that I better be nice to my readers today. Please forgive my indulgence in fun yesterday, at your expense. At least my blog keeps surprising you, right? My regular readers know that Fridays are called Favorite Things Friday here at Adulting – Second Half. On Fridays, I don’t go much further than skin deep. I list three favorite things, or songs, or TV shows, or food items, etc. that rock my world and I ask you to share your favorites in my Comments section. Here are my favorites for today:

Redecor – This is my new phone game obsession, which I mentioned earlier this week. By now, I am sure that you are thinking, “Wow, this lady plays a lot of phone games!”, but I do other things while I am playing the games, such as watching TV, laying in bed, cooking, driving (kidding). Anyway, this is a perfect game to enjoy the fun of home decorating without the expense, mess, logistics, mood swings, or chaos that comes with actual home decor. It is almost like an adult coloring book. The fun of the game is that you get to vote on other people’s designs, which has opened up my mind to a whole new level of impressed. People are so creative. I love that feeling of, “Wow, I would never have thought of that combination and yet, it looks so amazing!”

Napa Hills Wine Antioxidant Water – This stuff is awesome! It makes you feel like you are drinking an adult beverage, when you aren’t at all. You can drink this for breakfast and not worry about saying something ridiculous and slurry, nor feel like you might need to check into a rehab. The marketing on this flavored water is genius. From their website:

“One bottle of Napa Hills water delivers 10 times the amount of antioxidants found in one glass of red wine, but without the alcohol or wine taste. Our first product is a refreshing Cherry flavor, inspired by Napa Valley Rosé, flavored with hints of cherry and lingering pomegranate finish.”

This drink is pricey, but it is tasty and has zero calories. It makes an ordinary lunch feel more special and Mad Men-ish, without any guilt. Splurge! It’s the little things in life, right?

Thriving as an Empath by Judith Orloff – If you are a person who has been described as “too sensitive”, first of all, you are not. You are wonderful, just the way you are! You are just more attuned to all of the energy surrounding you, more than the average Joe. And that’s not good or bad, it just is. Sometimes this “sensitivity” can make life a little more emotional and difficult, but other times, it can make the world seem more vibrant and overwhelmingly beautiful, than some others could possibly ever imagine. This is a great book, written like a daily devotional, to help you to navigate your beautiful, empathic nature. I have given this wonderful book as gifts, and it is one of those gifts which friends have told me they liked, more than a dozen times. It might come off as “woo-woo” to some, but take a look inside of it, and you’ll know right away whether it resonates with you or not.

Okay, I loathe to do this after my nasty trick, but I honestly take Easter weekend off every single year. I’ve done this since I started my blog (you can look in the archives to see this). As a Christian, there is not a more appropriate time in the year to hit the “reset” button, than during Easter weekend. It’s like a Lenten sacrifice for me, in a way. I love to write! I love to commune with you, so taking this time and space away from my blog, honestly makes me appreciate it, even more. It’s just something that I must do, for reasons I don’t even fully understand. Here’s last year’s Good Friday post to verify this, (since you may have trust issues with me now 😉 ) Have a miracle- filled, delightful weekend and I shall be back on Monday!

Friday is Good

Friday is Good

Dear Readers,

This is last year’s Good Friday post:

“Seek and You Will Find

Happy Friday, dear readers! Happy Good Friday!! In honor of the holiest days of the year in the Christian faith, I am going to take some time off from writing this weekend to enjoy some more just “being” and reflecting. Thank you for your loyalty and understanding. I treasure you, my readers. Have a wonderful, hopeful, redeeming, restful Easter weekend! I shall be back on Monday with more musings! In the words of Jesus:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Matthew 7:7-8 NIV“

I think that I am going to continue to honor this tradition of taking Easter weekend off from writing. To my Jewish readers, I hope that you experienced a meaningful, calming Passover and to my Christian readers, I wish the same for us, this holiday weekend. For all of my readers, whatever your religion is (or is not), I love you. I wish for you health, safety, peace, sanity, and a renewed sense of what being alive really means to you.

Please do not worry. I am well. I am with you. I think that I need some time to be quiet with myself, and Easter weekend seems like the most absolutely appropriate time to do this.

I will be back in verbose form, on Monday. I appreciate you, from the bottom of my heart. Happy Easter! I am going to end this post with one of the most reassuring verses from the Bible.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Matthew 6:26

Refreshed and Renewed

I’m baaaack! This past weekend is the first weekend that I took off from writing my blog since I started writing it back in July 2018. It felt strange. I automatically sat down to my computer Saturday morning, but then laughed at myself and forced myself to get back up and to do something different. What I learned from this little experiment of mine, was priceless. I missed writing my blog. I missed my readers. A lot.

Sometimes, we fall into patterns and habits and schedules and we wonder how we even ended up in certain “ruts.” I think that I was afraid my writing had become rote to me and to you. But what I learned is, that this writing is necessary for me right now. It is a passion for me. It makes me feel more alive. It is not a habit, but now, almost a necessity for me. It has become part of my breath of life.

This past weekend was a little emotional for me, for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons, was that for the first time, I didn’t celebrate Easter with our six-person nucleus family. My eldest son lives in a different state now and luckily, he was able to spend the holiday with family members and even had other offers for celebrations, that he had to turn down. So he was fine and the rest of us were all together, so we were fine, but it was one of those acute moments of understanding how much our family life is changing and how much it will change, in the years to come.

Building up to Easter, is when my emotions were escalating. I bought so much candy for our kids’ Easter baskets, that the checker asked me if we were having a party. I had to put it on two credit cards. (okay, the credit card part isn’t true, but the first statement IS, pathetically, true) I was obviously in overcompensation mode. The funny thing is though, when Easter rolled around, I felt good. I felt calm. I felt peaceful. I felt hopeful. I felt the promise of the holiday.

Thank you for your understanding my need for a break. Thank you for still coming by to read past posts. (I see the stats.) I hope that whatever your traditions and beliefs are, that you were able to celebrate a beautiful spring weekend with people who you love. I hope that you feel refreshed and renewed. I do. And it feels good.