Ten on Tuesday

1. Lately when old pictures of Juliette pop up on the screensaver, we're invariably struck by how different she looks now. She is not a baby any more. This photo was taken a year ago, and she doesn't look like this anymore.2. We haven't taken too many pictures lately, but PhotoBooth captured this one I love. 3. I'm memorizing something for Easter Sunday. Memorization is not my strong suit. I had just gotten through explaining to Ben that the reason I struggle with memorization is that I can't memorize something while multitasking, and then I realized that I can: I can memorize on the Elliptical! I knocked out the first paragraph during a 25-minute blitz. I'm in for a lot of cardio between now and Easter morning.

4. One morning a couple weeks ago, Juliette did not want to take her monkey pajamas off. So Ben used fabric markers to make her a monkey t-shirt, tracing a Curious George monkey from a coloring book. Pretty nifty, eh? Of course Juliette refused to wear it for a couple weeks, but now she loves it. 5. Juliette has become a lazy bum. I'm thrilled. Gone are the days of her waking up screaming at five in the morning; now she tells me, "No, stay in bed, Mama!" at 7:15am. Niiiice. The time change helped, though it also means she's going to bed later. Oh well.

6. As a first step in my attempt to establish some sort of basic meal-planning practice, last night I wrote out a list of all the various things we eat for dinner on a semi-regular basis. Ben asked me why I was making the list, and I said, "So I can refer to it." He replied, "In conversations?"

I laughed.

7. I still have not finished the Great Nieces and Nephew Scarves Project of Christmas 2009. And it's not scarf season anymore. And the ones that are done won't fit next year. Fail.

8. I love Jamie Oliver and his ambitious Food Revolution so much that I've thought about it all week and ended up writing about it in the church newsletter this month.

9. I'm not a regular reader of Pioneer Woman, but I do love her cookbook, her writing style, and her story. I'm really excited to see Reese Witherspoon star in the Pioneer Woman movie.

10. Have a blessed Holy Week!

I Love Gym

I may as well have won the lottery yesterday afternoon. Thanks to a class action suit against the gym where I was a member during seminary, I got a free 45-day membership to the club that is less than a mile from our house.

I've already been twice.

You wouldn't look at me and think: gym rat. You probably wouldn't think that one of my major considerations in picking out a college was the proximity of the gym to the honors dorms. Nor would you guess that I took so many gym classes in college that I couldn't get credit for them all.

I just love going to the gym. I love the elliptical machines. I love the weight room. I love swimming laps, and I loooove the jacuzzi after it's all said and done. I love feeling buff, even if I've never succeeded in actually being buff.

Oh, and I also love playing racquetball, though I do not at this moment have a partner lined up. Ah, the good old days of playing with Andrea three times a week.

We did belong to a remarkably crummy gym our first year living here. (Remarkably crummy = blood on the walls of the racquetball courts for weeks, even after we complained. Repeatedly.) Once the membership lapsed I wasn't about to join the nice but infuriating gym that had charged an arm and a leg to quit (let's just say the class action suit was very well deserved). I figured the weather's nice enough, I don't need a gym membership.

But, oh, have I missed it.

So I get 45 days. I'm going to go as much as possible; there really isn't anything that melts my stress quite as reliably.

I'm totally joining a gym in Illinois.

Ten on Tuesday

It's been a bumpy ride around here. Some great stuff, some not so great stuff.

1. We rented a house! It's a nice little two bedroom - two blocks from the train, four blocks to church.
2. We currently live in a nice medium-sized three bedroom. We have some downsizing to do - which we are mostly doing with relish. Too much stuff makes us both crazy. I'm a little nostalgic right now, though, because Ben just took his old word processor to the e-waste site. He wrote a lot of great poems on that thing.

3. My back went out on Friday. Ugh.

4. I discovered HGTV during my 48 hour back pain extravaganza. I didn't even know we had it; I never flip channels thanks to TiVo. I am capable of watching ungodly amounts of HGTV, and may just need to pretend that we don't have it. It did come in really handy when I was pinned to the couch.

5. Last Wed we had a textbook perfect day at Disneyland with Ben's family. Juliette did not have one single meltdown, which I consider a small miracle.

Oh, Family...


Even the Merry-Go-Round makes me queasy. I'm old...


On "It's a Small World After All"...


Watermelon at the Frontierland BBQ joint...


So convenient to have a kid who will nap anywhere...


Happy faces with Aunt Jennifer...


6. Sadly, the day at Disney might have been too much for Juliette. Her ear infection came back with a vengeance on Friday (i.e., same day my back went out... poor Ben). She coughed so much they checked for pneumonia. After a day of antibiotics and nebulizer treatments she's still coughing like crazy.

