Whining, Japanese Beetles, God & Paint Therapy

Some periods of life are just hard. Hard.  Can't get around them, have to make it through somehow.  Hard.  We're going through one of those.  Long and hard.  I thought our northern house would have sold by now, so now I am hours away from my husband (and grandbaby!) babysitting our Victorian house.  He is job hunting in the new location and I have put almost all my money-making "junking" ventures on hold during this transition.  Which means we are cash poor.

Nope, I am not done whining...  The temps and humidity this summer (since June!) make it feel like 100 degrees almost every stinking day.  Our northern house hasn't seen any rain in weeks.  Lots of grass is dead, some trees looking bad, and I am watering almost every morning.  I have started to collect "gray water" during the day to water potted plants.  So I was watering this morning and I noticed Japanese beetles eating my crabapple tree (probably the photo "frame" of flowers you are looking at on my blog right now is a photo of blooms from that tree).  Japanese beetles.  Argh.  So gross.  So discouraging.

 Must go to Home Depot and spend money on JB traps.  (I think God had a plan). I picked up two, and wandered to the paint department.  I had kind of been thinking about painting our china cabinet.  We bought it back around 1986 from a little old lady whose husband had made it for her.  We paid $75, which was a lot of money for us.  I was thinking that for our Ozark house I wanted something older and more primitive to put dishes in, but frankly that is not in the budget right now.   So I was perusing the paint samples, and found a lovely shade of gold by Behr -- Romanesque Gold.  I pulled the trigger and bought a quart.

I dragged the china cabinet on the back porch, did a "primer coat" with a white chalk paint.  Then a coat of the gold with a little of the white chalk paint added (to kind of layer colors.)  And then a coat of the straight gold.  During these three coats my nerves began to calm.  I began to count my blessings, and remember the joy and peace God grants me while I paint.  God is teaching me all sorts of lessons during this season of my life, and sometimes I lose sight of that.  It is EASY to see the hard, and much tougher to see the good.

I have a few more stages left before I finish the china cabinet (stay tuned), but today was a good start. And I am feeling better. By the way, the vicinity of the beetle traps looks like a Alfred Hitchcock horror movie "The Beetles"-- apparently the bait really does work.