Random Coast Photos

On a clear day.
How did the stone get that way?

If there is a fire, the pug makes herself comfy!

I did finish all of these, but it took 2 hours!

Brain, Brawn & Beach

We spent last weekend on the coast and it was fantastic.  The weather was cool and sunny, and the company was exceptional.  Our friends are nearly as nerdy as we are, adventurous, and full of energy.  Because of this,  it was not alright that there wasn't a dry way across a small river to the big beach.  We used levers, muscles and a civil engineer to turn a fallen tree, into a bridge.

We were quite proud of our work.  We watched visitors come to the beach and casually walk across our bridge.  The kids excitedly told the first few folks of our creation, but I think they felt snubbed when they weren't met with as much as enthusiasm as we had.

The day finished off with a walk, a sea food meal, a game of hearts (which was good for the competitive types, not me, so much, but I'll play) and a lot of laughter.  One of the best days of the year!

simple machines

muscles and a calculator watch

next, a pyramid 

Guts Doctor

My husband has been suffering (though cheerily) with an illusive ailment for several years.  It swells his digestive track, and makes his life miserable.  There has been little to do to make it better.  Unprocessed food and pharmaceuticals have been nearly ineffective, but this story isn't about that.

Last week he swallowed a small camera, that made its way through his digestive system and then out (see photo).  It sent information to a pack that he wore all day.  The pill got stuck, and he had to have a procedure to push it through.  While in his throat, the doc took a biopsy.

He even smiles when there's a complication.

As my husband woke up from the ordeal, the doctor talked to me.  He told me he took a biopsy, and that the problem might be Eosinophilic esophagitis.  Eosinophilic esophagitis?  That sounds like something someone made up to use 23 letters in a name.  He explained it to me briefly, and as he walked away, I took out my fancy phone and Googled it.  You can too if you want, though it is rather boring.  I had it on Wikipedia in 5 seconds, reading about it.

Do not ask where this pill has been!

Today, ten days later, I got a letter from the doctor in the US mail.  It was printed from the same Wikipedia site I read, stem to stern, last week.  I know the intent was to inform us about what is going on inside my husband's body, which is really kind.  It did make me laugh a bit too.  I'd like to welcome the "guts doctor" to the Information Era!  It saves paper.

Photo A Day: January

I made a challenge for myself to take a photo a day with my phone.  It is a fun challenge, but one a day is a challenge.  It was a good thing to try something creative everyday, and see what feels right.  Some days/themes felt wrong, for instance: My Bag and Colour (it was Australian).

Here were the photos that I liked the best:  

         The themes, from the top left, clockwise:

Morning: My coffee pot and my kid's reflection

Something I Made: the girl and the hat

Reflection: Me driving (I took this waiting in the car, not driving)

My Sky: looking up through the Douglas Fir at my house

Two Days of Hands

Somehow, my husband set his phone to play music as an alarm, last year.  The phone didn't hold much music, and the first song on the list was "With My Own Two Hands", by Ben Harper.


Every morning, a few minutes before seven: descending bass line....dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.....I can change the world, one, two, with my own two hands....


The first few days that this song pulled me out of my slumber, and got my feet to the floor, I was in a fog.  I'm usually in a fog until 10 am.  I wasn't processing the song, it was just noise.  Here is the song. You only have to listen to the first 5 bars or so, after that it is obscenely repetitive and inspirational.





Normally I can lie in bed for a slow start, but not to this song.  By the fifth measure, I was out of bed.  It was like a bit in my mouth, I had to get up.  I started to wonder why this song was making me  uncomfortable and exhausted.  (I started thinking about it after 10am.)


It is a tall order to wake up everyday being prompted to change the world with your hands.  You can't do it by lying in bed until 7 am, or, that is what it feels like if it's the first thing you hear every day for a month. 

