37 posts from April 2008

Sometimes, I wonder why God puts up with me.

You know those moments stretches of days when you start out with the best of actions (prayer and study) but once that's over it's like chaos reigns? Or maybe that you're walking in a fog and just hoping to make it from one moment to the next? Yeah. My last few days.

Last week, at bible study we went around the table taking prayer requests as we always do. I gave up my usual ones---homeschool mostly---and asked for God to lead me in the direction He wants me to go in terms of where I should be serving at church. I wrote it down since we ran out of time to share verbally and that was fine with me. Verbally smacks of "leading the witness" and I'd rather it be 100% a God thing.

Well, golly gee. Tonight I go to church sans hubby who is ill. Someone approached me regarding a need that I absolutely have no talent for. Zip. So I'm going to be praying about it and asking for confirmation and also to make it possible for me to even do.

I am just so blessed to even have that happen to me.

Speaking of faith, my hubby is so happy they did Neil Diamond on American Idol finally (they're singing "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" or whatever it's called, hence the reference). Wow. They got us to watch AI again! The Beatles and Neil Diamond in one season? Look out your window, you might see pigs flying!

TimmyJohn's was nice enough to add me to his neighborhood and so I added him to mine. Good thing, too, else I would have missed out on some wonderful writing.

The Warrior, part 1
The Warrior, part 2

Our friends' youngest daughter, A, is very sick. The found out that she has colitis, gastritis and a urinary tract infection. She'd been complaining about tummy aches and they were finally able to get her to see a doctor. Now she's on very strong antibiotics for a few days, rest plus a restricted diet for a month. She's underweight and malnourished because of it, too, so no doubt the special diet is to help with that.

I got tickets for all four of us to see The Musical Adventures of Flat Stanley this Friday. Yay! I love me a good musical*. I hope the boys will enjoy it, too. The little one will like the larger-than-life feel of a stage production, I think, and the older one will love reminiscing because they did a unit study on Flat Stanley in first grade.

The musical will be staged at the Long Center, one of the first performances for this new facility. Adjacent to it is a large field, grassy knolls and a park with lots of water fountains for the kiddos to run through. Just another reason to love Austin :)

I went to buy tickets at the window in person mainly so that I could do a recon to figure out where to park. I was surprised to find out that I saved $30, all told, for our four tickets. Can you believe it? I thought at most I'd save the $1 per ticket fee to print the tickets via online ordering.

For my boys.

You would have liked her. Just a list of things she had me do, wanted me to do or was going to let me do:

- Learn to hula dance
- Learn to play drums
- Be a surgeon (spec. brain surgery) or lawyer
- Learn to ride a motorcycle (at age 13!)
- Make lots of money
- Skip 7th grade (dad said no)
- Learn Spanish

What she didn't want me to do, ever:

- Date until I was out of college
- Learn ballet
- Read a King James bible
- Be an artist
- Starve (goes with above)
- Be a nun (the desire was short-lived for me anyway)

Sometimes I wonder what my dad thought about some of her wackier ideas. I wonder what some of her other ideas were that I didn't have the privilege of hearing.

For my boys

When I was four, my brother had a red pedaled jeep and my mom thought it would be a great, fun thing for us to ride down the street with it.

Our house was on a hill and adjacent to our property, the street went down at a slant, leveled off where another street crossed it, then slanted down again.

There we were at the top looking down at the hill. I remember imagining what it would be like to go down, wind blowing through my hair as I sat on the back of the jeep. Then I was living it. I have no idea how long it actually took to ride down---seconds probably---but I don't remember the ride down at all. It's just the end that I remember.

When we got to the bottom, a car was driving down the cross street. My brother had the presence of mind to turn the jeep quickly to the left to avoid it. There was screaming, I remember, and all of a sudden we were on the ground and my face hurt. There was a commotion and Mommy was more than upset with herself.

There was a visit from the doctor (she was a personal friend) to check our injuries. My brother's left arm and leg were scratched up. Most of the left side of my face was scratched, the top layer of skin gone because of friction, so were parts of my left arm and leg. Funny thing about physical pain: you remember how much it hurt, but you can't remember it to relive it in your mind. That's good because if the photos Mommy took of us are any indication, there was quite a bit of pain.

I know, though, that the doctor had her clean the wounds daily with hydrogen peroxide, but I made a deal with Mommy that she would do it while we were asleep. Well, more like I screamed and hollered and carried on so much that she didn't want to have someone else hold me down so she could do it. She cried when she tried to and I'm sure I gave her grief over it. As deep as the wound on my face was, I'm still surprised I have no scars.

babette, pre-border
Originally uploaded by sarah1rene

This is something that makes me seriously contemplate picking up my crochet needle again and using it for something more than binding off.

Hubby said it would make a great rug (true) but in my ambition, I thought "blanket" for our much too big bed.

Anyone else like Gustav Klimt? No, not his personal views (too much raunchy) but I love the way he combines very linear elements with organic and there's the bit of "bling" in the gold that he throws in. I did a packaging design project in school for a hypothetical coffee table book of his work.

But this reminds me of his work a lot. And now I'm intrigued.

For the boys.

Mommy grew up on a farm in a bahay kubo, a home built of bamboo and light woods that stood on stilts. This was to keep the home cool and to keep it from washing away in floods. I don't know if it was her parents' house or her mom's parent's house. I visited once and Lilang, my great grandmother, was living there. I was three and that was when Mommy dressed me in denim bell bottom jeans, red sneakers and red t-shirts. She and Daddy have a photo of me on the back of a carabao wearing that outfit (pony tails, too) and I wasn't looking too amused. I think the carabao smelled but I don't think I was afraid because I wasn't crying.

Mommy told me that she really enjoyed living there when she was little. She and her brothers and sisters loved having a lot of room to play.

Once, when she was six I think, she found she wasn't close enough to the house to "make it" to the bathroom. She got desperate and found some bushes. Well, while she was busy the geese found her. She said she got upset and cried because they snipped at her and chased her back into the house. She'd get a giggle about that when she told me the story and then said "Geese are mean!"

A few years later, we got a pair of geese for pets. The idea was to have babies, but we found out they were both boys. I made sure they knew I wasn't afraid of them :D

I just realized I got tagged by Zero606. Ooops. Here goes:

• I am one of KC's  featured friends
• As such, I should include their names and also pick 4 or 5 more of my own featured friends.
• I have to inform ALL the featured friends to keep the ball rolling.

Note: If you use Blogger, you can add your featured friends using the new page element ‘Link List’. You may read everything about how this Featured Friend started by reading here and here.

Tagging: Ayen, Jen (daya ko ano), Dexie, and the lady of the house at Aming Tahanan.

A brilliant person on knittinghelp.com's forums shared something awesome with respect to knitting something complicated like lace.

It's recommended that you use a lifeline at each pattern repeat.

Basically, that's a thinner thread you string through all the stitches so if you lose your place and have to frog back you only have to go back one repeat. She recommended using unwaxed dental floss because it's nice and thin and slick. The awesome bit has to do with the needles.

Knitpicks Options needles have a little hole at the end of the cable where the needle tips screw in so you can insert a thingamajig to help tighten the tips. You slip the thread through the little hole, knot loosely so it won't fall out and as you knit---voila!---your lifeline is automatically inserted for you. Just untie the knot and keep going until the next repeat.

If you're making a top-down garment, the lifeline is nice to use so you can take it off the needles and try it on as you go.

This has been a huge help so far! A lot of the Knitting Help folks are also on Ravelry, in the Knitting Help group, and they're just as free about dispensing wisdom over there.