Oh, ye of little faith, take it easy. It’s not the whole stash I’m giving away, just a few nice bits of it.
It’s not an "I’m a loser" give-away going on here; it’s a celebratory one.
I finished my draft. That’s right. I finished one entire, complete draft of my dissertation. That’s a novella and three short stories. And I’m finished. Woo-effing-hoo! I may graduate from this program before I turn 40 after all!
Since I’m so freaking happy about this, I’m going stash diving later today, and I’ll find three fantastic skeins to share with my lovely, encouraging readers. How to choose, how to choose?
Here’s how. Tell me what your dream is. The one you could see yourself achieving, but just haven’t been able to start. Believe me, I know about not being able to start on dreams; it took me about ten years to get up the courage to apply to MFA programs, and I’m so grateful I got the nudge I needed to do so. Here’s another option. Did you get a nudge that worked? Are you heading confidently towards your dream? Tell me about that.
I’ll select three stories and award them with skeins of yarn from my stash. It won’t be the cashmere from Rome, but I promise it will be good.
Published novelist. That’s the biggie. I am working towards it, and got two rather nice nudges this year: I published my first “professional” piece of fiction (they PAID me!), and on the basis of that story, I heard from two agents. Now I just have to finish the dang book!
Congrats on your own huge accomplishment!
Congrats on finishing your draft!
I want to go home. I know that’s kind of silly for an all-powering dream, but I’m already doing what I want to do, now if I was doing it in a place that didn’t have such a high ratio of cornstalks-to-people, I’d be fully contented.
Well, back to Seattle OR a mountain cabin in the cascades where I could go live. And maybe a baby or two. But I’d happily settle for being home.
Thanks for the nudge. I’m on the edge of a new scary life–getting divorced, job-hunting, lots of endings and beginnings.
My dream (like Amy’s) is to be published. What, I don’t know yet.
I’ve been paralyzed by fear for so long, but reading your post reminds me there’s another life out there waiting.
Yay!
I knew you could do it!
My dreams are all too weird to share.
Congrats! Maybe some celebratory Monkey socks to signify getting the proverbial Monkey off your back?!
My dream is to be in private practice, not beholden to Medicare, helping to keep people safe in their homes, preventing falls and improving strength and balance before they end up in the hospital. I’m thinking once Flyboy is in public school and finances are a bit more relaxed…
It’s not glamorous, but it’s important to me!
Congratulations! What a wonderful achievement. How funny you should write about dreams. Tonight seems to be my night to talk about my dreams. I am meeting Molly early tonight at SnB to discuss possibilities of opening a yarn store in ABQ. Mari is also bringing a friend of hers tonight to SnB who is a Professor of History at UNM, that would be my second dream. I can’t wait to pick her brain.
Congratulations Beverly!!!!
My big dream is to find a quiet place on the water where I can knit and craft to the noise of lapping water with Hubby by side. Kind of a far off dream. A more immediate dream which will help me get there is to be able to bring in money with my crafting. A neck injury last fall has caused me problems with getting a job out in the work place. This is making me consider more seriously starting to sell my quilts or find a niche in sewing. I hope to have some product by Christmas time to start testing the waters.
Yay! Congrats that’s quite the accomplishment.
My dream would be to figure out how to enjoy the moment and not stress about all the stupid stuff that’s going on in my life. And to buy a house near teh ocean.
Congratulations! I’m so happy you achieved your goal, what an accomplishment!
My dream is to run a non-profit, something big and health-related, like the Canadian Cancer Society, or something like that. :0)
Or, retire, and live the simple life on a patch of waterfront. That would be good, too.
Congratulations Bev! I knew you could do it.
My dream… I’d like to write an ethics textbook for high school students. I taught the subject for 4 years, and developed my own curriculum. Now I just have to write it down…
Yay! Congrats on finishing!
That is great news! Congratulations!! You must feel incredible!
I have big long-term dreams, but the one that’s most pressing for me at the moment is something that will hopefully begin to bear fruit in August. I am one of two girls’ camp leaders in my church congregation. We are taking 7-9 girls to the beautiful mountains next week, along with several other groups from our area. It is my great, fat, pleading dream to make a positive difference in the lives of these girls. Two of them are solid and come from healthy, happy homes. The rest run the gamut of dysfunction—it’s a tough neighborhood in some respects. Anyway, I am just hoping this week we can really give them something they can use—a little more vision, a little more grounding, a little more confidence, a little more assurance that they’ve got an actual circle of supportive friends. I’ve seen it happen before. Magical things can happen when we go on these soul-nurturing retreats and get to look at stars and listen to birds and hike and stay up late and paddle canoes in a quiet setting.
