Here’s the pretty stair case that Steve, the excellent trim guy, designed for us.
Jody designed this mantle… It’s black Walnut, yummy!
Mudroom bench
Pocket Doors into the office off the dining room.
Closet doors in an upstairs bedroom. Pretty doors! This is what the rest of the interior doors in the house look like.
And the outside is rockin’ right along as well!
That would be “compact fluorescent lights.” I know, I’m on a green kick, but it has to do with what I’ve been reading in my spare time! And when I decided that I’d just blog about what I was thinking about, going through, and so on, I guess that necessarily means that you’ll be sort of subjected to my phases of thought, experience and what not… So here’s my green tip for the day.
I just found an article that told me some things I didn’t know about CFL’s, very handy. For instance, don’t put them in ceiling fans as they don’t like vibration and it will shorten their lives. Also, don’t install them in floor lamps in your toddler’s room as the jumping up and down done by small children will shorten their lives as well… the light bulb’s life that is…
Check the article out here.
Also, I read somewhere that Home Depot is now taking them for recycling, which is the preferred method of disposing of them since they contain a small amount of mercury, which is completely recoverable through recycling, but is bad to throw away in household garbage. Since they last like several years depending on where you have them (We started using them in lamps about two years ago and haven’t had to replace one yet!), you’re not going to have to add frequent trips to your Home Depot into your weekly routine.
I’ve been reading a great book called Green Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck, and after discovering that my kitchen sponge was the most dangerous object in my house, I decided that a little revamping was in order. Plus, I really don’t need to be breathing toxic fumes from cleaning products with my asthma, so I’ve been doing a little research and changing some things up about the way I clean. Read the book, it’s worth it. And, check out a couple of my new favorite products that are better for you and better for the environment… it’s a win-win!
Method: I’ve found this at Target, and as near as I can tell it’s everything it claims to be. And it works really well. They’ve got a spray-on shower cleaner that if you do it regularly, prevents you shower from ever needed to be scrubbed. No really, ever! And if you forget like me, they’ve got a great product for scrubbing as well that’s quite effective 
Clorox Greenworks: I was dubious of this one because it was a major company, slightly more expensive then their regular, bleach-based cleaner, but they’ve got a website where they disclose all the ingredients and it really is all safe, biodegradable, natural, and so on. I’m excited, because this one I can get at Publix, and thus doesn’t require an extra trip to Target.
Seventh Generation: I have to admit, I don’t like their dishwasher detergent, but everything else I’ve tried of theirs I like: glass cleaner, dish washing liquid, and laundry detergent. Definitely worth trying some of their products.
I heard something a couple of days ago that sort of put me over the edge. See, it was the same thing I’d been hearing from different random people for over a month, and quite frankly, I’m tired of it.
I hadn’t planned to post on the topic which I’m about to post on because it seemed to deeply personal, too hard to talk about, and yet when I heard this statement once again, I decided that perhaps there was some more that God wanted to do with this experience to help other people understand the nature of God better.
There’s an overarching belief in America that “Everything happens for a reason.” Christians as a whole haven’t stopped to question this, but rather adapted it to “God has his reasons” for whatever bad thing just happened.
For me, it was a miscarriage at the end of May.
And the statement I heard over and over again was that “God has his reasons” or “God made our bodies to process things like this” as I began to heal.
And I am thankful that my body could process it without medical intervention, but my body wasn’t made to work like that. It’s just an example of God’s grace in a messed up situation. There was no divine “reason” for this miscarriage. Something went wrong, somethings we’ll never know because it wasn’t even quite 5 weeks into the pregnancy, but something went wrong because the world is broken. And bad shit happens because the world is broken.
The world is broken because we broke it, way back at the beginning of time, when the world was a lot younger and the first humans chose not to trust what God had to say.
So now we process pain in a broken world and we somehow have to ascribe the source of that pain to “God having his reasons.” If that were true, then everything good and bad would have to have its source in God and his mysterious ways, but the problem with that is God would no longer be good.
But, some would argue, perhaps God needs to teach us things we don’t understand, or perhaps he’s punishing us for some wrongdoing that we don’t know about.
It’s true that God uses parent imagery of himself in Scripture, but most of the things that people try to apply that metaphor to in their lives would sort of be the equivalent of burning your baby’s finger on the stove because they reached for the hot burner so that they would learn not to touch the stove, rather than telling them “no” or some other much less harsh form of discipline that while they might not like it, causes no lasting damage.
