Linda's Blog (56)

While I'm still confined here in my hospital bed in our family room recuperating from a knee surgery several weeks ago, today I thought of a cool gift that cost me a whopping 99 cents and only took a few hours of my time (something I have more than enough of right now!), helped me to learn something new about computers, and entertained me with things I love to do. Not much more of a win-win situation than…

Just about one month ago, my world as I knew it all came tumbling down; on December 18, 2011 I had an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon. He had performed a knee surgery on me back in December of 2009 (from which it took me about a year to recover)  and has been following me every since; my knees have been growing progressively more painful and although he has been…

Last night found us at 42° 23′ 9″ N, 88° 14′ 9″ W at the Johnsburg Public Library (almost two hours from our house during rush hour...we could see Wisconsin from there!)......dropping off this gift I/we made for Kristen Finch, wife of David (author of The Journal of Best Practices), who mentioned on FB it was an idea she loved, but wasn't that crafty and I ever so innocently said, "Oh, I'm…

This story was brought to my attention by a former 29gifts member, who went on to become The Gift Prolific....now coming to the completion of his one year endeavor to give a gift of some sort every day for one year, paint a painting and write a short blog about it and then coming up shortly giving away all 365 paintings at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada (all of which are numbered so that the recipient can look back…

Although I continue to find the gift of daily giving a continued source of joy in my life, this particular post isn't really about something I did. I've been intrigued with it for weeks, but don't really know a better forum of people with whom I can share my thoughts.

A few weeks ago yet another patient of my husband died; he asked if I wanted to…

The other day at our public library, there was a huge plastic jar with the label, "Quarters for Quilts", a fundraiser for the cleaning and restoration of the La Grange Centennial Quilt, made back in 1979 by a group of  local women, featuring 22 historic homes, public buildings and churches of our town. It was on permanent display at our original library, but was put into storage while our new library was…

This afternoon, I was behind a car with a very interesting bumper sticker that I've never seen before; being the curious sort that I am, I googled it to see what it was about.…

On December 24, 2011 my husband and I flew to Santa Ana, CA to spend Christmas with his cousin, a woman who lost both her parents by the age of 11, and has worked extremely hard and given up many things to raise her son as a single mom. This son is now a former Marine, having completed two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, married with an almost 1 year old little girl, living here in Illinois, working and going to school…

So, you'll never guess who I met a few nights ago......

A few months ago, I randomly clicked on someone's 29gifts link to a young artist calling himself The Gift Prolific. I didn't know it at the time, but he discovered 29gifts long before me, did a few rounds of giving, and then came up with his own idea. He has taken on the challenge of giving away some kind of gift each and every day for a year, creating a…

I'm off on yet another of my grand ideas! So much fun!!!

At the school where I volunteer, we have a new Spanish teacher, a lovely, feisty young woman from Lima, Peru-the only one of her family to live here in the United States. She is so sweet, but is not a native English speaker, so she often…

I sit here this evening with ice packs on many of my body parts-I'm not feeling sorry for myself, this has just become the reality of my daily living. I'm very grateful for the internet in general and the 29gifts website in particular for giving me exposure to so much of the world despite my limitations. Randomly browsing the site,  I just came upon the video posted by "Grateful & Buddhaful" about the young…

Quite a few months ago, my 32 year old niece gave me a few books of poetry by one of her favorites, Mary Oliver-someone whom I knew nothing about. I did a bit of research about her and found that she is a Pulitzer Prize winner, had a long relationship with a woman who died recently, and lives in Provincetown. But beyond that, not being much of a poetry fan, I gave them only a quick scan and put them on my…

Today is a day of great contradictions for me.....part of me is incredibly disappointed and heartbroken. My husband is a lung transplant physician (for any newcomers-no, he is not the surgeon who performs the operation, he is the guy who follow patients with severe lung problems, some of…

This youtube video has gone viral and has already accumulated over 5 million hits, but for the few of you who may have missed it, I'm choosing to share it here. The back story is that a granddaughter to this couple installed a webcam on their computer and they are trying to figure out how to capture a picture.

Besides being hilarious, the nature…

Once again, my eyes popped open at 4:00am (I'm doing better, yesterday it was 3:38!) and I'm done sleeping for the night. However, on this day I don't really mind being awake this early, because it gives me time to reflect that 30 years ago at about this same time, I was heavy into labor pains and fully realizing that this was going to be "the first day of the rest of my life". I had read a lot of books about "natural…

I have an inkling that it might be different in more rural areas, but I live in the suburbs around Chicago and I often notice how often much of humanity passes each other by without having any interaction at all with each other. It especially bothers me about workers in personnel positions, for example receptionists in doctor's offices or other businesses that I visit, where people seem to pay no attention in a personal way…

If you knew me well, you would know that while my biggest joy comes from doing random acts of kindness, what I hate the most is coming up with a gift for a specific occasion, either for those I know well as well as for those I don't.

The head coordinator for all the classes at the place where I exercise is a young woman named…

I'm very busy over here, with one eye on the Academy Awards but more of my attention on this cool thing I found through Oprah's website-the template and tools to create a "vision board". I've seen some before and always thought they were interesting, so creating this one was fun. I was a bit limited b/c I'm on my laptop with very few photos, but it's a reasonably good first try, I'd say. Looking forward to putting a bit…