Sunday Catch-Up: Geraniums, Writing Courses and Destination Weddings (and anniversaries!)

Hi everyone!

Hope all is well.  These weeks are absolutely getting away from me!  I am working hard on my writing and I also have a small contract for a not-for-profit organization which is taking a lot of my time.  Add in yard work, reading, seeing friends and things I cannot even recall, it is hard to know where the time is going.

Over the last six weeks, I have been taking an online course: Revise Your Novel/Picture Book in a Month.

Taught by super agent Jill Corcoran and Martha Alderson, author of the Plot Whisperer, this 8 video series has been an amazing tool to both improve my abilities and to get things done.  I learned so many things, so if any of you out there are sitting on a story, this is well worth the funds and you can revisit the videos for months afterwards.  You can also access Jill and Martha afterwards on Facebook for help, so it is great!


Yesterday we went to the garden center and bought tons of geraniums.  We hang baskets of them around the pool and they always make me so happy, from the scent to the bright flowers.  They are also almost completely indestructible.  This is a good thing, when the summer weather here can range from drought to torrential rains!

They also make me think of France, as it seems there is a pot of red geraniums everywhere.

Speaking of France, I have been enthralled by Habitually Chic's sojourn to Paris.

How fun would it be to move to Paris for the summer?  Pretty fun, if you ask me...

However, what I would like even better would be to go back to a little stone cottage like we stayed at in 2008...

Or maybe Nyons, where I happily spent 2 hours and where I need to go back and spend at least a week:

It's funny how places get under our skin, isn't it?  We drive through a place and make a mental note that we absolutely MUST go back there at some point...

OR

we read about a place and dream about it for years and then are surprised to find ourselves there.

There is something surreal about that kind of trip.  I remember walking through The Tower of London and thinking again and again "I am walking through the Tower of London.  I am REALLY walking through the Tower of London."

Those landmarks are familiar and yet utterly foreign to us.  Especially the most iconic ones...

You can't be alive this weekend I think and not know about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's wedding.  There is something very Marie Antoinette-ish about these kinds of weddings, but I will not speak ill of them, as frankly it is a waste of energy and I hope that they, like everyone else whose wedding I am aware of, live a happy life together.  There is enough negativity in this world without piling on.

But if got me to thinking.  Next year is my 30th wedding anniversary.  We went nowhere for our 25th, so perhaps a celebration is in order.  Where would I renew my vows were I to do such a thing?

A destination wedding appears to be all the vogue now, though we got married in a little stone chapel here in Fredericton.

Would I pay Florence, like Kim and Kanye?  Perhaps, I've not yet been to Italy and I wouldn't need a wall around me to shield me from the paps and would be content with field flowers...

Maybe Scotland at the old family homestead?

I also really need to go see Charleston and the other Bloomsbury haunts..

Would have to leave Barry at the local pubs for some of that...

I am also thinking of Bruges...

Or maybe I would beg Rosemary over at the amazing blog Share My Garden, to let me do the vows in her spectacular garden:

It's fun to wile away the hours while you are doing mundane tasks and dream of places to visit.

How about you?  What would be your dream wedding destination?

Have a great day and stay safe out there!

xoxo wendy

A Handsome Book

Hi everyone,

Have been sucked into the world of Gone Girl and just resurfaced.  Talk about a crazy ride...

I know some of you started this and then dropped it, but it completely sucked me in...

But this is not the handsome book of which I refer...

No, I am talking about when publishers release wonderful new versions of old favourites.

My most recent favourite was the lovely hardcover version of To Kill a Mockingbird recently released by Harper Collins to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the book (they must have known Dani would cover it in her book club!):

Then this past weekend, I was shopping at one of our local bookstores, Westminster Books 

and I came across some newly-released versions of L.M. Montgomery books by Virago Modern Classics.

I have some very old L.M. Montgomery books

 and some of the wretched mass market versions:

So when I saw the Virago versions, I was enthralled!

No slutty Anne here, like those released last year, but a lovely, illustrated, Anne:

And there were Emily books released as well.  Oddly enough, I do not own the Emily books, though now I do...

I probably was always reading my sister's growing up...

Honestly, I am a sucker for a pretty book.

