What is on the table

It has been almost a full year since I have visited my own blog. Just watched "Juile and Julia" and thought about some things that were mentioned or brought to mind by that delightful movie - like how narcissistic it is to have a blog, or the way a blog seems to help you sort and validate your experiences, or the very discipline of the act of journaling. All in all, I can see that it is time to get back to it. I stopped writing because the "Balcom House" was something that I understood - it was a place. Then it became an out-of-control sit-com sort of situation, and now the Balcom House is more of a concept of sorts. In my last post we were just returning from a college tour in NYC. We, the Balcoms still all lived in the same house, which, at that time, was still a yucky greenish grey color with peeling trim. We enjoyed the hub-bub of many friends and friends-of-friends coming and going. We were beginning to get a studio going, and that was in use by us a little and by a friend of ours a lot. I was working in Mesa as a First and Second Grade teacher. Oh, I need to correct myself. We WEREN'T all living at Balcom House! Ken, my husband was living in Whiteriver during the week, three hours away, and working there in the high school, only coming home on weekends. SO I should have said that we, the Balcoms still all lived in the same house on the weekends. I quit my job, realizing that if I intended to live with my husband more of the week, I would need to get a different job. I got a job as a house mother in a maternity home that is a part of the Living Hope Women's Centers ministry. We now live there, and Ken commutes to Whiteriver only forty-five minutes from the Hope House. Caralie went to the King's College in NYC, which meets in the Empire State Building. She lives two or three buildings down from there in the Herald Towers. Tully, now 21, is living in the Balcom House in Mesa with a renter, Phil, who is a nice addition to the family. So .. . . Ken and I are in snow country in the White Mountains. We live across the driveway from the Hope House in a ministry-provided two bedroom house which we lovingly call the "Butter Yellow Cottage". I have many things to write to catch up, but for now I will tell you what is on my table here in the "BYC". There is a sewing machine that I used to sew drapes that are for room deadening for the studio I am running on the weekends in Show Low at Lewis Music. My pack of harmonicas, a stack of books including "Lullabies from Around the World" and a video - "A Fiddler's Guide to Waltzes, Aires, and Haunting Melodies" both purchased last weekend at thrift stores. There is a paper cutter and the templates that I am cutting for our CD jacket for our new 13 song CD "Rise Up". A heart-shaped box of chocolates from my son that he gave me for Valentines Day, my training note book for our ministry to counsel in the Crisis Pregnancy Center, a plastic container with banana cake in it that Jean Ann, the relief house mom made today and brought over, the notebook I put editing notes in for the video editing work I am doing for Heritage House, and various other books and papers including a paper I am supposed to fill out about our family and our "doin's" for mom's family reunion coming this summer. What is on your table?