Noury's Creative World…

Have you noticed that fruits and vegetables do not need a label with ingredients, % of this or % of that?  The only ingredients are, oxygen, water, and sunlight.  A magic brew and voila, the miracle of nature and our Creator.  The best color coordination and best tasting nature has to offer.

Cutting this cantaloupe and pear made me think of this.  Don’t even have to look at any label when you buy them.  Very simple.  Why couldn’t we just consume more of these goodies, instead of those you know what, those things.   I really could not come up with a name to describe “le garbage” we are bringing home when we go shopping for groceries.  I think I already did a posting on this issue.  But just looking around us we can see we are going down baby, we don’t need anyone from outside our frontiers to come and do us in.  We are happily eating ourselves to the road of no return.  And the curious thing, no one likes to talk about it.  We just go on happily eating and drinking and buying larger sizes.  Super size me!

Have you noticed how sizes are getting bigger?  What about the furniture?  One thing I noticed in Paris is that the chairs in the restaurants are very petite.  Even to get in and out of your seat, you have to pull the table, so you can maneuver out.  Spaces are very small and you are very close to each other.  The French paradox.  They eat a lot of creams and  butter.   This butter is just heavenly. I remember I was eating the butter by itself thinking it was cheese and Milagros told me it was butter.  That’s how good it is.  Going back, they, the French people do very happily eat and accompany their meals with plenty wine and good conversation.  There’s a grace to do that.  Here, most of the time we just get drunk and the faster we eat, the better.  Not such a good thing.

Going back to the paradox, maybe alcohol burns the fat on the way out of our systems.  Who knows.  I am not recommending use of alcohol.  Remember, alcohol burns your brain cells.  Not too many neurons to go around for me.  But that’s where the paradox resides.

One thing is for sure, and my friends, I am including myself in this constant and eternal battle, natural ingredients are so much better than those names we cannot pronounce.  They should create a country for just those little names.   Conspiracy theory working full-time here.  They give the garbage we are ingesting those names, so we don’t feel we really know what the hell we are sending down our pipes.

Only natural ingredients are better than those monos, saturated, artificial anything and you know what I mean.  Every time we are contemplating putting something in our petite mouths, let’s think–look for other alternatives.  If none is available, water is a good filler upper.

When I was working on this posting I heard a tweet from a bird and it sounded as if the bird was inside the house.  I looked to the upper glass part of my door, and there was this tiny bird serenading me with a beautiful melody.  This was my best attempt to capture this memorable moment.  Nature at its best.  It never fails.

So it was today…23 June, 2011…a day of contemplating how we should become more of one with nature.  Have the loveliest of weekends.  See you Monday!

Your Happy Contessa

“Can we ever have too much of a good thing?”  Miguel De Cervantes, Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright.  Don Quijote de la Mancha.  9 October, 1547 – 23 April, 1616.

I bought this fried (yes, I know…not so good for my precious arteries) piece of chicken breast, to shred it and insert it in my delicious soon to be lunch salad.  But, surprise!  the piece of meat looked so diminutive that I was kind of disappointed.  I even surprised myself at my reaction.  You know how greedy we humanoids have become.  Bigger everything, including the problems and stress.  Bigger is better and give it to me as fast as you can.

After a few seconds of surprising myself, I thought…always thinking.  Sometimes I even get tired to thinking so much.  But I don’t have anybody else to talk with about my little brain waves of thinking, so thinking in complete silence is.  Now, going back to my forever thinking…maybe this “smart” chicken knew what was being fed to the rest of the population and she decided she was not having any of it and decided to pass the hormone du jour.  As a result, I got the only chicken piece in the whole lot that was leaving very few carbon footprints.  That thought made me kind of content.  Notice I said content, not happy.  Usually a chicken breast lasts me for two meals.  This one is already gone with lunch.  Hormones or no hormones…that was my question.  Hopefully that “smart” chick had a very happy life.  I bet there was not a shred of bad fat in her trim body.

