 
I have been overwhelmed by dirt for over a year; I have grown bitter looking at that bleakness day after day. Andrew and Jarrett have sacrificed many, many weekends to install irrigation and work the dirt into acceptable contours for a lawn. Friday when Jarrett and I pulled into the driveway and he yelled, “Whoaa, look at that!” I looked and there it was this very light greenish tint to our dirt. Oh thrill!!
The thrill is greater because of the hard work and waiting, because of the severe winds that blew the dirt and sent it everywhere. We would look out the window and watch as the topsoil was blown to kingdom come and Matthias voiced what I was thinking, “That wind makes me want to yell.” It just grated, the dryness the bareness. From time to time we go now to the window and gaze contentedly at our green. And hopefully I have grown too.
I am looking forward to walking on the grass, grandchildren playing out there, sitting outside and having grass all around us.
“You shall have a covenant with the stones of the field…
You shall know that your descendants shall be many,
And your offspring like the grass of the earth.
You shall come to the grave at a full age,
As a sheaf of grain ripens in its season.
Behold, this we have searched out;
It is true.
Hear it, and know for yourself.”
 A friend and I were sitting on our front step having a glass of sangria the other evening when a few runners started to pass by the house. Soon the trickle turned to flood but they weren’t the typical stream-line, spandex-clad crowd. Some had dread locks and beards or were running in cargo pants, and a number of them looked very out of shape. So we finally started asking them what the occasion was. Was there a race or something?
“We’re running for Jesus!” one guy yelled over his shoulder. “Because it’s a good night to run!” someone else said. Eventually a jogger stopped and told us there were about 200 people gathered behind our house drinking beer in the alley and we left our stoop to investigate.
We walked out our back door and sure enough, a van had pulled up behind our place, a couple folding tables had been set up and about 200 people were drinking Yuengling out of plastic cups, eating oreos and doritos, milling about, talking and carrying on. So we joined the party and discovered that they were a random group of people called “hashers” who basically run and drink beer every Thursday. They have a website and each week someone scouts out a route, starting at a metro stop somewhere in the city and ending (hopefully) in an obscure alley where no one will notice or call the police. And honestly, if no one had told us, we never would have known they were out our back door. We hung out, drank beer and chatted with folks for thirty minutes or so until we heard a siren and someone alerted the hashers that the police had arrived. Immediately the tables were broken down, the van was packed up and the crowd disappeared. The alley was completely empty in a matter of seconds– no trash, no plastic cups, nothing.
 
 
 The recipe called for Emmental and Gruyere but we used Jarlsberg instead of Emmental. We decided to have a back porch fondue party this past Saturday and let me encourage you to have one this summer. It was really a lot of fun. I think it is more typically a winter thing to, but when the weather is nice it is pretty fun to eat it outside.
The food prep is minimal and I found a great recipe on Epicurious. For the dessert, we just had some dark chocolate, strawberries, and Port.
Be sure to have over some great friends who bring an assortment of mixed drinks and let the party begin. I think the best part about fondue is that it is such interactive eating and with a lively bunch of people, wonderful conversation is bound to come.
 This is about all you need for some spectacular fondue. 
Aileen and Jason are engaged to be married this fall!
Man oh man, that is a lot of planning in a very short time so we got started this past weekend. Aileen is the most laid back wedding planner ever!
Compared to planning Meghan’s wedding, it is amazing what is available through the internet. It has saved tons of running around by looking online and narrowing down where we go. Taite and I spent the weekend with Aileen at her apartment, which is directly over a bar and grill which is open until 2 a.m. and which is Mexican themed and which play thumpa thumpa music until 2 a.m. interspersed with a little Tom Petty and which you can hear from her apartment as though you are at the bar and for which I was not able to sleep until the bar finally closed at 2 a.m. Other than that for which Aileen calls me the Princess and the Pea, we had a very wonderful time. We ate Sunday morning breakfast before going to church at a great little coffee shop.
For dinner the first night we had New Orleans style food, jambalaya and seafood gumbo at a quaint restaurant .
And since there were no guys around, we ate dinner on the sofa the next night watching chick flicks, It’s Complicated (very intriguing for the fact that I am an older woman), P.S. I Love You (very sad) and New in Town (corny and predictable).
We had an amazingly productive yet relaxing weekend.
“O, Lord… Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men- to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand… cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition…” Nourishment is only for awhile; what we shall need forever is taste. (Robert Farrar Capon)
In this one toast Capon brings up two big ideas, 1. feasting and 2. dining gratefully.
Feasting
I have been intrigued with the relationship of fasting versus dieting. I think dieting is from the devil. Dieting seems kind of cruel; you can’t eat most of what you wish you could and that is how you will lose weight. Then when you get tired of the diet food, you eat like you did before… and gain back all the weight. And on top of all that weight gain you feel guilty because you didn’t stick to the diet.
