Life is sort of back to normal.

Well, normal is a pretty big stretch, seeing as I have blue hair right now,  I work in my pj's as a graphic designer everyday, and I  am a woman with a wife. That's my normal and I adore it.

Life is pretty good lately, although I have been struggling with re-entry to my long time home of Asheville. I don't find struggle to be a bad thing, more like an opportunity for growth and enlightenment. Well, most of the time I see things that way. Change does not happen without a lot of struggling for me. I don't necessary love change, but I do like it as each time I go though a big change, I am lighter, and more balanced on the other side.

Since moving back to Asheville, I am slowing down, working a little less, playing a lot more. I feel like I am getting back to my life before I left Asheville, but I am complete different.

Losing Antonio has changed me forever. Lots of people have said, I don't know what happened. It's a complex story, but let me say this. WE DID NOT GIVE UP ON ANTONIO. Antonio gave up on himself. I have learned you can't force someone to make the right choices, believe me I tried and it did not work. You have to WANT to change, even if you are 15. Antonio is 16 years old now and almost a man. I haven't spoken to him since he left. I still miss him daily. If you want to read about what happened. See this post.

http://7luckyducks.blogspot.com/2011/08/hard-times.html

If you want to know more about how we are feeling about Antonio now, check out this post.
http://7luckyducks.blogspot.com/2012/07/what-i-am-diggin-on-this-week-gratitude.html

Meg and I are both SO happy to be home in Asheville. We are so grateful to be near our friends again. We are so happy to be back to a balanced life where spending time with each other, our friends and our sweet Mambo kitty are the most important things in our life. ta - ta for now!

home sweet home. Oh Yeah!

well, well, well, I know I promised to talk about the big news forever ago, back in July and here it is, nearly the end of August.

The big news is, Meg & I moved back to Asheville August 1st! Hooray. We are beyond happy about being home.

Don't get me wrong. Denver is a super city, but a large part of why we moved there was for Antonio to go to High School. Since that didn't work out we decided earlier this year, that we were going to rent our house in Denver out for a year and move home. We are looking forward to a year with no house projects!

We landed for the first week in Asheville in a beautiful cabin, 25 minutes north of Asheville in Fork's of Ivy. It was a magical place to re-enter our beautiful home state. It rained a ton while we were out there, and every evening was misty and beautiful. It was beyond amazing as you can clearly see in the photos. We plan to go back out soon and take photos of the inside of the cabin. The cabin got Meg and I both fired up about building what we have coined as our ultimate house.

Everyone including Mambo the cat loved the cabin. It was a quite, comfortable and relaxing place to land after packing up our life for the 2nd time in a little over a year and driving cross country. We ended up driving from Denver to Baton Rouge and back four times and back and forth to Asheville from Denver twice. Needless to say we are getting our money's worth out of the Kia Soul we bought back in early 2011.

The long term plan is to either renovate an existing house, or build a house from scratch once we sell the Denver house. Either way, the ultimate house will have loads of victorian influences, reclaimed wood/materials and other old, cool stuff included.

We are in a rental house that is a little cutie bungalow in Montford. We have been in the new house for two weeks today. We are loving it. The house sits near a bunch of quite woods and it feels like you on the side of a remote mountain but really you are about 2 minutes from downtown. It's perfect for us!

We were welcomed back by our friends with such enthusiasm. We are very happy to be so loved. Our peeps really missed us and we missed them too!

We are spending loads of time with those awesome friends of ours & settling in to the new house in addition to working of course. I am still swamped with work which is awesome and amazing. I am so very grateful for my wonderful clients.

I am curious who can guess which photos I took (with photo booth on my macbook pro) and which photos Meg took. Clearly, she is the professional.

Alright peeps. I am back to being settled and back to blogging way more often. Have an awesome evening!

What I am diggin' on this week. Gratitude...

I am very inspired lately. The sky seems bluer, the trees greener and life brighter than it has looked in a long time. Things are very good for me. I have a great wife, Meg. She amazes me every day with her constant effort to grow stronger, braver, and more awesome. I still have sweet Mambo the cat, after 15 years of snuggle time! I love my work and I have some super duper clients right now. My work has never been better. It's amazing to think about the difference a year can make.

