Today’s Daily Prompt from WordPress is State of Your Year.  I thought I would give a pictorial and little verbal narrative of my year so far.  Overall it has been a fantastic year and it is only getting better by the day.

In early January I wrote what I consider one of my best responses to the Daily Prompt.  You can read it here, Audience of One.

Be gentle with yourself and have fun.  I won’t ever tell you that you are unworthy of being in one of my challenges and that your photos are bad.  We all started somewhere and I adore seeing people find their niche in photography.  It’s fun to watch people grow and learn and become more aware of themselves and become confident.

First month or so of the year I was enjoying my new Sony a7ii full frame camera.  Here is a shot I took in January of a farm close to town.

Sometime in this time frame I took a nasty fall in our dining room.  I only got bruised on my knee where I fell, no broken bones or stretched out tendons.  Chris and I stayed fairly close to home and didn’t really do too much.  We just enjoyed a warm winter and early spring.  Once our flowers started blooming, I could stay in my own yard and get some beautiful photos.  Here is one of my daffodils.

I was also lucky enough to have a photo of mine used in Stacy’s One Photo Focus Challenge.  This is a challenge where about 20-25 people edit the same photo.  This is what I did for my final edit.

The highlight in March and April was the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival.

Unfortunately we didn’t make it back down to the tulip festival, which we had planned on, because our heater and air conditioner broke and needed to be replaced.  This happened during a three week cold snap.  Our weather turned colder than average and we stayed bundled up with our wood stove burning to keep us warm.  The smoke from our wood stove, which really isn’t bad for an evening fire here and there, made my lungs burn and breathing became difficult for me.  Left over damage from Lyme Disease that I had.  So we ended up keeping our house cooler than normal and using space heaters when it got to cold we did use our wood stove.  Result was in the two weeks it took to replace it, my core body temperature got down to 95 degrees.  So it took a little while to recoup from that.  Although I was so thrilled with how fast I snapped back from that experience.

During this time, Chris had a nasty fall outside in the rain one day.  She was pretty bruised up, but once again there were no bones or tendon damage.

Then in April we went to Seattle.  I’m sure most of you remember my post about our adventures.  We are now kind of looking forward to going back someday and finding out better ways getting around Seattle.  Here is a photo of a mural in Seattle.

I was fortunate enough to get in contact with an old friend of mine from 30 years ago.  We are finding out that we still have a lot in common.  She has a daughter who lives in Portland and another one who lives in Seattle.  My friend, Sue, lives near Rena, Nevada.  I met here when I was in my early twenties and we both lived in Colorado then.  So we are having fun catching up on our lives.  She grows, shows and sells bearded irises.  So we have flowers and photography in common.  That is exciting.

And of course I still have my qigong classes which are going real well.  I’m actually starting to feel healthy and mobile enough to do some routines.  Especially those that I can adapt to sitting for the most part.

It’s been a great year and getting better all the time.  Life is wonderful and full adventure.  Here is another photo of the iris gardens from this weekend’s trip.

Qi (energy) hugs

Cee