Holidays might be grand, wonderful times of exciting hustle for most families but for many primary family caregivers they only add more stress and lead to deeper despondency. If you are a caregiver, remind yourself that you don’t need to live to any one’s expectations but your own. Enlist your family’s help and if they […]

I am the primary family caregiver for my mother and this month is mine. Mine and everyone’s who act as caregivers for an ailing parent, spouse, lover, friend, child… Ours is a difficult path and we often find the ride to be bumpy as hell. If there is a family caregiver in your life, thank […]

I know this lesson, I really, really do, and yet… I recently purchased some fancy inventory keeping software. It keeps track of time, materials, vendors, sales tax – lots of stuff in great detail! Only… it wasn’t working for me. At least it didn’t seem to be working consistently. I decided, after inputting my own […]

Do you get all wide-eyed and excited at the ripple of dancing fringe? I have a passion for fringe from long and geometric to graceful and feathery to short and spiky. I don’t think there is a fringe that won’t catch my eye and make me grin. I think it might be the freedom of […]

How do you view art? For some art must have a message, be it socially relevant or relevant only to the creator and viewer. For others it must be visually appealing. Some critics view these requisites as being mutually exclusive. Both groups mostly agree the work should be well made – a phrase that is […]

Yes, after a four and a half month (phew! I was afraid it was longer) hiatus, I am back to posting! Summer is definitely over here in southern New England, with trees turning from their Summer greens to the myriad warm colors of Autumn. What a beautiful season! I am working now on a landscape […]

I am an artist caregiver so for me art is both work and respite. My objective, with this post, is to share some ways other caregivers, who may not necessarily be artists, can use art to give themselves some ways of coping with the stress in their lives. Suggestions to try till you find the […]

Just in time is not really the best way to work, but sometimes it is unavoidable. Such as this month when I finished a new work of bead weaving art just in time to enter it into the Etsy Bead Weavers monthly challenge. The theme is the trilogy of novels, “Lord of the Rings” with […]

Finally, after all that deep thinking, we come to the last question: when do we eat? Possibly one of the most important of the questions, this last, number seven in the list, reminds us that life is not just about the profound but also about taking care of ourselves, enjoying life, and, very importantly, having […]

Now that you have a destination, it’s time to work out the route. Where “route” is defined as “How I’m going to get where I want to go.” (Which was the topic of the previous post in this series.) Whatever you were doing before? You’re going to have to start making changes. Unless, of course, […]