Ahh...glorious (?) summertime

I have all my windows open this afternoon because the weather is SO beautiful...breezy, semi-cool--a perfect summer day. Time to enjoy all the sights and sounds of summer:

• The neighbor kids setting off pack after pack of firecrackers.
• The neighbor dogs howling loudly because they don't like firecrackers less than *I* like firecrackers.
• The neighbor kids playing with a dirt bike...revving the engine over and over and over and...
• The neighbor adults drinking heavily, which leads to...
• The neighbor adults fighting, which leads to...
• The neighbor adults screaming vulgar obscenitites at each other, which leads to...
• The neighbor kids screaming at them to stop, and...
• The neighbor dogs howling at all the screaming, which sometimes all leads to...
• The neighbor ME calling the police and someone (sometimes it's Mom, sometimes Dad) getting hauled away for domestic violence.

Not today, though. I'm escaping to the country with my camera and my blackberry (as in real berries, not the phone!) pail. More productive than napping, anyway.

Chemicals, schmemicals...

I deep-cleaned my (in)famous bathroom floor yesterday.

I've been using a new hair product in a bottle with a crappy sprayer that never sprays where you want it to go and I've consequently accumulated a lot of sticky gunk on the floor. So, I spent a couple of hours de-gunking yesterday.

The problem is, the stuff that won't spray where I want it to spray and won't hold my hair where I want (if I DO manage to get some of it on the proper spot) somehow sets up like concrete when it hits vinyl flooring.

I try to use natural products whenever I have that choice. I've been using citrus-based cleaners for a few years now, simply because I believe as a society we are unwittingly toxifying ourselves with all the possibly lethal chemicals we use, on a daily basis, to make our lives "easier" without counting the potential down-the-road costs. (Another sermon for another day, maybe.)

I tried all the natural stuff on the hairspray gunk. Nothing budged it. So, I dug in the back of the cabinet and found a couple of old chemical cleaners. I tried some kind of spray stuff that SAID it was orange, but the only thing orange about it was the hideous color and artificial orange scent. It kind of worked. Then I tried the "scrubbing bubbles" stuff. That, or the combination of the two, worked. The floor is de-gunked. All pretty and white again.

I, however, am not. I was wearing shorts. My legs are now covered with an ugly, itchy poison ivy-ish rash. I am truly MIS-ER-A-BLE. And I've learned my lesson. Those chemical cleaners are in the trash. Along with the others I'd shoved to the back of the cabinet. And the cheap, gunky hairspray is going in there, too. If natural products won't clean it up, I won't be using it. Harsh chemicals and I are parting company...as much as we possibly can.

Sometimes I have to be reminded why I've made the decisions I've made in the past, especially when another way looks easier. Point taken...and the basic truth of that will be applied elsewhere as well.

Beautiful...

I want to join the dance!!


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Broken...

...courtesy of Heather at Deconstructed Christian:

"I’m a broken person. A collection of smashed pieces. I used to think God fixed the broken and made things perfect and whole. Now I’m not so sure.
I think it’s more like he holds a candle in such a way that it illuminates all those broken pieces, so the light shines through and makes them beautiful in their brokenness."

OUCH!!!

Courtesy of Frederick Buechner, from "Wishful Thinking":

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Tomatoes and peppers and beans...oh, my!

We started planting the garden tonight. Three of us worked until the tornado sirens went off (actually, we kept working after that, but don't tell my mom!) I was in the middle of planting a row of beans and I was NOT going to drop what I was doing just because the sky was turning pinkish-greenish-purplish-blackish...I just kept thinking "if it starts raining, I'll never be able to find the place I stopped", so I kept going.

We got about 20 tomato plants in the ground (I still have to buy Romas tomorrow), plus about a dozen bell pepper plants and 6 "garden salsa" peppers. Not sure what that is, but I'm going to buy some habaneros or jalapenos tomorrow, just to make sure we have the hot stuff. Wiles already had okra and watermelon planted by the time I got there.

Left to plant: Corn. More beans. More tomatoes. Squash. Cilantro. Dill. Maybe some lettuce if it's shady enough under the tree.

I'm so tired, but it's a good tired.

Community...one bite at a time

We're planting a garden!!

