Hello friends.
I’ve missed you. I have been begging and pleading with my schedule to let up and allow me some time to write, but no such luck.
Until today, when I dropped my sweet almost 2 year old off for her first day of summer preschool camp.

 
haha, let’s play a game called “how many dead plants are there”?

 
So here I am drinking a cup of still warm coffee and writing a few of my thoughts down. And now you get to enjoy the ramblings of my brain displayed on paper:

• Remember my experimental mutiny against excess {inspired and imitated from Jen Hatmaker’s book} ?  Well, I already completed month 4 without you. I sat down at the computer on June 1st to tell you all about how we were going to tackle reducing Waste together throughout the whole month. Today is July 9th, and I still haven’t completed that post or shared an ounce of my month’s experiences with you. I will catch you up later, I know you’re waiting at the edge of your seat to hear more about how much of a waste monster you are.
• I have been purging again. The struggle is real folks. It sort of never ends. I think my tolerance level for the amount of possessions in my house is decreasing. er, increasing? whatever. The first month of purging stuff was painful. nay, brutal. The second was slightly less  painful and a lot more annoying (as I realized how much of a hold some things truly had on my heart). It is becoming easier and easier for me to let go of things and have become more and more annoyed when things pile up again. Thankfully, I’ve had a lot of motivation to continue down this new fangled path in life called ‘being content with what you have’ in the last few weeks. We’ve needed to make space in our extra room {previously my ‘craft’ room, Chris’ ‘guitar’ room, and my beloved ‘store the junk here and close the door’ room} for a friend who will be staying with us for a bit. I wasn’t sure how I would fit all the contents of that room into other places in my house and I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t really possible, so I had to purge more. Fortunately for me I have the most awesome friends in the world. This is how it played out:

me: hey friends, I am calling out for help. I need to get rid of more things and I am feeling overwhelmed. I don’t know where to start or when to find the time and am dreading it because all that stuff in there is stuff that already made it through the first three rounds of purging so I obviously love it and value it and want to keep it but know I have to make some hard decisions to let things go and make room and I don’t know if I can do it as quickly as it needs to be done.  I mean, I don’t want to burden you guys and I know you have your own stuff going on. I hate to take away from your time when I know you have your own schedules to deal with, just let me know if possibly, just maybe in the next few weeks or months or this year some time you can spare a minute to help me out a bit. Kthanks.

friends: ok. see you tomorrow.

And they came. and they brought liquid encouragement in the form of a large fresh-squeezed lemonade. And they stayed pretty much all day even though I said repeatedly “don’t feel like you have to stay all day”. And I am so, so thankful for them.

So, seriously if you don’t have a group of people who do this kind of thing for you please reach out to me and I will be that for you!

• On Tuesday I ate 9 mini reese’s peanut butter cups while at work. Tuesday was a tough day for some of my patient’s, so it was a tough day for me emotionally.
• The community garden is going very well. We are dealing with some finicky soil, some annoying rain barrels, and some brazen deer… but we continue forth in our efforts to grow green stuff. I’m not gonna lie, gardening is a little bit addictive.
• I haggled at a yard sale for the first time in my life last weekend and afterwards I all but ran back to the car to proclaim my boldness to Chris. I still don’t think he realizes the magnitude of this life experience for me. I mean, I was that kid who wanted ketchup but would suffer without it just so I didn’t have to go up to the counter and, gulp, speak to someone. This is big folks.

Brain purge: 20% complete, but alone time is over so the rest will have to wait for another day.