Blessings and Gratitude

This is a love letter to my family – the one I grew up with and the ones I have chosen for myself as life goes on.

Gratitude has been on my mind a lot lately. If I had to count my blessings today, I feel like I could start and never stop. I seem to be in a perfect storm of blessings, where every part of my life is full of happiness and satisfaction. My life is not perfect, but there is so much good surrounding me, that even the less-than-ideal bits aren’t too troublesome. I know this can’t last forever – there will always be those valleys of disappointment, sadness, and troubles – so while it does, I desperately want to soak up every little drop of wonderful.

Two people have recently come into my life who have made this more clear than it ever was before. Megan and Grace originally came to stay at our bed and breakfast because, as I’ve evasively told so many people, they needed to get away from a difficult family situation for awhile. But it was so much worse than that. The family situation wasn’t bad, the family was completely lost. Not lost in the sense that they’re far away, across the globe in an remote location where communication with them is difficult, and visiting nearly impossible. Not lost in the tragic sense of death, by some horrific accident.

No, Megan and Grace lost their family because their family chose to cut them off. Completely. Forever. Megan and Grace chose to leave their family’s church, and to their family, this means they are worse than dead. They are traitors, sinners, and to be regarded only with scorn. A family who loved them – cherished them, even – only three months ago, has now turned them away with no room for negotiation or communication.

The girls are, understandably, heartbroken. Imagine what it is like to understand why your family has done this, but to wish beyond hope that it did not have to be so. Imagine knowing that your family is still there, doing the regular things you’ve known all your life, laughing and working and playing and pretending that you never existed while you struggle to figure out who you are apart from them, and what you should do with your life now that everything you knew is gone.

In attempting to imagine this, in attempting to sympathize with such a devastating situation, I find myself returning again and again to gratitude.

I have made some choices in my life that my family does not approve of. Like Megan and Grace, I left the church I was raised in to follow a different path. And though I know this occasionally causes my parents distress, they have never rejected me. Despite emotional disputes and confused expectations, they continue to love me for all they are worth. They love me with the kind of love that involves hugs, tears, rowdy family dinners on long weekends, difficult conversations over tea, confused phone calls about unimportant daily problems, and gifts of marshmallowy treats because they know how happy such a small gesture makes me. We see each other often (thought not as often as we all might like), we talk every few days. I know what is happening in their lives and they know about mine. For every difficulty that has ever come between us, there has been infinitely more love, support, and forgiveness.

And I am overwhelmed by gratitude.

Mom, Dad, Megan, Tommy, Grandpa George, Grandma Shirley, and Grandma Lorena: Thank you for being there. Thank you for loving me unconditionally and for always challenging and encouraging me. Thank you for being there through ups and the downs. I hope you know how much I love you in return, and how much more I wish I could express this. There is nothing in the world like family, and I could not be more grateful that you are mine. I love you. Forever. As Grace would say: Every day and every day and every day.

Megan and Grace: if you read this, I didn’t mean to make you cry. For all that your family has turned you away, I continue to believe with all my heart that they still love you. I disagree with the way they choose to express their love, but I deeply, firmly believe that their love for you is still there, and I deeply, desperately believe that we can always continue to hope for a day in the future when perspectives may be changed. Maybe in this life, maybe in the next. Whatever the case, I want to be your stand-in family for as long as you’ll let me, and you know I’m not alone. You are surrounded by people now who want to help you and love you and take care of you. Our ideas of what this means may not always match yours, but if that doesn’t make us more like a real family, I don’t know what does. But know this: you are not alone. Every day and every day and every day.

 

 

 

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Me and my Diet

Image credit http://www.flickr.com/people/16004130@N08/

I have never had to watch what I eat. I am blessed with a fast metabolism and some very skinny genes on my mother’s side. (Thanks to the well-cushioned genes on my father’s side, however, you will never catch me wearing skinny jeans.) I love my body. It has some flaws, as all bodies do, but I can work with them, and I’d say my body’s assets easily outweigh its problems.

