Houseplants

Last night I noticed that a couple of our houseplants were looking a tad dusty. Being as we're emerging from a long, cold winter (with concurrent construction behind our house), I find we have to vacuum, sweep the floor, and dust much more often than normal.  The only other place I've ever had to do this upkeep as constantly was when we lived in arid Utah. Nate loves to use the spray bottle, so I figured I could enlist his help to give our adored plants a little spray.

We have houseplants in each of the eight rooms in our house. All of the plants have either been saved from the nursery clearance racks or are cuttings transplanted from the original plant. At any given time we usually have a few cuttings lined up on our kitchen sink windowsill. I think we have plenty of room for even more.

I gathered the smaller downstairs houseplants and placed them on the floor of our kitchen. After a long, gray winter, all these plants clustered together was a beautiful sight to behold.

Though I do prefer cooler weather over hot weather, I was growing a bit weary with not being able to at least open the windows for fresh air.  So it was such a reprieve to open the windows for a bit this afternoon as we almost reached 50 degrees. It is especially nice to read next to an open window. Here are a few of the current books Andy and I are reading: Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson (me), Consilience by E.O. Wilson (Andy), and collected stories by Jorge Luis Borges.  Though neither of us have a tremendous amount of time to read these days, but we both try to allot a little time here and there as we can. 

It's March

It has been so long since I've written here! It has been on my mind to get back into the groove of taking the time to be here, but it just hasn't happened until now. It's not that things have been busier than normal (at least not for me- Andy has been incredibly busy with his new job at Ohio State and coaching lacrosse, so our time with him these days is super precious).

I think it stems from a mutual agreement on the part of my husband and I to limit portions of our time spent online; we quit Facebook altogether a few months ago, and frankly, neither of us miss it one bit.  There may be a chance he and/or I will return one day, but we'll approach it very differently; in the pursuit of valuing our time in general, we will probably remove most of the contacts on our "friends" list. In the past, both of us had temporarily put the brakes on using the site, but this post inspired me to really think about what we do online, and with whom we share what personal information. Andy isn't nearly as private a person as I am, but he values authentic connections every bit as much as I do. It truly has no reflection on the associations of people that we had on that particular form of social networking- it is simply a reflection of how we choose to spend our time and where we choose to focus our energies deliberately (and without as much noise).

I am not sure how I'll continue to use this space. I'd like to think that, at the very least, I'll use it once in awhile to express myself when the mood strikes.

And, naturally, I love the quote at the bottom of Leo's page on why he quit Facebook.