What we learned this winter

Linking up with Emily P. Freeman to share What We Learned this season....


1.  Thanks to Kaitlyn Bouchillon, I finally know how to spell gray.


A for America; e for Europe.

2.  How incredibly organized our worship services are.  


On the first of December, our family was asked to go up front and read the Advent call to worship at the beginning of the service.  And thus I received the "worship grid" by email, which is a spreadsheet that details each minute of each service, including what is happening, how many minutes it will take, and who is leading it.


I was also sent a copy of our reading, which I was nervous about forgetting to bring, but when we got up there, there was another copy sitting on the music stand for us.  Also there was a list on the floor in front of the pastor of the order of worship.

3.  How intensely self-focused I am.


This should come as no surprise to anyone, but the same experience of the Advent reading taught me this, too.  Honestly, I missed most of the service up to the sermon, because I was so nervous about how it would go, and then how it went, and whether I looked like an idiot.

4.  Something more of the longing of Israel for the Savior to come.


Our Sunday school class for adults with disabilities is so enjoyable.  All year we have been working our way through the Bible, tracing the promise of God, ever since the garden, to someday send a Savior.  Week after week, we reiterate humanity's sinfulness, and reaffirm that God had not forgotten His promise, but the Savior hadn't come yet.  The study has deepened my own appreciation of the intense longing Israel felt.  O come, O come, Immanuel.

5.  Our local elementary school decorates for Christmas.


This shocked me.  I keep forgetting I'm not in New England anymore.  We in the Bible Belt now, honey.

6.  Christmas trees cost $70.


Again, not in New England anymore, I guess.  Where I come from, Christmas tree farms are like trying to sell ice to a penguin.  I am sure if Christmas trees cost $70 where I grew up, we would've had home-cut trees a lot more often than we did.

7.  Planning a vacation really stresses me out.


Jason's much better at it.  We were offered a week away, childcare provided, for our anniversary, and it look a long time to decide what to do with ourselves.  I finally had to walk away and make Jason come up with three itineraries for me to choose from. 


The pressure of not wanting to squander this precious time, combined with the overwhelming range of options, is just too much for me to handle.

8.  My angry outbursts at my kids are very often driven by fear of how they will turn out.


My superpower is seeing--at lightning speed--my children's apocalyptic future, in stark detail, based on the misbehavior incident of the day.


You'd think I'm making a soufflé or something.  One wrong move and--blam! the whole project collapses. 

9.  Mindy Kaling went to Dartmouth in 1997.


Being a New Englander, I knew a couple people from my high school who also enrolled at Dartmouth in 1997.  I've been there.  Have I seen Mindy Kaling before?  Do I totally know someone who totally knows her?

10.  A sticky lollipop stick that someone left in the car is perfect for retrieving the credit card that fell into the tiny crack between the seats when you pulled into the car wash and bumped over the tire-holder-thingy.


What is that thing called anyway?


11.  I'm an abstainer.


More practical life wisdom from Gretchen Rubin.

12.  How to finally lose ten pounds.


Here it is:  promise a friend (not a super close friend; one you like and trust but are also kind of intimidated by) that you will pay her $100 if you don't lose 10 pounds by the target date. 


The good news is that it worked amazingly. 


The bad news is that it took a fraction of the time to gain it all back, predictably. 

13.  Apparently the communion juice cups are not filled one by one.


Rumor has it that the church has some contraption that fills the whole tray of communion cups at once.  I'm consumed with curiosity to know what this thing looks like, but poking around the church kitchen has made me none the wiser.


14.  Not all dates are pitted.


I like medjool dates very much.  But I didn't realize that unless specified, they have rock-hard pits in the middle that are probably solid enough to break your tooth if you're not expecting it. 

15.  How to make appliqués.


They came out very cute.  But here's a pro tip:  put an old towel on the ironing board before you fuse the plasticky backing onto your cutout.  I did carefully avoid fusing the sticky plastic to my iron, but forgot to protect my ironing board, which now has a charming plasticky patch.


16.  Darius Rucker was the lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish.


His voice does sound familiar, now I think of it.

17.  What a sugar glider is.


Lizzy:  "Can you find 'sugar glider' in the encyclopedia for me?"

Me:  "What's a sugar glider?"

All of my children:  "It's a little flying squirrel."

Me:  "How do you all know that?"

Ada:  "Your children's knowledge has surpassed yours."

18.  I can schedule blog posts to go live automatically.


I did not schedule this post.... but I did write my last Friday links post several days early and schedule it to go up by itself on Friday!  Magic.




What did you learn this winter?

Links from the bunny trail

- "Two Ways to Prepare for Worship"--a timely encouragement and a hint about how to prepare your heart for worship this Sunday.

