Prayer Request

     The last week has been very trying for my family. My Papa (that'd be my Dad's dad) fell last Friday and broke his hip really badly. He was already in bad health from advanced Alzheimer's disease and metastatic cancer in his lungs, plus being 82 years old, so his already full plate really couldn't use this extra helping of trouble.
     We had hoped Friday after getting through the chaos of the ER that he would have surgery that day or early Saturday, but trouble with a less than helpful or knowledgeable hospitalist delayed his surgery until Sunday when a specialist from Memphis could come and step in. The surgery itself went well, very quickly and no complications, but this last week Papa has pretty much steadily declined. As of today he had failed his swallowing test three times.
     Today he was discharged from the hospital, and was moved to the Sanctuary Hospice House. As it worked out, yesterday when my Dad and his brothers and sisters were looking for a place for him, it 'just so happened' that their evaluator was in Oxford and could see Papa, and that they had a bed open up just when they needed it. God knows when there's a need, and He can work things out so perfectly, can't He?
     Anyway, please pray for Papa to have peace and rest, and for my Dad and his siblings and their families to have the extra strength they'll need in the next few weeks.

Papa and Granny, dressed up for church, circa 2007

    

     In my personal life, I'm having a few other difficulties that are driving me slowly crazy...and at this point I think I'd rather take the freeway and just get the trip over with. I've been waiting on news from some jobs I applied for back during Christmas, and this particular company is being painfully slow with their hiring process. I keep being told that they're still working on the paperwork, that it's still going through the systerm, but that's a long long time to wait with no real feedback to go on. I'm also having a few health issues that, added to the job stress, are making the senic route to crazy real fun indeed.

     I'd just really appreciate just a quick moment in your prayers, if you remember as you're running through your list before you nod off to sleep. Thank you all so so much.

 

The Lull Life

     This week has been kind of slow at the Falkner house. I think the nasty weather here is somehow contributing to an attitude of blah-ness. All I've wanted to do is nap all day in the recliner closest to the fireplace, with my fleece pajama pants and a big quilt.

Highlights of the week:

     My cousin Devon stopped by yesterday with her baby :)  Italy Claire was born December 19th, one more little leaf on our BIG ol' Falkner family tree. This was my first time to meet Miss Italy, so definitely a yay day. I love love love babies, especially when they're so cute and sweet and lovable! Italy was just a doll for us...a TINY little thing. I almost can't wait until I have one for myself...that's almost, now. Dev was telling us how little sleep she's had - Italy is a night owl - and how tired she is being mama while her hubby is back home in North Carolina, even with Nana and Granddad there to pitch in. I'm thinking that motherly instinct I have can stay dormant a few more years yet! But I'm sure loving sweet Italy :)

Isn't she just adorable?

    
     Secondly, this Saturday I get to pick out a new mattress! I'm currently sleeping on what I fondly refer to as the Taco Bed, meaning that it starts out nice and tall and fluffy on the sides and dips waaay down in the middle where I sleep, like a taco shell. Not that I don't love my bed and still spend some great quality sleeping time there, it just really needs some TLC.
     My bed frame is a great old antique iron frame. I'm talking traveled in a covered wagon old. I got it from my great grandmother, but it was the most awful English peas mixed with avocados green. Hideous, plus a little rusty, so we had it fixed up and powdercoated in a satiny black finish. Now it's really beautiful, and a really great antique. Can't wait until my new mattress makes it even more amazing!


     Not quite a highlight, but my mom got to do mini-surgery on me this week. Usually this is entertainment in our house, since my mom and older sister are nurses and my little sis is planning on majoring in nursing. I'm usually the guinea pig - Molly practices giving shots every other week with my B12, and they all had fun taking stitches out of my old appendix scar. But this time I woke up Wednesday morning with a horribly hurting toe - ingrown toenail. Zero fun, sir! I haven't had one since I was a little kid, but oh do I remember how much I don't like them. But I sucked it up and asked mama to come doctor on me.
     I'm really proud of myself. I didn't scream, cry, beg or plead at all haha. Only a little moist-eyed and tensing up a lot, and that's more than some grown men I've seen. I have a high pain tolerance, but I think I would have traded that for a kidney stone and quite a few migraines!
     I told Mama that after that pain, I was definitely not going with natural childbirth in the future. Not that I ever really considered it, but now I'm pretty sure that my mind has just been solidly made up. If Jesus had meant for people to hurt that much, He wouldn't have given us anesthesiologists.


     Found some cool pins this week. Some are totally unrelated to my current life, but hey, who says I can't plan ahead? :)

So true, but that's what is there for!

I like this so much better than a big calendar...and you can change it to match your decor! And the frame comes from WalMart. Love that!

Cheap WalMart or Claires bracelets...meet cheap dollar store candles!

