The next room in the house that we want to redo is the kitchen. Many of you know what a huge task that is. Julia is soon to leave for college. For the first time in about 50 years, I will be HOME in the autumn with no: 1) school, 2) work, or 3) children. That's a stunning thought! So ... what better time to rip out the old kitchen and try to make it into something I love?
Because I gotta tell you -- I really, really don't like the average kitchen. This is what we have. I did not clean up before this photo shoot, haha!
The left side, looking from the dining room
Our kitchen is about 8 feet wide by 20 feet long -- that's me guessing. Happily, our ceilings are 10 feet tall, so there's lots of room UP.
The right side, looking from the dining room
Down the middle -- this is a galley kitchen
I will not get my dream kitchen, because my dream kitchen would have a center island and a wood stove and a comfy couch, plus a desk and chair. The walls would be those of a log cabin, which this house is not. Since I can't have those things, what do I want? I want open shelving and a rustic look. I'll lift a few photos from google for you:
I love all this old, dark wood. The darker the better, for me!
This kind of free-standing furniture would be my favorite, with open shelving elsewhere. I loathe cabinets.
I love those old Hoosier cabinets, but any old sideboard would do.
Adam will build the shelves for me.
I like these shelves below:
Shelves, to me, seem to provide a more economical use of the space. And I want a rod overhead to hang things on.
I love this. I want my cookbooks in my kitchen again. I want herbs drying overhead. I want to sew a curtain to hang in front of the under-sink. And although there's no room for a chair, I'd love a folding stool I could pull out of a nook, to open and sit when needed.
As for the color of the walls (because they must be painted!), I'd like the light sage green in the photo above, or something close to it.
We'll also pull up the flooring, unsure of the condition of the wooden floor underneath.
Do any of you have kitchens like this, or wish you did? Do you have suggestions before we start? I told Adam perhaps we should start in one corner, ripping out and replacing little by little as we go around the room. Yes or No?
The summer is flying along. I caught the above photo Monday night while driving home from Oriental. I'd been enjoying the company of lots of lovely ladies at our church's second "Ladies Salad Supper." Here are the ladies. Don't they look happy? We had fun.
I finished knitting this shawl. (It's bigger than it looks.) I'm wondering whether to put a little trim around the edge, so I laid that red yarn around the edge to see -- what do you think? Crochet a picot border or not? Red? Another color?
At least once a week Adam puts in his "office hours" down at the river park in Oriental. He enjoys reading there and meeting/talking to people who walk by. When you have a dog like Beau, you have your own greeting squad!
Here's a random thing. We were in Books-a-Million and saw this display for record players. Really! Brand new ones for sale to the youth of today. I was puzzled. Do kids have LP's to play on them? I have a stack or two of old LP's, but I don't think my kids do. Is this supposed to appeal to them or me?
If there's any doubt, the display next to it helps -- a whole rack of Harry Potter stuff, with prominent LP's of the Harry Potter motion picture soundtrack. Yes, a soundtrack that was written long after LP's were old news. I guess they want my kids' generation to buy the LP's and the record player, and put away their iPod shuffles and cell phones/ear buds.
Adam and I love to drive down to Vandemere to their beautiful waterfront park. It's pristine, shady, quiet, and hardly used. We were the only ones there Friday evening.
The docks are quite nice too.
We are enjoying our nearly-empty-nesting.
So is Beau :) He says, "Can I be the only kid now, huh?"
Well, here's the real last kid! Julia just turned 18. As is tradition with our kids, she went straight out and did something that would've been illegal for her the day before -- she bought a lottery ticket!
What a cutie. This is what Beau did the whole time she was in the store:
Two birthday photos:
This is the third year Anna has bought Julia a Chinese birthday candle.
The first year, it pretty nearly blew up!
Last year, we lit it outside to prevent a house fire.
Here's this year's candle, straight from the orient:
It came in the most unusual bubble wrap I've seen. It's a bubble wrap container with a hinged lid.
I won't post the video here because it's long and big to load, but the great firing of the birthday candle was a flop. I think the mechanism failed to ignite properly. The candle arms never extended, the central flame did not shoot up, there was no endless birthday song either. Boohoo! But it was fun lighting it and watching the plastic melt!
Adam bought Julia a glass dip pen for her birthday. She loves it.
He already had ink she can use.
I baked her a pumpkin pie at her request.
One last random thing I want to share -- look at the beautiful purse I found at our local thrift store for $4!! What a find. The brand is Sakroot. Julia was given a small purse by this company for her birthday. I love the style of the fabric.