For my whole life, I’ve lived around people who are dieting for one reason or another, and I’ve felt varying degrees of scorn or sympathy for them. Scorn in the cases of people who were dieting to lose those 5 vanity pounds that they clearly didn’t need to be losing, and sympathy for the ones who really struggle with their weight or with health issues. I’ve looked over the meals of folks dealing with lactose intolerance, high cholesterol, celiac disease, type I diabetes, or allergies, and I’ve thought to myself, “Thank God I don’t have these problems. I would die if I couldn’t eat cheese/bread/chocolate/eggs/whatever-it-is.”

Eating is an activity I really enjoy. I began life as a picky eater, but grew out of that when I spent a year living in France. I love to taste new things. I love to experiment with what I can cook for myself. I love rich foods full of delicious, flavorful things like butter and spices and homemade stock. I want to learn to like all the vegetables (though I’m currently stumped on broccoli… it is not a vegetable that goes out of its way to make itself lovable). I’m even trying to learn to like fish, a thing that does not come naturally to my land-locked palate. (After California Rolls, the world!)

But I’ve been recently diagnosed with GERD. That’s Acid Reflux disease in fancy new medical terms. After a lifetime of eating everything with no problems, what caused this? Probably an over-dependence on ibprofun. Is there anything I can do about it? A lifetime of taking drugs, perhaps, but I’m really not into that. The alternative? Eat things that don’t make me sick.

And when I say “sick,” I mean it. GERD strikes by spazzing out the Lower Esophageal Sphincter, the muscle that keeps the contents of your stomach where they belong. My issue is not eating too many spicy or acidic foods, my issue is eating foods at all. Fun fact: eating tomatoes doesn’t give you heartburn because they are acidic, it gives you heartburn because they cause the LES to relax, loosening the barrier between stomach and esophagus. Esophaguses are not designed to fend off the level of acidity that’s very normal inside a stomach. When that happens to me, I feel like there’s a tiny little man living inside my stomach, punching me repeatedly. Antacids don’t help. All I can do is wait for the evil little man to finish digesting my food and take a nap.

So apparently there are things I can eat that will keep my LES from going on the fritz. Lots of websites out there advocate extreme measures (giving up carbs and giving up dairy completely are the most frightening propositions I’ve seen), but I’m much more interested in trying the middle of the road options that at least leave me with balanced diet options.

Even those are hard. Here’s a list of things that are straight out the window:  Fruit (except apples and bananas), dairy (except low-fat cream cheese), flavorful meat (the leanest of all cuts are okay), egg yolks, garlic, onions, tomatoes, peppers, alcohol, anything sour, anything spicy, and cookies.

COOKIES.

You guys, I’m going to die.

But I’m not, actually. I keep thinking I will. I love to eat these things. Cheese? Onions? Peppers? BUTTER? My favorite things. I had no idea how dependent I was on them until I had to start thinking about not eating them. I’ve spent about a week moping, declaring that all I can eat is peanut butter toast and rice. But now that I’m (mostly) done feeling sorry for myself, I’ve been finding some better options. Stir-fry is a very good option, as long as you’re careful with the amount of fat you use for the frying (hooray for a well-seasoned wok!) I had a very nice pork chop with apple marinade last night. I bought things to make low-threat sandwiches for lunch, and some rice cakes for when I get the munchies.

Rice cakes…

 

I take it back, I’m going to die.

No no no, I’m not. Because my goal is to keep this up for a couple of months until the GERD goes away. If I can teach my body to behave again, I should be able to add the good things back in, hopefully a little at a time. I sincerely hope that if I can retrain my body, and stay away from the ibprofun, eventually I’ll get fully back to normal without having to restort to a lifetime dependence on Prilosec. (If too much ibprofun killed my tummy, I don’t like to think about what too much prilosec would do to me.)

In the meanwhile, if you catch me casting sad puppy eyes at your slice of pizza or your giant piece of chocolate cake, you’ll know what’s wrong. And I sincerely hope I don’t lose too much weight, because I need what I’ve got, and my honey likes my soft parts.
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The Morning of the Super Boff

I don’t make mistakes one at a time, I make them in packages. More efficient that way. Makes for better story-telling too. (Scope this one out for my most epic of Super Boffs.)

