And Once More, Baby, I Can Cook!

"What will you be when you grow up?"
They asked when I was four.
Quickly I replied, "An artist."
"Well, then you'll be poor."
This bothered me, but then I thought,
"I'll love art all the more."

"What will you be when you grow up?"
At twelve, they asked again.
"A musician," was the fervent answer.
"Perhaps you will find fame."
Do what you love, that's what I thought
Whether or not they know my name.

"What will you be when you grow up?"
Was the whole point of the test.
My aptitude, as it turns out
Was for a botanist.
For books had inspired fascinated thought
On what each plant did best.

"What will you be when you grow up?"
They asked me at my prom.
"I'd love to be a wife and lover,
After that, a mom."
"That's your goal?!" they laughed at me.
I looked back with aplomb.

What did I become when I grew up?
I wonder as I sit.
An artist, yes, with paper and string,
I scrapbook and I knit
To record the lives of those I love
--My husband and my git.

A botanist? I have no plaque
To declare that I am one.
Yet constantly, I research what
Each kind of plant has done.
And how these plants can help the lives
Of each and every one.

A musician? Yes, I guess I am--
I studied it in college.
I write, I play, I even teach
To spread the love and knowledge.
Though fame may not be where I'm going.
At least creative passion is flowing.*

And after all those other things,
Those dreams that have come true,
There's one more thing that I became
I said I'd never do.
I said I'd never be a teacher,
Yet when day is done
And I look at all the things I do
I'm teaching every one.

I teach my children how to live,
To magnify each day.
I teach others' children how to improve
The music that they play.
I teach scrapbooking, I teach health tips,
I even teach crochet.
All this I did, and love what I do--
All this in spite of "they."

*I realize this rhyme does not fit the form I had set, but did you know that the only other word that rhymes with "college" is "acknowledge?" Since I had already used "knowledge," the close repetition of the word did not appeal to me. Purists might ask why I did not change the rhyming word. Answer: I took artistic license. Its my dang poem--I'll change form mid-way if I want to, darnit!

Little Big Man

Jabin, so little, yet proudly waiting on the bench by the door for his brothers and Daddy to return, just like a much bigger boy would.

You are growing up so fast, my little man!

Beatboxin' Sesame

Watched "Stranger Than Fiction" tonight. Cool movie. Good point.

But this is still the coolest thing I saw today. Enjoy!



He's not so bad at impersonating Inspectors, either.

Top Fives

Heather Anne asked me what my top five favourite books are. I'm going to cheat a little and answer this in two categories: Top Five Favourite Fiction books, and Top Five Most Life-Impacting books that I have read.

Top Five Favourite Fiction Books*
1. The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
3. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
4. Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde
5. Otherland by Tad Williams

*Read as "The Top Books I Could Narrow This Down To for a few minutes to type the list, out of the 500 or so I could actually include here.)

Top Five Most Life-Impacting Books
1. The Bible
2. The Maker's Diet by Jordan Rubin
3. Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD
4. Captivating by John and Stasi Elderidge
5. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

And just for fun, here are my kid's current Top Five Books:
1. Bob and Larry's ABC's
2. The Napping House
3. Cows In The Kitchen
4. Trouble in Tonka Town
5. The Gruffalo

Today, Dawn introduced me to Facebook. How flippin' cool is that!! Uh, I mean, oh Great! Another way to waste time on the internet connect with friends. Just what I needed! (Dawn, I'm not sure that was entirely kind. ;-) Just kidding. Way cool, thanks.)

Glub! Glub!

Help! I'm drowning in a sea of numbers, houseplans, and not a free night with pretty patterned paper and adhesive in sight!

SOS! All my creativity is being sapped! I am now accepting questions as prompts for blog topics. Please leave in the comments section.

Hope you are having a good week, friends.

Musical Fruit

Did you know you can make your own beans? It's easy, it's fast, you can start 'em cooking in the morning before you leave for work, and you have a nice side (or main) dish ready when you get home. Then you can double the recipe, freeze the leftovers and throw them in everything from soups to chilies. Plus, then you can reduce your intake of Bisphenol A, found in the lining of most canned foods. Here's the simple "how-to:"

Basic Beans

2 cups navy, white, black, or kidney beans
2 tbsp. whey or fresh-squeezed lemon juice
filtered water
4 cloves garlic (opt.)
1/2 tsp. celtic sea salt, or to taste
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

The night before, place the beans in a glass bowl and cover to double the height with filtered water; add lemon juice or whey. Cover to keep dust out.

