One Pebble

I went walking on the seashore
Saturday evening
Looking at the pebbles that track the tide lines

Mum likes little Pearly gray pebbles
Perfect circles
Euclidian ovals
All small as Yankee dimes
I like bigger pebbles

J likes bigger pebbles
Not even pebbles, stones
That are large and bumpy and strange
He throws them in the ocean
To watch them bounce on the waves.
I like keeping my pebble

Rebekah collects bits of seashells
That are striped or solid
In blues or golds or oranges or browns
I like stone pebbles

My pebbles is an odd size
Not too big
Not too small
An oval of sea grey
The color of wind capped waves
There is variation in the grey
White patches and yellow stains
A hundred years of polishing by sea and sand
I curl it in my hand
My pebble

I think I'll name him Hubert.

Lazy crazy daisy days

The last week has been a huge long set of lazy crazy daisy days.

Lazy Monday and Saturday J and I bummed around the house doing next to nothing cept a little painting and a little baking and a lot of wii-ing. It was nice after one crazy full weekend and befor another one. But too much lazy makes my house disorganized and messy and that makes me edgy. I don't know what it is about having a clean room, but when I don't have one, I just feel uptight.

Crazy Tuesday and Wednesday and thursday and Friday and tomorrow are all crazy days. Tuesday I had two back to back tutoring sessions and painting the living rooms and painting the hallway. Wednesday was more painting, more tutoring, helping a lady from church, running errands, and homegroup! Thursday J and I bought 30 cases of laminate flooring to replace the carpets in our house and then I worked on a super secret fathers day present even though my machine kept freezing up. J and I went on a LONG walk to help me ease he tension from THAT. Friday I woke up two hours befor I needed to, cleaned and went walking with Jamie and came home and did the huge sinful of dirty dishes and ran errands and cleaned some one else's house and helped set up for a friends wedding and then crashed. And tomorrow, we have church and my baby sisters graduation party. Hard to believe She's soo grown up!

Daisy we went to a wedding today (and worked a lot at it). It was fabulous, but it kept reminding me of my own wedding. I guess it was the hydrangea (which I used) or the arbor (ours was wrought iron) but I kept thinking of being in my white dress, with J in his black tux and there being daisies everywhere. Daisies are one of my four favorite flowers and they were the first flower J gave me when we were dating.

Anyway, Jand I are one week from our first year anniversary. And I love him more than the day I married him.

Happy One Year, baby. Here's to many many more!!!

Ketchup

Haven't really felt like blogging in a LONG time.  Mostly because I don't know what to write (and Pioneer Woman says to only blog about what you feel like writing, but she does it every day....hmm).

So, some things that have happened since I last blogged:
1) Bought paint for the house.  All Behr: Desert Camel for the living room and hallways, Zinnia Gold for the kitchen (IT IS VERY YELLOW AND HAPPY AND I AM SUPER EXCITED ABOUT IT!!!!!), and Mother Nature for the master bedroom.

2) Bought a rake and hoe and shovel and hose and work gloves to start my garden (whenever it is no longer meltingly hot outside and when we finish painting inside).  Jamie told me the coolest way to prepare stiff clay-ey soil like ours.  You mark out your garden into 1' strips.  Starting with the first one, you dig down 1' and put that dirt into a wheelbarrow.  Then you loosen the next foot of soil, mixing in compost or soil or sand or whatever is needed.  Then you go to the next strip, digging up that foot of soil and flipping it over to the first strip, filling in the hole.  Repeat the process until you have finished digging up and mixing and loosening all strips of the garden, and then put your wheelbarrow of dirt on top of the last strip.  Now you have a loosened, prepared, plot of ground for gardening.

3) CLEANED OUT THE PINK ROOM!!!  So happy!

4) Started painting the kitchen (mostly doing the cutting in work because I hate doing the rolly brush.  blech)

5) Went on a shorts shopping trip with my sister.  Confession: I have not worn shorts since 9th grade, maybe?  It's been a long time.  I just never felt comfortable in shorts because 1) they never fit me well 2) they were never cute and 3) they made my legs look fat to me.  Rebekah was VERY good at telling me that all the shorts I tried on combatted all three of these assumptions (except the ones that DID not fit me well).  And, I found some cute ones.
These:

And these:

And I tried on this dress:

And I looked something very much like a fat, triangular, asparagus stalk.  Beck's laughed at me and told me not in a million years and I agreed.