I had an appointment for a hair cut at 8:30 this morning. I was running a little late (go figure) and then when I got where I was going, I drove right past the building because, for some reason, her sign was down. I drove around the block, almost turned up a one-way street going the wrong way, then parked two blocks away because I couldn’t stomach making an uphill left-hand turn in Lead. I had my computer with me, so I locked the car and began the hike up the hill to the salon.

When I got there… empty. Not just closed, but clearly she’d moved out. Guh… what? I reached into my purse to call and see where she’d gone. No phone. At least my computer was in my car so I could find some wireless and look it up.

I got back to my car and discovered I’d brought the set of keys that only starts the car, but does not unlock it.

Oh crap.

So I hiked farther down the hill to the gas station where I mooched a phone to call the office. Dustin was out for a breakfast meeting, but Amanda had just called saying she was still on her way to work… from Lead. “GIVE ME HER CELL PHONE NUMBER!” So I called and got her voice mail. I tried calling again because I thought if it rang enough times, she might pick it up even though she didn’t recognize the number. Instead, some dude named Ted (whom I had apparently just woken up) answered. Oops, sorry Ted.

I called the office again to confirm Amanda’s phone number, then called her back. She answered, and was already down at the office in Deadwood. She most generously offered to come get me, so I called Dustin to see if he was available to give her the keys so I could take my own car back, but he didn’t answer his phone.

So. My car is still in Lead (where I don’t THINK I’ll get a ticket for leaving it parked all day…) with my computer locked inside. I have to do payroll this morning.

I’m… hungry.

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Why the end of the world not being tomorrow makes me sad

It’s been all over Facebook: RSVP now to the post-rapture looting party on May 21, 2011!

The idea that the world is going to end tomorrow, supported by those who follow the calculations of Harold Camping, has become a giant joke to the larger part of those who know about it. It’s far from the first (and certainly will not be the last) time folks have proclaimed that the end of the world will be on such-and-such very specific date. To me, it breaks my heart a little. People have quit jobs, broken their families, and left everything behind in preparation for an event which I, like so many others, am pretty sure won’t happen tomorrow. I can’t imagine the emotional state they’ll be in if dawn breaks on Sunday.

You have to understand that I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who also believes the world (society) as we know it is likely in its death throes, and that Armageddon is a real thing that I sincerely hope to see begin during my lifetime. I am one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and we tend to take Biblical prophesies at lot more seriously than many folks in main-stream branches of Christianity. We do the same thing Harold Camping’s group is doing – getting out and warning people – but we’ve been doing it for so long (and mostly without megaphones), that we’re more of an ongoing knock-knock joke than a news item.

And Witnesses have had their run-ins with badly-chosen doomsdays too. The most recent was a date in 1975,  but that didn’t pan out, and it left a lot of people broken-hearted. Perhaps that was a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way. It seems so clear to me, in Matthew 24:36 when Jesus says, regarding the end of this world as we know it, “Concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the Son, but only the Father.” If Jesus himself was not given access to that information, why should we be? We are, however, given plenty of opportunities to recognize that the time is getting close, as outline in the rest of Matthew 24.

As someone who believes that such an end will eventually come (though the end I anticipate bears very little resemblance to the end being trumpeted for tomorrow – no rapture, for example), I have undertaken to live my life simply, so that I will not be reluctant to let it go; to keep my priorities straight, so that spiritual matters and not material ones are kept at the forefront; to help any who will listen see that life cannot go on as it is and encourage them to form their own relationships with God. In such a way, I am capable of living in the “end times,” when life is difficult and disasters too abundant, with both hope and patience, without worrying too much about exact dates and times and what the implications to my faith might be if that doesn’t pan out.

So here’s hoping that if it’s not tomorrow, it’s soon. And to my friends and family: I understand that you may think I’m every bit as nuts as the folks who’ve cashed out their 401ks because they won’t be needing them after tomorrow, and respect that this is not the path you’ve chosen. Thank you for continuing to love and support me. I have every confidence that death – by natural causes, unnatural causes, or divine intervention – will not be the end for any of us.

