Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Lucky New Year

Lucky New Years Day Dinner
This is the classic meal for New Years Day.  The collards represent paper money, the black-eyed peas the coins. We rounded it out with a sweet potato and a beautiful corn pone baked in the cast-iron skillet.  Tasty and healthy.  Plus, the peas, collards, onions and sweet potatoes all came from our garden.

2013 was a very good year. I hope that 2014 will be even better.

Looking back at my goals for 2013, I actually managed to achieve the big things I had set out to do.  I completed my certificate in Environmental Education. I completed the Playful Pedagogy training at the NC Zoo.  I kept working with community gardens and rounded out a good year at the Growing Healthy Kids garden in Carrboro.

My favorite work was with several child care centers doing outdoor learning and nature education.  I expanded my skills in that area of work and continued a solid relationship with Spanish for Fun.  In 2014, I will be launching my new business; Playful Nature Consulting.  I'm excited and already have classes and workshops lined up over the next few months.  Be watching here for more on the new business, I'm working on the website now and hope to have it launched sometime in January.

That is one of the reasons I've been absent from this page.  Very busy lining up new work and getting things rolling.  But also I've been trying to get my life re-organized and ready to go for the new year.

David built this carefully crafted, beautiful and very functional library style ladder for my birthday.  It has been awesome and helped me use the space on top of my closet for storage of things I don't need to get to that often.  Once I got things up top (like 15 boxes of photographs, the family memorabilia) I was able to rearrange the inside of the closet for things I use a lot like office supplies and my EE materials.

I spent Thanksgiving changing my office from this:
Into a space I can actually work in again!  So progress is happening and I'm looking forward to the future.
And here's hoping our lucky dinner tonight will keep some green rolling into the coffers in 2014!

I wish you all a very happy new year, thanks for reading.