Merry after Christmas!

 

Once again. I missed Christmas in Bloglandia, but to those of you who happen to stop by,
“Merry Christmas” from my cottage to yours!!
It has been awhile, hasn’t it? I think I say that each time I stop in and each time it feels like more time has passed since my last visit. Thankfully I"’ve been given a moment to catch my breath and hopefully catch up with many of you.

We had a wonderful, peaceful Christmas spent with Jim’s family…Good food, children’s laughter, and just being us. For the first time in many many years I actually baked and had my plates ready when the neighbor's stopped by. I’m sure they wondered what was up since Cori is never on time.

For my 51st birthday Jimmy bought me a harp. It’s a pixie harp with 19 strings which, is perfect for me being one of my nick-names is “Pixie Queen.” I’m sitting here laughing to myself so I’ll go off on a little bunny trail and explain. You see, I have a friend…we’ll just call her Honey Bee. One day Honey Bee and I were bored when we noticed a book of baby names lying on the shelf, so we decided to look up the definitions of our names. Her definition was, you guessed…Honey Bee while mine was a pixie like creature that dwells in a hollow near a stream. So Pixie Queen I became…ok…hopping off the bunny trail and back to my new harp.
I read on the internet that before you play your harp, you are to give it a name, since they are not considered to be mere in-adamant objects, but each one having a unique personality of its own. So I decided to give mine an Elvish name, what else could I do? After much research and debating I decided to name her Erulissë (Air-oo-lee-say) which means Grace. There were so many beautiful Elvish names to choose, but I kept going back to this one. I like the way it gently rolls off the tongue. I’ve been playing and tuning her each day, but need to find a teacher.

So, you now know that I got a harp for my Birthday, but where else have I been and what have I been doing? I’ve spent the most intense semester in all my years of schooling…thankfully it’s over, but while I was there I learned…

How to paint in Photoshop.
I took a class and we painted trucks, apples, robots, and all manner of boy things. It was so much fun! I also learned that somewhere inside my heart is a children’s story waiting to be written down on paper.

 

I opened a Bakery (fictitious of course) and created every imaginable piece of packaging that I could think of. I also learned that things created in Illustrator don’t transfer well to the web “-(.

 

  

 

I learned that not every picture you see on the internet is real and that if you take a great amount of time and care, you can create your own little visual worlds.
Next time you look at a photo look real hard.

And I’ve learned, that when you are ready to come down off your shelf, God will move you in a new direction, but I’ll tell you about that later.

If I don’t make it back before New Year’s I hope you all have a lovely one and please be safe! It’s a crazy world we live in!!

Until next time…
xoxo Cori