In the morning, drain the beans and rinse. Place in a medium saucepan with filtered water about 2 inches above the level of the beans; bring to a boil. A large amount of foam will rise to the top--skim off with a spoon and discard. Add garlic (if using), salt and pepper. Reduce heat to Low, cover tightly, and boil for 6-8 hours until beans are soft and water is completely absorbed.

If desired, grate organic cheddar or asiago cheese overtop when serving.

Goes well with: salad, cottage cheese, ginger carrots, roast beef, brown rice pilaf, steamed veggies, sprouted grain toast with raw honey.

This recipe was found in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig.

Ways I Procrastinate

"Oh, that darn paperwork! Wouldn't it be great if it all just...blew away?"
- Mike Wazowski, Disney's Monster's Inc.

• Reading my friend's blogs. :-) @):-x :-D /.-]
  
• Knitting a few rows on the dishcloth I'm working on.
• Doing some research into natural, organic skin care and cosmetics.
• Cleaning the bathrooms.
• Checking my e-mail.
  
• Doing some random calculations: The number of grocery bags used to bag my rather smallish order tonight=10. Multiply that conservative number by 52 weeks=520 bags a year. Multiply that by the approximately 18 years until my children have all moved away from home=9360 bags. I think, from now on, I am going to bring my collapsible crate and a few cloth totes to the store. I never really thought about it before, but now that I know that by this small change, I can keep at least 9360 bags out of the dump, out of the burn-barrel, or out of the recycling centre, I don't think I would feel comfortable just continuing on in the previous path.
• Doing the dishes. (I'm not sure this counts as "procrastinating." This is a multiple-times-per-day chore that, if left undone, would cause serious issues with the running of the household.)
• Scrapbooking a page.
• Re-working my business cards.
• Reading A. Scott White's continuing saga of Aphter.
• Checking my e-mail.
  
• Doing the laundry.
• Scrubbing the kitchen.
• Planning menus.
• Checking my e-mail.
  
• Writing a blog post.

If I think about my blog post ahead of time, have I now elevated procrastination to a new level? "Planned" procrastination? Is that, by definition, procrastination at all? Would it not just be re-prioritizing the to-do list?

Hmmm.

Oh! Would you just look at the time! Time for bed. I guess that darn paperwork will have to wait until tomorrow, now. (Tee hee!)

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Holidays are most definitely over.

We got back on Friday, but still maintained "vacation mode" until Monday. I did not even turn on my computer until Sunday night, being hesitant to break my "fast"--I had been quite enjoying it. Plus, I was in the middle of a really interesting book I started at my in-laws called The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. (The same guys who wrote the controversial The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, from which Dan Brown drew a lot of his material when writing The Da Vinci Code.) Even then [Sunday night], all I did was check my personal e-mail, figuring that it was not really like working, and I could put off the business stuff for one more day till I was officially "back."

I'm glad I did. The next day, upon opening up the "work" Inbox, there were several distasteful messages in there. Apparently, my listings are not completely compliant with eBay's listings policy, which is not such a stressful thing in itself, despite the fact that I now have somewhere around 112 active listings to correct. :-þ However, someone (likely the blighter that reported me in the first place) sent me a rather snippy e-mail about it. Has no one heard of civility, or giving the benefit of the doubt? Yikes! It was an honest mistake! At any rate, I have never been one to take it well when a) I realize that, through my own negligence, I have broken my word, regardless of what my intentions were, and b) someone tells me off for something I was unaware of my guilt in using the meanest way possible, instead of just bringing something gently to my attention. Both are irksome. What's even more irksome is that I also need to get my taxes done this week, as well as correcting all these listings!

Needless to say, my stress levels were through the roof yesterday. Today is not much better.

Oh, and did I mention that Jason and I went to see a natural health practitioner who does Photo Comparative Blood Analysis on Friday before we left Red Deer, and one of the (many) things that became apparent from my blood sample is that I run most of my day on adrenaline? Wheeeee! (So, Colleen, you might not want a bottle of my Patented Energy Oil after all--unless you like getting chased by a bear all day, too.) STRESS! No matter how often I try to simplify my life, it always seems to get complicated again.