 In a couple of weeks, Antonio will have been gone for a year. It's hard to believe I saw him so often before that. I miss talking to him a lot. There are so many things I wish I had said. I haven't spoken to him since he left, other than a couple of short facebook messages. He stopped responding to me about 6 months ago. I am not surprised. I vowed never to support him making (what I consider) bad choices & I am sticking to my guns. I likely will never make such bold NEVER statements again. I am 38 and still learning these things.

Losing him was so difficult, but necessary. One of Meg's sisters described trying to help him as fighting gravity. Wow, that was right on the money, that statement. Thank you Babs! We needed someone to give words to how it felt to work so hard and still lose him. Meg and I had to evaluate everything we deemed important in our lives after he left. I enjoyed being Antonio's mom. I don't want to be anybody else's mom.

We both believe that service work is the key to having a full spiritual life. It has been tough being without that for the last year. I am still not ready to take on any other service work right now.

The skinny about what happened is Antonio doesn't understand the value of telling the truth. Basically, after he arrived in Denver, all of his stories fell apart. It was heartbreaking. It still stings a year later.  I am still hurt that he was SO dishonest with me so often. I had a false sense of what I had control over and what I didn't.

I miss this little guy. I miss the guy I thought he was. I miss being his mom, but I am happier now than I have ever been. It's just different than what I thought it was going to be like.

The five years I worked with Antonio taught me so much, but the best and most impactful thing was not to speak on an issue unless you personally have experienced said issue. I thought I knew what growing up in poverty in asheville was like. I didn't until I worked with Antonio. I thought I had great ideas about how to impact young black men before I worked with Antonio. My ideas to help him could not over come his background. I thought I had ideas about welfare and what purpose it served. My ideas about poverty and welfare have changed completely. I don't have any big answers, but I do have a clear image of the problems. The problems that exist in Antonio's world are vast.

I guess thats how life goes sometimes.  You live, you learn. 

I pray Antonio makes it to adulthood, relatively safe and sound. I pray that someday there won't be a hole in my heart where our relationship used to be. Time will tell. In the meantime I plan on focusing on every wonderful & amazing thing I have to be grateful for.... like all my great friends, my amazing family, my wonderful partner Meg, my most awesome of all cats, Mambo, and my wonderful life. I will let the universe work out everything else in it's own time. 

Happy 4th of July!

I hope everyone had a super holiday. This week has been super around here. Meg and I went to Georgetown, CO on Tuesday to ride the loop railroad there. Wow, was it fun. The train is a steam engine built in 1912. It was originally running on a track in Maui. Wow, Maui to the Rocky Mountains. The day was overcast and cool, about 65 degrees. It was a lovely break from the 100 degree temps we were having last week here in Denver.

We tooled around Georgetown, CO after the train ride. It's a quaint little mountain town, in a beautiful valley with rocky mountains on both sides. We toured a hotel that had not changed hardly at all since 1875. It was like stepping into a time machine. The architecture is beyond cool in Colorado mountains towns as the boom for most of them was in the late 1800's. If you are like me and you like Victorian architecture you gotta get to Colorado and do some exploring. Leadville is a killer town for victorian house stalking. It's amazing how many victorian houses are in city of Denver too. A lot of silver tycoons had city houses as well as places near their mines in Leadville and other spots around Colorado. Check out the Baker neighborhood if you are ever in Denver proper. It has the best examples in the city. (in my opinion!)

The 4th of July was a laid back day for us. I worked some in the morning and then in the afternoon we had a family photo shoot. These photos say it all. We are a very lucky family and we love each other SO much. I have the cutest Meg in the whole wide world and the most handsome Mambo in the whole wide world. How did I get so lucky you ask? I have no idea, but I am grateful to have such amazing love and support.

Things in Denver are great. Things are getting ready to change. Today I am happy to be here, in the mile high city. ta ta for now!

Our Denver house! Photos! Yes!

well, I do keep my promises, but sometimes things take longer than I had planned. In the case of photos of our new house, it's taken me about 6 months longer than I thought, but hey better late than never, right?

Well, here you are. Our beautiful house. We both love this house. It's a real home. We are so lucky to have found the right place for our Denver experience.

Our house renovations are nearing the end of the line. It's a good thing because neither of us are really up for any more painting, caulking, fixing, or going to home depot for a least a year, maybe two. Justin is also pretty over sawing, building shelves, tiling stuff, and other random everything he ends up doing around here. Have I mentioned that he is world's best ass saver around?

