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This year, all of our family Christmas gatherings were already concluded before the 25th, leaving me and my gun-slingin' super hero, all alone with the cat and our own devices on Christmas Day.  But alas even gun-slinging super heroes can catch colds, and when mine awoke with a bad case of the sniffles, i was inspired to cook what i have named Christmas Soup.  I was so pleased with the results, that i am inspired to make my Christmas Soup an annual tradition.  After all, Christmas time may be the most wonderful time of the year, but with all the candy, cold air, and stress, it tends also to be the most sickly time of the year, and the most challenging to our immune systems. So here's what i did.   First, i had some homemade chicken stock from the last time we thinned out our rooster population.  I made it by simmering the bones in the crockpot for many hours, in order to suck the nutrition into my stock.  It's wonderful stuff, and very good for you....

My friend, Patsy, told me a story about a time during her childhood, when her family lived on a ranch, where her father worked for the owner and took care of the property and animals.  Patsy remembered with special fondness how the owner of the property taught her how to work with horses and allowed her to ride the horses as often as she wanted, which she did, often.  She recounted how she would take her favorite horse in the evening, and go for long rides, and find a grassy patch in the woods, where she could sit and read and enjoy the beauty of nature and the tranquility of the woods. The follow-up to my friend's story painted a different picture than the beginning of it, when she told me that the house on the ranch where her family lived didn't have electricity, or even indoor plumbing, and how she would be so embarrassed that she would work hard to make sure her friends never saw her house after dark, hoping that they wouldn't notice that there were no lights. As...

This summer, i got to spend a lot of time hatching chicks.  SO much fun! But for some reason, i started having some formation anomalies in some of my chicks in every single hatch.  In the beginning, i didn't have any place set up to keep any special needs, chicks, and i assumed it was an anomaly, and not a trend.  So....i would do the wise farmer thing and um....return the deformed chicks to the earth, so to speak. Pretty much always, the deformed chicks would be "late hatchers."  They would take longer to make it out of their shells than the main group, and all too often not make it, in spite of my attempts to help. In response to this pattern, i became very frustrated, instituting a policy that late hatchers would not be helped - or even allowed to try to finish hatching - once the main group was finished hatching and ready to go to market, remaining eggs, mid-hatch or otherwise, would be "cleaned up." This policy lasted about one hatch. My ch...

Sometimes i think that writing about deep spiritual thoughts is something i should do only sometimes.  But you know, i turned 39 this year.  I'm pretty sure deep spiritual thoughts, might just be part of who i am.  I think i'll stop fighting it. So here's one for you. Recently, i heard a little story on the radio, told by the Christian singer, Mandisa, telling her inspiration for one of her songs.  The song is irrelevant to this particular deep thought (it's Overcomer), but the story made me think. I'm rusty on the writing, and i'm trying to cram some decent blogging into an insufficient time slot, so try to ignore the non-smoothness of this post. The story is about a friend (of Mandisa, not me), who heartbreakingly (if it's not a word, it certainly should be) became pregnant with her second child AND learned that she had breast cancer, in the same short season of life.  This friend had to go through prenatal care and chemotherapy at the same time, a...

I have attempted to write a new entry in this blog a few times since April 8.  I have thought about it quite a bit more than that. I have often envied the consistent writers i observe.  But it seems, that this writer requires times of ... what do you call it ... sequester?  Something like that. They say bloggers shouldn't blog about blogging, but.  Well, i guess i just don't care.  I'm not here for a popularity contest, but i do hope that sometimes God can use my words to give a laugh, a smile, a thought, a comfort, a peace, a wisdom, or a guffah to those who read it.  Looks like i spelled that wrong....let's see....that's supposed to be a guffaw?  Yes, the lack of squiggly red lines tells me google thinks that's correct. I think part of my problem isn't really that i don't have anything to say.  It's that i have so many things going on in my mind and my heart and my life, that i can't settle on any one thing long enough to explore it. ...

Today i ran across an article on Facebook, that caught my attention.  The headline reading something to the effect of "FINALLY, WE HAVE PROOF THAT STARBUCKS IS SATAN!" That's not what it said.  But that is what they were getting at. (I'll post a link to the real article later, so you can see for yourself.) Now, i was certainly skeptical that Starbucks had been proven to be Satan, but attention-getting headlines, get attention, and this one got mine.  I followed the link to an article published in an online magazine aimed at Christian readers, written by an author whose column title is given to the idea that she is watching out for us and warning us of what's out there. The writer of the article tells the story of a legitimately displeased Starbucks customer who had been sold two yummy coffee-based wonderments the tops of which were decorated in caramel, by an artsy barrista, one with a pentagram (it's the same star you've drawn since you were six,...

I'm not sure if i know how to say the thing that i want to say. Sometimes, i go for long spells without writing because i don't know how to share the things that i'm learning from the experiences in my life, in a beneficial lighting.  You know, in a way that doesn't come off sounding like a plea for pity. I guess everyone probably wants a little pity sometimes, some acknowledgement that whatever they are going through really stinks, a LOT!  But generally, it isn't helpful. I also don't want to sound like i'm complaining about my life in any way.  Complaining is ugly in general, and  besides that, complaining compromises the process of growth, of seeing past the circumstances, into the lessons that God can teach us through them, if we let Him. But most of the so-called troubles we go through are merely interruptions of inconvenience in our fast-paced, luxurious lives of automation. The legitimacy of our troubles can easily be brought into perspectiv...