(smaller button below)
Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe.
If you want, you could simply tell us the most unusual dish you’ve ever eaten. Or the worst meal you’ve ever served.
My point is that we’re pretty relaxed over here, and posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes. [Read more...]
Curiosity Journal: a weekly recap of what I’ve been reading, playing and learning; what I’m reacting to and writing.
Inspired by Monica of Paper Bridges, I’m occasionally recording a Curiosity Journal. Tag words are: reading, playing, learning, reacting…and writing.
Reading: I just finished Eat, Pray, Love, and now I’m craving pasta. While I wouldn’t recommend this book from a moral (crass humor and sexual promiscuity) or spiritual perspective (this blogger describes Gilbert’s theology as “far afield”), I found myself wishing I could stitch together similes as memorable as hers: [Read more...]
My nine-year-old son spent most of Wednesday curled up on the couch recovering from a stomach virus while I worked on the computer at my desk a few feet away. At some point, he got up to get a book, and when he returned he stuck a Mozart symphony in the CD player and pressed play.
Music filled the room.
I sighed. [Read more...]
(smaller button below)
Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe.
If you want, you could simply tell us what food says “I love you.” Is it starchy comfort food ladled out by someone else, or a dark chocolate bar? Tell us about it or take a picture. [Read more...]
Last year's garden
The garden is mostly my thing. I plan it out, sketch ideas, buy the seeds or seedlings, and direct the entire process.
My husband tills while the kids trudge out and help rake, plant and water…some of them grumble and mutter the whole time, aggravated to be working when they could be playing. [Read more...]
The world of my childhood centered on a small farm in the American Midwest where my parents leased out the fields and kept a herd of cattle. We gobbled down all-you-can-eat catfish at small-town diners and overheard farmers discussing crop rotation. I never expected to travel outside the United States—a trip to Florida was exotic enough for me. As for learning a second language, everyone around me spoke English. Why bother with anything else?
Then, a year after college, I met a guy named Philippe who grew up in Europe and spoke fluent French. The son of American missionaries in Belgium, he grew up speaking English in the home and French everywhere else.
Within an hour of meeting him, I made a request. “Say something in French!”
“What should I say?”
“Anything,” I urged. “Anything at all.”
He looked up at the sky and said, “Uh, Le ciel est bleu; le soleil est brillant.”*
I melted…
:::
Read the rest of this article at TheHighCalling.org, a site about the integration of faith and work.
* [Translation: "The sky is blue; the sun is shining."]
Back in 2008 I had the opportunity to visit the the Corrie ten Boom Museum in Haarlem, Holland, where Corrie ten Boom, author of The Hiding Place, and her family protected and hid many Jewish people during World War II, helping them escape to safety.
I wrote a lengthy post about it and included some snapshots.
Now, thanks to a new website created by the Corrie ten Boom Museum, you can take a fantastic virtual, narrated tour (link takes you to the English version). After the introduction, click on specific rooms to be taken directly there. Clicking on the rooms in order is ideal, if you have time to listen to the narration. Directional arrows allow you to look up or down, left or right, and to enter different spaces.
You can see some of the ten Boom family photographs up close in great detail, and feel as if you are standing in the various rooms.
Before you leave, be sure to visit Corrie’s bedroom and step into the actual hiding place. You can turn around the cramped space and imagine what it must have been like to huddle in fear, listening to Gestapo clop around the house as they searched for hidden Jews.
The people who gave us the tour in 2008 told Corrie’s story and, in keeping with Corrie’s love for Jesus, they wove the Gospel message into the narration—the message of love, sacrifice and forgiveness in Christ Jesus that Corrie wrote and spoke about so earnestly and passionately during her lifetime as she traveled the world.
The virtual tour includes that same message, woven into the narration.
Please visit the Corrie ten Boom museum online, and make sure you have time to linger.
We home educate, which allows considerable flexibility in our schedules throughout the week. But we supplement with once-a-week classes in a cooperative effort involving multiple families. The parents share the teaching, and I offered to teach high school writing.