Give me a penguin classic,

A modern classic

Oh hell, ANY classic, and I am swooning like a school girl looking at Andy Gibb in 1977 (now THERE is a specific image...)

How about you?  Are you a lover of pretty books?

Do you own multiple versions of the same book?

Do you dislike the latest trend in books of photos on the cover when all you want is a fine font or lovely illustration?

Would love to hear!  Have a great day and stay safe out there!

xoxo wendy

Review: The Confidence Code

I have confidence in sunshine
I have confidence in rain
I have confidence that spring will come again
Besides which you see I have confidence in me!

The Sound Of Music - I Have Confidence 

Ah that we would all be so confident!

And yet, many of us are not.  

And of that many, most are women.

Enter journalists Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who wondered why that was.

Their research has led to the interesting new book: The Confidence Code.

Chock-a-block with the most cutting edge research about the social, psychological and biological factors that play into whether or not someone has confidence, the book aims to understand why, all things being equal, men tend to over-estimate their abilities by 30% while women tend to under-estimate their abilities by around the same amount and what implications that has not only for the men and women involved, but for society as a whole.

I used to see this confidence gap manifested a lot in my former career. 

Young bright women would doubt their hunches, second-guess their abilities, whereas their young male counterparts would brashly take a shot regardless.  

Eventually, you take enough of those shots, you show enough chutzpah, you will make some big wins.  And get promoted.

Too many women describe themselves as "lucky" when they do well, beat themselves up over every little mistake, and feel they must prepare twice as hard in order to be taken seriously.

I'm not going to give away much more about this book - it must be read and digested properly and I highly recommend you do so.  

Despite achieving a lot professionally, I would often feel like I was a fraud, that somehow others were more intelligent or quicker than I was, and I was constantly questioning my abilities.

So it was a relief to see that I am in good company and the authors provide concrete tactics, based on research, as to how to address these feelings of inadequacy.

At the website for the book, you can take the confidence quiz.  While many would consider me quite confident, in fact, I came out as having only medium confidence.

The description of medium confidence:

What does that mean?

It likely means one of two things.  First,  you might be generally in the middle range of the confidence spectrum regarding a variety of your judgments.  Alternatively, you could be high in confidence on some matters but relatively low on others.  That is, there are times when you do feel confident about your abilities, or confident about successfully addressing a challenge. But there may be other times when you may be risk-averse, or may choose inaction over action. You may also spend significant time ruminating—a huge confidence killer. 

As soon as I got to the last sentence, I knew I was nailed.  I am a terrible ruminator, and having just completed the Brene Brown course on whole-hearted living, this is my number one to-do: stop playing the endless negative loop in my mind, the coulda, shoulda, wouldas of every situation.  

This is a wonderful book for:

• the person who wants to boost their confidence
• the person who wants to help mentor a person, particularly a female person, and help them gain confidence in their schooling or workplace.
• the person who wants to understand why we are still struggling to have women run for office, assume leadership roles, stay in leadership roles, etc.

I highly recommend this book and will be telling all of my girlfriends and the smart women and men in my life about it!

Some more thoughts on confidence by two woman I greatly admire:

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” ― Virginia Woolf

And in the fake-it-till-you-make-camp (of which I excelled at times...)

How about you?  Any struggles with confidence?  Have you read this book yet?

Have a great day and stay safe out there!

xoxo wendy

Miller Time Friday: A Salute to Barbara Walters

When I was young - and I am talking mid to late 1960s here - my mother was a religious watcher of The Today Show, ergo I was, too.

And besides my almost cult-like adoration of Joe Garagiola, which I still have, there was Barbara.

She was smart, she was articulate, she was beautiful.

And she inspired.

If you look up the definition of Trailblazer in the dictionary, surely you will find Barbara.

When she left The Today Show to be the first female co-anchor on the nightly news it is was groundbreaking.  And horrifying.  Because if you think we live in a misogynistic society that judges women solely on their ability to be young and beautiful, well try and imagine the 1970s.

Even her co-anchor, especially her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, was loathsome towards her.

But Barbara persevered.  She went on to have a career that anyone would have killed for, and if she has become somewhat of a caricature for some, well that is the price you pay when you attempt to stay on air until well into your eighties.