Still, two pairs of Old Navy shorts for $22?  YES AND PLEASE!

Now, I should probably get back to painting.  Feels good to blog a bit.

Mmmm, That New Home Smell

J and I moved last Saturday (thanks to a small army of helpful men and women and friends and parents and brothers and sisters) into the cutest little three bed/two bathroom house south of Fuquay.  The house is adorable and I love it.  I got all my furniture just about where I want it to be and there is nothing stopping me from making this place into a beloved, safe, welcoming, inviting home.

Except, well, the fact that it's 97F outside...  And I have no desire to move when it's 97F outside.

(pics to follow...)

Packing

J and I are moving from our teeeeeniney little apartment into a super cute teeeeeeeeeeniney little house.  (Important distinction: the super cute part).  And we are moving on Saturday.  Because we are so close to the move, today, I had to pack.

And, because the ladies in our church are made of winsauce, I did not have to pack alone!!!  *cue the cheers and explosions of confetti and fanfare for the common man and other happy joyful celebratory celebrations*

We packed: books, DVDs, games (Wii and board), blankets, linens, towels, place mats, napkins, cooking utensils, plates, cups, mugs, glasses, pots, pans, tins, cupcake pans, clothes, shoes, coats, sweatshirts, vases, tea cups, candles, figurines, spices, and silverware.  All in boxes.  All packed up.  All nice and neat....

But, here is how my living room now looks:

Almost everything that I own is now in a box.  What's left, you ask?  Electronic devices and food and picture frames and the random flotsam and jetsam that floats around houses until it gets swept up in a laundry basket and moved.

Oh, and furniture.  The furniture isn't packed yet.

2 Corinthians 5:21

"God made [Jesus], who knew no sin, to become sin for us, so that, in Him, we might become the Righteousness of God."

Powerful words that rightly sum up practically the entire New Testament, and certainly the Gospel.

I've been reading John Stott's Magnum Opus: the Cross of Christ in my Bible study and have just finished a chapter on four different ways to view the effects of salvation.
1) Propitiation, from the Temple Mount.  God, through Jesus, satisfied His own wrath by fully and completely bearing it on behalf of sinful humanity.  In doing so, Jesus both fully absorbed God's wrath and fully bore our sins away from us, accomplishing the jobs of both the sacrificial Lamb and the Scapegoat on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16)

2) Redemption, from the slave markets.  God paid the price on our heads (life-blood) to Himself to satisfy His own code of law.

3) Justification, from the court room.  God pronounced us completely justified and "brought forward into the present the verdict that belonged to the last judgement...by sending His own Son in the likeness of our sinful nature to be a sin offering, God actually condemned our sin in the human Jesus.  It is only because He was condemned that we could be justified" (Stott, 189)

4) Reconciliation, from the family room.  God initiated the reconciliation of believing sinners to Himself by 1) removing His wrath from us and 2) removing our sin from His sight.  By destroying the grounds for enmity, God creates reconciliation.  And we, who were once far off from God and cut off from the covenant people are now brought near and bound to both God and His Church through Jesus.

Stott ends with the passage above and a quote from Martin Luther: "Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin.  You took on you what was mine; yet set on me what was yours.  You became what you are not, that I might become what I am not." 

Bagels

So today, I attempted to make bagels from scratch.  Note the word "attempted".  Very important word.  I began with the recipe you find in Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.  No biggie.  Love this cookbook and I have yet to find one single recipe that didn't work out perfectly.  So I followed their steps up until the actual boiling of the bagels.

That's right: BOILING!

You take these precious little lumps of dough...

And poke a MASSIVE hole in them and stretch the lump out until the whole is bigger than the previous exterior wall of the bagel.

 I'm guessing the theory is that it'll shrink in the wash, so to speak?  Well it doesn't.  It tears apart.  And then you end up with strips of gooey bagel mush floating in your stockpot of water:

 YUCK!  So, I thought: what if you only poke a tiny little hole in them?  Will that work?

 The answer is yes:

(though some work better than others)

I dusted them with sugar and cinnamon because the dough was plain.  

Not bad.  Though, what a mess.  

 How do they taste?  ........................uh......................... ask me tomorrow.................