I’m about to get rebukeful.
Yes, I am. I know that I don’t usually launch into scriptural exhortations . . . but I just have a little something to say.
For a good number of years now I’ve been periodically hearing very sweet Christian women take the Lord’s name in vain. It surprises me every time – and I always stand there doing a mental double-take . . . replaying it again and wondering to myself if she just said what I thought she said or if I misheard. But no – I’ve heard it enough times now that I’m certain I’m not making this up. Quite honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss. I’m not really sure what the rationale is. (And, by way of making the situation weirder . . . I’ve never once heard a Christian guy do it. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but I’ve never been around when it did.)
Is it because it never occurred to them that it’s a problem to take the Lord’s name in vain? I doubt it . . . these are very established Christian ladies, and it’s not like they’ve never heard of this concept. Is it a total accidental slip up which is Continue reading ‘Stand Back!’
I’m afraid that I have a very uncouth story to relate. An incident which makes us all stop, drop, and wonder about whether we do, in actual fact, live in a first world country.
We’re in Boise at the moment, the shining capital city of our great state, visiting Granny. And the hands-down best pizza in town is to be found at the Flying Pie Pizzeria. It’s crazy good pizza, and no trip to Boise is complete without at least one stop there. Flying Pie is a bit of a Boise legend, and is basically unchanged since my husband used to hang out there in highschool (lo, these many moons ago.)
While they make great pizza at the Flying Pie, it’s also an undisputed fact that the place is gungy and weird. It’s got a very “independantly-owned-bowling-alley-from the eighties” feel about it . . . the kind of bowling alley where the owner lived in a trailer out back. Strange decorations abound in the dimly lit interior – decorations like a giant wad of tinfoil the size of a dishwasher. Continue reading ‘The Flying Pie’
And no, it’s not a Grecian Urn I’m afraid. If this pot could tell stories I’m willing to bet that they’d be far more wholesome and free of suggestiveness than whatever dirty deeds were afoot on that urn Keats was so taken with. 
What we have here is an enameled cast iron dutch oven that my grandparents bought in Holland in the fifties. It’s huge. It weighs a ton and three quarters. And for all of my early life, this was the only large pot my mom possessed besides her canner. Pert’ near everything was cooked in this pot. When Mom made spaghetti she would boil up the water in this pot and drop the noodles in . . . sideways. (I don’t think she bought a stock pot until I was in high school!) This was also the one-stop-pot for homemade mac and cheese. Noodles were boiled in it and then drained, the roux was whizzed up in the now-empty pot, everything was reassembled therein and then chucked into the oven. Very versatile pot, this. And due to it’s long years of tireless service, it is now straight black inside.
I thought for a long time that it just needed a real deep scrubbing of some sort. Many’s the time I’ve washed it and felt a twang of conscience for not really laying into the black bits with some sandpaper or something. It’s only lately that I really clued in to what’s going on here. All the enamel has worn off the inside, and we’re down to the bare iron. Which means, of course, that we’ve either eaten all the enamel over the years, mixed tastily into the mac and cheese, or it’s been over-zealously scrubbed one too many times. (And if that’s the case then we can rest assured that it is Mom and not I who’s responsible for the situation.)
Mom has a gorgeous array of pots these days – Le Creuset in beautiful colors. But this lowly dutch oven still puts in its fair share of stove top time, and I always love seeing it humming away with steam billowing out the sides.
I’ve discovered that I could get more of these on ebay . . . some of which are in pristine condition and their interiors are still a spotless white enamel. And if I didn’t mind paying obscene amounts of money for shipping I would totally start collecting them. But I have to say I’d miss that black interior. In my humble opinion the black adds to the charm.
APRIL FOOLS!! HA HA!! GOTCHA, SUCKERS!!
(They’re not spaghetti and meatballs at all. They’re Jemima’s birthday cupcakes.)
