Small Pride

Before heading out to Michigan for our vacation last month, I spent many hours knitting projects to give as gifts. Below are a few.

Rachel with her knitted name blocks.







Anna with her name blocks plus a heart & a smiley face. Adam said I needed to make sure both girls got the same number of blocks.




To make these 12 blocks, I had to knit 72 small squares, stuff them all, and sew up 144 seams. I don't recommend making blocks unless you aren't easily thwarted by tedium.

The Curious Habits of Arachnids

The spider pictured here is about 3 inches long if you include leg span. Kinda big, a little creepy, highly fascinating. He lives at the edge of our carport. There's another spider, not quite as large, who lives off the back porch overhang.

For several days consecutively we have watched these two curious specimens and attempted to photograph them. They're rather mysterious, as we never see them in the daylight. Are spiders nocturnal? Doubt it. But they're smart enough to stay out of the 95 degree New Mexico sun, I suppose. Every evening at dusk we see them both spin out of their hiding places & steadily re-weave the webs they weave every night. I don't know if the spiders dismantle them or if the webs are damaged by birds or weather, but every evening they patch & mend & weave anew. A discipline of hope, don't you think? Inspiring. Sometimes we leave the back porch light on to draw more critters to the area so the back porch arachnid gets nice & fat.

Who knew that reading "Be Nice To Spiders" as a child would evolve into such respect for our eight-legged squatters? Almost makes me not want to tear down the carport. Almost.

How I Learned to Love My Country Just a Little Bit More; or Why I'm Thankful for Newsweek

Whenever I have a friend or family member tell me about their international travels, their amazement at the beauty & complexity of the culture, I feel like the US is lacking a little something. And when asked about favorite foods - how many people answer w/ a country? "Anything Mexican" or something. What's the US cuisine? Do we HAVE any?

I haven't traveled internationally (yet) so I haven't had the experience of another culture outside of the US, but I sometimes feel that our nation is culturally less rich, or beautiful, or tasty.

Upon reading a special report in Newsweek about Islam in America, I found something that makes me love our crazy country just a little more. A few sentences by Keith Ellison, the Democrat from Minnesota who is Congress's first Muslim:

The U.S. is founded on the idea that we're all connected to a set of ideas, not a set of histories. For all our criticisms, the idea of America is an amazing thing - a society organized around a set of principles instead of around racial or cultural identity.

That's a beautiful thing, for all our imperfections.

August 13

Happy Birthday Mom! We love you!

Being Nice

I've been newly inspired to blog after a lively online "chat" with a long-distance friend. I often feel like what I might write about will either be too inconsequential to be worth writing or too heated to be palatable to my friendly readers, so I paralyze myself into not writing.

But mostly I think I'm a pretty hopeful, happy person...so it shouldn't be too hard to write something nice even if it's also tough, right? We'll see!

For now I have just one thing to say: I have found, caught and released outside no less than THREE very quick, slightly too-large to like spiders today. Ew. But just know that if you're ever near me, I have a designated "bug catcher cup" for exactly this purpose.

I don't like spiders much, but ever since reading "Be Nice to Spiders" as a child I realized that I'd rather have a spider or two around than all the other critters that they eat...so I try to be nice. If they are too close for comfort, I catch & release them. If they are on my ceiling, I let them be. If they are cockroaches, I'm not nearly so compassionate, I fear. Maybe that's a children's book in progress..."Be Nice to Cockroaches." I doubt it.

But I've been proven wrong many times before!

Inertia Works

This is my family. Cute stuff, huh? Mom got the whim to do a matchy beach picture, and we complied. Overall, we got 80+ pictures taken by a cousin ("amateur" photographer, I guess?)...and now we have to sort through them all. It's like looking at wedding pictures again, in a way...dozens upon dozens of photos of the same people, positioned just slightly differently, and you really only need about 3 pictures to capture it. But still fun. Anyway, that was last week. I'm home from vacation now.

Thus the title of this entry: inertia works. I'm still in vacation mode in so many ways...like most things related to my computer. It was strange & lovely to not have computer access for a full week. But now I've paralyzed myself from blogging b/c I feel too overwhelmed with everything I haven't written. So I'll just do a list. Or a few.

Some things I learned or realized while on vacation with my family:

1. I love visiting the place I'm from, but Silver City is really my home now.
   
2. How to solve a Rubik's Cube...almost.
3. That I really do get along well with my family & love hanging out with them. This isn't really new, but it's fun to be reminded of. Sometimes it gets tricky to balance my roles as wife & mom with my roles of daughter & sister, but I generally manage okay.
4. I don't enjoy traveling anymore. I like being where I'm going, but the journey itself isn't fun anymore. I tried to post a quote about this on my blog home from the computer at my parents' house, but it didn't show up:

   The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines. - Henry J. Tillman

5. We never quite get to spend enough time with my spouse's family, especially his sister & niece. They're really fun, they love Simon & he adores them right back, but somehow it never quite works out. This is disappointing. We see his mom a little more, but still infrequently, and almost never see his step-dad for more than an hour. This year we DID get to spend a few hours with the whole extended family on his side though, which was great. We got to re-connect w/ some cousins who also moved away, so the logistics worked in our favor this time.
   

Some things Simon learned while on vacation in Michigan:

1. Balloons sometimes go to "balloon heaven" when the helium is quicker than the hand.
2. Bubbles are mesmerizing.
3. Beaches are mesmerizing.
   
4. Sand is hard to walk in.
5. That Grandma & Grandpa have names. They are "ama" & "ama." (Sometimes "grandpa" is "ampa," but the extra consonant isn't often too clear.)

Some memorable moments:

1. Our rental car had "FU" scratched into the paint of the trunk. We got a magnet from my parents house to cover it while we had the car; it was a photo & "blurb" about a missionary from their church. We then ran into him in town, and he laughed quite hard.
2. We got to go to a car race at Berlin Raceway w/ my dad & brother-in-law. Classic cars, recent models, crashes, beer, fireworks...fun night.
3. My sister is really funny. We already knew that, but we saw her in one of her funnier forms - performing with the improvisational comedy group she's part of. My favorite moment was when she was a giddy ballerina waiting in line at midnight for the new Harry Potter book to hit the shelves in a Western style skit. Priceless.
   
4. My other sister has twin girls who had their first birthday(s) while we were together. It was a marathon birthday party day, complete with pictures, cakes (several of them...Simon even got one!) and an inordinate amount of gifts. I wonder how many boxes they ended up having to ship back home?
   
5. Beach bonfires are the best...especially when they involve fun cousins, a drink, and funny stories. Lovely. Not so lovely, however, when they all intersect in just the wrong way and the beer gets snorted into the sinuses. Ouch ouch ouch. But still worth it.

Things I love about vacation:

1. Family. They're good. We love them, and even like them! It's a blessing to have the ability to spend time with them all. And friends too...some of them feel like family.
   
2. Time to read. I read all of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows in a few days.
   
3. Different meal experiences. We rotated dinner responsibility, and we had some fabulous meals.
   
4. The lack of agenda. Even though my highly organized self gets a little crazy, it's actually really nice to experience a significant drop in responsibilites & busy agendas.
5. All the unexpected moments & conversations & photos that last, and therefore sustain the vacation much longer than the week or two it actually took.
   

Heard

I feel like I might be starting to learn what discernment means. I am deeply, richly blessed. I am experiencing peace in my life, amidst crazy busyness. I think I might be learning how to listen to the call of the Divine.