The Bible makes use of another means to enjoy food more fully and in the end maintain a decent weight, fasting. Fasting and feasting let you enjoy the food you love guilt free.
A general rule of thumb straight from the Bible is, when you’re happy and among friends, eat but when you’re depressed, fast. ”A feast is made for laughter, and wine makes merry; but money answers everything.” (Amen!) And if it’s not a feast day,eat lightly. Save the feasting appetite for feasting with friends. If you are the sort who eats when you’re depressed; stop. It’s not right.
The Bible always combines feasting (which is a positive way of over-eating) with celebrating, never with depression. Fasting is always associated with sadness and mourning; “‘Now, therefore,’ says the lord, ‘Turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting with weeping, and with mourning.’” Joel 2:12
We have those days where there are no holds barred, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, birthdays and Sundays in general. Those are not days to eat half portions and worry about weight gain. But when plain old Monday morning rolls around, toast is good enough… with home-made strawberry freezer jam.
We need to learn when to feast and when to fast.
Dining Gratefully
Dining gratefully is lacking in America. We are so rich with variety and in quantity of food that we have come to despise food and view it as a curse. Americans have always embraced dieting which is in one sense a way of fearing food, and now there is a new way to diss God’s goodness to us: food allergies. I know I’m putting my neck out there to mention this but you can’t swing a dead cat without hearing about somebody’s food allergy.
Is it me or are there more people than ever with food allergies these days?
These pseudo-allergies allow us to obsess over lists of ingredients on every package of food, ferreting out that bit of flour, that bit of dairy. Do people in India, North Korea or Pakistan have food allergies like us!? America is so abundantly blessed that we have managed to turn God’s blessing of abundance into a curse.
Given our tendency to idolatry, to obsess over ourselves, is it any wonder that we think we are allergic to the most basic ingredients: flour, milk, sugar, eggs…
Picking and fussing our way through the goodness of the earth, food becomes nothing more than nutritional value or a calorie to be counted. To look at food, God given in all its diversity of taste and texture and turn that blessing into a burden to be endured is to become an idolater, spiritualizing away what should be loved. It is thanklessness.
We have left off with thanking God and dining gratefully, and have given license to our propensity to obsess about ourself. Didn’t that bit of sugar, flour or milk make me the slightest bit queasy? Making sure everyone knows just how special we are with our special, limited diet, we forget to drink in the goodness from God’s generous abundance. We have taken this gift of taste and variety from God’s hand and said, “NO.”
We need to thank God for the fat of the land and dine gratefully without excuse.
My disclaimer
Obviously there are people who if they eat a peanut or some other food will seriously end up in anaphylactic shock. There are some who have diabetes or other serious illnesses who really do need to watch carefully what they eat. I am not talking about that. I am talking about the psuedo-allergy thing which belittles the people who really do have food allergies and really can’t eat certain foods. This psuedo-allergy thing tries to make itself look as dire as a real allergy, a real illness. It is not. It is obsessive thanklessness.
So on your feast days, eat for heaven’s sake! And when you are sad and mourning, fast. Between times, eat a little of what you love… And in everything give thanks. Your allergies just might evaporate into thin air. Wouldn’t that be terrific!?
“Bring your father and your households and come to me; I will give you the best of the land of Egypt, and you will eat the fat of the land.” Genesis 45:18
 Yep, Peeps and chocolate bunnies for breakfast!  Our feeding frenzy before Christmas Eve service having just caroled our way through the neighborhood  Looks like a totally fake backdrop but it's real! Hostetter's ranch.
OH MY GOSH!!
Andrew and I have now been married for THIRTY YEARS! Today!!
I remember a long time ago, and I can not believe it has been that long, when seeing couples who had been married for that long my first thought was that they could not possibly understand the love, the desire, the passion that we shared. I mean, these folks were old, they were sagging in places, they were wrinkly, they were worn looking. They could not possibly have the love and passion that goes with having young tight bodies all thin and beautiful.
Thirty years later I am happy to tell you young married madly in love vibrant couples that we are now old and saggy. No, what I mean to tell you is that by God’s grace and a lot of love and forgiveness it gets better and better.
So how, you might wonder, will we be celebrating this wonderful milestone? Well, originally the celebration was going to be ME CAMPING!!! It wasnt’ actually meant to be the celebration, in fact we had no celebration planned except to one day see grass instead of dirt all over our acre of land we call home but I digress, but as it turned out we were going to be in a yurt on the Oregon coast with Jarrett, Taite, Matthias and Andrew’s brother, Matt, and Doris and Heidi. I was excited about the yurt part ( I mean, wow! a camping experience with electricity, heat, a flushing toilet, a hot shower, OK the shower and toilet were a few hundred yards away BUT the toilets flushed and the shower was hot! and that for us is really moving up in the camping world) and about spending good relaxing time with family; it was the lumping that in as our anniversary event that was a bit troubling to me.
