Decorationing

Last Thursday we (the seven oldest minus one, all that currently fit in Eric's car) finally went to get our Christmas tree. We found one we're happy with. As it was late, we didn't do any more than put the tree up in its stand.

"Are we going to wait and then decoration it?" Kristen asked.

Little Missy got her hair cut, so it's finally all the same length after her self-haircut early this year. It is cute, but so short! It makes me sad. I'm glad it's so cute, or I'd be upset.

We "decorationed" on Friday morning.

  I am not the only shutterbug; this little guy had fun: "Smile, Santa Elf," he kept saying.

Taking pictures of ornaments is fun:

Aunt Mel's ornaments are our favorites. Authentic sea animal men!

Beach Property ornament I made Mom last year. Unfortunately, we're losing the water. Hopefully the one I made Aunt Mel fared better.

This year, Methusaleh gets his own little tree. They even added a mini manger scene and some angels later.

We hung lights in both bathrooms this year. Upstairs were multi-colored:

They looked cool and inspired some self-portraits:

I decided that the lens I most want is the 50mm, or some lens that has low aperture, down to 1.8 or so. I missed it most of the day as the majority of the pictures were low lighting and I didn't want to use flash, so I had to up the ISO, which makes them grainy, and they tended to be blurry.

There were more pictures like the following, but the ones with her eyelids flipped inside out were disturbing, so I won't post them.

In the afternoon, we made cut-out cookies.

Such an adorable cookie baker!

Time to decoration cookies!

A (Sort of) Recovered Blog

Last week, I had an idea I should have had a long time ago. My Word document blog wouldn't work, but I decided to try to open it under another program, the one which ended up working being Word Pad. Though it loaded the document slowly, wouldn't let me copy and paste the words, mixed it up some, including some technical garbledygook, and didn't include the pictures, it was still there, most of it.

(I believe that sentence should have semicolons in it, but they are for clarity, and I also believe that the general public would find more clarity without them. As mentioned before, rules-in grammar-are made to be broken.)

I painstakingly...painstakingly is too extreme a word...tediously...still too extreme but better...I tediously retyped it into Word, trying to get it to scroll down as I went, rejoicing that my irreplacable words were not gone.

It's not a big deal, and of little interest to anyone save myself, but it made me think of just one more thing God blessed me in, which so often we don't consider. I heard somewhere recently that there are no coincidences in the Christian life. "Every good...gift comes from the Father in heaven..." even small ones. We know this, of course, but rarely do we really think about it.

Perhaps what I would have most missed were my poems, many of which I did not have anywhere else. For a while I tried to post a poem and a picture every day. Some aren't any good (most?), but they're still fun to see later. Here are some, with their pictures. They were done in June. Warning: this will be a long post!

My Shoes

My shoes have been ‘most anywhere,
Think of a place I’ve been and they were there,
To Friday Night, oh, many times,

Around the house, and back outside.

To the garden, park, and church,
To evening service, to graduations,

To Christmas meetings of relations.

They’ve wandered through the woods for fun,

About the house and yard they’re run.

To babysitting, Kid’s Club, BYBC,

They’re there on the feet of me,

Outside playing games or races.

They’ve been also to yuckier places,

Sat in the sun room over winter,
Through the freezing winter’s brr,

For they stepped on mucky yuck

In a rainy day of bad luck
Through the chicken yard they went,
And so I did no more present
These shoes on my feet in any places,
For they were dirty, sole to laces.
Then in spring they were left in rain

In hopes of being clean again.

And so they are no more forlorn--
But still in no clean places worn.

~ Jeannette Beerbower

Butterfly World

I could not get this picture to be sharp.

Butterflies living in a plastic world

Unaware they never lived at all

Over beautiful flowers that never bloomed

Don’t know they’re fake in a tiny ball.

They don’t know their stripes were painted on,

Don’t know they never stretched their wings to dry,

Never ate a leaf or saw the sun,

They don’t know they will never fly.

~ Jeannette Beerbower

I have no idea what it means, but it sounds profound.

 Little Girl Eyes

  

Caught by the eyes of a little girl

Wonder and purity behind the gaze

Surrounded by curls she cut herself

Such innocence and mischief blended

In her sweet and wicked ways.

~ Jeannette Beerbower

 

 That is one of my favorites.

Faces

The faces of children

Eyes of brown, green, blue

So intent

So innocent

So trusting of you

Ready to follow

To listen and do

So

Be careful

Where you lead

Those eyes

Those faces

Watching you

Eternal Impact

You were here but for a moment

But the impact is eternal

We’ll never know how the love

The hug, the smile

The offhand word

No one realized

You had heard

Affected you

We’ll forget perhaps

This day

But you never will

We pray

God will use

The camaraderie

The games, the songs

The love you felt

To show the wrongs

In the world

To point the person

You will be

To the Christ

That you need

So we pray that much fruit

Comes from the seed.