Anyhoo, I'll probably go more into the Blood Analysis in a later post, but for now, I'll include the highlights of our trip. (By the way, I thought of at least three or four fantastic blog posts on my trip, which will now be reduced to two-line paragraphs, if I remember them at all. That's what happens with no internet access--great thoughts are lost. Pen and paper, you say? Pfffft!)

The farther south we went, the colder it got. When we found out that the forecast for Red Deer area was -20C for the day after we arrived, not to warm up much for the next several after that, and it was going to be almost balmy here in comparison, we gave our heads a little shake. Then we shook them back, because we weren't going down for the weather! As one last-ditch attempt to assert his hold over the area, Old Man Winter actually dropped a fairly significant amount of snow on us mid-way through our trip--but it was mostly gone within 36 hours. Here's a pretty view out my dad's window of the winter spring wonderland.

I eventually did get hit by that cold the rest of the family had, but fortunately not so hard as the rest of them. As a little souvenir, we left a specimen of the virus behind for my brother Logan to sample. Kind of us, wasn't it?

My brother has been living at Dad's temporarily since the end of January, having returned home from a six-year stint in the States briefly until he can get the paperwork in order to become a world traveler. (Trying hard not to be jealous.) To my shame, I never once visited him at his own pad in Washington, although we all made it to California together one Christmas. However, after this week, I don't feel so bad--he transformed my old bedroom into his own private bachelor pad, or as he and Dad affectionately call it, the "AV Room." This was where Jason and I ended up sleeping, actually, right on the futon, surrounded by a setup that I'm sure Jason shed a few jealous tears over. (Kidding, honey.) There was a wall screen and projector combo, an X-Box, a Playstation 2E, DVD player, and two full racks of movies and video games. Before you think my brother has not enough to do with his time and money, let me say this in his defence: many of those games, and I'm sure at least a few of the movies, have gone unwatched and unplayed until his current sabbatical, due to the fact that a computer programmer apparently never gets any time off. Not completely true, but the last thing (and Jason can attest to this) that a computer guy wants to do in his time off is spend more time in front of the computer!

Anyway, all this to say that we got to sleep in the equivalent of a kind of Zen-like movie theatre for a few days. (Logan has a few Asian decorating influences going. That's where I got the "zen" from. It does seem a bit at odds with the still-pink walls, but I won't mention that. Oops. Guess I did anyway! :-D) So on our second night there, whilst the male adults in the house were fooling around with poker chips and the devil's game (KIDDING!), I went downstairs and watched Happy Feet on the big screen, knitting madly on the sweater for my sister-in-law Angela that I did not quite get finished before we came home. :-( (I know it doesn't look like much here, but trust me, it's much more impressive when it's six feet wide, and you're watching it from your brother's own bed.)

I also discovered that I've got what it takes to be a Guitar Hero. (All my colluj ej-u-muh-cation is paying off! Hee-HEE!)

We got to see a fair bit of extended family on the trip, but not nearly as many friends as I would have liked to. However, with us all feeling a bit "under the weather" (especially since the "weather" was big fluffy flakes the size of rabbit pelts), it was probably best that we spent most of the week, hanging with our families, and making some great memories. Mid-way through the week we moved our base camp to Jason's parents. It didn't really matter which house we were at--our boys loved playing outside in the mud, muck, wet, snow, whatever. (I thought I had packed enough clothes to only do laundry one time during the week. I was wrong.) However, they did get an especial kick out of playing on Grandpa and Grandma Winters' trampoline.

Jason and I did, too. (Of course, no one took any pictures of me!)



I came to a realization on this trip: I don't miss Sylvan Lake. Oh, I miss our families there, and our friends, too--tons! Mega-tons, even! But, as I drove by the new development where a pretty field and farmhouse used to be, and the new mall, and wandered aimlessly around another renovated mall trying to find the store that I know used to be right there!, and almost got run into by an impatient driver at a yellow light as I was turning left, and felt the sure and steady increase in tempo of my heartbeat in my chest to match the frenetic pace of the people around me, I knew I didn't miss Sylvan or Red Deer anymore. Sure, it's nice to have all that easy access to shopping--but I'll be quite content to "save up" for those trips to the City we make a few times a year, from now on.

