Plaasabilities

Snow Angel Knitted Lace Shawl with bead embellishment I was just a kid, 9 or 10 years old, when my mother taught me the basics of knitting. Having been raised in Germany and the Netherlands where almost all women  knit, my mother could whip out warm woolly things with stunning speed. I was OK at knitting but preferred crocheting because it was easier for me and I could produced finished items much faster with a crochet hook than with knitting needles. By the time I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt, I was firmly entrenched as a crocheter. That is until my dearest friend in school, a passionate knitter, made it her personal mission to convert me to the other side. She took me to my first real yarn store and helped me find a sweater pattern and suitable yarn to knit it. I knit my way through the stress of a Master's degree, producing several sweaters and other small items. I moved to Utah after graduate school and continued to knit and crochet, though my crocheting was far ...

"Frost Away" The fog was just beginning to lift near the Walker Camp Prong Crossing on Newfound Gap Road. Great Smoky Mountains National Park © 2014 Kristina Plaas, All Rights Reserved Sundays are always very hectic for me in late fall. It's what happens when you are a church musician who is given the added responsibility of organizing programs for large regional meetings and Christmas. Most of us love Christmas music but making those musical events happen is a huge challenge. Given the changes in my life the last few months I haven't been as effective in meeting those challenges as I would like. I see everything that either needs to be done or that I haven't done well and feel, um, discouraged. I keep giving myself the guilty "should" lecture, listing everything I should have done but haven't. Add Sunday night fatigue to the mix and the results aren't good. Tonight, just as I was about to cave and have a very nice, personal pity party I...

"Upward" Looking up into a canopy of brilliantly colored Sourwood and Sugar Maple trees. Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park © 2014 Kristina Plaas, All Rights Reserved Some days are just hard. There's no way around it, hard things stare me down and I have to face them. I don't think I'm alone in saying I don't like dealing with hard things I didn't choose. Challenges I choose are fine, those I didn't choose are, well, not fine. But life is about hard things and I am trying to gracefully accept that. I'm pretty sure my grace fell a bit short today. This afternoon I resumed the task of sorting through mother's things in order to give them new homes. Many of my friends from church are involved in a rummage and bake sale to help raise funds for a Young Single Adult Branch member who was diagnosed with cancer, is undergoing expensive and debilitating treatments which leave her unable to go to school, work, or pay the mounting medic...