Koloa Landing

YES! This is ME! I won this trip last December! And the trip is planned for this fall!

People ask me, "How did you win that?" Well, my days are very slow, and I need quiet easy activities. Since I have felt so much better when in Hawaii, something many of us know as the "Location Effect", I started looking for trips to Hawaii to enter! I came across this one, and you could enter every day and get an extra entry for tweeting. So I did.

On Black Friday, I thought, "I should go check that contest page at Koloa Landing". I couldn't believe my eyes!! In fact, until they emailed me, I only half believed it was really me!

Koloa Landing is in Poipu, Kauai. The pictures look beautiful! I can't wait to take my own pictures and share them with you. I'm sure they will treat us very well!

Whenever we travel to Hawaii, it is super low budget. No swimming pool, no resorts. We find the cheapest rental and cook all our own food. So a resort is going to be a REAL treat!!

Watch for pictures coming in the next couple months! For now, you can visit their website if you'd like to see it! Click here: Koloa Landing

Waves

The waves have been big lately. I haven't been able to eat for over 3 weeks. This is the worst gastroparesis flare I've had in many years! I know how to deal with a flare that lasts a week. Usually they last 2-5 days. It's hard not to focus on the waves and panic. In light of that, I thought this was a great video to share today.

Find a Way Through

"Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and there's got to be a way through it" ~Michael J. Fox

Loss... Grief... Accomodate... Acceptance... Embrace..

It's a continual cycle with this illness. It takes continual effort to work through the grief and get to a place where I can adjust and embrace. And then before I know it, I'm back at the beginning.

Loss... Grief... Accomodate... Acceptance... Embrace...

The number of days I can paint has greatly reduced in the last year. I've recently discovered how much I enjoy Instagram, and editing my photographs. The picture above is one of my edits. I've only just begun learning and I'm trying to win an ipad so I can do even more with my photos (there are lots of companies that host contests with ipads as the prize). It's all a part of choosing to accommodate to my losses, accept them and find a way through them. 

Return to blogger

Wow! I can't believe it's been 7 years since I moved my blog away from blogger over to Wordpress! When I moved, it was so that I could have a beautiful self hosted Wordpress blog and include aspects of a website on it for both my art and my journey blogs.

As the years went by, I have continued to decline both physically and cognitively. I switched from a self hosted blog to a free wordpress blog. That meant I couldn't sell anything or have any referral links. That was a little disappointing.

I was recently helping my husband create a blog for a year long project focused on marriage for our church. I discovered how much more I liked blogger now and decided to begin reworking my blog and move it back here.

And guess what I found? Wordpress and blogger are not speaking. Which means I can not import all those years of blogs.

So, as I start to blog here, I'm just going to republish posts that I want to save for posterity, or that I think might be beneficial to those who visit.

I'm not very consistent in my blogging lately because it's hard work to write and put together sentences and it can cause some PEM. I'll try to blog about that later. But for now, welcome back to my blog!