I amaze myself at how I can take a piece of chicken and do a whole posting.  There’s so much in the universe to talk about, look about and nonsense about.  But no one can complain about the muses being totally MIA, I can suffice by myself.  That’s very empowering.  294 words.  That’s a decent posting.

Oh yes, look at my daily salad.  When I read about the issue with veggies that was going on in Europe the past few weeks, you don’t want to know how panicked I was.  I thought…there goes my intent on being healthy and keeping somewhat fit to get into my skinny jeans.  Even thought it is too hot now for jeans.  Do they make skinny shorts.  Oops!  Legs are not that great looking at 62 seasons and the 63rd approaching pretty soon.

Yes, I do take the skin out, with all that good tasting greasy layers of skin.  Only God knows how old is the oil they use to fry that stuff.  You can smell the grease miles away.  Sooo good!  It is better not to think too much when trying to eat anything.  It takes your appetite away.

Bon apetit!

So it was today…22 June, 2011…a day of ingesting my monthly dose of recycled old lard…and pretending I don’t know anything about how good it is for me.

Your Happy Contessa

“Honey, I’m your cook, not your doctor.”  Paula Deen when asked if all that fat she cooks with is good for you.

Sometimes even the best planned events or occasions in our lives can be met with one challenge or another.  I am in the initial stages of moving to another place, where I think…remember this…I think the grass will be greener.  But  also realize that greener grass takes a lot of fertilizer, lots of water, even more now that we are in the middle of this blazing summer.

There is a lot of smoke outside right now, but the local tv station, which  I think originates in another planet, is saying nada about it.  I think they even pre-record the weather forecast.  Here I go again…side tracking…

Yes, a lot of water, fertilizer, and a lot of effort to have that Nirvana looking grass.  I have made a deal with my ego self.  I am not contemplating this move to be my answer to find happiness,  there’s that word again, but an opportunity to make meaning and write some different experiences in the book of what I call my life.  No too high expectations, no big disappointments.  Life is better when we open up to the possibilities of what the days, what the people that surround us, may decide to gift us with.  What we do with whatever is handed to us is what really matters.  And as Miss Raylene and I decided this morning, we are going to get some pink shaded sunglasses and use them to see everything that touches our lives.  Pink, light, and pretty.  No ugliness, no problems.

As my lovely and brilliant daughter would  say, life is like an equation, all you have to worry about is finding that missing factor.  And that’s where the excitement and fun begins.  Always look at challenges as an adventure to find out where this thing is taking us.  Whatever that is.  It will show us how resilient and persistent we really are.

So it was today…21 June, 2011…the day of the year with the longest hours of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, and the day of the year with the shortest hours of sunlight in the Southern Hemisphere.  Opposites.   So that means, that tomorrow the countdown starts second by second of eliminating sunlight from our days.  What a conundrum of a mind I have.  I love the hot weather, and how can I even be thinking about cold weather.  Better stop it right now.

Your Happy Contessa

“Make everything about you and your life elegant and special.”  Me

This was a quote from an article in this morning’s paper describing this generous-to- humanity woman who has gone on to her next journey.

Just like that bumble bee I captured this morning on a Rose of Sharon.  There she was, Miss cute bumble bee going about her business of doing her part in the very elaborate and complex development of what we call the food chain.  Nothing is unimportant in life.  She did not mind that I was trying to capture the moment, she just went on because today was probably a very busy and hot day.

There are so many things going on all around us and most of the time are so oblivious of the importance of some of these happenings.  I am training myself to be more alert and listen to the birds’ singing their beautiful tunes in the morning, to the sights of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny this morning, first noticed by Miss Raylene, and I tried to take a few photos, to later realized I had my fantastic cheap camera on the close-up default, so the visit of these precious creatures was captured very fuzzy.  But at least they are in the vault of our nice memories.

Let’s not underestimate the preciousness of the moment, the inhabitants of our surroundings that work so hard to make life beautiful and worth the presence of our existence on our beautiful planet Earth.

