i went to my high school reunion this weekend. here is gideon playing with his contemporaries, miles and zacharias. and it looks to me like miles is set out to charm. impossibly cute.
Archive for August, 2009
hooray, hooray!
it’s not done, but as you can see – it’s better.
my mom is positively heartbroken she didn’t finish it. but a stomach virus made a killing around here. so that was that. most of the white is still just primer, so i will be trimming windows for a while. the south side just has been primed and patched, but needs sanding and paint. and the back of the house is just primed. it needs patched, sanded and painted. then the whole thing needs another two coats for polish. so, you see, i didn’t get off scott free, but i tried. next i need to get the decorative trim on my porch. and i swear to you, someday i am going to take the duplex door off the garage. i can’t stand it. picture a nice, round decorative window instead.
any votes as to whether i should paint the facia black and add some black shutters? a drive by told me that is what i should do. i’m just not a very black kind of girl. does fuchsia come in black?
isn’t it cute?
a whole bunch of good things in one; buttons, ink, beads, pin wheels, embroidery. and then they slapped it (and all it’s friends) on the ugliest, black and neon, jackson pollock background you ever saw. what were they thinking? i have no idea. there was a whole slew of these lovely pieces, all entirely gone to waste. buttons and all. i almost walked right by it.
in the slum department, however, things are looking up. if you hold out a few more days i will post some after pictures and you will be quite surprised.
this is what i did this week. woo-hoo. actually, i’ve been prepping for the last month. but this week i got the first coat of primer on the north side. and i got the cable one guys to come take down all their frankenstein cables everywhere. whoever lived here before thought they needed cable into ever single room (minus the bathroom and kitchen) with three satellites mounted to the roof for back-up. their day is done.
observe the improvement.
the rest of the house isn’t even scraped all the way, but i needed to get paint on this side because every time the temperature would change, more paint would decide to come off. i almost had it done and then we had a week long rain storm and i had to entirely redo it. i have learned my lesson. so this side is primed/caulked and ready to go. unfortunately, there are four sides to a house… but, before i had the chance to become too discouraged, my mother and father volunteered to come over for a week and show me how it’s done. they will be here this evening. now talk about spoiled. : P
a picture…
and my favorite quote (so far) from notes from the tilt-a-whirl:
infinite regress isn’t possible. the world cannot be resting on the back of a purple turtle on the back of a purple turtle on the back of a purple turtle on the back of a purple turtle on the back purple turtle… it doesn’t even help if you work in anti-turtles.
here is the moment of my amaze. the olive that i hold in my hand along with its friendly minced pimento, this olive that i now taste and eat, that former olive was, on some level, made out of something that was…not made from anything.
there is another word for not anything. the word is nothing. at some point, that is the answer to the question. what is it made of? what is it made of?
nothing. and yet…it is.
words. magic words. words spoken by the infinite, words so potent, spoken by one so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. they are real. they have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. they are us. in the christian story, the material world came into existence at the point of speech, and that speech was ex nihilo, from nothing. god did not look around for some cosmic goo to sculpt, or another god to dice and recycle. he sang a song, composed a poem, began a novel so enormous that even the russians are dwarfed by its heaped up pages.
you are spoken. i am spoken. we stand on a spoken stage. the spinning kind. the round kind. the moist kind. the kind of stage with beetles and laughter and babies and dirt and snow and fresh-cut cedar.
yes, by all means, run out and buy it.
i got a new purse (from aunty piolet).
and new chapstick, courtesy of dame von smaak.
although it doesn’t do much in the anti-chap department. fortunately that is quite besides the point.
aren’t they cute? i think my dad and his aunt were born a year apart. grandpa was 54. now that’s what i’m talking about.
anyways, if you have a chance, skip over to my dad’s blog. he wrote the loveliest post on his childhood; about growing up, working hard, making ends meet and enjoying it. to this day he is always commenting how lucky people are to be poor.
(and now we just get to see how long this is up before lena makes me take her picture down…)
really, it is. sometimes i wonder what i have got myself into. anyways, today (joy of all joys) i thought i would share my yogurt container collection. the thrill. the wonder. who eats that much yogurt? well, gideon. and marc insisted on saving all the containers. when i cleaned the cupboards the other day i decided to go all out, and there you have it.
of course, i would rather have matching glass containers with the little flippy tops, but no such luck. and below is marc’s spice collection (adams peanut butter jars are the best). his lentil and rice collection however, which he keeps in 12 cardboard, oatmeal tubs, leaves much to be desired. that is just not right.
i have succeeded in getting rid of all the random boxes and cans in the cupboard. but we still have a nice collection of bottles and jars. someday i hope to have a real, walk-in pantry without a single label or brand name in sight. it’s interesting where you can end up when you start thinking about food. you can come up with a whole philosophy. so far, i want to buy my dry goods off the online co-op along with whatever dairy, and make up the difference from my garden. simplify, simplify. in the future i want to have some acreage. in which case, jehu has laid claim to taking care of chickens, gideon is dying to become a beekeeper and i can just see jaelbait turning into a cute little goat milker. maybe i will never have to go to the store again. i remember reading an article about a lady, here in boise, who decided to quit going to the store. it is more plausible than you think. she found a local farm and took her kids with her to pick up eggs, she hunted down a place to buy local produce and even found a local dairy that did home delivery.
and here are the kids picking corn the other day. gideon hauled his wagon around the block and passed them out to the neighbors.
we’ve been having lots of fun eating out of the garden. gideon and jehu check their zucchini’s, cucumbers, strawberries and pumpkins every day. “there’s another one!” they even ate rhubarb pie yesterday because they were so excited that they helped pick it.