We arrived in Peace River on our return trip at 10:45 on a Friday night, and had to drive right down one of the two main streets of downtown Peace River to get to our little subdivision on the hill. Although we knew there would be a few half-tons huddled around the entrances to the two pubs on the other street, the one we were on--the busiest one in town in the daylight hours--had not a soul to be seen. Oops, except for the few vehicles in front of the theatre, waiting for their owners to take them home after a late-show indulgence.

And we sighed. Aaaagh, it was good to be back.

Jude and Ang making "funny faces."

A long-time favourite spring-time activity in our house--playing in the creek created by spring run-off. The tradition has now, apparently been handed down to the next generation.

Jabin almost, but not quite letting go while walking between Daddy and Papa.

Home again, Home again, Jiggety-Jig!

Okay, so this is the point at which I pretend I haven't already been on blog-holiday for a week and half to say that I'm going on a holiday--a real one, and will not be posting while I am away. We are going to the home stomping grounds for Easter week, and are looking forward to a time of relaxation (maybe!), and bonding with our family members. Yippee! So, there will be no postage of blogs until I return, as there is little-to-no internet access at our relates' houses. (And who wants to blog when you could be visiting? Or shopping?! Hello! We'll be right by a major shopping centre! Ha-HAH! When I lived there, I never thought of Red Deer as a "major shopping centre!" Perspectives have changed, I guess. Sorry for the bunny-trail.)

So, my class went great, for those of you who are wondering, and I had a good time scrapbooking on the Saturday, too, completing 11 pages and a card over the weekend. Sorry, I have not had time to scan and post any of them. I was supposedly going to be doing my taxes this week before we went on holidays but HAH! that's not going to happen.

PLUS! I just signed up to be a Young Living distributor, because I was totally frustrated by the inaccessibility of good-quality essential oils and other natural health care products in this little town. There is a small health store here, which I finally had a chance to take a good look in today, being pleasantly surprised at the amount of selection he crammed into the small square footage, but I am still glad that I now have "easy access" to such a reputable and high-quality line of natural products. (If only they had laundry soap. Sigh.) So! If anybody out there (well, maybe not anybody. I don't think YL is in India yet) would like to get some great essential oils, goji juice (otherwise known as Ningxia Red), personal care products, etc., just let me know and I'll hook you up!

Thanks to a day out in the wet and cold with only mud boots on Saturday, my older two boys caught a cold, which Jason also came down with a day later, so my kit arrived just in time on Monday! We've been using the peppermint oil to keep the sinuses clear for all parties, and I've been having a drop of it in my water to boost my immune system and banish the scratchy throat that has also been threatening me for the last few days. In addition, I've been putting three drops of Oil of Oregano under my tongue before bed every night for the same reasons. That stuff could have the same ad campaign as Buckleys: "It tastes awful, but it works!" So far, so good--no cold has taken hold here! So long as I get enough sleep, I should be okay. Jason actually took the day off work, because he really doesn't want to be sick on our holiday. Can't say as I blame him.

A realization hit me today as I was toodling around town doing my errands: I feel at home, here. There is a strange sort of figurative "double-vision" going on though, because I still think of the trip we are taking this weekend as "going home." I know when we get there it will feel awkwardly strange and strangely familiar all at the same time. But the roots we have here are more than just sprouts--we are in the early stages of what could be solid, life-long friendships; I know how to find everything I need in town, pretty much, and I have learned what needs to be purchased from on-line sources or saved for major trips to "The City"; this is the second time I have seen the seasons cycle into spring here, so there is a bit of familiarity in that; and we have lived in this house long enough to need a for-truly-and-really good "spring cleaning."

I guess the process of getting broken in is coming along nicely. My biggest concern is the number of spam e-mails I will accumulate while I'm gone! (Eep! My business account gets an average of ten+ per day. I really gotta get me some good spam filtering software for that one!)

Recommended reading while I'm gone:

Cold medicines harm children's health, charge pediatric doctors

The top five nutrients for healthy skin

Environmental Working Group - This is a great "watch-dog" type site with lists of hazardous chemicals found in the products you bring home from the store. I have been making particular use of the list of hazardous ingredients commonly found in personal care products and cosmetics.

Have a great holiday, everyone! Hugs! Blessings on you and yours!

Edit: I thought you may want to know that I called McCormick's Canada to see if they irradiate any of their spices, and they said "no." Yippee!