Friday Favorites - 3.25.22 - Home again!

  

It's Friday!  As always, linking up with Andrea and Erika for some favorites from the week.  Please feel free to link up or just comment on the post if you don't blog.  

First FAVORITE, of course, would be the Florida sunshine that I could not get enough of this week.  Not only the sunshine, though, but a couple of sunsets too. . .

You can see the sunset out there over the water -- there were a lot of sailboats coming in. . .I wasn't positioned to really get "good" sunset views this trip.

Ken took Amy and me out to dinner at Bluewater Bay Marina my last night in FL :)

Funny enough, by far, this was my best sunset view of the week -- out of my airplane window yesterday evening in Destin!

And, as we got closer to East TN, the view out my window was this:

But across the aisle (the plane was only 1/2 full so it was easy to see this) was this beautiful sight.  I wish I would have asked to sit on the other side of the plane :). I'll have to remember that when flying north in the evening. . .this was at 8:27 pm EST

Always a FAVORITE - sunshine and longer days.  Welcome Spring!

What a reminder this was to me over this last week!  I prayed for a friend like Amy for years and years.  She walked into my life almost 20 years ago. . .I remember the first night we spent a significant amount of time together -- she left my house kind of late (we both had babies at the time - she lived across the street) and I woke Tom up to tell him about my new friend.  She is someone everyone loves (for good reason) but, the quote above is "me".  Definitely not as easygoing as her ;)  She gets me, loves me, sustains me, and is "my person".  I'm pretty sure anyone who is close to her says all those same things too.  She moved across town, then south, back to OH after I had left, then Hawaii (her husband was Air Force) and now is where they have always wanted to be -- in the Florida panhandle.  And yet the friendship has endured.  Outside of family, she is the most special person in my life.  I am so thankful to the Lord for bringing her into my life.  I am closer to Him because of her, I am energized and a better person because of her, her family is an inspiration, she is a FAVORITE.

Projects!!!  My week in Florida was all about getting some work done on some of Amy's houses.  I didn't count hours, but we went to the one house five times to paint and then I got to cap off my trip by taking this:

and ending with this:

A FAVORITE - transforming spaces by organizing them :)

Amy has the "style" touch -- I'm the task master ;)

I know this book has been out for awhile, but I just got around to reading/listening to it.  Luckily I had both the copy and audio version so while I was painting by myself some days this week I could listen to it, but in the mornings when I was watching the sunrise (or the eagle that hangs out in Amy's backyard or the woodpecker that was going at a tree one morning) I had the copy to read.  Excellent read, especially if you like historical fiction. Reading is a FAVORITE - I'd always rather do this than watch television.

 
Here is a description of the book from Amazon:

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.
The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but does she have the strength to revisit old memories?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

Wordle!

Have you played?  Click on the link above and try it!

Only one puzzle a day. . .usually Tom and I do it together on the way to the dog park each day but since we weren't together last week I kept forgetting until almost bedtime.  I so much rather doing it with him, though.  

HOME

No matter what, wherever I am, however much fun I am having, I always, always love coming home.  East Tennessee is such a beautiful place to live.  Having a lot of my family here makes it even better :). I am so thankful to live here -- home is a FAVORITE.

That's about it for this week. . .it was a full one, for sure, with plenty going on today too.  On the schedule, another FAVORITE - tennis!  I haven't held a racquet in almost two weeks :/  I have a clinic then practice with one of my teams.  Laura said she is coming home for breakfast and I haven't seen her in over two weeks so that will be a nice way to start my day :)

I'm still looking for a paying job and have had some serious interviews the last two weeks -- one last Thursday in person with a national company whose home office is here in Knoxville and now today with a national non-profit (it's a Zoom meeting with the hiring manager) that would be a remote position.  We'll see.  Interviewing is NOT a favorite, but meeting new people always is and I've only ever had one job in my life that I didn't love, over the summer one year in high school.  Not a bad track record, right??  Hoping to find something that becomes a FAVORITE in my days/life.

Let me know some FAVORITES of yours.  Shay did a post this past week on some of her FAVORITES -- I bookmarked a few things to try from that.  Here is a link if you are interested.

Happy Friday!

Jenni