Hope nobody who decided to read that was bored.

A Snow Dusting

I got up early this morning to the first snow of the season that is worth mentioning, and despite the chill, I couldn't resist going out when I saw this snow-dusted chair.

As it was dark, I rigged up a tripod and took pictures as the sun came up. 

Playing with the white balance is fun:

Due to the large amount of rain we got recently, there were pretty reflections.

Before I was done, my fingers were frozen, but it was worth it.

A Thanksgiving List

There are so many things to be thankful for. Here's a rather random list in no specific order.

1. Jesus tasted death so that I do not have to. This is such an awesome thought that I don't need to list anything else to feel absolutely thankful.

2. My family-both immediate and extended. They are wonderful!

Here's some of them, just one side, and not all of them.

3. My wonderful church family

4. My friends, which are often included in the above two. I have been impressed for some time with the great blessing that godly friends are. I have been so blessed in this area that I don't even realize what a blessing it is; as I realize that many-perhaps most-people cannot say that almost all of their friends are godly, I am so grateful for the many I have who are an encouragement to my faith.

5. The Bible. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be imprisoned and have to rely upon only whatever Scripture you can remember. What a blessing to be able to see in print the Word of God whenever you want, though I don't use it as much as I should.

6. Grandma-of course she is included in family, but grandmothers deserve special mention.

7. That we don't live in the city (I didn't write that we live in the country, lest people who really did live in the country laugh.)

8. Fire (I probably would have added this even if Seth hadn't mentioned it)

9. Grace. I know she's included in two above, but some of you were probably expecting it anyway, so I might as well comply. ;-) Now I want to list more friends that I'm specially grateful for, but we don't need an exercise in seeing if I can list everyone. (But Ashley, you made it on my blog again. ;-)

10. Some new clothes I got this week

11. Cranberries. The delight of cranberry bread cannot be fully described.

12. Pumpkin. The delight of pumpkin squares cannot be either. Pumpkin pie is good, too.

13. Kristen's adorable faces

14. Bible studies

15. Music-Christmas, musical, classical, hymns, contemporary, big band, country, kid's...can you imagine life without it?

16. Thanksgiving. A reminder to be thankful, an excuse to see family, a reason to make yummy food you wouldn't normally, Christmas is coming...what's not to be thankful for?

17. Christmas!

18. The camera lenses I borrowed, especially the 50mm I've used a lot.

19. Transportation-running vehicles and the many people who have graciously given me rides

20. The mint, white chocolate chip pancakes I had for breakfast

And I think I'll stop at an even 20.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Chickens

This spring will be the fourth year since we got chickens. It's been fun, especially when we have chicks. We've had them four times, besides Notrella (pronounced not-er-ELL-a), the one chick that hatched when one of our chickens got broody.

Notrella the day she was hatched. She was the only one that did. The hen got down and followed her around and let the others get cold.

I have been told I should write a book on lessons learned from chickens. While I don't know that I have enough to write a book (and do know that probably no one would want to read it, including me), I have noted a few things, though I may not be able to remember them all.

Chickens are interesting. They are creatures of habit; social, yet cruel; smart, yet annoyingly stupid. More like us than we'd like to admit. They are interesting to watch and often amusing.

The first "lesson" I noticed was from when they were chicks, especially when we had 25 in a baby pool. It was fun to give them food. They especially liked bread. The chick who picked it up would run around the pool and the others would hurry after it, cheeping loudly and pecking at the leader until someone made him drop it. Then another would pick it up and repeat the scene. Meanwhile, if you put more in, there would be crumbs lying untouched in the woodchips. Anyone who chose to quietly eat the crumbs could do so, but they were so aware that the others would try to take it from them that they tried to find a place to eat it alone, and so they usually didn't get to eat it. It was fun to watch.

Tim and the 25 chicks

It's also fun to call them, "Here, chickie, chickie, chickie!" and see them come running from all around. If they discover you don't have any food for them, they nonchallantly pretend to peck at the ground like they'd been there the whole time and didn't expect anything from you. Lately, however, they haven't been coming, or sleeping in the chicken coop; I'm not sure why.

The chickens don't realize we're trying to take care of them (well, most of us are-there are a few I would recommend they run away from).  The rooster will attack if he thinks you're invading his area and you don't look too impressive. He never bothers Eric.

Roman

Before I wasn't afraid of him, but a year ago I was shooing the chickens out of the garden when he gave me this look and suddenly my leg was attacked. If you've never seen a rooster attack, you cannot appreciate how fast a rooster can move. It happened so fast I could not even tell how he did it. It must have been his spurs. I still have the marks on my leg (though admittedly they probably would be gone if I hadn't picked at them). After that, I found myself avoiding the rooster: I took detours, made sure I had something in my hand, and kept looking behind me, feeling like he would run after me. I told myself that was silly, but I still couldn't help it. Then Eric said Roman (our rooster's name) tried to attack him, but Eric stared at him and walked towards him, and Roman backed off and didn't bother him again. I wouldn't attack someone ten times my size with clodhopper boots on either, even if I had evil sharp spurs.

