I can't imagine what my life would have been like had I not had the great experience of being raised by Dick Clark...LOL.  Seriously, best damn thing that ever happened to me.  You sir, will be missed. 

I would be remiss in my duties as a mother if I didn't advise you all that Little Monkey won South Dakota State Female Cub Recurve divison.  YEAH!  This weekend she takes a crack at NFAA Indoor National Championships.  Cross your collective fingers!

Hey guys!  I wanted to make sure that you knew where to find me on the web:

Pinterest

Twitter

Tumblr

Let me know in the comments what yours are if I am not following you so I can!  I hope you have a great week!

She isn't so little any more...that is my monkey with Andre Agassi.  She went with her JOAD archery team to compete in the NFAA World Archery Festival in Las Vegas where she got the privilege of working as a runner and meeting Andre Agassi who was there to hand out the awards.  Andre is a longtime supporter of children's sports and educational opportunities so it was a great feeling to know my monkey had such a great opportunity.  He signed her arrow quiver so she carries that with her every day.  If she has just one tenth the dedication he did on the tennis court, I am sure she will be doing great things!  To top off her fabulous week, she placed 3rd in her division!  YEAH monkey!

Hey guys!  Here is my new project.  My husband has long been a fan of Giles Kristian books and they are REALLY hard to come by in the US.  Luckily, he is working on a deal to publish here in the Fall but I suggest you get on these NOW!  This is what I am reading first and I will let you know what I think about it shortly!

Interested?  There is still time to JOIN me!  Check out details here and let me know if you are in!  :)

Onward!

Really, I am so awesome, why wouldn't you?  :)

Peace and Chicken Grease,

Michelle

In preparation to post my new resolutions, I found this from earlier and admit that the last few months; I managed to accomplish NONE of what was left for me on the list HERE.  I guess I will add those things to my running list for this year and get busy.  What I DID manage to do in the later part of the year is this:

Last part of 2011:

Learned to make pasta from scratch

Relocated Middle Monkey to college out of state

Submitted writing to several literary competitions

Began writing pieces for www.almostnerdy.com and www.examiner.com

Relocated to an uber-tiny town in South Dakota

Completed another semester of graduate school

Started another Nano but did not finish, however have a good start on a second novel now

Road tripped through and have visited now, SIX new states that I had not been to yet

Made new friends

Watched Little Monkey become a super awesome junior archer

Started and maintain TWO Tumblr accounts, one as a graduate school project and one as a personal design/DIY blog

Began to load my children’s stories on Amazon

My intentions for 2012:

I will learn to sew

I will learn basic cake decoration

I will visit Machu Picchu

I will further my study of meditation

I will complete my second NANOWRIMO

(all of these left from the end of last year)

I will learn to cross country ski

I will learn to snow board

I will learn to ice skate without falling down

I will learn to shoot skeet

Skydive

Read more each week

Load more stories for sale to my Amazon author account

Continue to nurture the amazing relationship that I have with my partner in crime

In preparation to post my new resolutions, I found this from earlier and admit that the last few months; I managed to accomplish NONE of what was left for me on the list HERE.  I guess I will add those things to my running list for this year and get busy.  What I DID manage to do in the later part of the year is this:

Last part of 2011:

Learned to make pasta from scratch

Relocated Middle Monkey to college out of state

Submitted writing to several literary competitions

Began writing pieces for www.almostnerdy.com and www.examiner.com

Relocated to an uber-tiny town in South Dakota

Completed another semester of graduate school

Started another Nano but did not finish, however have a good start on a second novel now

Road tripped through and have visited now, SIX new states that I had not been to yet

Made new friends

Watched Little Monkey become a super awesome junior archer

Started and maintain TWO Tumblr accounts, one as a graduate school project and one as a personal design/DIY blog

Began to load my children’s stories on Amazon

My intentions for 2012:

I will learn to sew

I will learn basic cake decoration

I will visit Machu Picchu

I will further my study of meditation

I will complete my second NANOWRIMO

(all of these left from the end of last year)

I will learn to cross country ski

I will learn to snow board

I will learn to ice skate without falling down

I will learn to shoot skeet

Skydive

Read more each week

Load more stories for sale to my Amazon author account

Continue to nurture the amazing relationship that I have with my partner in crime

Bad things happen in life.  As much as we wish they wouldn’t, that is just how it works out.  It is rare (in my opinion at least) that you get through bad stuff and suddenly things are just peachy.  The universe requires relentless processing, analysis and reflection.  I am not sure I have figured out the pros and cons of that yet, but I keep trying.

In 1987, my life was the culmination of a lot of things that happened to me, too young to fully grasp their effect.  I lived in a foreign country as an Army dependent where I had graduated high school the year before.  I felt invisible much of the time, a mess of a person it would take decades to work through.  At this rather inconvenient time, I met a man that altered the course of my life.  He was fun, kind and he loved me in a way I did not understand.  Our relationship was brief but it so etched itself into my soul that I was unable to let it go.  For years we stayed in touch through the births of our first children.  Each time we spoke, I dreamed that he would say “this is it, I am coming to pick you up and we are running away to live happily ever after.”  That didn’t happen.  Ironically, at a time before the ease of internet interactions, our lives both became unbearable sometime after our last conversation but we had no way of knowing.  Distance and drama ensured that we lost contact and those dreams of mine faded away in comparison to the reality of my life.

