Hello Everyone! Look at us! Over 4,600 comments to the last post!!! Impressive, wouldn’t you agree? 💌 So much to celebrate 
today . . . First off, it’s time for our drawing!🎊 Vanna is shuffling around the kitchen, putting Hershey’s chocolate syrup in her coffee (coffee-coffee-buzz-buzz-buzz), I hear the whip cream can fizzing. That girl knows how to start the day! So here we go! Enjoy these last moments of everyone being a winner. My favorite time! MUSICA🎧 
So first let’s do my Pumpkinhead china cup and the Inspiration Notecards! ‘Tis the season! Eeeek. I’m probably more excited than you! Quiver stomach! Heart-throb! Wishing everyone GOOD LUCK!🍀
Vanna is UP, perched on side of my art table, bedroom slippers kicked off, pink-painted toes curled over the edge, 
lime-green rubber body-suit gleaming like snake skin, yellow, daisy-covered swim-cap keeping her red hair in check, she does a high dive into the thousands of names, scissor-kicks to the bottom, round and round, vortex forming, little papers with names spinning up and out, floating and swirling around the room like confetti (and btw, you still have a much better chance of winning than if you played the lottery! Plus no ticket investment. Already a win-win!)👏
So here we go . . . I just pulled a name out of the air, floating right toward me, saying, “Choose Me!” And the lucky winner of this Pumpkinhead cup (and notecards too) is,
PAM LANE❗❗ (the one with the red hair!)
Congratulations Pam! 🎉 I’ll email you so you can send me your address ~ but, as you’ll see later in this blog, we’re going away for a week, (we put FUN on the calendar a few months ago, and here it comes!) ~ I’ll send your cup and notecards first thing when we return.💖
So who will be next? Here we go, this time it’s for the four seasons of cups . . . four English mugs for one lucky winner!
Reaching, reading, and here we go! It’s
KAREN HORRIGAN, a second grade teacher,
Our next winner! Congratulations Karen❗️🍎 I hope you enjoy your cups! I’ll send them in about a week! Say hi to the kids!💓
And next, it’s time to meet the lucky winner of the Martha’s Vineyard cup!
Her name? Another flittering wisp of paper that says:
MARNIE‼️ The Marnie that lives in the Canadian Rockies❗️🇨🇦 (Did you notice how many people commented from foreign countries? Another reason to love the Internet.🌍 We get to connect!)
Congratulations Marnie, I hope you and your girls love it!
❓❓❓❓❓
How about this for planned spontaneity? We celebrated National Read a Book Day on Twitter last week, inspiring me to add just one more giveaway . . .
A book of your choice, signed to either you, or to the person of your choice . . . one of these, or . . .
Or, any of these that I still have! You can choose! I have some hidden away, but not all, so I promise to do my best. You can tell me which one when I email you! And decide who gets it!
PAMELA WELTER❗️❗️ . . . carrot and onion chopper extraordinaire❗️ (I like to clarify WHICH Pamela Welter, just in cases!).
So let’s run away! More escapism! Easiest time of year to do it! We are starting to see colorful leaves in the trees on our morning walk!
Well, we did it, we put fun on our calendar months ago, made plans, got tickets, set dates . . . we’ve been anticipating and TOMORROW is the day!
Tomorrow we leave on the 7 am ferry to go to Boston where we’ll pick up our English friends Rachel and Paul, and off we’ll go for a meandering week falling in love with the NEW England countryside! To undisclosed locations none of us have ever been to! A rented house in a small town we’ve never seen. An Adventure! In the fall!
Old houses, drive-by photography, roadside stands, and perhaps leaves just beginning to turn and drift into the roads . . . crisp air, windows open, music up . . . morning tea around the kitchen table with the newspaper . . .
Staying off the main roads . . .
Finding roots . . .
And filling in the blanks of American history . . . stopping everywhere we want, lunches out, art galleries, a night at the movies with popcorn and Downty! None of us have seen it yet! Seeing this movie with actual English People! You go see it too . . . then we can talk about it next time! Fingers-crossed we love it!
With our dear, long-time, too-far-away friends (in this photo, years back, we’re in Maine), a miracle, when you think of this big earth, that we found each other, thanks to a letter Rachel wrote me when she stumbled on one of my books in England! And yes, I’ll bring home lots of pictures to show you! Running away from normal! This is when I try to slow down time!