- A little less timely, but I thought this was a thought-provoking article to aid in self-reflection... even if it's not January anymore.

- This totally inspired me.  Could I really read twelve books for fun this year?  More than that, could I expand my reading horizons by reading something different than what I'd normally pick?  I actually made some idea lists related to this challenge, but I'm not totally committing... yet.

- Dude, did you know you can play practice Boggle online?  Just don't tell Jason I'm secretly practicing for our date night competitions.

- Also, how neat is this?  Rules for a bazillion card games, and you can search by number of players you want, or age of player, or type of card game.  So handy!  (See what I did there?)

- An article reminding me--and reassuring me--that believing in Jesus is reasonable.  Faith doesn't know all the answers, but it's not stupid.

- This is kind of intriguing.  I wonder if it really works?

Happy Friday!

Mess factory

The bag that, unbeknownst to me, Caleb chose to bring to the church meeting, which I didn't notice until the lady in the row behind us pointed it out.

We recently had an unplanned bit of drama at the Miller household when dear youngest son, in an act of wild foolishness, ended up breaking a wine glass just before dinner.  I exploded--I liked the wine glass, it is true; but the all-too-familiar, out-of-control thoughtlessness that occasioned its breakage was what sent me over the edge.

Caleb has set up a cardboard box in the corner of the school room, inside which he prefers to do all his schoolwork.  He calls it his "office."  I have sat outside this box by the hour, feeding tiny slips of paper through a designated slot, for him to read or calculate, and send back out through the slot, with mechanical sound effects.  Because if reading or subtracting at a well-lit table with ergonomically-correct chairs is difficult, maybe try doing it in a dark, cramped box.

Since I Could Not Even, Jason talked to Caleb first.  After a while, Caleb came to me with a tearful apology and asked if I wanted him to buy me a new glass. 


Oh, son.  I don't want you to pay for the glass.  I want you to use self-control.


And my budding theologian responded, through frustrated tears, But it's so hard!  It's impossible basically!  It's like doing one hundred pushups--you just can't do it!

At the end of myself, through my own frustrated tears, I asked, What's our hope?


We talked about our sinful hearts, and Jesus, and he eventually arrived at an answer:  God will save us.


Yes, son.  He forgives us now, and promises that one day, in heaven, we won't have any more sin.


This message was met with a fresh round of tears.  But why does it take so long?!

I hate to tell you, but this dawning awareness of yourself at age seven....is going to be with you your whole life.  Thirty-two years later, I still find sinlessness as impossible as one hundred push-ups.  And I still cry out, How long, O Lord?

Lizzy tossing a word salad.

Days later, in the school room, that incubator of all character traits good and bad, dear son was again getting revved up.  He had discovered the sharpener at the back of the 64-pack crayon box--and that if you screw and screw and screw the crayon in it, it makes colorful waxy confetti all over the table that only smears when your mother keeps trying to brush it off so we can do your stupid math already!!  In abundance of delight, completely oblivious to my desire for an alternate activity, he exclaimed, "I'm a mess factory!"


Yes.  You certainly, certainly are.


And so am I.  My heart churns out sin like a Play-doh extruder churns out neon spaghetti. 

I want to blame my irritability on February.  Can't you blame everything on February? 


But there is no season for sin.  Sadness may have seasons, but sin just has excuses.  And I can find those in the middle of summer just as well.  I am a factory for them, after all.

The evolution of Bob Ross

Some time before Christmas, I introduced the kids to Bob Ross, via YouTube.  Caleb was completely mesmerized and kept saying, "This is amazing!"  Thereafter, he set up shop on an overturned cardboard box and started churning out landscape after landscape, a la Bob Ross, albeit in crayon. 


And they weren't half bad, to be honest.  Plenty of happy little trees. 


Later, in Sunday school, the kids were supposed to decorate cards.  Caleb showed his completed card to his teacher and said, "Do you know Bob Ross?"  She told me that she could, indeed, recognize the influence.


So our friends knew exactly what to get our family for Christmas. 

Bob Ross, meet Photoshop.  Because the picture on that box, we learned, is completely fake. 


Here is Bob Ross sprouting. 

Aka, covered in maggots.  

I set him up on our kitchen windowsill, so he was, as Jason philosophically put it, an ever-present reminder of our mortality.

Or, noting the profuse sweating he's doing, you could picture him on Fear Factor.

A couple days later, the sperm phase.

Could it be more disturbing?

Finally, the phase of promise.  Except for that sprout shooting out his right nostril like a freeze-frame sneeze, it looks like we could actually achieve picture-on-the-Chia-Pet-box status.

Unfortunately...

"Driving 55mph in my convertible."

And when we got back from Gatlinburg:

Mold and dead chia.  RIP, Bob Ross.