I'm so excited--this is a LONG-time dream of mine and it's finally going to happen, on a small scale, this year. Some friends aren't using their garden space this year due to other demands on their time, so we decided, kind of collectively, tonight at our small group meeting to plant the garden for ourselves. One of the guys tilled it up tonight and I'm going tomorrow to buy tomato and pepper plants and squash, corn and bean seeds. With baseball games and swim team meets and other summer time demands, we may not get much planted this week, but that's the plan.

I was raised in a garden. Pretty much literally. One of my earliest memories is sitting in the garden with my grandparents, holding a handful of seeds in my chubby little hand and listening to my granddad tell me what each was as I dutifully laid the precious pea, bean, kernel of corn into the row he'd hoed for me. My grandparents always bought us this amazing package of seeds each year--a plethora of vegetable and flowers seeds, all mixed together. We planted, watered, weeded, watched...and harvested. I learned that cherry tomatoes taste best when you pop them in your mouth fresh (and warmly sun-kissed) from the vine.

There's nothing like the smell of freshly tilled earth--the first thing I did tonight was stick my feet into the soil and relive all those years of memories. I've had to be content with about 12 square feet of garden space in my tiny backyard for the past 4 summers, but this garden is HUGE. I feel like we've been handed a hundred acres!

There's nothing like community--we plant together, we weed and water together, we harvest together. Hmm. Kind of sounds like a church, doesn't it?

And, as a gardener and a cook, there's just something innately beautiful...sensual...satisfying...complete, I guess, about plucking a beautiful ripe tomato from your garden, preparing a meal using something you've grown with your own hands, and then blessing others with food that is the product of your labor from beginning to end.

This IS "a good thing".

Of cats and WalMart bags and God...

God uses the funniest (as in strange/funny) things to speak truth to me sometimes. Maybe that says something about my character...

My cat, Pissy (yes, that's really her name), has been crazy tonight. Running circles around me, jumping in my lap, meowing loudly, doing her racetrack gallop--through the house, up the chair, down the chair and back around the circle in the opposite direction. And jumping onto the bench under the window and pawing at the window blinds, which she KNOWS is absolutely forbidden and irritates me more than anything else she does--she's ruined countless sets of mini-blinds with those antics.

Tonight, she would stick a paw into the blinds and pull them down, then turn around to see if I was watching, with (I swear it) a totally defiant look on her whiskery face. As soon as I would jump up to smack her, she would leap off the table and run. She was acting like she really wanted something and I should know exactly what she wanted (and then, of course, rush to do her bidding), but the door was wide open so she could go outside to enjoy her favorite perch on the front porch and I knew her food and water bowls were full. I thought maybe we were going to have another earthquake--I keep hearing that animals act strangely right before an earthquake.

I was doing some laundry tonight and when I went to throw the laundry in the dryer, she came galloping into the laundry room right behind me, ran to her food bowl and started meowing. I looked down. No food bowl in sight. A WalMart plastic bag had fallen off the shelf above her bowl and had drifted down and completely covered the bowl. It was there. But she couldn't see it. And she apparently couldn't figure out how to move the bag (I'm surprised at that, really) to get to the food she knew was there.

I picked the bag up and she dived into the food like she was starving. I stood there, looking down at her and the now-exposed food bowl, and God started nudging me.

How often are we like Pissy? How often do we run around like maniacs, looking for someone else to perform a "quick fix" that we are more than capable of performing ourselves? How often do we go to the source of our nourishment, then stand there like a dumb animal (sorry, Pissy), waiting for someone to open the book and read to us, waiting for a preacher to tell us what God is saying, waiting for someone to feed us? I've seen Pissy do some pretty amazing things--she can push open a heavy door, she's been known to claw a big chunk of carpet and padding up off a floor while trying to dig her way under a door into a room...she's a pretty smart and determined feline. And she couldn't move an empty WalMart sack off her food bowl? What is THAT about?!

Kind of like some people I know. Resourceful, skilled, crafty even...able to fix cars or unstop plugged drains or build beautiful things. But they stop dead in their tracks at the slightest little "thing" that stands between themselves and the amazing good things that God has for them...they stop and wait for someone else to come along and pick up the trifling piece of plastic bag that's covering up the place where God is dwelling. Why do we so often think we have to be "led" by someone else to what God is shouting specifically to us? And why do we allow ourselves to starve when God has given us a brain and the ability to move, go around, dig through, or blast to bits (insert mental picture of Pissy in Rambo gear, machine-gunning the WalMart bag...) the insignificant thing keeping us from the food he's given us?