If I HAD to break my wrist, I could not have done it at a more perfect time. Monday was exactly eight weeks, the optimum healing time, completed in the nick of time for travel freedom. Although, yes, as you can see, I will be 
bringing the instrument of torture (brace) with me on this trip. I don’t have to wear it, but just in case we decide to climb a mountain, the doctor suggested I bring it along. I’ve been doing my physical therapy and my wrist, and everything connected to it, is SO much better. Every day I can do something I couldn’t before. Like cut an apple in half! I’ve typed all of this so far, and so far, my hand isn’t hurting! Your best-of-luck and prayers did the trick!
On the way home from the doctor, this luv-lee scene was waiting for us at the harbor. Yes, island fairies running ahead, preparing little scenes of beauty! Before I met Joe he was the cook on that schooner. Made forty delicious meals, three times a day, on a wood stove!
Last Friday we had a dinner party for my girlfriend Jaimie . . . it was also the 30th Anniversary of the very day we began moving into our beloved house in 1989.
Here’s the kitchen as it was that first quiet winter, before computers, before blogs . . . with the old fridge that required defrosting! Which I loved and held onto until death us did part. And the old blue linoleum 
floor (you can barely see, for good reason), which we changed to wood. Other than getting a new stove, and changing the hinges, handles, and drawer pulls on cupboards and drawers, it’s all exactly the way we found it! We already had the bird feeders hanging outside those windows, and you can see one of my Beatrix Potter people on the little shelf, Jemima Puddleduck. Making tea in my old heart cup.
This was the dining room as found. My friend Carlton took one look at the house, looked right through that crazy 
turquoise paint and said, “Good bones.” My thoughts exactly. Girl Kitty (the first, from Holly Oak!) was helping me set the table for our first dinner party. Despite the wallpaper. Which clearly (to me) had to go. Thank goodness for candlelight, everything is bearable in candlelight. Anyway . . . one day at a time. . . this was the BEFORE picture . . .
And now, the AFTER. The next people to have this house will probably come in and paint the cupboards turquoise again!
Hello handsome.
Dinner party after dinner party . . . If this dining table could talk! Because this old table was also here when we moved in, and it will stay when we go. Now you know why I love all this old MUSICA I play. This house was made for it. It speaks its language.🎵 This house was built in 1849, only 23 years after John Adams died. It was here before the Civil War. Before Teddy Roosevelt, before cars, before two world wars. Before phones. During the time of letters and the clip clop of horse hooves.
And in between our dinner parties, thirty years of care-taking, we did our job, brought her through the years, all the holidays, filling her with LOVE DNA so she will be wonderful for the next lucky family. Our House of Creativity has become a person.
Only thirty Autumns, seems too few! And look at all the wonderful ways we’ve celebrated it:
Lighting candles on the fireplace mantle for our dinner party . . . flowers from the garden . . .
S L O W D O W N
Don’t forget to put some escapism on YOUR calendar.🍂 The littlest thing keeps us looking forward!🍁 Hope you all have a wonderful day!💞 
did until I lost it. Besides typing, writing, and painting, it opens cat food cans, washes hair, signs books, holds a freaking fork, puts on earrings, uses scissors, deadheads roses, DRIVES, and chops onions. Hello. At first I couldn’t do any of it, I gave my brain a new kind of workout by practicing writing with my left hand, but one-by-one I’ve been getting things back. And Look Ma, I’m typing! I think I MIGHT get the brace off Sept. 14, my Doctor keeps little secrets to himself, I’ve learned, but I am hoping! It wasn’t a bad break, no surgery; I glowed like a 7 year old when he called me a “good patient.” It’s the little things in life. Yes, physical therapy will follow, but I’ve been doing exercises to keep my arms strong, so I hope normalcy returns soon. Thank goodness for Joe! He’s been taking such good care of me!
The heart cup is another Courage item. The world is so wild these days, we need as much of this as we can get. And there’s another secret about this cup . . .💞
I didn’t design it! I designed a red cup with hearts on it which Joe thought was a little boring, and said, “Why don’t 
you make it look like champagne?” I said, naturally, “What are you talking about?” He tried to tell me, but I couldn’t picture it, was running out to lunch with girlfriends, and said, willy-nilly, over my shoulder, “Draw me a picture!” Because I know Joe is an artist even though he never does it. But I didn’t expect THIS. Champagne bubbles made into hearts. Of course I fell in love with it. My boy is a genius! 
