Here are some sites that I found fun or interesting this week:

Brain Pickings’ review of Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. 

Robert Downey Jr. on forgiveness

A former slave tells his old master to shove it

I didn’t really realize it until this week. I just thought it had become really difficult because of time constraints and lack of focus. But it turns out that I’d lost my mojo.

No, not like Austin Powers lost his. Of course, I’m talking about blogging mojo.

For quite a few months, I’ve struggled with what to write here. And even more so, with wanting to write here at all. I had zero inspiration. No creativity. Nothing sounded funny.

Then came this week. I was searching for inspiration, as usual. And unlike this past fall, I wasn’t taking no for an answer. But it was looking pretty bleak; no ideas were coming to me. So as a distraction, I decided to reread some of my old posts.

Here’s when something weird happened: I read 5-6 of them, and something changed inside. Maybe it was just renewed confidence. (Hey! Maybe I CAN be funny!) But I don’t think so. It feels like something more fundamental. Almost spiritual. I suddenly had something I just HAD to tell you about. And writing it down was relatively easy. (It was the candy hearts post.)

I have no problem giving God credit when he moves me spiritually, but this wasn’t exactly that. I think God does deserve the credit for getting me to read old posts. But the shift inside of me was more like an internal door unlocking for the first time in quite awhile. Reading old posts is what did it. Apparently my creative side, my mojo, has been tucked away in a little box in my brain for quite awhile.

My logical, practical side has been in control; and frankly, she’s a party pooper. I set my creative side free this week, and she has loads to tell you about. Now I just need to remember to let her stay out and play.

Have you ever let your logical side squelch your creativity? Were you able to let the creative side out? How did you do it?

This winter we’ve discovered more to like about this new house: When the leaves are gone, the view is extraordinary. This is what I see every morning:

I thought I was pretty “with it.” After all, I’m a blogger – that’s current. I’m a social media manager – that’s still cutting-edge. I’m on Pinterest and Google+ and LinkedIn and Twitter. I watch YouTube videos. Unfortunately, my kids have led me to understand that I don’t watch ENOUGH YouTube videos. Of course, in comparison to the hours that they can spend on YouTube, I look like a slacker. (Unless you define slacker as someone who DOES watch a lot of YouTube. But then you’re not my kids.)

Lucky for me, I have teen/tween kids to educate me on the wonders of YouTube. And in the interest of public service, I feel that I must pass this knowledge on to you, my reader. I hope it enriches your life as much as it has enriched mine.

Lesson 1: Who the heck is Chuck Testa?

Have you ever heard, “Nope, Chuck Testa”? No? Consider yourself lucky. Every time – and I mean EVERY time – that I say, “Nope,” Hannah follows it with “Chuck Testa.” Fortunately, I now understand what it means. Here’s your first lesson in teenage pop culture (Warning: It’s really stupid. A recurring theme that you will discover in the videos that kids find hilarious.):

Nose tracks. My front windows are covered with nose tracks – dog-height smudges and smears made up of dried slobber and snot. At this moment, two of our dogs are busy creating more. They’re seated in front of my office window, gazing out at the street.

The dogs are waiting for something – anything – to appear in their line of vision, because they believe that if they can see it, it must be invading their territory. Since they can see the neighbors’ yards and the cul-de-sac where cars turn around, this leads to a lot of pointless commotion. And excited smudging of the window glass.

I really need to clean those windows, but the only time it occurs to me, I’m always in the middle of something else – like writing this post. Okay, I COULD get up right now and retrieve the Windex and a paper towel, but you and I both know THAT’s not going to happen.

Oh! So, Hey! How have you been?

Here I am, making an appearance after my self-imposed exile from this blog. Postwise, I skipped right from Halloween to the new year. You might be asking, why did I exile myself? Well, for a while last year, I questioned whether this blog served any purpose. If it was worth spending the time on. I felt that I needed to evaluate what I was writing and why. To figure out whether there was a better use of my time and energy. So around Thanksgiving, I decided to step back. I wanted to take a break from writing here and see if I missed it – if my thoughts still needed a place to land. If my unique perspective on my life needed to be shared.

You know what I learned? Not much. If I’m honest, I’ll admit that I didn’t even miss writing here very much. It took me until about now to even WANT to blog. And I’m still not sure WHY I’m supposed to write about the funny stuff that happens around here. I think I struggle with assigning value to something that’s usually just pure entertainment. (At least I hope it’s entertaining.) How does humor fulfill my purpose? How does art fulfill the Great Commission?

I really don’t know. A friend who’s an artist said that he believed that I should let the fingers write what they want to write. Just put it out there.

So here I am. I’m back. I can’t promise to post daily or anything, but I’m back at my post, like my dogs at the front window. Hopefully not just creating a pointless commotion. Then again, if I am, at least I’ll have fun smudging the glass.

I know Halloween is now far in the past, what with all the Christmas displays up in malls and stores. But for me it feels like just yesterday. That’s probably because I spent November 1-5 in Seattle, WA, for a John Maxwell conference called Exchange. Highlights of that include touring the Boeing plant, visiting Microsoft, and touching a fish during a presentation by the guys from Pike Place Fish Market. Oh, and we ate really well. The one disappointment occurred when a group of us walked from our hotel to the Space Needle, only to arrive and find that it had closed just five minutes before we got there. I can now say I’ve “been” to the Space Needle – and attest that the gift shop was quite scenic.