7. I had an absolutely wonderful surprise at church on Sunday morning: a visit from Allison and Anthony! Ben was in on it the whole time. They even sprung me out of the post-church bylaws meeting early (with the blessing of the lay leaders, who love A & A nearly as much as I do) and took me out to lunch at The Spot. We even have a crazy photo to show for it. I love Allison's interpretation of it.


8. We bought one-way tickets to the Midwest today.

9. If you had told me that there would ever be a chapter in my life in which I would listen to Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas more than Over the Rhine, I would have laughed in your face. But I continue to be altogether obsessed with pop music these days. I think it's a stress reliever.

10. Charlie turns two on Friday, which means my sisters and I will all be mamas of two-year-olds. Wow.

Pop Culture Hallucination

Yesterday, Juliette came down with her eleventh illness since September; the last three have practically overlapped, one after another since early February. It's exhausting for everyone involved. This time it's another ear infection, so she started antibiotics last night. Her fever shot up again when she went to sleep, but not enough time had passed that we could give her more Motrin. For a couple hours last night we were pretty anxious, though as far as we could tell her temperature peaked at 103.2, below the 105 the nurse hotline said was hospital time.

So in the midst of those anxious hours, I was lying down next to a sleeping Juliette. All of a sudden she shot up in bed and said something I couldn't quite make out.

Mama: What, honey?
Juliette: Boom boom pow!
Mama: Boom boom pow?
Juliette: Yes!

And then she turned over and went back to sleep immediately.

Juliette knows "boom boom pow" in two contexts; she knows the 30-second iTunes sampler that is one of her favorite dance tracks. And sometimes we say it when she falls down - i.e., Did you fall down and go boom boom pow?

It has yet to be determined if Juliette was falling down or watching a Black Eyed Peas video in her feverish dreams last night.

She's doing much better this morning. :)

Miscellany

• Last week I tried something new: I set a goal of writing my entire sermon in an hour. I'd already done extensive reading and planning, so it was just the writing bit. I didn't meet the goal, but I did have about 75% of it done when the bell rang. Normally, it takes me about... oh, 15 minutes per sentence?? I'm not sure what effect it had on the manuscript; I don't think it was any better or worse than usual. I did feel like I didn't "know" it as well - part of why it takes me so long is that I constantly reread what I've written so far. When I was in middle school I participated in Power of the Pen, where you'd be given an hour to complete a writing prompt. Could be a handy skill during busy weeks, though I doubt I'll do it all the time.
• On the way back from not visiting someone at a local assisted living place (date miscommunication), I walked alongside a gated up movie set. At first I didn't realize that the "house" was just a facade... it was a little disorienting.
• I tidied up the top of our bureau today, which included making a stack of papers to recycle. Juliette was underfoot, so I asked her to go take them to Daddy in the kitchen and say, "recycle." She follows orders pretty darn well.
• Except when she doesn't.
• While reading a commentary on the Prodigal Son at the local coffeehouse this morning, I was sitting next to two very professional looking women who were discussing at length some sort of business dealing one of them had had with Lady Gaga.
• I recently discovered an glaringly overt instance of plagiarism, one that I might have missed if I hadn't coincidentally read the original source a couple days before. I really hate plagiarism. I sent a note to the editor, including that I genuinely hoped it had just been an oversight, and that the attribution was intended to be included. I seriously doubt it.
• One of Juliette's current favorite activities is making us run drills in the front yard. If we stop running, she'll say, "Run, Mama! Run, Daddy! Run!

Any Day a Beautiful (Yet Bittersweet) Change

At any time I could change, any day,
a beautiful change.
(The Innocence Mission, "A Beautiful Change")

A beautiful yet bittersweet change is afoot. And I can pinpoint it more specifically than the "any day" the song notes. June. Sometime in June.

After nearly eight years in Southern California, these Midwesterners are heading back home again. Well, sort of. A new home, a new state, a new city, a new church, but one that is situated a stone's throw from one of the Great Lakes. About six hours from Northeast Ohio.

Chicago. Or rather, the western suburbs of Chicago.

(Poor Juliette says "Who are you calling a Midwesterner?" She is 100% Californian.)

On Sunday I shared the news with my beloved congregation. It was heartbreaking. I love them, and will miss them terribly, and the feeling seems to be mutual. Serving here has been a profoundly grace-filled gift.

I cried, probably too much.

(I told that to Lisa and she wrote back, "I think I cried when I quit my first job at Famous Footwear and I never baptized anyone there.")

In the letter to the congregation, I wrote, "You welcomed Juliette into this world with such love and fanfare that it still seems that she moves through the world wrapped in blessings." They welcomed me into the ministry with the same caliber of love and fanfare.

They are great at love and fanfare.

So it's bittersweet. We are undeniably very excited about this move. The position leaped off the pages of the Christian Century classifieds, catching my attention before I'd intended to start the Search and Call process. I'm still amazed that I received the call. I'll be an associate minister.

Wrapped in blessings.