E Is For Egg, Exactly What We Need

April 6, 2016January 28, 2021 / Ally Bean / 41 Comments

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

This proverb tells us to not make everything dependent on one other thing. It reminds you that if you drop that basket and break any eggs, then *kablooey* you’ve lost everything.

Yep, you’ve got nothing then. Kind of like me now.

You see, my gentle readers, I have nothing more to say on the topic of eggs.

Well, that’s almost true.

Sure, I could tell you about my latest experience with eggs [pickled them], but do you really need me to do that?

Instead, I suggest that we all agree that I showed up here, posted something as per the challenge guidelines, and then babbled enough to make it seem like I had something to say.

This works for me. I hereby declare that I have written about the letter “E.”

And the A To Z Challenge continues tomorrow…

Doing Nothing. Taking Names.

February 23, 2016February 23, 2016 / Ally Bean / 38 Comments

It’s difficult to keep a personal blog when there’s not much happening. ‘Ya know?

I can tell you things like I’m feeling well & walking more. Zen-Den is content with his life at the moment. We are happy, thinking about attempting to plan to go on vacation sometime, somewhere.

Projects around the house continue. Culling out what we don’t need anymore & giving it away. Painting one bedroom a new color. Waiting for the carpenter to be available to put crown molding in some rooms.

Weather is nicer, warmer, sunnier. Talked with landscaper about removing some overgrown shrubs, taking down a pathetic tree, adding some decorative grasses. Ordered more fancy stone for the path under the deck.

But you see, that’s all I have to share today on these hallowed blog pages. Not much happening at Chez Bean.

So I’ll leave it up to you, my gentle readers. Should you care to talk about the stuff in the photo above, OR have a question for me, OR want to tell me something about yourselves, please feel free to do so in the comment section below.

Heaven knows, I don’t have much to say today, so I’m hoping you do!

More Snow, More Gray, More Mellow

February 15, 2016February 15, 2016 / Ally Bean / 30 Comments

SATURDAY THE SKIES WERE bright blue and it was sunny outside, but very cold. We spent the whole day driving every which way around the region, doing errands.

Not being at home, basically.

Then Sunday arrived, even colder than Saturday. We decided to stay inside, doing pretty much nothing worth talking about.

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LATE IN THE AFTERNOON it started to snow again, so I grabbed my camera and took some photos of winter scenes in the waning afternoon light.

As shown here, the midwestern winter colors are a natural earthy palette all their own. Very subdued, tending towards gray. Either you like them [I do], or you don’t.

To me, these shades of gray, which I only see for a few weeks during the year, are a reminder to relax and mellow out.

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A Conversation About Self-Awareness & Assumptions

February 4, 2016January 9, 2017 / Ally Bean / 36 Comments

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A friend, who was clearly absorbed in her own thoughts, got into my car, buckled up, and without so much as a Sherman T. Potter “howdy-do” said:

Do you think you were wanted?

Now I’m a good friend. Attentive. A natural-born problem solver, but you have to give me some context. So I said the first, rather inarticulate, thing that drifted into my head: huh?

Then the story unfolded as she went on to explain that she’d started reviewing her life, all of her life, in light of a recent setback in which her job ended.

While she understood on a logical level why her job, which she tolerated, had been cut, on an spiritual level this experience had sent her into a spiral of self-doubt– and a need to understand it all.

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We talked for a while. She explained that the question she had asked of me wasn’t about being wanted at work, but about being wanted within a family. That is, did I think/she think that our parents wanted us.

In my case, Yes. In her case, No.

Getting to the crux of her contemplation, she thought that being unwanted early on would have given her some superpower to automatically know when that sort of thing was happening again.

In other words, because she was so sure of herself had she missed some sign that she was going to be kicked to the curb by this employer?

We came to no definitive conclusion about her recent job loss, but we did stumble upon a good topic of conversation about self-awareness. That is, how we all make assumptions based on previous experiences.

And how those assumptions when applied to the here and now, aren’t always a good guide for how to live your life, even though it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that they are.

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