DIY spoon rings. I have one, but it's only made for one finger on one hand. Making one that's more versatile would be amazing!

Source: kirstenerickson.blogspot.com

DIY glitter laptop case. I'm hoping that Gateway makes hard cases for my laptop so I can make one of these ASAP!

Source: lookwhatmelissamade.com

J.Crew Martha bracelet...love it. I think it'd match everything I own.

Pale amethyst ring. Love the shade of these, just perfect.

Instead of decorated chocolate strawberries, decorated chocolate fortune cookies! Perfect for people like me that aren't just in love with fruit, or for people like me who just love sweet things :)

Feng Shui

     I love to change things around, furniture and decor wise. I thing that your decor gets stale if you keep it the same way for years on end. Come on, admit it, you get tired of looking at the same four pictures on your walls, and if you sit in the same place on the couch every day you'll end up making that one place sag faster than all the other seats! Plus I'm a big believer in anti-packratism. Yes, I just made that word up. I throw things away constantly. I think it's because I've moved so many times, but I don't like to accumulate. Just having to keep paperwork like tax receipts and school records hurts me, because it's paper piled up in drawers that I'm not ever going to use. The only thing I don't like getting rid of is art supplies. That stuff is expensive! Plus, there's pretty much nothing you can't reuse somehow :) That's the beauty of up-cycling.

     Anyway, this week, I decided to get a little creative in my room. I have a pretty small room, and I really can't move the big furniture around, but I've been wanting to do some changing up with the little things like my bookshelves and my reading nook and such.

This is one new addition I just got back from getting framed. It's hanging over my bed now. I just loved the frame - it's like old barnwood, not smoothed out or finished.

My great-grandmother Angel Falkner was an artist, and I think every one of my family members has at least one of her pieces. I have this piece (Foggy Morning in the Spring) and a pretty aqua blue and cream one of dogwood blossoms (that my mama is going to have to give me back - it's hanging in her bathroom at the moment).

Don't you just love Hobby Lobby? Flowers 50% off means I get to make something for the naked corner of my room. I love the cream ostrich feathers against the plum here. And yes, my room is two different colors of purple. The long walls are the light color, and the short wall and the bay where my window is is the dark.

     While I was gone to Ecuador, my parents had a chaise and a rocking chair recovered for me. I had bought the rocking chair at an antique store and it just needed new cushions, but I inherited the chaise from my grandparents and it was in really really bad shape. As in, 'it's not coming in the house until it's fixed' bad shape. One of our neighbors does upholstery and builds furniture, so he took on the job. It came back a new being!

Isn't it pretty? And the fabric is devine. It's a kind of soft linen-cottony blend, but that creamy white color will match anything I ever want to use it with. And it sits like a dream.

I even bought new pillows. Actually, to tell the truth, that wasn't entirely my idea. The dog sort of befouled one of my other black pillows, and beaded pillows and washing machines don't go well together. Oh well, I like these better anyway!

      I had that nook built into my room specifically to make a reading nook like this. I've always wanted some place just to be able to curl up with a blanket and read for hours, and now I have it!

I just love the lamp in my nook. Isn't it just fun and quirky? I found it at Redesigning Women, a kind of thrift/antique/anything store in New Albany, for twenty bucks, and all I had to do was put the black shade on it. You never know what you'll find going hunting in there.

The mirror I got at First Monday years ago, for I think five bucks. Some clorox wipes and a few coats of paint later and voila! Beautimus.

Oh, and if I ever complain about needing more room for books, I ain't lying! I have this bookcase and another just like it on the other side of my room, and only about one and a half shelves left! I have more books than I do shoes and purses combined!

Now you've all seen where I live...or at least where I lay my head down at night. Hopefully one day I'll be able to start those dream house decorating blogs I'm already planning out in my head!

Christmas Decor

     This is a kind of long post, but since I've been kind of going crazy lately cooped up in the house, and spending WAAAAY too much a lot of time on Pinterest, and I only get to use the Christmas excuse for the next couple of weeks...ya'll get the pleasure of a good, long post! I've seen tons of amazing ideas for holiday decorating, and decided to try a few out. I don't have an apartment or house of my own to go crazy in this year, much to my dismay, but my mama is willing to let me have a little decorating freedom in the house. She just doesn't see the Christmas spirit in my purple lights and silver ornaments :)

     Okay, inspiration picture number one:

     We have a ton of red, silver, and frosted white ball ornaments from when I was a kid that we don't use anymore, and some extra 'filler' ornaments we bought a few years ago when we used to have a big tree (now we have one of those skinny ones). They still match the colors we use at Christmas, so why not dig them out again and make something pretty? So, here we go.

My pretty glitter sprayed pinecones...definitely want to wear gloves if you're going to do this. Pinecones don't stand up too well, so you have to hold them while you spray. My hand was solid glitter when I got done.

