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The last time we remodeled our house (read, "recovered from a house fire"), we made the decision to downsize our spacious bedroom to make room for a roomier utility area.  This meant eliminating the part of our bedroom which served as a home office.  Two desks, two desk top computers, including the giant, now obsolete, car-sized monitors, had to be eliminated from our floor plan.  I was ok with this because the elimination of the giant office space came with the promise of a black Friday discounted lap top computer, that i could use on the arm of the couch, while watching t.v., visiting with friends, and listening to music, because the more media exposure one gets, all at one time, the best in the long run.  Or that's what i heard. And i did get my lap top and my down-sized bedroom.  A couple of years later, i even got a new bed.  And i have successfully used my lap top on the couch, while watching tv, talking to my husband, and texting with friends,...

Do you know that verse, "Beloved, let us love one another."   ? I know it.  I learned it as a song when i was a child.  Teaching scripture in song is a very successful method for me.  I can't forget it.  Recently, i read that scripture again, and it was the part after the song that caught my attention.  Well, first, let me sing you the song. Queue piano. Beloved. Let us love one another. (echo: love one another) For love is of God, and everyone that loveth, is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is Love. (echo:  God is love.) Beloved. Let us love one another. First John, four, seven and eight. I turned 39 1/2 this week, and i've known this song since i was something like 4 1/2.  And all that time, i think i've been reading it wrong.  I've been reading the words of this song as an indictment.  I hear this snotty voice in my head, mocking me, "you just don't know God.  you would act righ...

I am the only child of the only daughter of my grandparents.  I was also the first born grandchild, the oldest of what turned out to be 16 grandchildren, and the only one, of all those grandchildren, who gets to call our grandfather, Morfar.  Morfar means mother's father, and since all of my cousins are the children of my mother's brothers, my position is sort of unique. I'm not special.  I just have a lot of memories of how things were before our family was as huge and wonderful as it is now, lots of pictures in my head that i don't have snapshots of. When i was three, i was the older of only two grandchildren.  I don't remember how it came about, but i do remember giving my Morfar a list (probably didn't write it down) of 3 items that i really wanted. A whistle. Sunglasses. And a tiny black teddy bear. So Morfar took me shopping.  We went from store to store to store, searching and searching and searching for the treasures i could see in my head. ...

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...