We have some very special guests visiting over the next month, so we are very happy to be able to put our best foot forward.

Bon Iver & Feist at Red Rocks. Check that off my bucket list.....

Man, have we been traveling a lot. Meg and I  recently drove down to the deep south and did a photo shoot of the Historic Dunleith Inn in Natchez, MS. The photos will be used on the new website, in the new print advertising and on a brand new billboard. I am still loving this project.

Meg did an awesome job capturing the spirit of Dunleith. We had a great time on the property for three days and enjoyed getting to know the house and all of it's150 plus years of history.  The new site will be live in early August.

So as most of you know I am a firm believer in balance between work and play.  So, wow, can you say stoked? It's been almost a week since I saw Bon Iver & Feist in concert. I still can't believe I was actually there. I have seen Feist before and this time was just as good, maybe better. The venue could not have been better, Red Rocks in Morrison, CO. The company was the best in the world. Meg and I still enjoy spending time together after almost 10 years together. Our 10th anniversary is this October. We have a pretty special trip planned and loads of changes are happening later this year, but for now, I am happy to be here in Denver, where I can do things, like see my favorite musician  of all space and time.

I feel in love with Bon Iver's music in the winter of 2009. It was a snowy cold winter and I listened to his album "For Emma" all winter long. His music says something I could never say with words. I can tell he has had his heart broken and he has been very low in his life, yet his music shines a beautiful light on that sadness. For me sadness is just as important as joy, as how do you know true joy without sadness?

 I am an artist and I feel all the range of emotions deeply and fully. I will take the sadness any day, so I can feel real love and joy. I consider myself very fortunate for the low times in my life, as they give me perspective about how happy I am today.

It's a rare cloudy day in Denver, our house projects are almost done and summer is here. We have a lot of fun things planned, like seeing Florence + the Machine at Red Rocks, riding the Georgetown loop train, and getting over to the Boulder Farmers Market.

Goodbye for now!

More B-day love & what the hell have I been doing besides blogging? A lot, that's what.

The epic b-day trip ended with a two days in Leadville. We had a great time checking out the amazing examples of Victorian architecture, and wandering around a couple of super killer antique stores. I am newly obsessed with purple glass from the 1880's/90's. It is clear when it is first made, but as it is exposed to sunlight, it turns purple depending on how much manganese was in the sand used to make the glass. Until about 1915 sand with loads of manganese was the sand of choice for making clear glass.

French Victorian example

see where this style gets it's gingerbread name. Looks good enough to eat.

Spindle love!

Glass is so much prettier than plastic don't you think?

Cedar Shake love. I want our Neo Victorian tiny house to look a lot like this. 

So, Leadville was beyond interesting. We also visited the matchless mine. If you are interested in the history stuff, this is where Horace Tablor made his fortune. This is also where Baby Doe Tabor lived after Horace died. There are still piles of silver mining leftover crap all around the mine. This crap is from the late 1890's. Can you believe it's still laying around. Crazy!

Here is me sitting on a pile of the leftover stuff.

Now we are back in Denver working hard. I am busy with design work, while Meg is busy working on the house. We have news regarding all of the house updates but that is another post.

Lately, we have finished the trim in the bathroom and kitchen. The kitchen floor is painted a great grey and looks awesome. We fixed two flagstone pathways that were a hot mess. Of course, by we, I mean mostly Justin. I think it's been like three posts since I said he was the greatest feller ever. Well, he still is. Today he put up the sun shades on the deck. Yesterday, he helped me and Meg get the backroom hardwood section of the 3rd bedroom ready to sand. He is also close to being able to lay new tile in the 3rd bedroom and the other bathroom.

What would we do without him you ask? We would be lost, that's what! Justin For President has been our latest chant around the house. He would make a great one by the way!

Someday I will take photos of everything. Someday when the house is clean. Wait, that may never happen but I will take photos!

Meg's sister is in town this week for a cooking class. We did a little day trip to Boulder on Sunday and had dinner here.  http://thekitchencommunity.com/  Can you say OMG, amazing food. I had this yummy roasted chicken with a meyer lemon sauce, over an amazing ramp mash. WOW. Thanks BABS!

Alright, next week, Meg and I are off to photograph Dunleith Historic Inn in Natchez, MS. The inn was built in 1856 so we are pretty stoked to capture the history and scale of the property.
Until next time!!