I love traveling

This scrapbook page is about the fact that I love traveling. That's what this figurine belonging to Don's friend J.R. reminds me of, people a long time ago packing up and going on a road trip. I'll do that from time to time. I don't know when - or even if - I will make it all the way to St. Louis, Missouri, which is the city this reminded me of, since its something to market the city's baseball team. I have been to St. Louis before, but I don't remember. (Maybe several times, but all when we lived in Illinois, when I was five months to 22 months old.) I have been to Missouri twice that I do remember, but not to St. Louis either one of those times.

Traveling in 2012, at least before September, is complicated by a lack of funds. Don will get his first pension check in September, we have learned. And by that time, he should be underway with his second semester at Cal. Baptist University. Which seems to me would prevent him from making a long trip until semester break in December 2012.

But we can hope for short trips within California. We have already made one this year. We started out the year in Cayucos, a beach town on the central coast. That's what my parents wanted to do this year. Going back from that trip, we traveled mostly down Pacific Coast Highway until we reached Ventura. We visited Vandenberg Air Force Base, Refgugio Beach and the Ellen Porter Performing Arts Center at Westmont College. I say that we also saw the Ellen Porter sunset at Westmont College. We spent the night in Ventura at a charming yet very inexpensive motel, then explored its downtown along with the smaller towns of Oak Park, Ojai and Santa Paula. All fun!

And sometimes, we will find new things not very far away at all. This bridge is in the Santa Ana River, with one side crossing at the trail Don and I frequently hike on. But this picture is from the other side, in Riverside. We recently discovered our neighbor city's Martha McLean Park on Jurupa Avenue. It's a nice park, and if you hike all the way to its western edge, you will then be on Riverside's paved Santa Ana River Trail. Find a break in the fence that divides the trail from the river itself to hike down to the south bank of the river. If I were to go straight across the river, I am less than one mile from my own house, but this was a cool bit of travel itself.

Social Christmas and why I'm sometimes on the A list

Yes, I have Christmas, not Superbowl Sunday, on the brain. I am a scrapbooker, and I like scrapbooking photos mostly in the order I took them. (Although this photo is a repeat of one I scrapbooked last week).

This scrapbook page is about the 14 Christmas parties I have attended over the last four years. Most of them are the same kinds of Christmas parties most people go to, I suppose. Work-related parties. Parties for my husband's work, and parties for church groups I belong to. These parties are all fun ways to end a year with people I have come to care about.

Well, that takes care of a dozen of the 14 parties, anyhow. The other two I have attended are a little more special. These are the parties put on by Bobby Ball Talent Agency. Bobby Ball is my husband's agent for Hollywood commercials.

For these, we drive to a nice party place in Los Angeles. We walk up to a security guard, tell him the right secret word, and go in. Once inside,we are surrounded by mostly young, mostly attractive, mostly well-dressed people who want to be stars. Some of them will be. The rest are just a blast to be with.

Scrapbooking Christmas in February

Christmas 2011 with Porters and Hesses

Ok, so it took me more than a day to get back to this. There were some cute pre-Christmas scrapbook pages I did with lace doilies that I thought about posting, but I never got around to it. However, this page is also posted on my friend Debbi's Color Stories Inspiration website. She reveals a new color scheme and creativity prompts every Friday afternoon. I had started this layout Friday morning, but realized as I thought about thought about what I might contribute to the Color Stories, that this layout had the right colors and had room for a few of the creativity prompts.

As one of my most faithful blog readers knows, this is part of my husband Don's family. We do the routine of back and forth between two families at Christmas, some years spending it at my parents, some years with his. With this family living more than two hours away, and mine living more than four hours away, it usually is a one or the other deal. It was supposed to have been the year we spent with my parents, but they encouraged us to visit my mother-in-law instead, as we would be seeing them on Dec. 29 when they rented a beach condo for New Years.

This year, Don talked his sister Nancy into hosting the family gathering. She even made most of the side dishes, and Kent had a collection of Hess wines. (We aren't sure how he's related to the winemaker.) We brought the turkey.

Hosting the family gathering is a big deal for Nancy. She normally prefers to do Christmas with just her husband Kent, children Sherman and Kristan and now, their families. But Kristan saw Don's side of it, that Christmas is more fun with grandmas, aunts and uncles. Both of her grandmas came, one each (Don and me) of her aunts and uncles. She also brought her boyfriend Jim.

