Sunnyview... the name of a real one-room schoolhouse my parents attended as children, it is now our homeschool name and, on good days, our outlook on life. Welcome!
2013. Some people say Twenty-Thirteen; others say Two-Thousand-Thirteen. However you say it, though, it's nearly over. It has been a year of… I guess I could almost say stagnation. I had the best of intentions with regards to writing a novel and/or working through my list of 100 classics and must-read books and/or learning German, but those ideas all seemed to get shoved to the side somehow or other. I planted a few things in the garden, but nothing really grew very well. I have educated the kids, but there has been little passion on either side. We didn't take any family vacations. I took my one-woman road trip in early November, but that was the extent of travel this year. The kids are more or less burned out on local museums, so I think we only visited the zoo three or four times and the aquarium once, and other museums not at all. I took a photography class. We bought a new-to-us car. We put in a fire pit. I painted the school room and the kids' bathroom. Those were the biggies.
Like I said, stagnation.
Still, even with stagnation, it can be nice to look back. Something I've done throughout the year is step out the back door (nearly) each morning and take a snapshot of the back yard. I've put all the photos - all 258 of them - into a slideshow. It's amazing how quickly time can slip by. This is a year, compressed into a little more than six minutes. It doesn't seem like much has happened, but that's my fault. Things have happened around me this year; I haven't made anything happen at all. I think 2014 will be very different, a trip to Australia and kids going to public school notwithstanding. And that's a good thing. It's time to step back and take charge of my life.