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The Dining Room Game

I have a coupon for paint, so I’m thinking about painting. This might be a little premature, with holes still in the walls, but it doesn’t hurt to dream, right?

For some reason, I find it easier to contemplate painting my dining room than any other room in the house, so that’s where I’ll start. We plan to maintain as much of the original Victorian flavor as possible, as we fix the place up, so I’ve been looking at historical colors. If there’s one realm where the Victorians went wild, it was in color. I brought some swatches to my mother last night, and she was horrified. Her modern, neutral tastes did not mix well with the fuchsias and forest greens.

And I confess – I was trained by my mother in the school of safe neutrals, so all this color business does make me a little nervous. But the more I think about it, the more I’m deciding that painting is a lot like getting a hair cut. If you don’t like what you wind up with, it can always be changed.

So here, for your viewing pleasure (and courtesy of my mad photoshopping skillz) are some color options for our dining room. Please let me know what you think. I need all the input and moral support I can get.

First: this is the unaltered photo I’ve been using as a basis. It was taken while the house was a bed and breakfast. The furniture in the picture is not mine, although I do envy the plants. I’ll probably have plants a lot like these before all is said and done, and I suspect my furniture will be at least as classy as what you see (as opposed to the dorm-room style stuff we have now).

Now, here’s what happens when you paint the walls the color they are currently. Of course, I don’t know enough about photoshop to show you the obnoxious sponge painting. Imagine that you can see vast swathes of white through the khaki color.

And now, I proudly present – the potential colors!

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So let me know what you think. Also, you should go check out Dustin’s House Blog. It’s way more au courrant than mine on all things house.

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Three Wishes

(Awesome robot army from image from http://gralinnaea.com/?p=1051)

When I was in grade school, we played the game: “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?” Must’ve been in about third or fourth grade. All the boys wanted x-ray vision, heh heh heh (without really even understanding why seeing underneath girls’ clothes was so great), the nerds wanted to command armies of robots, and someone wanted to be able to teleport from place to place. I, fresh from having read Lois Lowry’s A Gift of Magic, was pretty sure I wanted ESP. I wanted to be able to read people’s minds.

“What??” declared the disbelieving teacher. “None of you want to be able to fly?” Oh yeah, oh yeah, we chorused in remembrance. We want that too.

I’ve since realized that the kid who wanted to teleport was the only one of us who was thinking practically. I mean geeze. Reading minds would turn into a huge burden, armies of robots always backfire, and flying is great but the troposphere is seriously cold. But teleportation? Do you have any idea how much of our lives we spend in cars? On planes? Trains and subways and the rest of it?

Skip to seventh grade, when I attended a superhero party. You were supposed to go dressed as a superhero, one you’d invented yourself. There were prizes for best costume, best superpower, best secret identity, and most useless superpower. My best friend won the prize for the last one. She showed up as Corn Lady, whose only superpower was the amazing ability to communicate with corn. With that stunning victory beside me, I can’t even tell you what I went dressed as on the occasion. I’m sure I had a cape.

Then one day last May I was in France, wallowing in disgust that I just ordered a carafe of “white water” instead of a carafe of white wine, and I’ve finally got it. I know what superpower I want. I want to be able to speak easily in any language. As we bumped along on the Metro that night, I honed down my wish, carefully considering how I would phrase it so that the granting genie could not possibly misconstrue my meaning. Here’s what I came up with:

“I wish I could communicate fluently in the language of the person I’m talking to at any given moment. “

What do you think? Is there still room for misunderstanding? I’m sure. I suspect all genies of granting wishes only grudgingly. I’d probably still only be able to speak to corn.

I puzzled over this for a good ten minutes, at the end of which I had truly convinced myself that someone was going to come up to me one day and actually grant this wish. I was making contingencies for different ways the wish could be offered – in case there was a price demanded or limits imposed…

When I remembered this was only a fantasy, that I did not have a scheduled appointment with said genie, and that the only way to pick up languages is to sit down and actually learn them, I was heartbroken. I felt like someone had just stolen my lollipop, but there was no mother to whom I could appeal to get it back. There just aren’t any genies – wanting to grant my wishes or otherwise.