There is a back story to this photo. Which is interesting, because "back story" is one of Color Stories' prompts on the jounaling side. I haven't really shared the back story with anyone who wasn't there at Christmas, and we all know it. But I know my faithful reader is going to ask "Where is Eddie?"

For those of you who don't know, Eddie is Kristan's 1-year-old son. (My faithful reader is my stepdaughter in Colorado, Kristan's cousin.) Eddie wasn't there, he was at his father's house. Kristan and Eddie (father and son share a name) were together for several years, long enough to create Little Eddie and celebrate his first birthday together. But now, for the rest of his parents' life, Little Eddie will be shuffled between them on holidays, or, when he grows up, will decide how to do that balancing act on his own. Good thing, at least for now, both parents live in the same small town.

My faithful reader may also wonder where her Uncle David was. He wasn't there either, and that's only because of a family feud. David lives in the same small town as the rest of them, but hasn't spoken directly to his sister and brother-in-law since shortly after Eddie was born. David had been renting a house at cheap family rates from Nancy and Kent for about nine years. When Kristan was pregnant, they advised David they wanted him to move out, so Kristan and the baby could live there. I'm not taking any sides on this, but David and Nancy don't see eye-to-eye on the decision.

My mother-in-law, however, is taking David's side. And she was definitely sad on Christmas Day that she could not spend more of it with David. She did see him at church, but that's all.

My faithful reader may also wonder where her cousin Sherman was. He is newlywed, and was spending the day with his wife's family. He did get to see his parents, sister and nephew earlier in the day. I am sure we were all happy for Sherman.

This year, Don will be spending Easter with his wife's family, for the first time in our marriage. My family has its weaknesses too -one of them making Christmas and Easter all about family - but family gatherings are less complicated at the Van Curen household and I'm looking forward to a holiday without so many complications.

Different things coming to this random blog

This blog, which I started in 2010, is supposed to be about my relationship with the little girl pictured above - Abigail. When I started the blog, it was also about my relationship with my own grandmother. The blog has already evolved into more than this, and I have decided it needs to evolve into even more than that. So, be prepared to see pictures and stories about my daily life (well not every day), and be prepared to see a lot more of my scrapbook pages.

The truth is, I don't have much of a relationship with Abigail or her immediate family. She lives in Colorado, and I live in California. I haven't even seen her in person since July. I had seen her in person one other time before then, although in both cases, the Abigail sightings were because we went to Colorado for several days in December and she came here with her parents for several days in July.

Because I don't really have a lot to write about Abigail - and nothing more to write about Grandma, since she moved on to Heaven in October - I have already randomized this blog, writing a lot about spiritual epiphanies and such.

It was on my other blog that I shared one aspect of the trip to California my granddaughter, step-daughter and son-in-law made. There were two trips to the beach by members of my family in the summer of 2011. Abigail, Holly and Rob made the one in July. Don and Ellen made their trip to the beach in August. It was miscommunication (mostly) that prevented the five of us from making that trip together, which I so would have loved. And I still would have gone back to the different beach in August! That's my privilege, living here!

At the time, my other blog was about my stamping craft projects. That blog had started with a crazy idea that Don and I could make a profit selling scrapbook supplies from our own website. Because we don't have room for a scrapbook warehouse at our condo, they would have actually come from what's known as a "drop shipper, " which is a company known as Doba. (Doing Business As). We figured out early on that the only products Doba had on hand that would be good sellers were acrylic stamps and a few Cricut supplies. I don't have a Cricut, they're too expensive! But I do have quite a few acrylic stamps, and had our idea gotten off the ground, I would have ordered more from my own website to create and blog about the great things that could be done with them. But, with the fees both Doba and the company we were working with would have charged for their services, it became clear that we would have had to have sold A LOT of scrapbook supplies to make it work. And this was in early 2010, when no one sold a lot of things. So we didn't do it.

In the meantime, I decided to post crafting projects, cards and scrapbook layouts, I had made with my own stamps. And I kept doing that for quite awhile, until late 2011. I have seen a good many beautiful scrapbook blogs explaining how they created awesome cards and layouts. I wanted my blog to be like theirs, somehow.