I do want to change/influence the world for the better, every day.  Yet, I don't know how I did yesterday, and I'm unsure how I might do today.  Gandhi said that I should be the change I want to see in the world.  Jesus said, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.  I'm vacillating between doing good, and just being.  Am I doing enough?  No.  Am I enough by design? Yes!

What I want is that just being me, is enough to make the world a better place.  I can't wake up to, "I Can Change The World" because no one can DO enough.  I don't want to try.  Waking up to this song just makes me feel like a failure. 


Little darlings, I decided that if I have to wake up to a song, I choose, "Here Comes the Sun".

This Is The Hand, Joe Dimaggio

When I was in college, I read many books for young adults.  One was Pink and Say.  It is about an unlikely friendship between and black boy and a white boy, during the Civil War.  The meaningful part, is that one boy has shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln.  When the two boys become friends, they shake hands, and one boy tells the other, that he has now shaken the hand, that shook the hand, of Abraham Lincoln.  

Now when I meet people who have good stories and have met influential or famous people, I think about our hands. My grandpa shook hands with Wyatt Earp.  I have sat on the lap shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand, of Wyatt Earp.  I once spent the day with the friends of Martin Luther King Jr.  I have shaken the hand, of a hand.....

This week I met a man who played baseball with Joe Dimaggio.  He is in the hospital, and in his late 90's.  Our conversation was difficult.  What is it like to look back on a life, full of adventure, tragedy and love?  How do you process nearly 100 years of birthdays, babies, Christmas, cars, coming and going?  What does it mean to live a life of hope?  Why is the end of the story so sad?  Why is the middle of the story so hard?  How could the colors of a life be so vibrant?

His tears were the answer: there is no answer.  His life has been rich with, well.... life!  One day at a time, he lived/lives.  That day, he remembered.  I got to be a witness to his story.   

Yet, his life is bigger than just one story.  Our stories connect, and there is no story without each other.  Knowing our time together was winding down, I put out my hand.  He looked at me through his tears, and grabbed my hand.  I told him that now, my hand has shaken the hand, that shook the hand, of Joe Dimaggio.  I took a piece of his story with me as I walked out of his room.  My  hand and his hand, his hands and Joe Dimaggio's, my heart and his heart.

I'm On Fire

For my birthday in the summer I got an iPhone.  It goes against my pragmatism to get such a fancy (smart) phone, but I love it!  LOVE!  It has been 1/2 years since I got this new phone, but it is as if I just got it 5 minutes ago.  I have happily made an exception to my usual policy of practicality.

I have an application on the phone that is called Instagram.  It is a forum to share photos, much like Facebook, but just photos.  After you load a photo to Instagram, then you can put a filter on it or zoom in. It is pretty creative.  You can also look at photos that your 'friends' have taken.  I like it, because I really only like looking at people's photos on Facebook.

This month there has been a challenge to take a photo everyday on a theme.  The day I took this photo, the theme was 'close-up'.  This is my hair.  This is the fire that comes out of my head.  This is what I have to contend with, up-close.  

I used to be offended about the stereo-types and nick-names assigned to red heads.  Aren't stereo-types judgmental?  I don't want to be judged for something that I did not choose, or how I look.  

Finally after many years, I have relented. This brightly colored mop does tell you something about me.  I am fiery, I am temperamental, I'm hot-headed, I'm passionate.  My locks are curly and messy, and I'm in good literary company: Anne of Green Gables, Little Orphan Annie, Pippy Longstocking, Mary Jane.  I have little influence over the condition of my hair, much like my ego.  All I can do is take care of it/me, and accept it/me as I am, the package and the product.

My phone is helping me be happy being me, which is not you.  Just don't get me mad, because I can lose my temper quite easily.