Yet, I’ve started fantasizing again lately. I’ve come up with two other wishes which I’ve carefully crafted into phraseology that will certainly get me exactly what I want, when that genie asks. I’ve decided not to share the exact nature of these other two wishes. They deal with a personal fear and lack of enthusiasm that I think I do a pretty decent job hiding from the world at large, and I’d prefer to keep it that way for now.

When I thought of my second wish, I realized that I was onto something really good. It took me months and months to come up with this pair of perfect wishes. Imagine how I might have blown it if I’d tried to make three wishes on the spot, right after the genie popped out of his bottle. I might have wished for one of the foolish things that people think they want, but don’t really need. Money? It can always be earned, and it’s possible to be happy with what you’ve got. (Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t turn away a million dollars if someone handed it to me.) Health is great, but something else is always gonna get you in the future. Power? Who wants that anyway? Fame? Same icky deal as power.

No, I found that both my wishes were designed to balance out personal flaws. The not-being-able-to-speak-French-so-well thing may not actually be a flaw, but I see it as a shortcoming, and when you’re in the wishing business, why not overcompensate? So I began to wonder what other shortcomings I would choose to overcome with wishes, and very quickly my third wish came to me.

Three personal shortcomings that I could wish away, rather than devoting the years of hard work and dedication it would take to overcome them on my own. My tangled tongue would straighten out, my fear and unethusiasm would disappear in a poof of effortless purple smoke. I’d be a step closer to perfect through no actual effort of my own. Is that a worldly spirit, or what?

Since I’m quite sure (in my moments of lucidity anyway) that no genies will be popping up to grant these wishes, I suppose the thing to do is actually make a concrete plan to tackle my shortcomings and make some progress on my own. As soon as the purple smoke filling my brain clears, I’ll let you know how that’s going.

So what would your three wishes be? (No fair wishing for world peace. Go on… be selfish!)

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House Progress Photos

So you can see the holes in the floor, but *I* can see the holes in the roof. And what you can’t see about some of the holes in the floor is that they look directly down into the rooms below. All in the name of straightening out the heating system. And yes – that thing on the left side is the “straightened” system. It’s a huge improvement on what was there before.

This is my closet. Or will be some day. Until I knock it out completely and turn it into a much bigger closet. But right now it’s in pieces because there’s some really wacky plumbing going through there. Probably there used to be a sink in the room. Wouldn’t mind still having that, actually. Hmmm…

This used to be a linen closet. Now it’s a closet full of ducts and pipes because I insist on having heat and plumbing in my upper floors. Oh well. Towels can’t possibly take up that much space, right?

This is one of many mystery holes one can find in almost all of my walls. It has to do with the frozen plumbing. I’m much more interested in holes now than surprise leaks later. Also, you may notice that my walls are not ye olde typical drywall. They’re ye older typical plaster. I hope the guys who made these holes know how to fix them.

Sexy new plumbing in our downstairs bathroom.

The corner of this room was overrated anyway.

I have an idea for a kitchen game: THE FLOOR IS LAVA!!! I’ll never get anything cooked if I can only step on parts of the floor with lick’n'stick linoleum tiles, but the good news is, if the floor is LAVA, everything will be cooked all the time.

Also, my kitchen floor has a trap door. Not really. But you could fall through it for sure.

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A Moving Tale, Part 1

We’ve been packing our house from the inside out. Sneaky, undercover-style packing that involves emptying drawers and closets that we never opened anyway. Each day, we take six or ten boxes to Deadwood when we go to work. If you walked into our (current) house, though, you might not even notice what we’ve been up to. (Well, except for the pile of boxes and tape hanging out in the living room.) The house still looks fully-stocked, well-decorated, and lived-in. Just don’t open any doors or drawers; you’ll discover it’s all a sham.

And with all that stuff gone – moved to our new house to wait quietly for our arrival – my life is no different. Amazing how much stuff we hoard (even knowing we don’t have nearly as much stuff as lots of people) and how little of it matters from day to day. The boxes already packed are labeled things like “Novels F-H — Sweaters — Hippo — Candleholders”. Unpacking should be an interesting adventure.