So it was today…20 June, 2011, a day visiting with Miss Bumble Bee and the Bunnies family, and pondering on the making of something out of nothing.

Your Happy Contessa

“Time is a sort of river of passing events.”  Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, philosopher.  26 April, 121 – 17 March, 180.

In my last posting I came across as being a tad depressed.  We must remember about the Harvard “expert” in happiness that stated that if you don’t have any lows in life, you are either a psychopath or you are dead.  So I decided in my last posting to take my dose of low for the month.  I am still breathing and being a psychopath is not a choice for happiness.  Those people are plain scary.  I remember in my soap “India” there was one, Yvonne, she was heartless, and even at the end of the story, she came out smelling real good.  Where were we?

Ahhhhhhh, the title of the posting.  I was feeling groovy and grateful this morning, and thought that I do have a beautiful life.  I have chosen to remember only the goodness of everything that has happened to me in my 62 seasons (there is a wasp trying to get in my house right now), and I am very appreciative of everyone that decided to show up in my life and even though the circumstances sometimes were not of my approval, looking back, they have become part of the great person I am today.  The tapestry of my beautiful life.  There are so many stories, characters, episodes, chapters, sentences, beautiful pictures, beautiful scenes, challenging moments, very frustrating and angry paragraphs in the pages of the whole book of my life, but that’s what they are, only paragraphs or sentences.

I have to remember to be kind and gentle to myself, not to live up to anyone’s expectation, because after all, we are all going through one thing or another, and also, not to be constantly comparing myself to anybody else.  I do not recall anyone having met God yet.  So if we live trying to meet anyone, and I mean anyone’s expectation,  that’s the best set up for failure one can have.

I feel good, grateful and I am looking forward to whatever is in storage in the next page of my life.  One thing for sure, I am going to make my darndest best to make it beautiful.

Life is too short not to make it pretty and beautiful.

So it was today…19th June, 2011…a day of remembering how beautiful we can make our lives to be.

Your Happy Contessa

“…And I hope to make meaning… with what I have left of my life”  A 64-year-old woman with early stages of Alzheimer disease.

Ok.  This is an update to let y’all know that I am not depressed right now.  The post below was the drama queen in me that came out to express herself.  Read with lots of sugar and honey in your intelligent minds.  Thank you!

Life is like a box of chocolate, someone said in a movie.  I would say, life is like playing a peek-a-boo game.  Now you see it, whatever that is, and now you don’t.

And I think it is better that way.  There’s only so much we are capable of handling before getting upset, stressed out, or plain with “la depre,” (depression in Spanish).  It sounds better, not so heavy.

The wells where my tears are produced are so dried, that even if I tried, only air will come out.  That’s funny.  Even I am laughing about it.  It is either laugh, or cry, and remember, no tear production on this face.  So, laughing is going to be.

But laugh about what.  That my brain is so fried right now, that I cannot think of anything to post about and this is something pretty laughable.  I am going to see up to where my imagination takes me and I am curious to see how many words I can type, saying much, much about really nothing.  Hang in there with me.  This is one of these days where anything goes and the light bulb refuses to light up my path.  One hundred ninety-seven words, oops, now two hundred.  It is getting much better.  Not for you, dear reader, but for me this is great.  Words are being produced in abundance.

This post is so important.  Hopefully it will make us realize that it is better to keep our mouths shut sometimes than open it and just let baloney out.  This is the case, my dear Watson.  Wow!  Two hundred and seventy words.  I think I am going to quit while I am ahead and still in a good mood.

Sorry I don’t have anything bright, witty, or earth-shaking to discuss today.  And to think that this is going to be my weekend posting.  My new-found readers are going to think that I am full of air.  Right now that is the case.  Hopefully the weekend will re-energize my neurons and some new muses may feel I deserve a chance for redemption.

So it was today…16 June, 2011…a day I wrote much about fluffy air just before turning the computer off.  Three hundred seventy-seven words.  More or less.

May you have a very happy and fulfilling weekend.  See you next Monday!