I decided not to let the rooster know I was scared of him and instead every time I went by him I stared at him. He looks away, and he's only tried to attack me a few times since then, without success.

Roman got Kristen once or twice last summer. "Cock-a-doo bite me," she said. After that it was so cute how she was scared of him. "Cock-a-doo not bite me?" she would say when she was going to go outside. She called Roman "cock-a-doo" or "cock-a-doodle". "You not bite me, cock-a-doo!" she would tell him.

One lesson I learned was that you should not sleep in trees anywhere near the road. Our mailbox has problems-it's been taken out at least four times. The last one, however, was the strangest; it happened at two something in the morning, and our mailbox and the nice new plant we had on it was completely gone. We later found the mailbox, hardly scratced, in the ditch. Melody heard the kids who did it, and one kid came back and carried away his bumper so that he wouldn't get in trouble. But he left his damaged car at the car place down the road so he was easily traced. The strangest thing, however, was the casualty. One chicken, for some reason roosting in the last tree in the row of fruit trees at the bottom of our hill, was apparently knocked from it by the car and its head run over. There were feathers scattered around it. It was quite bizzare.

Kristen the day we got the chicks in July

Our most recent "chicks" are not really chicks any more, and should start laying soon. We split an order (25 chicks minimum) with another family. One of them is a rooster, even though it wasn't from a straight run, which means that they were sexed and should be pullets (baby hens). We wondered, because its comb and wattles were big, and a pullet's tail is different. A rooster's first crowing is quite amusing, though I didn't hear his. It took Roman quite a while to get his straightened out. Contrary to popular belief, roosters crow randomly throughout the day, and at least it doesn't wake me up in the morning. Like the airplanes that frequently fly over our house, unless I'm paying attention, I don't even notice if no one points it out. I like the sound of Roman crowing. It makes me feel more like we live on the farm that people, amusingly, think we live on.

Another sound is more noticeable, at least if it's near the front porch: the loud cackling of the hens before they lay an egg.

I wrote most of this post a month ago and finally decided to finish it. I could go on much longer, but I said I wasn't going to write a book. There will, doubtless, be another chicken post in the future, if you're interested.

And, doubtless, even if you're not.

A Thankful Heart

As I considered writing this post and what I was thankful for, a song, I think a Keith Green one, ran through my head: "A thankful heart is good medicine, good medicine, a thankful heart" - until I realized it was a joyful heart, not thankful. But that's okay because really, they're the same. When I'm thankful, I'm joyful, and I can't imagine someone being joyful and ungrateful.

(That would be a Steve Green song. I always say Keith Green when I mean Steve Green.)

Thanksgiving is next week, though I didn't think of that at first. What made me think of what I was thankful for were Bible study and applesauce. It sounds silly, I know, but making applesauce always makes me joyful.

Specifically in Bible study, I've been thinking a lot lately about how God blesses us and Jesus' sacrifice, though we are so undeserving. Thinking on that for a while ought to make anyone thankful!

I'm thankful for the glorious downpour yesterday. It was cool how just hearing the sound of the pounding rain made you automatically think of God.

I'm thankful for my dad; it's his birthday today. As I write, we're doing Greek, and I'm thankful for a dad who loves to learn and teach others.

Which makes me think of words. Imagine a life without words. Wouldn't that be awful? At the last evening service, we heard a challenging sermon on speech. Afterwards I talked to Mrs. Bayly, my pastor's mother, and she kept saying things about the many words being spoken in the room, which is always noisy after service. When I told her my little sister is talking a lot now, she said, "Now you have to teach her how not to talk." We discussed what it would be like if we didn't teach kids to talk. They wouldn't have to learn to control their tongues. But then, I thought, they wouldn't be able to hear the words that would help them to control sin, or to encourage others. Though responsibility comes with words, they are of great importance and a gift.

Now, we're having cake and ice cream, which I am thankful for, especially the latter.

Can't have a post without a picture-another thing I'm thankful for.

After not writing for fourteen days, I have two posts in one day. Well, I was somewhat distracted by the previous post...which is another thing I'm very thankful for.

And (believe it or not) I am thankful for Shakespeare and Milton and their awesome (I try to be careful about using such words, but one thing Dad read from Paradise Lost - 'mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate' - was just cool) words, and a dad who'd rather spend his birthday reading them than playing games.

And for Kristen's, "Picture a picture of this, Jeannette."

That was fun. I think I'll probably do this again.

What are you thankful for?