Skip forward to 2008.  Each of us had fought our battles, his literal in the hills of Afghanistan, mine getting out of a destructive and abusive relationship.  I was world weary, distrustful, broken and tired the night I dropped to my knees in meditation.  I will never forget it.  I opened my heart and asked the universe to point me in the direction of the person I was to spend my life with, the person I was meant to be with.  While I was true and sincere in my request, admittedly, it had a sad tone.  In looking back, I suppose I had accepted that it may be my lot in life to be alone.  I had made relationship decisions up to this point based on what was best for my children, never considering I had a right to happiness independent of them. 

I settled in for what I thought would be a full night of sleep and did the most important thing I could have done for myself…I let it go.  I didn’t worry or think about it again.  I am not sure that any time before, or since really, I can truly say that.  I read a chapter of a book, turned off the lights and drifted off to sleep.  At approximately 4:30 AM on July 6th, 2008, everything changed.  When I say everything changed here, I mean EVERYTHING.  Some 20 years later and a good 15 years since we last spoke, I sat straight up in the bed and completely freaked out.

I had a dream.

I was driving a car to a large park/outdoor space, winding around several corners, headed to a picnic area.  I was clear on where I was headed and why.  He had called me and said he needed my help.  When I arrived at the appointed area, I saw him talking to a friend.  As I got closer, I heard him say:

“You have to understand man, she is the…”

What the hell.  This is when I sat up, before I heard the remainder of the proclamation, now fully awake and completely confused, WAY too early.  My worry gene fully activated, I immediately started trying to figure out why this had come up NOW in my life.  After the longest and most excruciating thirty minutes, I did what any one in 2008 would do, I flipped open my lap top and searched My Space for him.  ::Poof:: there he was.  I stared at his picture for a couple of minutes and the years between then and there evaporated.  He seemed so sad in his new pictures.  Is it possible he really did call out to me?  I sent him a short “hey, how goes it message?” and began an agonizing wait.

Then I wrote this.

Still, I waited.   I knew it was unlikely anyone was up at that hour of the morning so I tried to busy myself with other things.  Much to my surprise he answered with “I was just thinking of you” and that he had saved the above picture all these years.  Later in the day, while checking my email, my UCC daily devotional arrived in my in box with the subject line “Your Prayers Are Answered In Your Dreams.”

I am not making that up.

We talked often after that.  He was in a bad place and struggling for hope and looking for what good could be left for him in life.  Somehow, the universe sought to push us back into each other’s orbit, for better or worse, to work through what was to be.  

In all these years since, I still get butterflies every time I see him.  Each morning we wake at 5 AM and he fixes me coffee.  We talk and share breakfast with our zoo and spend an uninterrupted hour and a half together before the day begins.  His physical problems from being in a war zone are healing; his mental ones will take much longer.  In that respect, we are not too different.

When we are apart, it hurts.  When we are together, he makes me laugh so much that it is painful.  It is funny how life dishes that out.  He has taught me that not everyone will disappoint me eventually.  I hope that I have taught him the importance of listening to the things the universe tries to tell him.  Above all, I hope our lesson to each person we meet is that we teach them to follow their hearts.

Under all those layers of stuff and years of bumps, bruises and scars, it really is trying to tell you something.

I hope the holiday week finds everyone happy and healthy!  It is always difficult to get back on track after having too many days of relaxation so I am hoping to not be that person this year.  I am horribly behind on my NaNoWriMo project due to graduate school work and other writing.  I am going to give it the good ole college try as they say when everyone else gets back to school/work tomorrow.  It's still possible!  (I have to tell myself this lest I admit defeat...I just can't do that.)

Part of one of my graduate school projects over the past few weeks has been the analysis of a 6th grade Social Studies textbook.  While for now I will leave those finding out of this (it is the Texas Edition which translates to conservative bias, enough said) I decided when tasked to "create" a supplement to this chapter I analyzed on US History, instead of going the route of a traditional worksheet, I would create a Tumblr.  This Tumblr has supplemental information to US History, primarily those events that while important, were not important to this textbook to include.  So that it wouldn't be horribly boring to students, it is meant as a multimedia interactive place.  There are documents, audio files, videos and first person accounts of a number of things.  When you click through some, there is additional information to learn, depending how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, on others, there are lesson plans for teachers to aid in teaching that particular lesson in their classrooms.  This is for secondary education but could be adapted in some cases to serve as lessons for elementary age students.  If you are interested in checking it out, click here.

While I had spent zero time on Tumblr other than keeping up with my monkeys away at college, I found that it sent me down a rabbit hole of sorts.  I do a fair amount of my own design and DIY projects, with stacks of magazines, books and pages torn from magazines to show for it.  While I have tried for some time to get a Pinterest set up (any one else having issues getting invites there?) I decided that Tumblr was a great format for this.  In fact, in may ways when reading through the design, interiors and DIY pages, I can easily get lost and time just seems to evaporate.  I am not sure that is a great thing but it is what it is.  If you have any interest in seeing what I think is beautiful or DIY projects I am up to, click here.

I am also begining the upload to Kindle of my series of children's stories (and maybe stuff for grown ups later on).  The first one should appear this week and I believe you can search the Kindle store for "Michelle Simpson" and they should populate there.  This will be in effect for the US Amazon.com site as well as three overseas versions of the site.  Hopefully they find loads of kids everywhere that laugh until their bellies hurt.  Right now there are six stories to be uploaded and then I will be writing more.  I plan to put up the first three this week and add a new one each week for a bit.  At .99 each, I think they are completely worth it! 

I don't know what I will find to do next.  Hopefully something completely awesome.  There is just never enough awesome in the world IMHO. 

Have a great week!  Peace and chicken grease!