Your Happy Contessa

“When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”  Joseph Campbell, American mythologist, writer and lecturer.  26 March, 1904 – 30 October, 1987.

A studio.  Yes, that’s what I am considering right now.  Going from 1,500 sq ft to 512 sq ft.  My nerves are hitting the ceiling of my second floor.  I need to continue getting rid of so much stuff.

Most of my beloved books.  But my train of thought is if I were to,  you know…go to heaven right now (I don’t believe on the hot one down below), by the way, where in the world is hell?, my daughter will be donating all 99% of my books to the library, so why not to do it myself, and see the happiness on the librarians’ faces.  Good tax help come April 2012.  2012…earth as we know it is supposed to disintegrate according to the Mayan calendar.  Another posting.  So much to write about…so little time and brain limitation.  Mine.

These are some of the favors my local library will be receiving come tomorrow.  Good books.  But I have come to accept the fact that if I hold on to things, I am believing that there is no abundance in the universe.  And I know by experience that abundance and blessings are out there just for the asking.

Bags and bags of treasures…to keep recycling…just like life itself.  Nothing really belongs to us, we just borrow things and keep them moving along when we depart from the planet.

Today I am keeping it slightly short.  Back is complaining.  62 seasons of moving, stretching, bending, extending and having too much fun.  Pay now or later.  I am always paying it seems.  Thanks goodness for ibuprofen.  Have to be careful with that stuff.  Liver, especially at my 62 maracas is kind of sensitive and temperamental with any kind of medication or man-invented stuff.

Again, let me try to say auf wiedersehen…goodbye in German.  When you say it,  sounds prettier.

So it was today…15 June, 2011…a day of letting go to open the windows of heaven to receive new blessings.

Your Happy Contessa

“Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does.”  Epictetus, Greek sage and philosopher.  AD 55 – AD 135.

This morning during our daily walk, Miss Raylene and I were talking about issues we are dealing in today’s world that made us revisit what we stood for during our “rebellious days.”

It made me ponder about what really do I stand for today.  Right now, I have taken a leave of absence, except for stressing in my community the utmost importance of helping your local public library.  I believe libraries are the foundation of a community.  No library, no enlightenment and almost non-existent progress with the social issues.  In conclusion, no progress in our lives.  Each individual is in a way a reflection of the community they live in.  We cannot continue living in the darkness and ignoring the issues affecting us and the rest of the world.

I remember this ocassion…the community where my husband and I had our business was not having a 4th of July celebration in 1997, due to budget constraints.  I decided that I was going to do something, because it was going to be my first Independence Day celebration as an American citizen.  To make the long story short, I went to the City Council to get approval for a small ceremony, on the steps of City Hall,  including the reading of the Declaration of Independence, which my beautiful daughter did,  and the singing of some patriotic songs.  To recap, it was a very successful celebration, even had the Fire Department show up with a beautiful truck with flags, we had a lady sing our National Anthem and all in all, my first Independence Day as an American Citizen was memorable for me and a few others.  Needless to say, from that day on, the community has not skipped an Independence Day celebration.  It is not what we say, it is what we do that speaks volumes louder.

I have been watching some videos related to social issues.  They make me feel sad that in a way, I am not a contributor right now to the progress of humanity in our search for a better world.  There must always be a continuous search to become a better group of people as a whole.  As Susan B. Anthony used to say during her battle to get women in the United States the privilege of casting a vote…”Failure is impossible.”

I need to find a cause to devote my time and my passion to help in the search to eliminate social injustice.  How am I going to do it?  I need to search and charge on.  Age must not be a determining factor in getting too comfortable and think that those duties of contributing  are just for younger generations.  Our problems are our problems.  They do not have gender, age or nationality.  We are in this together for better or better.  No space for negativity here.

So it was today…14 June, 2011…a day to ponder of becoming an active member of society once again.  The choices are endless.