This means, of course, that I assign, read and evaluate a lot of papers. Last week I finished grading the last of the ten-page research papers my writing students completed. This was the first time they undertook an official research paper assignment, so they needed to learn the process from beginning to end: how to brainstorm for ideas, narrow down the topic, develop a working thesis, do initial research, modify that thesis based on the initial research, find reputable sources, begin in-depth and focused research by digging into online databases, organize note cards (yes, I had them use note cards), fuse outlines, write a rough draft, revise that draft, and turn in a final copy on time with all the requested elements.
They did it all; they turned in their papers.
And then I got to grade them.
Lucky me.
But I paced myself throughout the week. This is unusual for me. My tendency is to put off the tasks that I dread and then spend one panicked day cramming in the work I should have spread out over time.
What a pleasant surprise to finish up the grading and pack my bags for co-op classes by 10:00 p.m.! I know this whole idea of spreading out the work falls into Time Management 101, but I guess I realized that this is a way I can slow down and simplify.
I can look at the week and schedule my to-do list tasks over several days so that my pace is measured and sane. While doing that, I can make time for the really important things. I want to find a pace that allows me to pray and play and ponder things like this:
Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. (1 John 2:6)
Please link up your Lenten reflections below:
(smaller button below)
Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe.
If you want, you could simply tell us if you’ve had asparagus yet—I’m told it’s the first vegetable to emerge in the spring. I had some already in my CSA box. Yum.
My point is that we’re pretty relaxed over here, and posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes.
When your Food on Fridays contribution is ready, just grab the broccoli button (the big one above or smaller option at the bottom) to paste at the top of your post. It ties us together visually.
For years I’d considered signing up for a CSA or food co-op of some kind. I went back and forth on the idea, dragging my feet, afraid to commit.
Then, at some point in the book club discussions over at TheHighCalling.org—during the beet discussion, I think—I just did it. I signed up with Green Bean Delivery (available in Indiana and Ohio). The first-ever delivery was quite exciting, especially because I was anticipating a bag of beets. When we got the bin, the kids asked what each item was as I held it up to examine it.
We’ve been in the system for a few weeks, and delivery day is still exciting. Once a week I just set on the porch their empty green plastic tub from the previous week. Later that day, the delivery guy shows up with a matching tub filled with my order.
If the kids are home, they work with me to drag it into the kitchen and unpack the treasures within. Even though it’s not that different than coming home from the store with bags of groceries, something about the tub appearing on the front porch turns the mundane into mystery: what’s in the box?
My son loves to help.
Voila! Fruits and vegetables!
Packed full: lettuce, oranges, strawberries on top
Hey, look: limes! And feta cheese!
Avocados and in the bags, mushrooms.
Full bowl
Green Bean tries to buy local whenever possible, though they offer produce from all over (obviously the oranges, kiwi and strawberries were from far away). And they offer organic, sustainable and conventionally grown produce—I can choose. I have until about two days before they bring the tub to change my order, swapping items in or out of the bin. The flexibility is nice. And I find that I kind of like sitting at my computer to make those decisions.
The strangest thing about buying food this way is that instead of examining my own avocados to evaluate ripeness, for example, or filling a bag with apples that I’ve inspected, I have to trust Green Bean to choose top quality produce on my behalf.
So far, they’ve chosen very well.
Rooms are like clothes and photographs- they tell stories. As I look around mine this afternoon- my mind goes tripping down the trails of my life… remembering what has been that has brought what I see around me. (from “Room Rhapsody,” by L.E. Fiore)
L.E. Fiore takes us on a tour of one room, browsing bookshelves and speculating on what is tucked inside a “mystery drawer.” Just as she said, the items tell stories and offer glimpses of this young woman’s life: the places she’s traveled, the books she’s read, and the kind of thinker and writer she is.
At the end, she wonders what she would find in the reader’s room, and what it would tell about him or her…an invitation, of course, for me to look around at this room and tell stories. [Read more...]
Blogger: Pursuing a Christ-centered, creative, curious, slightly quirky, slow-down life and sharing it with you, post after post. (Home of Food on Fridays).
Author: Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families
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ann kroeker. curator. (read it, liked it)
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