In addition to these varied events, Adam and I enjoyed a visit with friends on their boat in the town dock slip in Oriental. Ray and Beth travel around, living aboard. They've sailed on their 41' boat from Texas to Florida to Virginia to the Great Lakes, down via the Mississippi River, with a stay at a lovely marina in Demopolis, AL, and many other places. We enjoyed hearing their news. They pass through our area every few years.
And this morning I sang with a friend, Nadine, at the 1st anniversary of the Oriental grocery store, "The Piglet." It's a small Piggly Wiggly, thus the name. Nadine and I are in the early stages of trying to form a group called "Higher Ground," a gospel ensemble with guitar (her) and autoharp (me) with an Appalachian Folk sound. It was fun to sing, but hot. Usually we sing in church, at the 5th Sunday Sings, and hopefully at local nursing homes this coming year.
That's all from us, folks! I hope you're staying cool this summer. We're almost done with July. Hooray!!!
Do you have a beloved church hymn that most people have difficulty singing? I grew up singing "And Can It Be That I Should Gain?" Seriously, people -- just look at that title! What kind of hymn starts with the word "and"? But I sang it enthusiastically as a child because it was the "theme song," if you will, of a church in Atlanta where our family went to Family Bible Camp each summer. And all my little camp friends were there each year, and we all sang the words (which we quickly memorized) even though they were convoluted and didn't always make much sense to us. Here are a few examples:
And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood?
Died he for me, who caused His pain, for me, who Him, to death pursued?
or
Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast-bound in sin and nature's night.
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray! I rose, the dungeon flamed with light!
or
Alive in Him, my living Head, and clothed in righteousness divine,
Bold I approach the eternal throne and claim the crown, through Christ, my own.
They're exciting words, and we loved singing them, but ohmygoodness, the tune is a pain! It leaps and jumps all over the place. In the new hymnal, the editors actually (finally) changed a bit of the melody line to match what singers had been doing for years, because the line as written was just awful.
Don't get me wrong; I love that old hymn, and I don't have any trouble with the tune because I grew up with it. But our congregation finds it quite challenging, and they sing quietly, confused by its leaping lines. The chorus is another story -- it's wonderful and rousing.
Tonight I flipped through the hymnal and wondered this: are there any other hymns with the same meter? If you don't know this, it's so helpful: hymns with identical meter can mix-and-match words and tunes. Since "And Can It Be" has a meter called L.M.D. ("Long Meter Doubled"), and there are several other hymns with that meter also, technically speaking, I should be able to sing the text of "And Can It Be?" with those tunes! Tralalal! I was so excited!
Yes. You can sing the words of "And Can It Be?" to the tune of "Sweet Hour of Prayer" and "He Leadeth Me." Those are perfectly singable tunes. (Phew!!) Interestingly, you can also sing the words to the tune of "Jerusalem" (of Chariots of Fire fame), if you want a swanky arrangement. And ... you can also use the tune "How Shall The Young Direct Their Way?" which is quite fun and lively. Who would've thought?
And if you're a real hymn weirdo, like me, here's another option for you, but I must beat-around-the-bush first. If you've ever watched the lovely movie The Railway Children with Michael Kitchen, you may remember the birthday song the family sings to Roberta. It's a lovely tune in a minor key. The tune is "St. Patrick's Breastplate," and it's in our hymnal (#104). Go look it up and give it a whirl. I adore that tune, although it's also quirky. But guess what? "And Can It Be" is also compatible with that tune! I was delighted with this find.
For a while I've wanted a more modern, singable version of "And Can It Be?" Most of the text is truly wonderful, rich words of salvation from a person stunned by God's love. "Amazing Love! How can it be? That Thou my God, shouldst die for me?!" I'm not enough of a song-writer to craft such a new addition to hymnody. But with our meter-matching, I found a lovely pairing in #560. The tune name is "Fort Lauderdale." (Strangely, it's listed under the L.M.D. meters in our church's hymnal edition, but not in my older edition at home.)
And this pairing of text and tune is really perfect. If you're able (and it's harder than one would think!) sit down and play #560 in the Trinity Hymnal (if you have it) and sing the words to "And Can It Be?" It's worth the effort. And thanks for reading all this, if you got this far.
What better way to keep busy in the summer heat that sitting inside and playing with yarn?
I'm knitting a shawl with lots of old Charisma yarn. It's a chunky yarn that I used to crochet smittens with. I love how all the colors are coming together!
This big bag belongs to Anna, but she left it here, so I've loaded it up with all my skeins of Charisma yarn. I like to sort and organize my yarns by types that way.
I'm nearly done with this scarf on my loom. It's a soft, loose weave.