These are my glittery pinecones with the old ornaments. I just love them! I remember decorating the tree with these when I was a little bitty girl.

Dining room decor. The candle sticks are there year round - my dad brought them as a gift for my mom when he visited Africa a few years ago.

Awesome huge glasses from Wal-Mart!

I just found this random container of mini-presents mixed in with our ornaments. No idea when somebody bought them, or why, but they look cute in my bubble glass bowl!

     Fun story: This project was a little more labor intensive on the front end. The other day after we made dressing (check out my blog about it!) I went out with Mama and Grandmama to hunt for pinecones. That was an interesting experience to say the least. My grandparents live next to a whole strip of pine trees, and I'm totally expecting to go and find a billion pinecones on the ground I can just pick up. No such luck. Not a single pinecone to be found, except about fifteen feet up in the trees. I'm a very short human, and I'm not about to just shimmy up a tree just to get a pinecone. (My luck, I'd fall out and break something, and have to tell some ER doctor this story). So, my mama gets on top of my grandmama's truck, and drives up along the trees trying to knock them off. We get a few, then finally my (tall) cousin Rodney comes along on his way to his deer field and decides to take pity on us and help the crazy women get their pinecones.

     I also did a few more simple things to use up the filler ornaments. We have a ton of big glass hurricanes sitting around the house - my mom loves to put candles and stuff in them, so they're perfect for this kind of stuff.

The extra ornaments in one of my mom's big glass hurricanes for our mantle...gold and red for the living room.

Another hurricane of ornaments for our coffee table



Mantle decor this year...sweet and simple.

A few shots from our Christmas tree...I mean, I already had the camera on, why not?

I love swirly hand-painted looking oraments (who knows if this one was actually hand painted, I bought it at a Hobby Lobby after-Christmas sale!)

I love big ornaments too!

One of my favorite ornaments, it's so heavy we have to put it really close to the floor in case it slips off the branch!

And our awesome glitzy treeskirt made for us by my Dad's secretary :)

My FAVORITE ornaments on our tree. We have three, two little and one big. I may have to covertly swipe them for my tree when I get a tree of my own...

This is my room's Christmas decor. I didn't put up a tree, mainly because I have a small room, it's on the back of the house where nobody would see it, and I didn't feel like dragging the little tree down from the shop's attic. But, I do have a few ornaments out and about.

Gotta love a Christmas sock monkey :)

Favorite! I found the glasses and bottle at Hobby Lobby years ago, they live on that silver plate on my dresser. But when I found miniature ornaments to match the swirly pattern on them...awesome!

Annual Dressing Making Day

     Every year around this time, my grandmama picks a day for us to come over and spend the day making dressing. Its pretty much an all-day event - we make the entire year's worth all in one day and put it up in the ice cream and cool whip tubs we've been saving all year just for this occasion.

     Now i have no idea what the recipe for dressing is. I'm not a fan of the stuff (yeah, I know, unAmerican), and it's a ginormous recipe for anybody to try to take on.
  
     Last night we started cooking the chickens (4, whole) in crockpots. My grandmama also cooked 4.

Three of our fat chicks :)

Rule #1: Save your broth! You'll be needing it later.

     After we woke up this morning and cooked a couple pans of cornbread, Mama and I loaded all that and our empty containers up in the car and headed to grandmama's.

We make dressing out in my granddaddy's shop. It's kind of the Cadillac version of a 'shop', heat and a/c, knicknacks on the walls, full kitchen, plenty of room to spread out our stuff. If we have more than our immediate family at my grandparents' house to eat, there are tables and chairs set up in there so we can eat out in the shop.

Our mixing 'bowl'. 

Mama and Grandmama 

Our 'scoop'. Yeah, we're not too picky about our cookware around here...

One 'making' of dressing. We save up ice cream buckets and cool whip containers all year for this reason.

You have to use your hands to do this properly. (For anybody who happens to eat our dressing, we promise we wash our hands very very well and very very often!)

All our dressing for this year, about 15 gallons!

Me, Mama, and Grandmama :) 

 

These are pics from around the shop. Granddaddy and Grandmama have a ton of really awesome stuff they've inherited from their parents or older family members, and most of it's out here.

Singer sewing machine

Old radio

Tea kettles

I'm pretty sure this is a candle holder, but it's really neat

A yoke, painted with my great-grandparents' names - Hazel and Euree Hale

Super old telephone, complete with green lei. It actually still rings too.

This is a pretty amazing idea of my Granddaddy's - a recliner swing. It's pretty awesome. I'm definitely installing one in my future baby's room.

Propellers - my Granddaddy was a pilot. The first time I flew was with him on my second birthday. I asked him why there were ants on the window, and he said 'Honey, those aren't ants, those are cows waaay down there.' haha