Still, you see that smile?  He's an inspiration to us all.  Through maggots, sperm, mold, and terrible hair days, Bob Ross has never stopped smiling.  Such unassailable gladness.  Such courage in adversity.

He's been a ray of sunshine to all of us.

Links from the bunny trail

I'm thinking I'd like to join some of my favorite bloggers who have this Friday feature--posting links from around the web for my readers' amusement, edification, and/or inspiration.


The Nester has The Cozy Minimal List; Like Mother Like Daughter has Bits & Pieces; Modern Mrs. Darcy has Links I Love.  Seeing as my finds have nothing to do with professional research but everything to do with clicking down useless rabbit trails while forgetting that I opened my computer to order more laundry detergent before we run out, I give you


Links from the Bunny Trail:


- This absolutely delights me.  Trevor Noah of the Daily Show covers the Ugandan Parliament brawl.  Reminds you that as embarrassing as US politics are, they could always be worse, yeah?


- We recently put away all our former plates and bowls and replaced them with color-coded sets:  one large plate, one small plate, and one bowl for each member of the family.  Everyone is responsible for washing their own plate.  We recently added this set of color-coded silverware.  It's not a perfect system, but it does cut down on the dish pileup, not to mention the moldy bowls that linger in some forgotten corner of the playroom for weeks on end.


- This explanation of how to make "English jacket potatoes" seemed so adorably British, but once I tried it, I remembered that though the English are great at tea and grammar, they're not known for their crowd-pleasing cuisine.  This method ruined the skins, in my opinion.  I'll go back to my trusty lazy method:  wash the potatoes and lay them on a pan; bake for a hour(ish) at 375(ish).


- Here's a helpful list of cooked beef temperatures for the doneness you want (including the obligatory "safe" temperature per USDA).  I found this when ambitiously making beef medallions for date night a few weeks ago.


- File this under "Disappointing Pinterest Promises."  It was supposed to be simple, fast, delicious, and change my life.  Instead it was way too runny.  I haven't forgotten it entirely, and wonder if I tweaked it somehow, could it still revolutionize my life?


- After some googling to figure out what beef medallions actually are, I settled on this recipe for the sauce, using the rum I had on hand instead of the cognac I didn't.


- Is this free and available??


- I thought I'd go for this in January, when we got back from Gatlinburg, since it's not a resolution, it's a "recalibration," which is completely different from obviously doomed-to-fail New Year's resolutions, which I am way too smart to be drawn into.  This plan calls for avoiding all sugar, wheat, dairy, and alcohol for two weeks.  Even in my January idealism that seemed unrealistic, so I decided I would just avoid sugar for two weeks--a life revolution if ever I would have one. And after a week and a few days, I decided to round up and call it good enough.  Spoiler:  it hasn't "recalibrated" my palate to stop liking late-night Ben & Jerry's pints of Brownie Batter Core.


- A tongue-in-cheek list of "Six Ways to Look Godly While Not Growing in Your Faith" for the new year.


Happy Friday!

Singing through the Psalms, part VI

Part I (Psalms 1-25) here.

Part II (Psalms 26-50) here.

Part III (Psalms 51-75) here.

Part IV (Psalms 76-100) here.

Part V (Psalms 101-125) here.


Today I finally wrap up my Psalm series with just two psalms in their entirety, with the familiar songs taken directly from them.


Psalm 130:

"Out of the depths I have cried to You, O LORD.

Lord, hear my voice!

Let Your ears be attentive

To the voice of my supplications.

If You, LORD, should mark iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

But there is forgiveness with You,

That You may be feared.

I wait for the LORD, my soul does wait,

And in His word do I hope.

My soul waits for the Lord

More than the watchmen for the morning;

Indeed, more than the watchmen for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the LORD;

For with the LORD there is lovingkindness,

And with Him is abundant redemption.

And He will redeem Israel

From all his iniquities."

From the depths of woe I raise to Thee

The voice of lamentation;

Lord, turn a gracious ear to me

And hear my supplication;

If Thou iniquities dost mark,

Our secret sins and misdeeds dark,

O who shall stand before Thee?

O who shall stand before Thee?

To wash away the crimson stain,

Grace, grace alone availeth;

Our works, alas! are all in vain;

In much the best life faileth;

No man can glory in Thy sight,

All must alike confess Thy might,

And live alone by mercy

And live alone by mercy

Therefore my trust is in the Lord,

And not in mine own merit;

On Him my soul shall rest, His word

Upholds my fainting spirit;

His promised mercy is my fort,

My comfort and my sweet support;

I wait for it with patience

I wait for it with patience

What though I wait the live-long night,

And til the dawn appeareth,

My heart still trusteth in His might;

It doubteth not nor feareth

Do thus, O ye of Israel's seed,

Ye of the Spirit born indeed;

And wait til God appeareth

And wait til God appeareth

Though great our sins and sore our woes

His grace much more aboundeth;

His helping love no limit knows,

Our utmost need it soundeth.