But my cards and layouts are not awesome. However, my cooking is. My current dream is to be employed as a food writer, so in November I changed the focus of my other blog to food, and I now use it to share any recipes I create. (I use cookbooks, but nine times out of 10, twist the recipe to make it my own.)

That eliminated my scrapbooking blog, which at the time I didn't see a need for. For almost nine years, I've shared hundreds of scrapbooking projects and tens of thousands of thoughts about scrapbooking with Two Peas in a Bucket, an online scrapbooking community. That community has tremendous bandwidth, so anything I wanted to share about scrapbooking could be shared there.

But earlier this month, Debbi Tehrani, a good friend I've made at Two Peas, started her own scrapbooking website, Color Stories Inspiration. Debbi is one of those highly talented scrapbookers with an awesome blog. Because of her great talent, and that of several people she recruited as a "design team" for her website, a new online scrapbooking community has started there. And many of them are not part of Two Peas.

Problem is, CSI does not have huge bandwidth. It's all relative. Less than a month into its launch, members of this online community have already shared 400-something scrapbook layouts. I myself have shared four. Each layout that each person has shared relate specifically to a challenge. Use five specific colors that she chooses, and use three or more of about 10 other elements she suggests. CSI really doesn't have room for pictures of anything other than that.

But Two Peas, in its 13 years in business, has accepted more than 1 million scrapbook layouts, cards and other photos. It also has sold several million dollars worth of scrapbooking supplies in that time. Two Peas seems to have unlimited capacity for text and photos. However, it does not. A few years ago it had to temporarily transfer layouts posted long ago off the site while it completed a major system upgrade, without which it probably would have crashed.

I am sure that was a major investment on the online scrapbook retailer's part. So I can understand why Debbi, whose income is her elementary school teaching salary and her husband's salary as a district manager of a restaurant chain, doesn't want to have to worry about a major website upgrade anytime soon. Granted, this couple has a lot more money to fool around with websites than we do. But they're not rich.

So....the many things unrelated to this challenge that I would like to share about scrapbooking with people at CSI will now become part of this blog. I also would like to share more about my daily life here. Ideally, I will in fact post daily entries. I don't know how interesting most of them will be. But I'm a professional writer, so I'll try.

I am not sure how the photography will work. Most of my scrapbooking projects I will be able to scan into the computer and post immediately. But the photos I take on a regular basis, I haven't been able to immediately post because I lost my camera cord. Since doing this, I have periodically burned a number of photos to CD, and then and only then can I upload them to the computer. So I suppose I will write, post, and come back later with the pictures.

See you tomorrow!

Don't worry, be happy!

OK, I guess this blog is going to delve deeper into the realm of the spiritual. I am not sure what that has to do with being a grandparent, other than these are things I hope to teach my little granddaughter some day. But my Bible study just wrapped up its study of Matthew 6 last night and now one of the staff at Sandals shared this link. It gives some very practical Christian insight into how to not worry. Blogger Justin Taylor titles it "A Game Plan For When You Start To Worry."

More thoughts on the spiritual realm

One legacy I am sure I will leave is my interest in the spiritual, which from time to time I write out in short essays, i,e. what a certain scripture means to me. I also firmly believe that when I am directed in my spiritual studies to look at the same scripture twice in one week, as is the case here, it's pretty important stuff that God wants me to know. Since God has given me the gift to write fairly well, and I am pretty sure he wants this little blog to exist to show others his glory through my writing, I am doing so.

I wrote the following essay after the Sandals Church Marriage Conference, in which guest speaker Paul Tripp actually challenged us, could we write 10 pages on Matthew 6:34? Could we write five? Could we write a paragraph? A sentence? I did not feel called to write five or ten pages, but the 760 words below seemed right. They examine Matthew 6:34 in the deeper context of Matthew 6: 19-34. Now my women's Bible study, we are studying Matthew 6:19-24, and next week, we will be looking at these verses some more, along with Matthew 6: 25-34. That may give me even more to say about Matthew 6:34 in two weeks, but for now I offer this insight.