Today, Barbara Walters retires.  I am reminded constantly, living in a place when women are still striving for their rights, that we have come a long way since Barbara went on the air in 1962, but we still have a long way to go.

There is a whole generation of female journalists who owe their successful careers to the doors that Barbara had to kick open for them.  She not only had to be good to get her jobs, she had to be the best.  And she was.

So today, I will be raising a glass to Barbara.  And thanking her for all she has done for women.

Let's have a Barbara Cocktail, shall we?

Barbara

1 oz vodka
1/2 oz creme de cacao
1/2 oz cream

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Have an awesome Friday and Stay Safe out there!

xoxo wendy

Style Wednesday - The Late Edition!

Hi all,

Have been beavering away here on many work-related projects, so slipping in my blog here and there as best I can.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged by me, that as soon as I say something definitive about ANYTHING, I immediately do the exact opposite.  (see my old posts on neutrals, which were always followed by colour or vice versa, my statement that blazers were not for me that was immediately followed by me purchasing a blazer, etc, etc, etc.)

So I giggled when I noted to Dani, in comment to her post about her gorgeous new sparkly giraffe print coat, that I had all but given up on wearing much sparkle.

It was sort of true, but not entirely.

I am unsure if this makes me a serial liar or simply someone with underlying magpie tendencies, who, when she tells the universe one thing, immediately has the universe reward her with exactly the opposite.

Or maybe not...

Because sitting in my closet was this sparkle linen cardigan from J Crew, waiting for it's day in the sun:

It no longer appears to be there, and to be honest, I bought it about 6 weeks ago during one of the crazy summer promo thingys, because I liked the idea of sparkly neutral pieces.

I wore it for the first time today:

And here is the closeup of the sweater:

I really like this sweater a lot.  Here I have paired it with Gap white jeans, my cole haan loafters, a vera modo sleeveless shell and a scarf from Target, which I swear has the best scarves going!

$16.99 and very fresh looking!


I am living in my white jeans these days, since the temperatures are still on the cool side.  These are gap 1969 always skinny white jeans I purchased on sale for $45 to replace my old ones which were looking quite worn.

This is really a Wendy outfit these days.  I am getting a little uniform and it is quite comfortable..

*****

On the happiest of notes, a hummingbird arrived yesterday.  There was much jubilation!  Because whatever else I am, I am most definitely this: a hummingbird lover!

Somebody sent me the following video on Facebook the other day and it made me so happy.  It's the little things, I tell you...





Have  a great day and stay safe out there!

xoxo wendy

Thinking of Robert Frost, A Spring Dress and No More Snow...

I have been thinking of Robert Frost these last few days.  My daughter, she of the English Literature Program, bought a book of his poetry the other day and read a few to me on the way home from the bookstore.


We don't think enough about poetry, do we?


I used to be obsessed with it in high school and university, and then life took over and poetry was replaced by work, housecleaning and the more prosaic novel reading.

But a fine poem can tell as much, if not more, than a whole novel.  Like the tight ball of the peony - so constricted, so small - a good poem opens itself up to reveal a multitude of feathery soft layers of meaning, there for the taking.

So yesterday, Mother's Day, I was out in the yard, doing my best to complete the spring time yard work which is typically completed well in advance of May 11th.

But we have a large yard and we had much snow, the last bit of which only melted over night last night.  There is still snow in our woods, but there is no snow in the garden and for that, I am grateful.

Mother's Day saw me don my gardening getup: Coldplay T, fuchsia chinos, a ball cap and gardening gloves.  Real gardeners do not dress like those in magazines, I think; they dress like they could at any moment be begging on some faraway street.

While working away, the weather changed suddenly from cool to hot, as it is wont to do around here: 4 celcius to 22 mid-morning.  The whole air vibrated with the sense of spring, like some switch had turned on and some invisible voice had cried "You There: Be Spring!"  So me, the hawk in the sky, and Charlie the Chipmunk, did just that and I am not so cool to pretend that I didn't do the odd bit of dancing and singing, if only to myself.