Add to all that, Heidi was celebrating her eighteenth birthday and I gotta say, it isn’t a lot of eighteen year old girls who would be sport enough to celebrate in this sort of high fashion.
OK, we are just back from the yurt adventure and I have to say it was stupendous. I know! Who’da thought!! We took a 5 mile roundtrip hike (uphill both ways sloshing through mud) and at the end of the trail arrived at a view that was spectacular and then to crown the event with glory we saw a whale and sea lion in the water below us and a bald eagle flying over us.
The beach was warm and sunny and the agates and other treasures were plentiful. AND Doris had the brilliant idea to pack no food, no cooking utensils, no nothing that smacked of us doing survival skill cooking while at our yurt. So, we ate all our meals out- and not at McDonald’s! That was really nice.
On top of all this fun, fun, fun, I received an email from a reader of our blog whose feet I could kiss who has offered us their place on the Eastern Shore, garden in bloom and rockers on the porch with a view of the Chester River, if we’d like to use it. Hmmm… YES! So, we will have one more wonderful adventure when we go to see our newest grandson in a couple days.
Wow! St. Patrick’s Day with an Irish Dancer and a bagpiper and a boy in baseball!
7 AM Taite to piano
8:45 – 11:00 home, do school work, make dessert, call orthodontist
11:00 fly out the door for an emergency orthodontist visit, grab dessert in case we can make the talent show/chili feed.
11:45 Done at the orthodontist, drive to talent show, eat chili
1:15 Home so Taite can get dressed for dancing, make egg salad for quick grab dinner for whoever might be hungry
2:15 leave for dance in Kennewick (I did NOT get lost!) Leave Matthias behind with Jarrett
3:00- 3:30 Taite dances, Jarrett studying for tests the next day, Matthias playing in the mud outside
3:30- 4:00 visit at retirement center, then leave for next dance location
4:30-6:30 This is where it got a little dicey because everyone needed to be someplace at the exact same time!
Taite dances at next retirement center
Matthias goes to baseball
Andrew needs picked up from his vanpool parking lot
Jarrett in full dress kilt goes to first pub for his night of pub crawl.
7:00 Taite Irish dances at a pub in Richland
Matthias needs picked up from baseball
Jarrett is piping at a pub in Kennewick
Andrew picks up Matt and meets us at the pub Taite is at. Meghan and Eric are there too with children, so we get a little grandparent time in.
Are you still with me!?
The pub is packed out and there is not a table to be had. But then Eric scores a table and we sit, order some dinner and enjoy the entertainment.
8:30 Jarrett’s pipe band has made their way to this pub and enter playing.
9:00 All small children must leave the premises, so we go home.
11:00 Jarrett makes it home
   
AND I just have to put in a little plug here for a great shop that with incredible speed, made a custom tie for Matthias’s kilt uniform. – Think Easter for little boys!
terri, February 25th, 2010
What a lovely day, our grandchildren brought carefully crafted valentines and Taite and Matthias woke up early and made some for us too. It was Sunday, it was Valentine’s Day and it was the one year anniversary of being in our new home. We needed to have a special meal.
We bought salmon and normally we just fire up the grill, rub the salmon with wonderful spices and grill it but we wanted a feast to celebrate this day and wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary so we made Coulibiac from a book I reviewed and like (and you can be assured that I reduced the recipe to its most streamlined form for you) from the Essential Rice Cook Book:
Coulibiac
2 oz. butter 1 onion, finely chopped
6 1/2 oz. mushrooms, sliced 2 T. lemon juice
7 oz salmon filet, skin and bones removed, cut into 5/8″ chunks
2 hard boiled eggs, chopped 2 T. fresh dill & parsley, chopped
1 C cooked long grain rice 1/4 C thick cream
12 oz block puff pastry 1 egg, lightly beaten or 2 T butter
1. Melt half the butter in a frying pan, add onion and cook until soft. Then add the mushrooms and cook an additional 5 minutes. Transfer to a bowl
2. Melt remaining butter in same pan, add salmon and cook 2 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and add choppped egg, dill & parsley. Gently combine.
3. In a small bowl mix rice and cream, season with salt and pepper.
4. (This is where I took a little turn as you will see from my photos and used phyllo dough instead of the puff pastry.) Puff pastry is the authentic way to make this dish. but either way, you need a base dough of 7″ X 12″ rectangle placed on a baking tray. Spread half the rice mixture leaving a 1″ border all around. Top with salmon mixture, then mushrooms and finally remaining rice.
