Life truly is more than valleys

I've been doing remarkably better these past couple days than I was a week ago. The serenity prayer, used in Alcoholics Anonymous, pretty much sums up my attitude at the moment:

"God give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other."

Life is so much easier when I simply decide to stop worrying about the future and the unknown joys and challenges that it holds.

My ACT is coming up this next Saturday. I've been working through Kaplan's 2006 test prep book these past few weeks, which has been a great help in preparing me for the actual test. What I love about the book is the author's sense of humor; he takes a test and makes it fun. Anyway, I feel that I understand what I need to know about the classic ACT well, and should do just fine on it - it's the essay part that has me a bit unsettled. 30 minutes to plan and then hand-write an entire essay? An essay about some aspect of public schools that I don't give a flying tomato plant about? (Sorry. Now that it's gardening season, I think of everything in terms of plants. *LOL*) It's going to be a bit challenging, that's for sure. But, I'm determined not stress about it. :-)

The garden is in full swing now. We've planted melons, watermelons, potatoes, peas, lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, strawberries, corn, some Asian greens, beans, herbs cucumbers... the list goes on and on. And we've still got more to plant: squashes (winter and summer), sweet potatoes, etc. We've been enjoying ourselves, though. Mom made a promises last winter that gardening would not be as stressful as it had been last year. So... we're not pushing ourselves quite as hard as we did last summer, but we're still at it (the garden, that is) as often as we can.