TSWDB - Feb 4

Please join in with us over at: 

http://thesimplewomansdaybook.blogspot.com/

I am thinking...That these hairstyles that Strike taught herself to do by working with her sister's hair, are so pretty ... 

 and this

 
I'm creating...our garden but only in my mind at this point.  Our tree-farmer friend extended the offer to us once again to garden at the tree farm :)  Hooray! 

I'm going...to purchase seeds soon. Fun! 

I'm learning ... well I want to research some organic ways to ward off hungry potato bugs from our garden.  My husband read somewhere that planting basil among the potato plants might help so we'll probably try that - but given how much they enjoyed feasting on our crop last year, I'd like to have a few other green tricks up my sleeve to try.

I'm pondering...this excerpt from a devotional:

Wisdom in Creation

Today's reading: 1 Kings 4:29–34This passage is a celebration of God’s endowment of great wisdom upon Solomon. It also celebrates the broader theme of God’s ordering of creation according to a majestic, divine design. God has infused his wisdom, as it were, into the very structure of material reality. And he has equipped the human race, created in his image, with the ability (the intellectual machinery) to, as German mathematician Johann Kepler (1571–1630) said, “think God’s thoughts after him,” in order to develop creation’s potential (note especially 1Ki 4:32–33). We as God’s designated stewards have been called to faithfully and intelligently cultivate creation’s potential. God wants us to varying degrees, based on the particular aptitudes and strengths with which he has gifted each of us, to draw out the fruitfulness of creation through engineering, entrepreneurship, development, intellectual understanding, the arts and so forth.

via: Discovering God's Design

I happened upon a book along that order the other day - that I just may order.

I think this book about how one man and half a billion honey bees help feed America looks interesting too: 

I'm reading...A book that I had on my Christmas wish list. Playmaker gave it to me. She wrote it herself! Actually it's a compilation of short stories she wrote for her Travel, Adventure and Foreign Culture Writing class.  Among the titles: Truth Ignored: A letter far from home (re: Amanda Knox) , Those Emerald Eyes (a tragic yet tender Iranian romance), Her First Word (an Amish story), Amazing Grace (about a young, female Chinese pianist), A Painful Memory (about an unlikely friendship between two boys in Mumbai. One poor and  Hindu, the other rich and Muslim. 

One of my favorite things...picnics!  I've planned 12 of them for 2012. Even purchased a lightweight picnic blanket with two features that sold me. One - it folds into a fanny pack. Two - it comes with little stakes to hold it in place. 

Under the dark canopy of the night sky embellished with just enough shimmering stars to shift our focus from our vantage point far below and somewhere along the fringe of a frozen lake amidst a frigid forest with a fabulous view of the frosty moon framed and hung almost directly overhead,  is where my husband and I feasted alone together by candlelight the other night ... the first of our 12 picnics of 2012. 

  

And - just for fun - let's finish here, 

 with this fantastic rendition
of a familiar refrain :)