This blog is my random thoughts, stories, and maybe a few pictures.  They will not all be lovely.  They will not all be happy.  It will include my family in a 'not so perfect' light.  I will leave the shallow aspects of my life for Facebook. 
As for the name of the blog, it belongs to a short story I read called "How Beautiful with Shoes" by Wilbur Daniel Steele.  It's about a simple country girl who is naïve to the world and her chance meeting with an educated madman who escapes from an asylum and kidnaps her.  By the end of their meeting, he is dead, and how she sees the world is forever changed.  I think of this story quite often.  Maybe because we all started out naïve at one time, but slowly came to know the world with its pain and beauty.  Like the madman said to the girl, "Fire and blood both; spare one or the other, and where is beauty, the way the world is?".