I don't crochet much anymore. It hurts my thumbs. But when I sit at the market on Saturdays with nothing else to do, making a little crocheted soap pouch is so easy.
Don't you like all the stripey colors? I hope somebody wants to take it home :)
These are the dog days of summer, as they say. Adam is out mowing and mowing. The grass gets ahead of him! We had day after day of rain, and then when it was sunny, he needed to finish the new chicken coop (which is finished! yay!). Bless him ... summer is not a time for farm projects when there's mowing to do!
I took Julia to WalMart earlier this week for the once-in-a-lifetime, set-her-up-for-college shopping trip. Actually, we were quite moderate in our purchasing; she's not a high-maintenance shopaholic type of daughter, I'm glad to say. She has less than a month left at home. She will visit us, but somehow I don't think she's the type to come back to live with us. She's quite independent.
Anna is now on her long school break. The Japanese school year starts about April 1, and they have a long break (kind of like our Christmas break) from mid-July till September 1. During this time she works for the Board of Education office. But in a few days she has a friend coming to visit her from the States, and she will spend a good bit of time with him.
Enjoy your yarn, ladies, if you're knitting these days!
Adam lost 66 lbs., and I lost 31 lbs., and we looked good, if I do say so myself!
May, 2015. We were already beginning to gain it back again.
We started reducing our calories significantly on June 1, 2013, my birthday. So ... we had pictures!
We were tubby. One year later, June 1, 2014, same restaurant, we were much improved:
Of course, it helps to have smiling faces. But we've got the records and numbers to prove it. We looked better because we'd lost weight. The photo at the top, from Philip and Kara's wedding, is one more year along, May, 2015. Already, we were struggling to keep our weight down. The weight loss regimen that had worked so well for a while, was failing. At first, when were dieting together, we'd sometimes say, "Wow! This is great! This doesn't really feel hard! I can't believe we waited so long! We can eat this way the rest of our lives and attain any weight we want to!" Ha! Adam's goal was to weigh 165 lbs., and he truly believed he would just keep going down until he got there. Why wouldn't it work that way?
We were eating very carefully. On a food log on his iPad, Adam entered every morsel he put between his lips. We looked at that old food/weight log again last night. We didn't stop dieting, and he didn't stop exercising. Why did it fail? I remember well when he'd come back from his daily 20-mile bike rides, wondering why he had plateaued on his weight loss, why he was again gaining weight slowly, even though he was riding more than before, and he was still logging his food, weighing himself daily.
We watched a video last night by Dr. Jason Fung that quite clearly showed us why our calorie-reducing plan failed, why it's designed to fail. If you struggle with this painful reality, please watch it. Find out why cutting calories and increasing exercise will not work because the human body is not designed that way. It's not "calories in/calories out." It's "fewer calories in/your body stores it up and rebels and shuts down your metabolism/gain the weight back." Yeah.
Fung is a kidney specialist and cancer doctor who advocates fasting. He has many other videos and a book too, so you can find out more about his theories of how the body works, and why our usual diets let us lose weight and then regain it.
He talks about insulin, obesity, metabolism, and fasting, and how the body stores fat. And it makes good sense. Adam noted in himself that the caloric intake that allowed him to lose weight back in 2013 will now cause him to gain weight. His metabolism has slowed so much, he can't lose weight unless he goes on about a 1300 calorie/day diet. That's insane!
When you've been morbidly obese -- a weight that is killing you -- and you lose lots of weight and feel great, it's crushing and depressing to gain it back and feel helpless about it. The feeling of failure, the disappointment of family and friends, the decreased mobility, the daily food restrictions that accomplish nothing -- it's all horrible. So we are ready to hear what Dr. Fung says.
I've never fasted. I've never been convinced that, as a spiritual discipline, it would accomplish for me what it is supposed to, although I'm happy for those who find it useful in that way. But perhaps for losing weight again, it would be useful. I'll keep you posted. If you have any thoughts on this, please comment. I have so many friends who've dieted, lost, and regained. I have one friend who had the surgery Dr. Fung mentioned, and she has kept off her weight. I have one friend who's lost lots of weight and seems to keep it off with huge amounts of exercise. Other than those two, I really don't know anybody who's lost weight from being morbidly obese, and kept it off. (I'm not talking 15 or 30 lbs.; I'm talking 50 - 100 or more lbs.) I have many friends who've had the failure we've experienced.
Here's a second video where he talks more about the fasting concept, if you're interested:
My friend Gretchen Joanna recently posted this poem on her blog. I love wrangling with a good poem, and this is a good poem. So even though I'd never read it before (nor heard of the poetess), I can't resist trying my hand at this challenge. What's this poem talking about? What's on the author's mind? I googled and searched just a little bit, but found no online assistance in this matter, so I'll just have to dust off my literary tools and take to it myself! Gretchen, on her part, thought perhaps the poem is a dream. What do you think?