We attribute to God’s reasons and God’s discipline things that are either direct results of living in a broken world, or consequences of our own behavior. Your baby might end up with a permanent scar for touching the stove after you made it clear that touching hot things was a bad idea, but that doesn’t mean you caused it to teach them a lesson.
The wonder is not that bad things happen, it’s that anything good happens at all. The amount of beauty and good left in this world that we’ve done our best to break and keep breaking is evidence that God is at work, that God is sustaining. The fact that my body could handle something as bad as that without any help from a doctor is evidence that God works in bad situations, that the bodies he made adapt and function even when things aren’t ideal.
And the sense of his presence, wrapping around me during the worst of that time definitely shows that he weeps with the broken-hearted, and works in all things for our good. Note, working “in all things” doesn’t require him to have caused “all things” but shows his power and might that he can in fact work in “all things” good and bad, for the good of those who love him.
I didn’t mean to lie, but I did… I said I was going to use a template so that I’d stay out of the CSS. Which I did… for, oh, 3-4 months. But now I’m back. I got tired of the template, so I went back to my own stylesheet (which lives on top of the sandbox theme for wordpress) and did a little tweaking. for about 3-4 hours. *Sigh*
What can I say? I needed an artistic outlet this evening, so here you have it! 
Proper 6 Year A RCL
June 15, 2008, St. Ann’s Nashville
Genesis 18:1-15
I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and a story she told at the beginning sort of struck me as going along with our readings for today. One of the first chapters is called “Waiting for Asparagus” and she tells of looking for the asparagus shoots to come up as a sign that spring was on its way. But then she went on to tell me a lot that I had never really thought about when it came to asparagus and I’m pretty plant and vegetable savvy, at least in terms of knowing where various foods come from. But I had never paid much attention to the asparagus.
I did this a while back, I don’t remember exactly when now, it sort of got lost amid the flotsam of the last month. I was at a craft store looking for some wooden letters to spell out “havenknoll” and nearby the ones I found, also happened to be this empty wooden frame thing, with a thin plywood back. Hmmm, I thought to myself, it looks like those letters would fit in that frame. And you know what? They did! Perfectly, like it was meant to be! And not only did they fit vertically, they also fit horizontally and it looked like the frame had been made to spell “havenknoll.” Here’s the finished result.
I mixed artist grade acrylics with my new favorite tool, acrylic gel medium, and layered on several different colors of paint. Then before the last layer was dry, I took an old brush and sort of stabbed it randomly into the drying paint to produce the old mottled “peeling” look. The gel medium also gave the paint some texture. And, I used it to “glue” the letters on, painting over the back of the letters with the gel medium and then pressing them in place. Gel medium dries clear, even though it’s milky white in the jar, so even though there was some smeared a little on the background, it doesn’t show now that it’s all dry.
The background is several different pieces of scrapbook paper, that I painted over with some white paint and then wiped off with a paper towel. My main intent was to cover the edges of where one piece overlapped another. There are three different kinds of paper, also attached with the gel medium.
Then to hang it I screwed little eye hooks, the ones that come in a picture hanging kit to string wire between on the back of large frames, only I put them on the top and strung some blue grosgrain that I had on hand through it and tied first a knot, then a bow and it was done! I also hang all my bulletin boards like this, although sometimes I use the picture hanging wire instead of ribbon.
Lot’s going on both on the house and otherwise… the good news news is that the house is making great progress, and I’m actually getting some writing done. No blogging recently, but writing nonentheless… So here’s some more house pics to tide you over until I write an actual wordy blog post.
No, I don’t know when that will be!
We’ve named our new nest Havenknoll, or basically, hill of sanctuary.
There’s some awesome sunset’s from our knoll…
and this great old dogwood tree in the side yard!
Okay, so I’ve had the busiest month since I don’t know when! It’s been awesome in many ways, but I just haven’t had time to post! But our house has made some great progress!
Here’s the second floor framed in!
And here’s Jody waving from the front door after they framed in the roof…
Here’s an amazingly blue sky! get a load of that! Oh and there’s a roof and windows too, see?
And another cool blue sky a different day, not as deep, but a cool color nonetheless…