Your Happy Contessa

“To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  This is to have succeeded.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, lecturer and poet.  Led the Transcendentalist Movement of Mid-19th Century.  25 May, 1803 – 27 April, 1882.

You know how my mind works…or doesn’t work.  I was really desperate in trying to come up with something to write about.  So I thought, why not continue with my saga about moving, packing, patching holes on the wall, donating galore of books to the local library with a heavy heart.  I love my books!  Things are going pretty smooth, but no place to live as of right now.  The Creator in charge of the universe is in charge here.  I have totally placed my situation in his hands, but I better get my derriere going, or it is not going to happen.

Moving a-la-French?  I don’t know what made me think of that.  Just a flying thought and I was immediately pondering; do you think the people in France (chic ones may I say) have a different way of packing?  More sophisticated, prettier?  Sometimes I feel a tad in a hurry and feel like just taking everything, and I mean everything to the Salvation Army.  Going back to Vive la France.  Do they sing beautiful songs, put some flowers on the table while doing the tedious chore of wrapping and re-wrapping things.  Maybe some wine to chill the process.  I am still catching up from last year’s newspaper that I had saved, and find some articles somewhat interesting.  Looking back, some things make a lot of sense or now they look plain idiotic.

This is me burning the mid-afternoon oil, trying to think of something to communicate with y’all.  It is working, typing and typing things that show what an incredible and lazy imagination I possess.  Fingers just keep on moving and word counter is showing a decent number.  Have to keep the word counter somewhat happy.  It is getting harder and harder, because I am physically exhausted and the neurons do not, I repeat, refuse to multi-task and go on strike if I push them to do just that.

Did you notice the boxes, and how far I am from your view?  I took this picture on purpose just like that to show you the incredible sacrifice I make to get the presses rolling to produce this nano-blog.  351 words as of now, is not such a nano thing.

I will stop blabbing right now.  I think you are getting my drift by now.  Hopefully things will get better.  By the way, the lily at the beginning of the posting is a picture taken this morning during my walk from Miss Kim’s garden.

So it was today…13 June, 2011, a day to ponder how the French people manage their moving from one place to another and pushing my imagination to its limit.

Your Happy Contessa

“A bientot.”  See you soon in, what else, French.

Well…it may depend on how old you are, what your situation is and one or two additional variants.

For me today it was my two tool boxes.  Time to start filling holes on the wall, sanding the compound mix after it was totally dried, and then painting over the whole production piece.  Has to be left as if there was nothing hanging on that space.

Today I was the repair-holes and paint-it- surgeon.  Have to go with gusto and face whatever it is you are supposed to do.  Yesterday, a trip to the Salvation Army and donated a whole bunch of stuff.  Another Christmas tree.  Didn’t like it too much after I purchased it last December.  The car was packed to the ceiling and when I was approaching the building, around 25 miles from where I live, I realized I forgot my list of items to be donated. It was hot, no makeup, no me.  I just jumped in the car after loading it and planning to go on Monday, but on the spot I decided to just go right there.  Not such a good thing.  Thanks God for my sunglasses.  I pretended I even didn’t know myself.  That’s how bad I looked.  But mission accomplished.  We worked out something of a receipt so when I go back next week, I will take my old list and the nice lady, Joyce, will stamp it.

Stuff for this, stuff for that.  That’s what we are…something full of stuff.  In a way, sometimes we let stuff define us.  But whenever I get too attached to something, I just think about the tornado victims, and right there, I can very freely let things go.  The flip side of having too much stuff is that you become a slave of it.  It possesses you and suffocates you.  That’s how I feel sometimes, and I don’t have a lot of…stuff.

Now, if you allow me I have to go and pack my two daily boxes of…stuff, :), so I can get ready for the moving van.  When is that going to happen…I don’t know.

So it was today, 12 June, 2011…a day to pack unimportant stuff in the bigger scheme of my life.

Your Happy Contessa

“How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.”  Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, French fashion designer whose modernist approach to design made her an important figure in 20th Century fashion world.  19 August, 1883-10 January, 1971.