5. Place another 7″ X 12″ layers of phyllo or puff pastry on top, crimp or fold to seal. If phyllo, brush with butter; for puff pastry, brush with egg.
6. Bake 15 minutes at 415º, then reduce heat to 350º and bake another 15 minutes.
erin, February 24th, 2010
This past Saturday a few friends hosted me the most beautiful shower ever! It was a dressed up event starting at 5 in the evening complete with low-lighting, cocktail attire, and hor d’ oeuvres. One of the girls dreamed up three completely different mock-tail recipes and even made personalized labels for the “champagne” (I sampled all of them:). Along with the twinkle lights and candle lanterns hanging from the ceiling, they had also hung a string of onesies that guests could decorate.
The evening would not have been complete without a round of Celebrity– in this case, Famous Babies-Celebrity
Some of the guests got pretty competitive with their cloth diaper/onesie decorating… and I mean the two women standing beside me
Elephants, Tiny Republican gear and American flags made a generous showing among the gifts
Me with one of the fabulous photographers of the event (Tim’s mom also took some pics).
The smallest hostest and her mom
terri, February 19th, 2010
Taite turned 13! A teenager! Who’da thought she’d grow up this fast!!? So what do you get a thirteen year old for her birthday?
 
Taite wanted to design her own sweatshirt for her birthday present, so working with the owner of the copyrighted flag and dancer and many emails later, a sweatshirt was born. It is now available in the designer’s shop at cafepress.com. We have ordered a number of items from cafepress and have designed some of our own.
I also discovered a sometimes commenter on our blog had a shop at cafepress too. I saw this clever design, “Don’t get mad, get imprecatory,” and thought it was very clever.
If you go to cafepress, it is a lot of fun to create your own design.
meghan, February 9th, 2010
 This is my favorite of the two. Here are some lovely ideas for your Valentine’s cards. I adored her work so much that I got two of these for myself and plan on framing them for my guest bedroom. Visiting her site again, I saw some new works that walls might not be complete without. I’m totally loving the Eiffel Tower and carousel. And how fun is that super hero one?
 This looks like a Paris street scene.
meghan, February 2nd, 2010
 Here are our Valentine's decorations. Valentine’s Day is a simply delightful holiday for a month when one is wanting some cheering up, chocolates, and a dinner out. So here is a project you can do to brighten your very February windows.
All you need is an iron, wax paper, and some crayons. Take two sheets of wax paper and sandwich crayon shavings between them, whatever colors you would like, and iron it. To protect my iron I put paper over and under the wax paper. Now you have a lovely, large piece of “stained glass” from which to cut your hearts. String them together with a needle and thread and hang them in your windows. Happy Valentine’s Day.
 Some of the hearts we hang singly.
caitlin, January 28th, 2010
My wonderful friend Rachel threw a baby shower for me last week that got me all excited and ready for this little boy. I thought you might like to glean from a few of her fabulous ideas that made the party so special:
Dessert
I am still thinking about (no, dreaming of . . . . no, obsessing over) the S’mores Cupcakes she created, and I’ve pretty much decided I need to have a box in the delivery room as motivation. These little beauties are the brain children of a local baker (Trophy Cupcake, who I’ve featured in Seattle Bride’s newest issue– on stands now) and the recipe was featured on Martha Stewart as her favorite cupcake flavor!
All the hype is for good reason, basically, they are to die for. And along with the Coconut Butter Cream Cupcakes and fruit that Becky and Aileen made, I could have hung out at the food table most of the night.
Fun
Rachel set up a table with white newborn baby onesies and paint and pens for guests to decorate. It was fun to see everyone’s clever designs and personality expressed on the little wearable keepsakes. Here are a couple designs.
Gifts
All my lovely friends proved my preconceived notions– about boys clothes not being very fun– completly wrong! But then, I’m just lucky to have friends with such incredible taste. I couldn’t believe the adorable assortment, and I’m going to be envious of my son’s shoe collection!
meghan, January 5th, 2010
 Milk glass candles. I also sprinkled some white feathers around them. The Christmas decorations are down and I could almost cry because the house seems so empty. I love seasonal decorations, especially in the winter.
I don’t know if you have ever seen milk glass in the antique stores. Vases, cups, plates and all of it for a dime a dozen. If you should come across some vases, buy them and fill your fireplace mantle with them. You won’t regret it. Put little votives in them and you will have the most lovely wintry mantle ever.
terri, December 30th, 2009
This is just a small bit of the hilarious Jarrett. I was reminded that I could record video with my camera and finally started.
So, here we are after a delicious meal of prime rib with some incredible wines for our Christmas dinner; we were visiting around the table when this small man suddenly appeared to entertain us!
After Dinner
And then Zac impressed us and really impressed Canon with his talent.
Zac, The Good Egg
And a bit more
|
|