This is my big dream for now. I’ll return to my previously scheduled progamming soon.
I hope someday I’ll be at the point you are. My dream, when I finish my Ph.D. is to bring together a group of like=minded people, to develop Nursing Home practice so that it consciously works to support family caregivers of people with dementia. They deal with ongoing ambiguous loss, and can get stuck in the grief, unless we try to help them out of it, by offering hope, supporting mastery, and having faith in their abilities to still care for their loved one.
somehow my posting ended up under Geo???
Congratulations on finishing the draft!!
My dream right now is to catch up on my sleep after all that I missed out on during the Tour de France! Oh, and I would also like to be able to see the southern or northern auroras one day.
Congratulations!
Congrats! That must be such a great feeling!
My dream would be to get to the point where I have more balance in my life. Grad school just has a way of taking over everything. I hope to be able to let more enjoyable things like knitting, reading, hiking and cooking take back a healthier portion of my time and attention.
I’d also like to be a Rockette.
My Mom & I’s dream together has always been to open a knitting shop. Her mom ran a sewing shop when she was growing up & my mom and both her sisters have made their living in the craft world at one point or another.
Our big nudge came drinking fruity drinks at AppleBees one night when the question came up “Why don’t we?” I think we realized that it was totally possible. A month later we had a booth at a craft mall that a year later grew into the shop we own now.
Now I just have to actually finish writing my book, find a dashing but sensitive dream hunk, and build myself a Geodesic Dome. Oh maybe throw in a flock of sheep. lol…
Congrats on finishing the first draft. For me it always hardest to get those initial words down. Once it comes to revising/editing, it gets so much easier because there is already something to work with.
My dream right now is to be settled enough with my job and my life in the bay area to have children. It might seem silly, but I want to wait until I feel some sense of community here. I was raised in a neighborhood where I had second and third moms. I really want the same for any children I have.
Yay! Congrats on finishing!
I can’t answer the dream thing this week, it would be 100% sarcasm.
Oh okay fine – my dream would be to get this fricken camper with no more nightmares. Oh and this week to end. I’m definitely dreaming of that. ;o)
I think mine sounds kinda lame compared to some of the others, but right now my biggest dream is to be FIT. Not skinny, not a certain size…but healthy. And strong. And not always looking to see if I’m the biggest person in the room. Fit, so I am healthy. Fit, so I can play hard with my children. Fit, so I can be a living example to my children. Fit, for so many reasons.
I have now reached my dream in terms of the education I wanted, and my dream now is to find a job I like, with nice co-workers, somewhere where I would like to settle down. Weird thing is though, that what used to be my dream job (high career, high status etc etc)isn’t anymore, I want something less prestigeous and more stable. I’m just so happy that I realized before I ended up in a job that would have killed me. I have applications in now for the kind of jobs I want, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
I have now reached my dream in terms of the education I wanted, and my dream now is to find a job I like, with nice co-workers, somewhere where I would like to settle down. Weird thing is though, that what used to be my dream job (high career, high status etc etc)isn’t anymore, I want something less prestigeous and more stable. I’m just so happy that I realized before I ended up in a job that would have killed me. I have applications in now for the kind of jobs I want, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
I always wanted to go back to college to get my PhD. Always wanted to do it, but never found the time, the money, the inspiration. Then one fall, four years ago, I just decided I was done. Done waiting, done pretending like I liked my job, done hoping something would happen to give me a kick in the pants. I just decided I was going to do it and a month later, I was re-taking the GRE (my original scores had expired, grrrrrr). I was sorting out what degree I wanted and what schools to apply to, contacting profs from my long-ago undergrad experience, getting letters from people I worked with. There wasn’t any one thing that made me decide to move forwards, I just did it.
