Sweet Water and Bitter

Yesterday, I suddenly realized I’d only written one post for the upcoming week. Nothing’s worse than writing under pressure and trying to develop a fairly lame idea into something worth reading, so instead I’m going to cheat and do a more personal and photo-oriented post.

First of all, in case you don’t read this whole thing, I want to tell you that I have finally gotten around to reading a book I’ve been noticing for several years: Kisses from Katie.

Not many years ago, Katie Davis was a normal teenage girl from Brentwood, TN, who had a passionate desire to serve the poor. While other girls were applying to colleges, she was diligently searching for a place to volunteer. She wound up spending Christmas break of her senior year at an orphanage in Uganda (after having to beg her mother to accompany her). The experience changed her life. Though her parents were not in favor and her friends thought she had gone off the deep end, she chose Uganda over college, and moved there as soon as she finished high school, planning to teach kindergarten in an orphanage. Since then she has adopted fourteen little girls and founded Amazima Ministries, an organization that assists multitudes of destitute people. She has done all this, she says, because Jesus does not SUGGEST that we help the poor and the orphaned and widowed, he COMMANDS it. Katie believes that she cannot in good conscience do any less than she is doing, and what she’s doing is giving every ounce of herself, day in and day out. She is astonishing and you should read about her. Buy the book, or maybe you’d just like to visit blog.amazima.org to see a short video of Katie telling you about her own story.

Wow…after that I’m kind of embarrassed to even tell you what I’ve been up to. :-(

But OK, here goes. My in-laws are scheduled to come visit us next week.

They are very dear to us and we look forward to seeing them. One added benefit of their visits is that we always get a little excited and start sprucing up our home. It took me  awhile to get interested in decorating this apartment because I felt so displaced at first…plus I didn’t know how long we’d live here…plus after owning my last three homes, I felt keenly that this place wasn’t mine. But eventually it has begun to feel like home, and really we’re in no hurry to find any different housing, so we’ve been decorating.

My first order of business was to convince my husband to move several oddball, manly, framed posters that he had hung in goofy places when we first got here…when I was not myself. I’d rather banish them to some subterranean man cave that we do not currently have, but since that was not an option, we put them all on one bare wall in our dining area. It’s not ideal, but at least now I have one wall of goofiness instead of several rooms of it.

So, on our newly naked bedroom walls, we have put this:

 Both the giant mirror ( which will surely decapitate us both if it ever falls), and the colorful metal birds are new. One morning I caught my cat perched on that black chair, tail switching, ready to jump up and eat one. I’m not sure if she could actually recognize them as representations of birds, but she sure seemed to!

I can’t manage to capture a good shot of this due to reflections, but this painting is The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. You will often see it displayed horizontally, as though the subjects were lying down. I admit it looks just as well that way, if not better, but we hung it vertically because that’s correct and because we’re all fancy and cultured like that. ;-) Oh and because we needed a picture that was taller than it was wide. (Hey…if you like this painting, I’ll put a link at the bottom of the post. You could order it from Art.com which is what we did.)

Then it was on to the living room, where there had been a blank spot over our TV for three years. We wanted something NOT rectangular,  and we hoped to find some kind of metal wall art, but we wound up with another giant mirror.     It was marked down because the paint was scratched, but that worked out fine for us because we didn’t like the color anyway. (It was originally silver, now it’s gold.) The minute we hung it, I suddenly remembered a decorating rule that says when you hang a mirror in your home, you need to consider what it will reflect. That’s the problem, because in this case it only reflects more blank white wall. Oh well. I’m not in love with it, but it’s better than nothing.

One last picture…this is my coworker and friend Christina wearing a Lilla Rose hair clip! 

I’m just getting started as a Lilla Rose consultant but I’m pleased that my friends have been excited to try the clips (and order some!) You can click the link in my sidebar to go to my Lilla Rose independent consultant site if you would like to look at more clips and try them for yourself.  www.lillarose.biz/sweetwaterandbitter

Excuse my shameless plugs, and have a great week! :-)

The Kiss, c.1907 Buy From Art.com