The Leaving
My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was–I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water–full of fish and eyes.
Here goes. After several readings, I note that the title of the poem seems to have nothing to do with the poem itself. Usually this means that the title is a clue, a key, and that the poem's meaning is hidden: the surface message is not the real one. So -- this poem is not really about picking peaches all night. Phew! That's a relief! Because that would be a silly poem.
The next thing I notice is that the poem starts with a relationship conflict. The daughter challenges her father. He says she can't do it, and she stubbornly insists she can. And then she does! But what does she do? What's the all-night, grueling activity that a daughter must do, that her father thinks she can't do? Well, I'd have to answer, it's the leaving. He says she can't leave; she insists that she can.
So, what does leaving feel like? It feels like picking peaches in the moonless dark all night long, up and down a ladder. Now that's a metaphor I can chew on!
I've invited our black Lab, Ned, into the garden with me a few times to scare off the rabbits who've murdered my bush beans. Ned quickly grasped the fun of chasing a rabbit around the beds. He enters the gate, sniffs high and low, flips his ears inside out (which looks hilarious), stands erect, and then bounces around the bed, fixated on the rabbit. I can become just like Ned when hunting down the whiffs of literary ideas in a poem or short story. So rather than hanging my entire interpretation of "The Leaving" on the word "leaving," I must find other clues inside the poem that tell me the daughter has travel on her mind.
First, each time she twists a peach from its twig, she is turning a door knob, opening and "entering a thousand doors" as she goes through this lonely process. A child leaving a parent is certainly opening many doors, looking for the right exit, looking at the many options for leaving, perhaps opening many doors in succession like Max Smart heading for his phone booth.
Remember that? How many doors must this girl open? A thousand. In the next line, the daughter says of her picking/leaving, "all night, my back a straight road to the sky." In the poem, the trees, the ladder, the pond are the things tying her down, the final task she must master before leaving. Freedom is represented in the sky, the stars (which are moving, while the orchard is "still"), the sunrise which allows her to stop and comes "in its goodness" to end her vigil. The morning moves, it comes over the "fields of the stars." The light "comes over the orchard," while during the dark night, only her hands were "lit" and the fields of stars overhead, her companions. Her back, which is her hard labor, is her escape into that sky, into that light that is her future. Her past is in the orchard, the labor of childhood, which is full of murmuring voices (from the canal) and watching eyes (from the pond). The canal voices seem to tell her of all those who had left before her, who had also done this work. The most obvious message is that a Herculean task is set for the girl, a task her father says she is incapable of doing. It takes all night, but when the darkness leaves and the morning light comes, she is free. Only at the end does she realize she has been observed each time she places a peach into the cool pond water ... a thousand times! A task she thought was a lone endeavor is not. At first this poem made me uncomfortable because of the girl's obvious awareness of her own body. She mentions it often: her chest, her hands, her back. She can feel, all night long, the stars moving through her body. At sunrise when the light comes, her body responds to it like a bell that's just been rung, and the vibrations still resonate and ring, an inner tingling and shimmering of response to the light -- a beautiful image. The focus on fruit and on a young girl's body reminded me of Rossetti's "Goblin Market," a poem designed to make the reader uncomfortable. It makes you squirm. But the night-time dreaminess of this poem also reminds me of Frost's "After Apple-Picking." Yet Kelly is charting her own path. Her character has no tale of sin or redemption, and the repetition of the ladder-climbing and fruit-picking doesn't make her stumble and stop. The daughter is driven to complete her leaving. She mentions her father only in the first line. After that, she's on her own course, accomplishing her own metamorphosis, moving from darkness into light. The only moment of hesitation and doubt is in the final line when she realizes she's been watched, supervised. Only the light of her leaving gives her the ability to see how she has had watching company through it all. "I was a girl then." Doesn't that say it all? Beginning that night of picking, she was a girl; now she's a woman. Her heart then was walled in, secret and private. Now it is open. Leaving is a labor.
I'm borrowing from Rev. Shane Bishop's blogpost on this topic, although I'd like to reword some of his points about "12 Things I See Happy People Do that Unhappy People Don't Do." We can all choose to be happier, and we can choose to be miserable. Decide what you want to be, and then take in hand your perceptions. If your vision needs correction, change glasses!
Eight Behaviors of Happy People:
1. Happy people are thankful. Unhappy people complain. Do you spend time thinking about all the things you want but don't have? It'll make you unhappy. Focus on what you do have, and be sincerely grateful. Stop thinking about the "I wishes." Change your expectations.