I got my master’s degree back in December. I think I might have finally found the right PhD project (um… today). And honestly, I’m happier than I’ve ever been because I’m FINALLY doing what I always wanted to do. Not to say that being a grad student doesn’t have it’s ups and downs, but it truly is mostly good things for me.
ps It turned out to be an excellent thing that I was doing this whole process. Right after I sent off all my applications in December, my DH got laid off from his job and got months of severance and more importantly outplacement services to help him find a new job. That was critical, it made the move so simple.
Among other dreams (I have many, and must sort, sift, and prioritize them, as life is not infinite), I have for a number of years now been toying with the possibility of returning to school — medical school, specifically. I had all but written this dream off as a realistic option, until I realized that for where I live and what I want to do, it would be no hardship to fulfill a service contract (to work several years as a rural doctor, in exchange for my tuition being paid) if I could get into such a program.
A radically different dream of mine is making my living in the fibre arts. I am only just realizing that that could be a realstic possibility for me: my passion for knitting has not significantly abated over the past however many years, and I’m learning that I love related, less time-consuming, fields (spinning, weaving, dyeing, designing) as well.
My big dream is to one day see (or see a photo of) a celebrity – preferably one I respect – wearing one of my hats.
Although at this point, I’d settle for anyone other than me wearing one of my hats.
My dream is to write a children’s book and have my sister, Lola, illustrate it. We had some wacky adventures (truly, acts of torture that didn’t involve scarring on my part) when we were little and I think it would be a funny story about sisters. Now, I just have to tell her about it, but you would think it would be easy since I blog with her.
Congratulations!
I’ve thought about what might be my big dream. I’m pretty happy right now (and I did a lot to get to this state) so there’s not much that fits in that category. Thanks for the nudge, though, I’ll have to think about this—maybe I have a Big Dream and I’ve been too busy to know it!
Wow there are some great dreams here.
Mine is to finely realize i can settle down and ‘be here now’. After years of dealing with leftover traumatic childhood crap and then the choosing of a partner who would perpetrate the same, i’m finally in a place where i am loved and happy with myself.
Mostly. 😛
I am learning to be in the moment where ever i am and whatever i’m doing.Because even if i won the lottery, it wouldnt change the important things would it? I would still knit, extended family issues would not be ‘fixed’ and illnesses wouldn’t all of a sudden be gone either.
So now..we all have the now :). My dream is to live in it and knit in it 🙂 I’m still anticipating future fun and learning mind!
~laurie
Congratulations on finishing your draft!
My big dream is to go to library school. Right now I’m headed for a bachelor’s degree in math, so I’m not exactly on track, but I’m young enough that I may still get there one day.
Big congrats Bev.
My dreams are littler these days.
I think, perhaps too much, about the present.
I have a knitting dream right now. I am trying to find an old apothacary drawers set to keep all my yarn in. This may take a few years, but I really want this in my little house.
Have ya seen it? Tell me have ya seen it?
Congrats Beverly!
My dream is to get my kids raised into fully functioning, responsible,healthy adults.And then I am going to travel the world with my loving husband and act like I am 18 all over again.
Congrats!
I used to have big dreams. Truth is, the little ones matter more. Having the courage to love, marry, have children, and work on the creative projects I love for money and enjoyment…. that’s what I’m working on now. Happiness is a one day at a time proposition.
Congrats!
I used to have big dreams. Truth is, the little ones matter more. Having the courage to love, marry, have children, and work on the creative projects I love for money and enjoyment…. that’s what I’m working on now. Happiness is a one day at a time proposition.
yea bev!!!
My dream is to be able to teach fiber arts and delve deeper into the arts. I am on my way… but still have a ways to go. I would love to expand my studio into a co-op situation… where we could become a guild of artists working towards furthering the craft…. dreams are good. Very good.
Proud of you sister!
My dream is that one day when my 3 year old reaches adulthood, she can look back to her childhood and say…My mom did the very best she could and she made my life growing up so special…I experienced great things, I made mistakes that were forgiven and never pushed back on me when I made another, she listened, she supported me and she gave me unconditional love.
That is my dream. To have my child know that being JUST a stay at home mom, I was able to give her everything she needed, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. To have her be happy and for me to be a part of that happiness…what better dream could I have?
Oh BEVERLY. I am so happy!
Thank you thank you! Whoppee!
Fun to read the dreams and great news on YOURS! What’s up next?
I dream is to lose weight for my health i,m over weight and I know if I had a treadmill I would be able to get this weight off, so that,s my dream thank you and God Bless Helen