It's a New Year!

Blogger is giving me a hard time with cutting and pasting all of a sudden - won't let me post.

It's been nearly a month since my last post. It was a wonderful holiday with all the immediate progeny in attendance, which we grandparents get great joy from. I wish we could could include more of the immediate family, but most are fifteen hundred miles or so away. Both my family in Michigan and MyBetterHalf's family in Boston had some snowy and frigid weather - and they're still being subjected to it.

I've made it a goal this year to try to wrap my brain around the Chinese concept of chi. First, I'm trying to get some grasp of feng shui. I have four books spread out across my kitchen table, and a number of sites bookmarked. I'm into it far enough to learn there are different schools of feng shui - which really gets a neophyte like me confused.

All agree, though, that the place to start is to get rid of clutter. I'll only state the obvious to those that know me and MyBetterHalf when I say we're a couple of pack rats (You never know when you might need such-and-such... I'll get back into those old clothes as soon as I drop off these pounds I've put on... How can you have too many books?... Know what I'm sayin'?)

Our first step was easy. There's an old shed out back that we've been using as our own private dump since we moved in here. In fact, there was junk left by previous tennants. We hauled off five hundred pounds to the city dump. I cleaned out the shed, cleansed it, and moved a lot of stuff from the side of the house and my back porch out to it. This made my back door, which I use quite a bit, more open.

We're working on our bedrooms and den/study/workshop now. We also have opportunity to paint the whole house. In other words, our whole house, our immediate environment is having a makeover. With everything we do I feel better and like I have more energy, more chi. From what I can tell this is what feng shui is all about.

\stay tuned