Mad Milk Disease

I know you are thinking that we already talked about cows this week, because of Cowboys & Aliens.  I like cows.  I'm surprised I have so much to say about them.  I'm a redhead, and we can get fired-up about needless things. So, here goes: 


Are we so far removed from our food that this seems logical?  The milk this ad council is trying to sell you does not need to be shaken because it is HOMOGENIZED!!  It has been processed, just like almond, soy, rice, and hemp.  After it is heated to kill any living organisms, then it is pressed through a sieve with tiny holes, so that every piece of milk is the same (homo) size, then they (the milk folks) add vitamin D.  


Adding Vitamin D is a throw-back to the industrial revolution (over 100 years ago). People started to get vitamin deficient because the sky was dark with coal smoke, so the milk manufacturers added 'D'. 


If you had a cow you, or a friend, milked 2x a day for a total of 8 gallons per day, then put that milk into the refrigerator, then you would have to shake it, if you wanted it to be all the same consistency.  It might make you as mad as this woman, and if it did, I know a great therapist.  Maybe milking a cow in the wee hours of the morning would be cathartic for you, if you have so much anger.


We should know where our food comes from, and how it is made.  I'm not a cow-milk person, unless it comes from a cow I know, and then I can't get enough.  I'm sure I was a mom's milk person, but I'd have to ask my mom.  


What I do know is where my food comes from, so I am not blindly persuaded by advertising.  This ad is banking on our ignorance, and is deceiving.  Rice milk is just as bad/good for you as milk is.  Milk is not sacred, unless you are an infant mammal.  Even then, species is important for survival.   


Anyway, drink what you want/can.  

Review: Cowboys & Aliens

The tag-line on my blog is, "there's a good story in every day".  You would think that if you were a cowboy living in a town invaded by aliens over 100 years ago, you would find a good story.  I could find a good story there, an adventurous, compelling, good vs evil story.  This movie has the potential to tell a good story, but.......there are so many 'buts'.

There are so many things going on in this movie that you don't even care about one of the characters.  There are so many simultaneous story lines and themes, there is no theme.  The thin plot is a medium for CGI slimy aliens.  It was literally: action scene, action scene, talking, action scene, slimy alien, death scene, action scene (this was the outline for the writer(s), I'm sure).

Remember when you cared about Jason Borne?  The whole of all three movies was a long run-on action scene, but I cared.

I love a good cowboy movie, and love a good sci-fi, so I was disappointed that this movie was so silly.

If you want good cowboy and alien entertainment, watch Firefly.  It's a television show that only ran for one season, and was summed up with a great movie after it was canceled.

Better than Words

Over New Years, we took a long weekend and went to visit friends in Ohio.  It's not a tourist destination, but it was a vacation.  We took a break from emptying boxes at our new house, and sunny warm winter weather.  We traded it for limited obligations and warm and satisfied hearts.

These are folks who are teaching me to love, and be loved.  There are more, but my mind/heart is full of our time together today.

Review: Tree Of Life

Last week I watched "Tree of Life".  Here is what I think about it:

I think it is like cilantro: either you'll like it or you'll hate it.

Some reasons you may hate it are its raw topics: grief, parenting, death.  If you watch movies to escape and relax, then don't watch.

Another is "Tree of Life" parallels the story of a family with the story of the cosmos.  It visually interjects cosmic events (Big Bang and  extinction of the dinosaurs) and the story of a family and a boy losing his innocence.  If you need action, watching the Milky Way for several minutes might be difficult to endure.

I can say that I liked it because of my demographic (30 something, parent).

"Tree of Life" is artsy.  It is wonderful to look at, but hard to watch.  It exposes the edges of daily life that we try to rise above.  It is difficult to watch Brad Pitt be a 'bad dad', but I know that I am also making mistakes.  That is hard to watch, like looking in a mirror.  When I see bad parenting in movies, it is usually dramatic.  The parents are drug addicts, narcissistic movie stars, or aliens, not real people, like in this movie.

The one flaw I saw in the movie was more of a question.  Why was Sean Penn in this movie?  His part made no sense to me, not even in the end.  They could have saved 40 minutes of this long movie by taking that bit out.  I see what they were trying to do, but they failed.

