For all those book loving souls out there, hast thou ever heard of a site called Paperbackswap.com? You can post books you want to get rid of and find more new book friends! You gain credits when someone requests one of your books, you mail it, and it is received. You pay the media mail postage, and you get a credit. Then you use your credits to request books from others for free, which they mail to you.

It used to be free to join. Now a full membership is about $20 a year, or you can swap for a small fee without it. If you have lots of books to swap, it can be well worth the amount.

I have gotten some very interesting books that way, and I’ve come to like new to me authors. It isan awesome way to keep books alive and out ofvthe landfill!

I was so grateful to feel Brother Sun on my face as we drove home from acupuncture today, and I thought of Diane! Despite the single digit temperatures, I could feel his warmth coming through my window, so I basked a bit.

At this moment, his rays are shining in the window of my living room as he prepares to dip beneath the trees for the night. There is burnished gold corn stubble sticking up through the whiteness in the foreground, then the stick figure silouhettes in the tree line, and this brilliant globe overaweing all.

I am grateful for the smell of my soup on the stove and the plink plink of the pellets that mean I am soon to be a good bit warmer. I am thankful for the happy greetings from dogs and cat that let me know I was missed, and the solid comforting presence beside me of the man who got the pellet stove going. I have been so grateful not to go through this severe cold snap alone. With husband, dogs, and cat it has made it warmer in the heart, at any rate.

I am grateful, too, for the dear souls here whose words also warm and cheer my heart. You are all such a blessing to me! ❤️❤️❤️

Oh, I am not so good at this! I have always tended to feel that whatever I am doing I ought to be doing something else. At present, I am recovering from years of illness that went undiscovered. It is a time when I cannot Do all I think I “should” do each day. My pastoral counselor reminds me that I am anything but idle as I have been using the time to heal in body, mind, and spirit, but I still feel like what I can Do is not enough. Old programming dies a hard slow death, I fear. ????

AMEN! Hygge has helped, but I am tired of feeling like a snowcone!

That does prompt a memory, though. Where I grew up, you could not count on enough snow for sledding or snowman making to come each year, so you made the most of it when it came.

One year, when I was eight or nine, I got the bright idea of making a colored snowman, all nice and rainbow-esque. I went to the kitchen, snagged my mother’s box of those little squeezy bottles of food coloring from the shelf, and proceeded to decorate my snowman.

I tried adding it to water to use as paint. Hmm. Not so effective. It needed greater strength of color to make any sort of show.

Well, you can imagine how much coloring it would take, and that is exactly what I didn’t have. Even put on more or less full strength, the blue absorbed as if I had not put it on at all, as did the green. The red only gave me odd patches, and the yellow made it look like the neighborhood dog had been past. It did not go at all as I had planned!

I finally used leftover pine branches from Christmas to make him a hula skirt then added some of those poky balls from the sweetgum tree for eyes, and an old fishing pole from the basement.

I did, however, have the ONLY piebald multicolored fishing hula dancer on the block!

I love trees, too, Manda. I have noticed how so many have limbs growing as if arms flung wide for an embrace, of life, of us, of our hearts to their heart.

We had thirteen or so ash trees on our property when we moved in, all of which were lost to the Emerald Ash Borer. One in particular I thought of as, “the grandfather tree.” He was majestic, shading the whole east yard and entry. He even had a comfy divot area that was just right for un-kinking my back after I’d been gardening in his benevolent shade.

There was no way of saving them, but I hugged him and cried a little before he was cut down. We saved what wood we could, so eventually he will become a piece of furniture or something to keep blessing us.

Diane, I agree. I, too, was always saddened and puzzled by Leah’s lack of acceptance no matter how well she “performed” her duties. There was nothing she could do to make Jacob love her more, just as there was seemingly nothing Rachel could do to be loved any less. Even in death, she reigned supreme in Jacob’s heart, and Leah could never step into her place.

And the ripples that flowed out from that dynamic were intense. They reached all the way to a young boy dumped in a hole and left for dead, a grieving father presented with the false evidence of a bloodied coat, a grief that was not abated for many years when the old father was near death. It moved through the boy’s new life as a slave and alien, his imprisonment on false charges, his miraculous gift for dream speak, and ultimate elevation to a position that saved many people from death by famine — including the very brothers whose jealousy had set the wheels in motion all those years earlier.

Joseph is a prime example of God’s ability to bring good out of evil, and to set the wheels of blessing in motion alongside the wheels of abandonment, danger, pain, and suffering. His quote says it all, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

I need to remember this more often. So often when we are confronted with evil, pain, loss, or suffering we cannot do much, if anything, about, whether on a personal or global scale, we wind up, like Joseph, in a hole we do not wish to be in. We need to remember that we do not see the bigger picture. We do not know the end from the beginning or even where in the story we fit. Somehow, somewhere there is more than what we now see.

I am so glad I am not alone in this! It is one of the foibles of electronic communication, I think.

I also find texting etiquette challenging. You would never simply walk off in the middle of a conversation, but it happens all the time with texting or messaging! Then there’s the difficulty of telling tone of communication, despite the fact that you can insert everything from a smiley face to a burrito, bowl of soup, or the Jamaican flag!

I have stopped using text or messages for anything that is deep enough to be misunderstood. I will no longer have conversations via text, especially tricky ones. I limit it to things like, “I am en route,” or “Did the box arrive?” There’s much less drama and fretting over how something was taken that way, and I am all about reducing all unnecessary stress and drama these days. ????