While out there, I tried to recall a Frost poem I had read some 30 years ago about the changing of weather, though I am not so clever to have many poems memorized (but this seems like an excellent past time to undertake if one wants to avoid early-onset dementia or Alzheimer's, doesn't it?), so I looked it up this afternoon.

It is a stanza from Frost's Two Tramps in Mud Time:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.


I thought of this because the clouds came out and suddenly, my spring-summer was gone, replaced by early spring.    Charlie and I agreed that such behaviour on the part of the sun and the clouds was absolutely intolerable and immediately signed a petition on Facebook, which I am also wont to do these days...

The garden is a dreary place in early Spring...

Though compared to the three feet of snow that covered all of this three weeks ago, the scene above looks positively miraculous...

Life wants to begin again...

The very beginning of a peony...

And rhubarb, that was only as large at the peony shoots last weekend...

The early buds of a lilac

I noted with interest that my Holly Plant was doing very well.  I couldn't even reach it to cut some Christmas last year, such was the extent of the snow by mid-December...

At my dad's funeral we had three pots of Balsam Fir, two of which have been planted in my backyard in his memory, and which seem to have survived the snow-that-never-ended just fine...

What I am always fascinated by in my garden is how such alien looking shoots can turn into such amazingly beautiful things in only weeks:

This will be a magnolia blossom soon enough

Everywhere in nature, the ugling ducking turns into the swan.  This gives me hope for how things might turn out at the far side of this exciting journey here on earth...

****

Later in the day, I was taken for ice cream and then we had the most delicious takeout burgers from Relish.  Both were my choices.

I was rewarded in all of my mothering pursuits by having all of my children with me for dinner, including the beloved Girlfriend (who gifted me with a necklace), who the entire family serenaded with Bless Your Beautiful Hide from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for reasons that are inexplicable to pretty much anyone but us, but I will tell you this: Spring brings out the desire to sing...

I was also the recipient of a new dress, which I may have seen in a window, tried on and brought home.

This is indeed a bit of a coquettish pose, but it was spring-summer for a few minutes today and I did want you to see that it was sleeveless....

A foot shot so you can see that I wore bright pink suede ballet flats, which seemed just the thing for a spring-feverish kind of day.

So I'll end this with a bit more Robert Frost (can there ever be too much Robert Frost?).

A Prayer in Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; 
And give us not to think so far away 
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here 
All simply in the springing of the year. 

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; 
And make us happy in the happy bees, 
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees. 

And make us happy in the darting bird 
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, 
And off a blossom in mid air stands still. 

For this is love and nothing else is love, 
The which it is reserved for God above 
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill. 

A Christmas Rose, in May....Don't you think that would make a nice poem? Oh wait - it already is...

I add "Read More Poetry" to my 2014 list of things that will make me happy, and I think of how lucky I am indeed, to be able to add something so sweet and so obviously frivolous to my to-do list. Poetry and flowers remind us how fortune indeed we are...  And there are many like myself who consider neither of these frivolous but the stuff which makes life worth living....

Have a lovely Monday and Stay Safe out there!

xoxo Wendy

Happy Mother's Day!

“When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.” ― C.S. Forester, The African Queen

I am hoping to get a good long post written later today, but wanted to send a shout-out to all the Mothers this morning.

My mom has been gone since 2001.  I still miss her and am grateful for all she did for my brother, my sister and I.

How will I spend the day?  I actually have work to do - both for the recent work contract I've taken, some revisions to my book that I want to do, and in the garden.

I have been cleaning up the yard and my flower beds all week and am still not done.  We have over an acre of gardens and the yard seems twice that size when you are raking and pruning and cleaning up and I have the blisters to show for it!  There is even a small patch of snow left in one of the beds!

I will take lots of pictures today and share some with you!  and I hope a selfie with something nice on for dinner!

I'll leave you with one fine thought on this day.

The thing that every (well almost every) mother learns when she has a child is that other babies are swell, but that somehow, she has been given the best one ever.  She doesn't mention this to anyone else, lest she hurt their feelings about their baby, but she knows it to be true.

We all had mothers who thought that about us, even if some didn't express it out loud.  And that gives me a lot of comfort...

Have a great day out there and stay safe!

xoxo wendy