Best Ten Things About January

Sometimes January gets a bad rap. Often the weather is cloudy and gray. It is time to think about taxes. Travel is difficult on snowy roads most years. Today I am celebrating the things I love about this first month of the year as I wind down my Best posts for the month of January.

Best Ten Things About January

1. My birthday is in January. It always gives me something to look forward to after Christmas. This year I got a homemade yellow cake with chocolate frosting baked by my mom.
 2. League play begins for college basketball so the Zags play on television frequently.
3.  I don't have to spend time going shopping because the budget is a bit lean after December.
4.  It is a good time to hunker down in front of the fire and read.
5.  Coffee tastes better on a dark, cold morning before the sun rises.
6.  I always get the urge to declutter and this year I really did it!
7. The greenhouse is in full bloom.
8. Seed catalogs begin coming in the mail.
9. If I get cold there is enough cat hair on the furniture to keep me warm.
10. The Amazing Amaryllises of 2010 keep blooming and blooming!

Sibling Assignment #118: Best Way for Using Creative Energy

 Cats defining bliss.

 This is our final Best assignment for January. I posted this topic asking my siblings to respond to "Best Way for Using Creative Energy." You will find my siblings' posts  soon.

The best way I use creative energy is taking pictures. I always loved snapping pictures with my old Pentax 35 mm and spent way too much money on film and developing. I remember when people first began using digital cameras I thought they were too complicated. Students were trying to show me how to use one and I still felt it were too hard. I purchased my first digital camera in January 2007. My love affair with photography began. Being able to take pictures and store them, download them, put them on a disk, or delete them freed me to use my creative energy to explore the area I live, remember my gardens, revisit my  greenhouse, love my dogs, and form family memories with digital pictures.

I still haven't had a class on photography. I have read a few books and magazine articles to learn tricks of the trade. Most of what I do has been trial and error. I think there will come a point that I will have to stop saving every photo image I take. I just love to save them. Here are some of my favorites.

Annie,Shelby, and Isabelle in the gazebo a few years ago.

My brother creating his own iPod ad during our Oregon coast trip.

JEJ and Shelby on that same trip.

An image of the boat launch close to home on Lake Roosevelt last fall.

Sunset on the Columbia River in Astoria in August.

My mom at Christmas with Mr. Santa and my hat. I was laughing so hard I made the camera shake!

Amaryllis in January.

The Cataldo Mission in January.

The Best Amaryllis Ever Grown

Remember those beautiful amaryllis blooms I posted a few weeks ago? I was so amazed they had bloomed so early this year. Guess what? The first bloomer has done what I have never seen one do. It is blooming again. It is not just blooming, but it has five flowers opening up. I can now recommend to you Target Smith and Hawkin brand amaryllis. When Target bought the Smith and Hawken brand, I guess it was fortunate for me.

I saw the plants on the shelf in November. They had lovely wine colored pots that looked like ceramic. Little did I know they would be miracle plants. I think the red one has another flower emerging also. Perhaps it will be up and blooming again just in time for Valentine's Day!

Winter Weather: A Best Guess

"When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure. "  -Alice Hoffman

 Is winter as we have known it gone from the inland empire? Are we going to need all those wool socks, heavy boots, and warm sweaters? Some days recently have seemed more like early March. The parking lot at school today was full of mud and puddles vs. ice and snow banks. We haven't even had a snow bank in weeks. TIme will tell. February may bring more snow that any of the months so far this winter or crocus may be popping up in five weeks.  I put the collage together to  remind me there was a small snowy winter somewhere between the first of December and the end of January. I wish I would have captured more pictures!

Not the Best of Days

"To An Athlete Dying Young"

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

-A.E. Housman

The Inchelium school family and members of the community are grieving today. Community members have extended their arms of love and respect to the friends and family of Dillon Simpson.
I'll always remember him running and throwing open the classroom door and greeting us with that beautiful smile. You will never be forgotten Dillon.

http://www.kxly.com/news/22336897/detail.html

Best End of a Book

" If our parents read to us as children, we remember the closeness of the moments together, the sound and power of voice and expression, the sense of wonder that a poem inspires". -Caroline Kennedy

I recently found A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children  by Caroline Kennedy at the library. Caroline created this anthology for families, choosing poems that were special in her own family. It is a lovely collection with colorful watercolor paintings by Jon Muth.  Many of her choices were ones I would also put in a family collection. All children should hear "The Little Turtle" by Vachel Lindsay( I remember Mrs. Morical reading it to the class in first grade). "Ode to a Pair of Socks" by Pablo Neruda, "maggie and milly and molly and may" by e.e. cummings, and "The Swing" by Robert Lewis Stevenson were all delightful to read again.

I discovered a new poem I really enjoyed while reading this anthology. Caroline chose it to end the book.

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

-Wallace Stevens