2. Happy people are generous. Unhappy people are stingy. Related to #1, people who don't feel they ever have enough are slow to let go of anything they do have. Practice giving things away.
3. Happy people forgive. Unhappy people hold grudges. This is perhaps the hardest and most important. If you've been done wrong and you're holding bitterness against that person -- no matter who -- it will eat you alive inside and make you unhappy. The ONLY way to overcome this is to forgive the person. Don't ask me why; I only know that it works like a secret weapon. Nothing kills bitterness off like thoroughly forgiving the person.
4. Slow down!! I can't emphasize this enough, for all you "doers" out there. Your "doing" is wearing you out, especially when you hit middle age. Try this: choose a simple task at home (sweeping, vacuuming, hanging out laundry, dishes, etc.) and attempt to do it as SLOWLY AS POSSIBLE. If you find this uncomfortable, you're probably a person who needs to slow down a lot.
5. Happy people look at others. Unhappy people are self-focused. Rich or poor, young or old, sick or healthy, no matter your gender or race, try to stop thinking the world is about you. Is your brain on a thought-loop about your troubles? When you enter a room, do you look around to find out who is looking at you? If you do, you probably need to work on this one. Again -- it's about expectations and perception, and you need to stop expecting everybody to be about you.
6. Happy people watch their words. Unhappy people don't know when to control the tongue. Adam says that we all believe what we tell ourselves, and it's so true. Stop telling yourself you're unhappy, stop telling yourself what you don't have, stop telling yourself how you've been wronged and abused, stop telling yourself you are worthless (or conversely, that you are the most worthy), stop telling yourself you can't forgive, and stop telling yourself that you can't change. And stop telling other people all that stuff too.
7. Happy people are not self-pleasers. Unhappy people are greedy for their own happiness. Happiness is a butterfly. You can't catch it in your hand but it will light on your shoulder if you leave it alone. Happiness is a side effect of other ways of living, not a goal in itself. Stop grasping at the air.
8. Happy people let go of regrets. If there are things in life you feel you missed that you can go back and recover, do it. Stop whining about it. If you're not willing or able to get up and go fulfill those little dreams (travel, music lessons, more education, learning a skill) then let them go.
Most of the people out there you think are very happy are just struggling along like you are. They may be a bit ahead of you in the effort, but they're working on these things like you. Look at those happy, smiling people who are kind and thoughtful and uncomplaining, and remember they have chosen to be so. You can too.
We watched the fireworks in Oriental. This year they set them off from the top of the bridge. The reflections on the water were breath-taking, as usual!
To avoid the crowds in Oriental (a town of population 850 swells to about 4000 for the weekend), we viewed the show from Green Bay Marina, where our little boat is moored. We'd planned to take the boat out on the water for the show -- and it is stupendous to view them overhead and reflected on the water, from a boat!! -- but the water was quite low and the rudder was stuck in the mud. So we watched from the dock.
I've been eating tomato sandwiches at last! My Brandywine tomatoes are beginning to come in.
The big news, of course, is that Philip and Kara are visiting and resting, and they brought OUR GRANDDOG along!! His name is Charlie, and he s utterly adorable.
Adam is enraptured with Charlie. Beau is trying to cope with the addition of a more-beautiful dog than he is, in the house.
Look at those soft, curly ears!
The above photos were taken on our drive back from Fort Macon beach yesterday. Charlie was snoozing from sheer exhaustion on Philip's chest.
Hiya from the beach!!
Adam's been cooking up a storm. Yesterday he made pickles, a gallon of salsa, and then made fabulous nachos for lunch. We had burgers from the grill on Sunday, and today we'll have Nathan's hotdogs for "The Fourth."
We are officially on tomato overload. We've made salsa and tomato sauce (over 6 quarts), canned and frozen. I've given some away. I hope to sell LOTS at the market this Saturday, but not selling at the market this past Saturday really set me back!
Adam's pickles
Last but not least, my four baby chicks are doing quite well. They are old enough now to take the warming light off of them, even at night. I also had heavy plastic and towels draped around their pen so they wouldn't escape through the metal bars. But I think they're big enough now they won't squeeze through.
I have two silkies (the gray ones) and two others that are a little smaller.They are living a good life on the front porch now while Adam builds their new coop and run.
I'll try to nab a photo or two of Philip and Kara, but you know how it is when photographing your children -- especially when they are on vacation and resting! I don't want to put them off in any way from coming again, haha :) Have a happy and safe July 4th, everyone! Happy Independence Day, fellow Americans!