WHY THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY

Matthew 6:34
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

As I write this, I have plenty of reason to worry about tomorrow. My husband has been unemployed for two years, and may run out of unemployment before he qualifies for a retirement pension in 10 months. Meanwhile, I too, was unemployed for two months, although I have found part-time work.
Although the prospect of trying to making it financially on one part-time income gives me plenty of reason to do so, Matthew 6:34 tells me I have reason not to worry about tomorrow. In fact, I don’t really need to worry about today either.

Why? Whenever the word “therefore” is seen in the Bible, you have to look back beyond that verse. Verses 28-33 start, respectively, with “And,” “Yet,” “If that is,” “For” and “But,” so they also indicate more of the passage should be considered. I believe a much more clear understanding of the passage is understood if we consider verses Matthew 6:19-34.

In verses 19 and 20, Jesus gives direction: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. “

He gives reason for this in v. 21, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.” So, our heart is to treasure the things of heaven, not earthly treasures. No one can take our heavenly treasures from us, but in this century, people have lost many earthly treasures, such as jobs, homes and investments. Jesus never wanted us to focus on these in the first place, because what he has to offer is so much better!

Verses 22 and23 tells us “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But, if your eyes are bad your whole body will be full of darkness.” A key to understanding these verses is found at the start of another gospel, John 1:4. “In him (God), was life, and that life was the light of men. John 1 quickly then introduces us to the Christian concept that God has made himself known through Jesus, and therefore Jesus is the way from a world of darkness and misery into a life of enlightened and joyful living.

We need that life-giving light that can only be obtained in God. We do not need most of our earthly treasures! In fact, even if we lose our homes, God will continue to provide for us. Therefore, we must focus not on the earthly things that we have lost or never had to begin with, but on God who gives us life and is everlasting.

What is most important in your life? God or earthly treasures? Verse 24 tells us we must pick one, because “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” If you value earthly treasures, you will focus your attention on getting more of these. If you value God, you will focus your attention on knowing him better.

Verse 25 says this is why one need not worry about the basic necessities of life, what you will eat, or what you will wear. Verses 26-29 compares us to birds, who despite lacking the intelligence to store up food after the harvest season, receive God’s provision daily, and to flowers, who do nothing whatsoever, but still rise up from the ground beautifully.

Neither birds nor flowers worry. Nor should we. Not worrying takes faith, but God gives us reason for that faith in Jesus. Those who do not have faith can only pursue earthly treasures, for they cannot believe there is any other. Yet those of faith can know that God loves us, God cares for us, and God will not deprive of us of what we need.

Verse 33 gives us further insight as to why we should not worry about things. Not only will God supply our basic needs, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

And that is why we need not worry about today or tomorrow. Instead, today, we should be focused on what we can do to see more of God’s good light.

And, in memory of Grandmother

As of today, this blog belongs to a Grandma who doesn't have that specialness of being both a gradmother and a granddaughter. My Grandma has gone home to the Lord. Go to my first post to see why Helen Dill was a special lady. She had been suffering from congestive heart failure, so I am both sad and relieved.

But stay tuned. I am obviously going to have to refocus this blog to de-emphasize the granddaughter part, and better empasize the "Grandma Ellen" part. I'm not sure how that will look. My granddaughter lives in Colorado. I have ascertained that I actually have a personality more like my other Grandma, Grandma Van Curen. Grandma Dill was a very calming spirit, Grandma Van Curen and I are more feisty.

Both were good Grandmas. One died way to soon, when she was 60. The other had the privlege of being a grandmother for almost 50 years. Let's hope I'm closer to Grandma Dill's age as far as my own longetivity.

I don't know what legacy I'll leave Abigail and any grands that come after her. I will definitely try to let Grandma Dill's legacy guide me. If I bring my Grandma Van Curen's spirit too, I guess that's a good thing.

I am Grandma Ellen. I didn't become a grandma in completely the normal way, since Holly is my stepdaughter. And since I start with that somewhat unique facet, then for one year and 24 days added to it the even more unique facet of bein a grandaughter, grandmother, I'll continue to find my own way to be a wonderful but unique Grandma to Abigail. I will bring to her my Grandma Van Curen's spirit AND my Grandma Dill's compassion, as best I can. And, as I see fit, I'll share that unique goodness with anyone who wants to know more about my take on being a grandmother.