You all are getting a little foretaste of the “joke” that Jemima is going to play on her class today at lunch. Are you making sure to notice the grated “parmesan” that’s actually white chocolate? Huh? Huh? Are ya? I have to say, these are turning out a great deal more spaghetti-like than I first imagined they would. The meatballs are those hazelnut chocolate what-nots, rolled in low-sugar strawberry preserves. (The low sugar preserves give the best color apparently.) The frosting is very wildly squirted out of a ziploc bag with the tip snipped off. Not bad, I have to say.
Jemima has always really reveled in the fact that her birthday is on April Fools, and she’s always dying to try to trick somebody. The absolute rudest one on record so far was entirely my husband’s fault. This was before we moved to England, so Jemima must have been turning 6. That meant that Knox was 7. Are you with me? There were five children, and the oldest was 7 and the youngest was 1. Ben got Jemima to call both of her grandmas in turn, and he had prepped her with this little message: “Hi this is Jemima. Um . . . Mom and Dad left to go get a mocha and they said they would be right back, but that was a really, really long time ago and they’re not home yet and the toilet is clogged and now it’s overflowing and everyone is crying.”
Now, come on. Is that rude, or is that rude? Granny, Ben’s mom, was in town visiting . . . and she was over at Ben’s sister’s house when she received that pitiful little call. She was at our front door in about 45 seconds flat – at which point she was very rightfully peeved at her badly behaved son. When Nana got the call she instantly flew into action with lots of “Stay right where you are, don’t move, I’ll be right there . . . don’t get off the phone, hang on, just a minute while I call Papa on the other line . . . . ” Somewhere in there Ben finally had Jemima say, “April Fools!” and then Nana was very rightfully peeved at her badly behaved son-in-law. I, meanwhile, was very rightfully peeved that anyone actually believed that I would have left my 5 utterly incompetent children unattended while I went off to get a mocha!
You know, sometimes I feel like things happen to us that really are too ridiculous to be true. Like maybe we, for whatever bizarre reason, magnetically attract “incidents.”
Ben had to go to Minneapolis for a couple days. He had to be at the airport in Spokane by 5:00 am this morning. Spokane is an hour and a half away. So, rather than me driving him up at 3:30 am, we decided to go up to Spokane last night, stay the night in a hotel near the airport, then I would drop him off at 5:00 and drive home – with plenty of time to get the kids ready and out the door to school. Are you with me on this? I don’t see anything outlandish in this plan. We weren’t really being reckless, or taking crazy risks. We were staying in the Ramada Inn in Spokane for heaven’s sakes, and Papa and Nana were babysitting the kids.
The first sign that things weren’t going to be wholly swell was when I went to turn back the crackly polyester bedspread and found a hair on my pillow. Pretty sick, but I told myself that I was feeling hyper-sensitive because of the noticeably weird smell in the room, that I was probably being ridiculous, and that it was most likely one of my own hairs that had somehow drifted down onto the pillow as Continue reading ‘Ants in the pants’
This post, I have to say, is very random and entirely unprovoked. And not only that, I’m about to cut loose and be extremely dogmatic about things that are entirely outside the realm of my personal expertise. (I like putting it that way, because it makes it sound as though I actually have a realm of personal expertise tucked away somewhere.)
Having issued fair warning, I would now like to give my candid, personal opinion of Canterbury Cathedral. (Told you this was random.) And if you have strong personal affection for the highly liturgical version of the Anglican Church, then I would suggest you stop reading right now. Before I haul up my socks and get too rude, however, I should give a brief summary of the good points about Canterbury:
Historical interest: Five Stars
There you go. Now for my opinion. Since I know nothing whatever about the actual architectural finer points of that building, and I’m sure there are many because you can’t have a ceiling that tall without it being architecturally impressive, I am going to assess it purely from a feng-shui-style perspective. (Notice I said “feng-shui-style” because feng-shui is also something I know nothing about.) But if I believed in Karma, Canterbury is wallowing in a sea of the BAD kind. If I thought that buildings emitted an energy, Canterbury’s energy is way out of touch with the straight and narrow. If I thought that Continue reading ‘Time to Spout Off’
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