Anyway, back to Halloween. This was the first year that we didn’t get together with our good friends Barry and Casey. In the past, we always trick-or-treated together in their neighborhood. This year, we had this (ultimately misguided) notion of visiting the houses in our VERY OWN NEIGHBORHOOD. (This is the first time we’ve lived in a neighborhood for a decade.)

We planned for Hannah to trick-or-treat with her friend C, and for me and Abby to visit our subdivision and then drive to another to get more loot. Charlie and LC would stay home to hand out (and munch on) candy.

Both girls wanted to be zombies, so their costumes were just ripped up dirty clothes. Easy enough. And then Charlie did their zombie makeup. He says that at one time a long time ago, he thought of becoming a special-effects makeup artist:

The girls were impressed and happy with their icky scars and pale complexions. They demonstrated their satisfaction by trying to eat their Daddy’s brains:

Unfortunately, trick-or-treating didn’t go quite as well. At dusk, Abby and I ventured out the front door to our neighbors’ houses. One problem: Not a single porch light in the whole subdivision was on. And everyone appeared to be completely gone. Gah. It was a ghost town. Not a single trick-or-treater in sight either. Which meant that the FOUR BIG BAGS of candy I’d bought were being steadily consumed by the two Charlies.

By now Abby was moping and wishing that she had just trick-or-treated with her friend Matt like last year. Fortunately, I’d made a call earlier to a classmate to see if we could visit her neighborhood, and she called me back just before we gave up in ours.

The evening began to look better when we discovered that Abby’s friend K lives in a townhome community. Where there are lots of kids. And everyone expects trick-or-treaters. WIN. We came home with a sackful of loot.

Poor Hannah didn’t fare as well. They got started late and only gathered a handful of candy before it was time for her to come home.

(It was weird to say, “Be home by 9:30.” I hadn’t expected the Curfew Phase to come so early with her. She’s only 12!)

Luckily, the two Charlies hadn’t had enough time to plow through all FOUR bags, so Hannah was able to raid our stash. All went well. And we were actually able to remove the girls’ makeup before bed.

I was all, “So how DO you remove theatre makeup anyway?” Charlie answered, “The usual way. With cold cream.” “COLD CREAM?? Who has COLD CREAM anymore?!” That’s what I thought. What I said was, “I hope that the makeup remover wipes work.” (They did.)

What’s the moral of the story? When you buy four bags of candy, and add in what your kids gather on Halloween night, it’s a very good idea to have a five-day trip planned the next day, so that all that’s left when you get home is a handful of Skittles and Dum-Dum lollipops.

Waving in the wind
In layers of color, leaves
Shift and fall to earth

Today is a rather blustery day. The wind, cold from the north, swept in on the heels of yesterday’s rain. I turned on the heater for the first time this morning. The kids all willingly wore their jackets to school. I think it’s finally time to say that fall is here.

I’m enjoying the changing view outside the windows of this new house. When we moved in June, the view from our back windows was like that of a treehouse. The leaves on the trees between us and the lake were so thick during summer that we were able to see only a sliver of lake near the shoreline. Now, every day the leaves drop a little more, and the blue of the water seeps through a curtain of red and gold.

This time of year holds so many memories for me. For one thing, in 1997 and 1999, at this point in October I was tremendously, uncomfortably pregnant. When I went into the hospital LC on the 25^th and then Hannah on the 26^th, the leaves on the trees were in the early stages of changing – like now. When I exited a few days later, it seemed that they had undergone a huge shift and were ablaze with color.

So now, every year since then, the change in the leaves has meant birthdays were coming. And with Abby’s birthday in November, late October launches a busy season that doesn’t let up until New Year’s Day. Oddly, as lazy as I am, I love the busyness. Planning birthday parties and trick-or-treating, and looking ahead to Thanksgiving and Christmas, I feel swept along on a wave of celebration.

And today? Today holds ordinary tasks, like laundry and blog post editing. Nothing celebratory. But the colors and temperature give a hint of the party to come, and I find myself excited about the weeks to come.

So over the weekend, I made another recipe for pumpkin bread, and it was also delicious and cake-like. Unfortunately, it also totally fell in the oven. I haven’t baked something that could fall in, like, EVER. So it was a surprise. Let’s just say that it was a little DENSER than it was probably supposed to be.

And here’s something I discovered yesterday: Apparently, I’m very predictable at this time of year. Last week, I wrote about pumpkin. Last November, I also wrote a post on the wonderfulness of pumpkin. Take a look: Pontificating on the power of pumpkin.

Did you notice that in the year-old post …

a)    I described my love for all things pumpkin,

b)   I referenced my need to get used to pumpkin spice lattes every year, and

c)    I shared a recipe?

Pay extra close attention to the submitter of the recipe. Yes. It’s Delora Lucas. Again. What this means is that I posted the same recipe two different times, almost a year apart. Unintentionally. I could’ve saved a lot of time if I’d just read my archives.

What other evidence is needed to prove my forgetfulness? Next year, I really need someone to call me in September and remind me about my favorite vegetable and recipe. Otherwise, I predict a repeat of this year. And last year.