Patio Pretties

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>The last holiday of summer is over and I'm sad that I haven't had much of a chance to enjoy my back patio. I gave it a make-over in the spring. The color scheme has changed a bit over the years.
It was once the colors of ketchup and mustard.Then it was decorated with subdued neutrals.I'm really liking the new scheme of black, lime, and turquoise.Luckily I have at least one month left to spend some time relaxing and taking in the last weeks of summer.

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

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>Have you ever looked at a blog and wondered what it must be like to live next door to the blog author and see how things are in "real life"? Are you curious to know if their life is always as pretty as the photos on their blog? There are times that I feel like a bit of a hypocrite because while I post
The Good, as in my recent front porch makeover.

What you don't see is The Bad,
the Christmas lights still out--but not on--at the end of February (I'm happy to report that I risked frost bite fingers
to finally un-wire these and put them away).
And then there is The Ugly,
leftovers that haven't been cleaned up since
decorating for a wedding in December.
(My husband and I both laugh and cringe at this sight.)
So why did I choose to post The Bad and The Ugly? Was it to relieve the pangs of hypocrisy? Perhaps. Was it to make you feel better about your real life messes? Possibly. But I think that it was mostly to remind us both that it's okay to look passed the bad and ugly in life to be able to see the good.
Last year we had so many crazy things go wrong in our life that one day my friend asked if I were keeping track of all of our of disasters. I sat down to write a list and decided that instead of writing of the bad things happening to us, I needed to make a list of what was going right. It was that list that helped us make it through the rough waters without totally sinking. We were able to find a balance of good along with the bad. In fact, the more we focused on the good the more there was to see. There is a lot of bad and ugly in this world but there is also so much good. Maybe that's one of the reasons why we like to look at all of the pretty pictures in magazines, catalogs and blogs. They portray a beautiful lifestyle, they give us relief from the ugly around us, they inspire us, and give us hope for something better.
No one has a perfect life. Everyone's life is a combination of good, bad, and ugly. But the more we look for the good and give it the attention it deserves the more we come to see that life really is what we choose to put our focus on.

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