After talking to the contractor and a few of his subs this week, we realized that there’s no chance our new house will actually be ready to live in by the time we move in next weekend. There will probably be a heating/venting system, though it’s so full of old gunk that it will probably cover the house in dust for a week or so after it gets turned on. Plumbing is a little iffier. We’re sure at least one bathroom and the kitchen will be plumbed, so that’s good, but there’s the small matter of the walls that need to be torn out to finish the rest of the plumbing.

I’ve seen what’s behind some of these walls. It looks like hamster nesting material. It’s seriously scary.

The kitchen also has only half a floor, but I”m pretty sure we can patch that up with cardboard boxes for the meanwhile.

The roof is halfway reshingled, which should be done before we move in. The foundation needs some help, and the porches all need to be rebuilt after that’s done. (Seeing what was lurking under the porches, by way of what should have been supporting the porches, was a real treat. Yikes!)

So that probably won’t all be done by next weekend. We asked the contractor which rooms we should move our stuff into so it would be out of the way while they continue to tear out/rebuild walls and make our toilets flushable. After considerable hemming and hawing, he generously suggested that the tiniest room in the back corner of the house might be a good place to stash our stuff, and that the attic might be a pretty good place to live. And yes, we can probably get into the kitchen a couple times a day if need be.

Yikes.

I think I’ll look at it as a sort of glorified camping experience. Three flights of stairs between my bed and my toilet? At least it isn’t an outhouse. Or a tree.

More updates as things progress.

New roof!

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Doods, we bought a house…

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the epic house tale:

Deadwood, where we work, is a 40-minute drive from where we live. This has never been a huge problem, but we’ve always figured that if we stumbled across a perfect house in Deadwood, we’d probably move up there.

At the end of March, we found that house:

Thinking that it was beautiful on the outside and delightfully historic (a bonus for us), we called our realtor and she gave us the tour. Though it certainly needed a lot of work, it was awesome and beautiful and obviously more house than we’d ever need or be able to afford or…

What’s that you say? It’s a foreclosed property? Fanny Mae is selling for the low low price of Holy Cow We Can Afford That?

Before the day was out, we’d gotten the city Historic Preservation Officer, the City Inspector, and a contractor up to look at the property. We got their opinions on how much effort and money it would take to fix it, whether it was worth the asking price, and what sort of assistance we could get from the Historic Preservation Fund.

The next day, we were at the bank applying for a loan. Before the week was out, we were pre-approved and put in an offer.

Turns out, we were too slow. Another offer had been submitted an accepted while we were doing our homework. It was awful. We’d gotten ridiculously attached to the house. I was irate and indignant to find out that the other offer came from someone who wanted the house as a project, to be flipped and resold. Didn’t they know that I wanted to live in it? Love it and fix it and be an excellent neighbor? Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from the guy who got foreclosed on because he thought he could flip it?

Displaying irrational optimism, we watched the MLS listing every day to see if the “Under Contract – Financing Contingency” would go away, for better or for worse. Our realtor told us not to hold our breath.

Then one Saturday, three weeks later, the house reappeared on the market – “Available”. We high-tailed it to the realtor’s office to resubmit our offer. By the end of the week, we were accepting their counter-offer. Today we signed closing papers.

Our current house goes up on the market on Monday. Until it sells, we’ll be eating nothing but ramen and freezer pizzas. It’ll be worth it. The new(old) house is a three-minute walk from our office, and it’ll be an incredible project to keep us busy for the next, oh, several decades.

Besides – with this many bedrooms, we’ll be able to have one zillion visitors. Give us a call. I’m accepting reservations starting now.

Check out some great pictures here:  http://www.facebook.com/dustinfloyd?ref=ts#!/album.php?aid=216333&id=504773272

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Current Blizzard Conditions

This is a game of “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” Do you see it? Even if you do not currently live or reside in the Black Hills, you can probably figure it out.

No, it isn’t the second Latest News headline inserted to correct a typo, which typo was then not removed, though that’s also pretty funny. Here, let me highlight it for you:

Right. Now here, to illustrate what 115 degrees and foggy looks like, is a picture out my front window:

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