A Little Bit Nostalgic

Good evening all my beautiful friends and followers.  Hope you all had wonderful day today.  Mine didn't begin until around 1:45 this afternoon, when I woke up from my 12 hour nap. :p  You know, it's amazing how much sleep I actually get sometimes, yet I still feel like I could just sleep on.  If I didn't have SO much to do, I would love to just do that sometime.  Just sleep until it feels like I've slept enough.  Is it possible? 

I spent a good 4 hours on the phone with friends while cutting and creating kits for work and finishing up Thanksgiving cards for my friend, who so nicely hired me to make them. :0)  I love making cards and doing the things that I love and getting rewarded by actually getting paid for them!  Talk about a blessing!  It's awesome. 

I am also getting ready to throw a Pampered Chef party so if anyone is interested or needs anything for the holidays from Pampered Chef, please let me know so I can add it to my party totals.  I'd greatly appreciate that!  You can hit up my consultant's website at Janell's Pantry and enter my name as the hostess, Amy Courchaine.  They have some awesome stuff out right now and actually, I was surprised to find that the prices are not bad at all!  I haven't had a PC party in like 8 years or so and it looks like the prices are pretty much the same!  They have some things that I absolutely must have in my kitchen.  In fact, most of the stuff in my kitchen is from PC and obviously I've had it for a long time!  I'll be ordering some of their stoneware and some of their great gadgets for sure.  The party is on December 5th and items ordered from my party are promised to be at your house in time for Christmas.  So fun!

On another note, I am posting one of the cards I've created.  This was made for a friend who also purchases her cards from me, for one of her friends who does quilting.  I thought a patchwork card was definitely in order.  The buttons are just stickers and the cream colored squares were textured with my Texture Boutique.  I had so much fun on this and it was super easy.  I cut the squares from my old school original Sizzix.  Worked fantastic for this!  I added a couple of ties too.

I must say, I'm really missing scrapbooking, with all this card making I've been doing.  My mom told me a great story today about a great uncle of mine who died in 1946 in the war.  She actually has the original letter that was sent to his wife from the military, informing her of his death.  She is going to get that to me so I can scrapbook it and put with a picture or two of him, in my album.  I was thinking today, how sad I am that I can barely remember the wonderful stories my grandma used to tell me about when she was a little girl back in the early 1900's.  I'm also very sad that I didn't ask my dad enough before he passed away.  He was a cop back in Chicago (only white guy on the force at the time!!!) before i was born and I didn't get to hear most of his stories.  You know when you're a kid or a teenager, you just aren't that interested in listening to your parent's stories? Well, I really regret that now, so if you still have your parents or your grandparent's take the time to listen to their stories and, better yet, write them down or tape record them so you'll always have them and your kids will know where they came from.  I seriously doubt I'll ever have children, but I will pass on my scrapbooks to my nephew or my cousins.  Someone will treasure them as much as I do.

On  to the fibro side of things... Thank you all for your wishes for my friend.  I know she will be reading this and appreciating all of your support.  I have had a long bout of feeling just sick lately.  Constantly sick!  Sick to my stomach, headaches, body aches, insomnia, sleeping too much, pretty much everything you can have go wrong at once.  I don't know what's triggering this so badly, except for the weather, but it's actually been nice the past few days.  This is tough.  It gets hard sometimes.  I try to stay as positive as I can.  I believe in the power of positivity, but there are times when it just gets rough.  Luckily, I only feel like that for five minutes at a time here and there.  I never let myself go more than that because I don't want my life to be full of despair and I don't want to be a person who is always "oh, woe is me".  I am tired though and sometimes I need to vent, so here it is...  This disorder, I would not wish on my worst enemy.  It is debilitating, life altering, and earth shattering.  You think and you think and you think, this has to go away, I can't ALWAYS be in pain, but so far, it hasn't.  I have pain EVERY SINGLE DAY of my life and have for the past two years!!!  I cannot remember what it feels like to not have pain.  I have no clue.  That is the reality of it and this is what I'm dealing with.  It's scary sometimes.  Sometimes you honestly feel like, my gosh, am I dying or something?  How the hell can a person survive this?  But I do.  We do. It does not kill us though some days we wish it might.

On that note, to all my fellow sufferers, it's ok to have those days.  Don't feel guilty, but limit it.  Don't let it consume you.  You still have tons to offer and a life worth living.  It is not your fault.  You did not wish this and you don't deserve it.  We are all here to learn, and this disorder, condition, disease (whatever you want to call it) will teach.  It seems like an F'd up way to learn, but we do learn from this and we are here to help other people who tend to take life for granted, including ourselves.  Just remember that.

Love and light to you all.
XO ~ Amy Jo