I was moved by this movie: moved to look inside, up, and snuggle with my kids.  It is a story of redemption, just like my story, so in that way it was worth watching.

Mennonite in a Little Acroyoga

I recently finished reading "Mennonite in the Little Black Dress".   I loved it.  I loved it because I felt known.  The last 1/3 was predictable and a bit slow, because there was a natural outcome to the writer's choices and those outcomes occurred.

Despite this, I loved it because it reminded me of how I was raised.  We are not Mennonite, but I guess my grandparents were, and they raised my grandma, and my mom, and she raised me.  My mom found a man with similar sensibilities, and then, here I am!

I'm sensible, and practical.  I didn't try alcohol until I was in my 20's or a cigarette until then either.  I still haven't tried dancing, and I don't watch TV (okay a little I do, I cheat on Netflix).  I don't swear, and I can make anything into a meal just by peeking my head into the fridge.  I'm a peace-nick.  I just realized that a blow drier will make my hair look cute.  These are things that made me feel like I am just like some other people: Mennonites.  "Mennonite in the Little Black Dress" made me realize I'm not the only one.

My brother-in-law, Ben, has been doing Acroyoga.  It is yoga in groups, people balance and stretch and do tricks much like an acrobat, hence the name Acroyoga.  It looks fun, but there is touching involved.  It is not a sensible activity.  My brain tells my body, NO!  Do not try acroyoga, even if it looks fun, and relational.  My heart says YES!  Your brother loves you, he is safe.  So I tried it, and I like it.  It makes me feel like a kid playing with my dad.  It makes me feel strong and balanced, and not just my muscles, my whole self.

I'm being vulnerable to share the video, but I'll do it anyway.  Most people wear yoga clothes to do Acroyoga, I wear long jeans and a wool sweater.

Comfort and Joy

I have been a spiritual care volunteer at our local hospital for 3 years.  Every year at Christmas I have a tender heart for all the sick folks that have to stay there.  Sometimes spiritual care is listening, or encouraging, or being really honest with someone who is sick.  It has been my experience that it is sometimes praying for people.

Today I visited a 93 year old woman who was there because she was old and maybe had pneumonia.  I thought I knew what to expect of our visit.   Usually when I know what to expect, I'm wrong.

She was very sweet when I introduced myself.  She seemed uncomfortable, and I said so.  She said that we spend our lives trying to get comfortable, and I agreed.  I asked if she was a 'praying kind of lady'.  Her eyes lit up when I asked.  She looked at me clearly with all her heart and responded, "do you need some prayer this morning?"

It took me a second to understand: she was wondering if she could pray for me.  Her question lifted my already cheery spirit.  I had to contain my happy laugh, then I said that I was actually there to pray for her, which I did.  I prayed for comfort and joy, even though she already had the latter.

It is my hope for you as well.  Merry Christmas.

Christmas Must Be Tonight

Enjoy Jeremy's Christmas tune,  and merry Christmas tonight!

Our Hearts Are Home

I have loved him since I was a girl.  Now I have loved him longer than I have not loved him.  He is not perfect, we do not love each other perfectly, but we are doing our best.  Loving him has made my life bigger and more beautiful than I could make it.  His love for me has brought out the best in me, inspired me, and been the fertile ground where I can flourish.  

I am a fiery plant: temperamental, passionate, impatient, insecure, and angry. I remember today, 16 years in, thankful to the mystery that orchestrated this exciting, magical, adventure of love.  I am thankful we can celebrate that our love can overcome the obstacle that is marriage.

Icy Morning

I took this photo this morning on a popular trail from town.  It is popular when it is warmer, which by 11am it was, and I passed many trekkers on my walk back.  On my way though, I was alone, but I didn't feel alone.  It seems so forested and dense now, but several generations ago the hills were bald and miners were busy on the creekside.  I tried to imagine them as I walked, and hummed Christmas music.