Our Shepherd good and true is He,

Who will at last His Israel free

From all their sin and sorrow

From all their sin and sorrow

~Martin Luther, "Psalm 130"

Psalm 146:

"Praise the LORD!

Praise the LORD, O my soul!

I will praise the LORD while I live;

I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Do not trust in princes,

In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation.

His spirit departs, he returns to the earth;

In that very day his thoughts perish.

How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,

Whose hope is in the LORD his God,

Who made heaven and earth,

The sea and all that is in them;

Who keeps faith forever;

Who executes justice for the oppressed;

Who gives food to the hungry.

The LORD sets the prisoners free.

The LORD opens the eyes of the blind;

The LORD raises up those who are bowed down;

The LORD loves the righteous;

The LORD protects the strangers;

He supports the fatherless and the widow,

But He thwarts the way of the wicked.

The LORD will reign forever,

Your God, O Zion, to all generations.

Praise the LORD!"

Hallelujah, praise Jehovah,

O my soul, Jehovah praise;

I will sing the glorious praises

Of my God through all my days.

Put no confidence in princes,

Nor for help on man depend;

He shall die, to dust returning,

And his purposes shall end.

Happy is the man that chooses

Israel's God to be his aid;

He is blest whose hope of blessing

On the Lord his God is stayed.

Heaven and earth the Lord created,

Seas and all that they contain;

He delivers from oppression,

Righteousness He will maintain.

Food He daily gives the hungry,

Sets the mourning prisoner free,

Raises those bowed down with anguish,

Makes the sightless eye to see,

Well Jehovah loves the righteous,

And the stranger He befriends,

Helps the fatherless and widow,

Judgment on the wicked sends.

Hallelujah, praise Jehovah,

O my soul, Jehovah praise;

I will sing the glorious praises

Of my God through all my days.

Over all God reigns forever,

Through all ages He is King;

Unto Him, thy God, O Zion,

Joyful hallelujahs sing.

~Scottish Psalter, "Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah"

Tennessee y'all

Jason and I celebrated 16 years by heading to Gatlinburg, TN.  On the way we stopped for lunch at a tea shop, which turned out to be much more frou-frou than Google Maps let on.

It was delicious, though.

Was I thrilled to finally arrive in our brand-new, 2400-square-foot luxury cabin rental for a week of relaxation with my boo, get all our supplies stocked away, and heat up a very fine frozen dinner while pouring a glass of wine?

Yes.  Yes I was.

We spent the Actual Night at Dolly Parton's Staaaaaaampede!

The pre-show: Mountain Ruckus, a great bluegrass band name if ever there was one.

The emcee for the evening's entertainment/competition.  

We were on the South side [that's the blue team].  We had to choose sides when we bought the tickets.  Jason's a southerner, born and bred, but I'm a Yankee, so I was very stressed about which side we should choose.  Jason settled on South since that was the home team.  We didn't want to end up on the wrong side of any civil animosity.  

In between cheering our side and jeering at the Yankees, we tucked into our roast chicken dinner and watched stunts like this guy riding a pair of horses around, over, and through fire.

The riders also changed out of their team colors in between races for a little peaceable equestrian square dancing.

Another night we spent at Ole Red, a restaurant/concert venue with, inexplicably, a tractor stuck upside-down to the ceiling.

Because....Tennessee?

We had no shortage of fun in our own house, though.  We spent Sunday watching football at our very own private sports bar with everything cozy.

Some days we just stayed inside and watched the snow fall.

The last day we gathered our courage, bundled up thick, and headed downtown to walk the strip.  Such an endeavor required first tanking up at Crockett's Breakfast Camp.

These were the most amazing pancakes ever.  I started by ordered a stack of three.  The waiter said, "Have you seen them?"  I said, "OK, two."  I more or less got a birthday cake without the icing.

s

Sooooo good 

After a while we took refuge from the cold in Ripley's Aquarium, which turned out to be far classier than anything with the Ripley's name has a right to be.

Very cool shark tunnel.

Horrible, nightmarish creatures...some sort of Japanese crabs.  They were the size of golden retrievers.  Without the furry appeal, though.  Definitely makes you rethink ever swimming in the ocean.

Good job, Nelson!  Shame on you, Peter Penguin.

After our fill of sharks and stingrays and jellyfish and penguins, we spent the afternoon tasting moonshine.

Who knew a) there were so many flavors, or b) that they could taste so good?

I love this guy.

I hand it to you, Gatlinburg.  You do moonshine well.  And ceiling tractors.  And penguins.  And bluegrass and luxury cabins and dancing horses.  I tip my cowboy hat and click my new boots to you.