War is Over for the Race Horse

War is over, if you want it.  This silly Christmas song jabs me every year.  One reason is, it is so catchy. I can't stop humming it.  My childhood was full of folk music the Beatles, and Peter Paul and Mary.   They sing an old folk song that Lennon (or Ono) used the melody for his Happy Xmas song.  The former was about a race horse.


I'll tell you why I think it is silly: the lyrics.  I'm supposed to be moved by their benevolence yet the poetry is so flimsy, that I am not.  It may be sacrilege to openly state that this song does not move me, even as I am nearly a pacifist.  It's just that it could be so much better.  "I'll be Home for Christmas" tells the story.  After saying that, today I'm making an exception.


"War is over if you want it".  I've always wanted war to be over, wanting it has made no difference.  War is a primitive response to conflict.  I can see how warring tribes thousands of years ago used it, but can't we evolve?  Packs of wild dogs war for territory, as well as primates.   


If we have learned anything, it is that war causes global suffering.  As our troops leave Iraq, even that will cause suffering.  Leaving a fruitless war you start, causes suffering, staying causes suffering.  It is a dead end.


Today it is nearing Xmas (or for some of you, Christmas) and once again I can't get that 'Old Stewball' melody out of my head.  Today a war IS over.  Today those children singing "war is over" as a descant to Happy Xmas has taken form.  Just like those angels who came to the shepherds, saying "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."  A sliver of heaven on Earth.


I hope you have fun

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

Karl Von Clausewitz

Trying New Things II

I'm trying a lot of new things lately, but I'm not the only one.  My girl is crazy about her children's chorus.  She is eight, and because she has parents in a community choir, and mad vocal skills, her choirmaster asked her to participate in an advanced choir.  Last weekend the community choir and her children's chorus joined together for holiday music.  It was a great opportunity for our community to see the FANTASTIC work these kids do.  

The first concert I attended, I was wondering if I had low expectations.  Would it be so terrible that it wasn't worth paying for a ticket?  It was quite the opposite.  People spend 2x as much to be a part of such wonderful choral music (if they like that kinda thing).  They sound so pure and perfect.  They perform music that children much older don't get.  I am a proud mamma.

Look how she is concentrating and so focused.
Not even the adults are that determined.

My girl is busy.  She would rather climb a tree or do a puzzle than read a book.  She rarely focuses on anything for too long.  I saw a determined and focused person, if she loves what she is doing.  She sat through 4 rehearsals and performances perfectly.  She sang perfectly.  Every night they sang "In the Bleak Mid-Winter" I had to brush away some tears.

Forest Floor

Our new home is pressing up against 700 acres of forest.  There are miles and miles of trails.  I found these tiny umbrellas on the forest floor.  They sparked my imagination.  I hope they do the same for you.

North by Northwest

This week, 2 people told me I should blog about movies I love.  I love movies.  The problem with blogging about movies I love, is I haven't seen many I LOVE for over a year.  The fact is I have seen quite a few movies I end up falling asleep in, not because I am too tired, but because they are too boring.  I love a good story.

I have seen thousands of movies.  My dad got me started on old movies from when he was a kid and before.  B-movies about blobs and monsters from the 50,  musicals, thrillers, academy award winners, Danny Kaye,  and science fiction.  I think he has good taste.  Really I don't care what genre a movie is, as long as it has a well crafted story.  This is why so many movies I have seen lately have been so terrible: un-compelling stories.

I am going to review movies, but only movies I like.  It will be more like a recommendation.  I usually don't watch a movie twice (except for Christmas movies), but I'll watch some of my old favorites again, and then tell you what I think.

I'll start with recommending 'North by Northwest'.  It was made in the late 50's and is by Hitchcock and stars Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.  What's not to love about that?  If you only watch new movies, you should try this old one.  It might remind you of some newer movies, but this one is fundamental.  There is mistaken identity, a beautiful girl, a lot of running, an airplane and did I mention Cary Grant?