A Fresh Start

December 30, 2009 by Debbie.

For over 20 years I’ve either read or said aloud Psalm 103 almost every day. I always thought of it as a song of praise from me to God. Today I realize it is not just a song of praise from me to God, but a song FROM God to me.

I’m reading Dr. Kevin Leman’s book, Sheet Music - highly recommend it. In one of the first chapters, Dr. Leman says that we all have an internal ‘rule book.’ Basically, it’s made up of the impressions we learned before third grade.  Some of the things in my ‘rule book’ are not to waste, don’t clutter, don’t leave a mess, DO something and get it DONE, start things early and finish before it’s needed. These rules are part of me and will stay part of me unless I conscientiously decide they are harmful and need to be replaced with one that isn’t harmful. My humanity leaves room for less than ideal  rules as I wasn’t raised by perfect parents, nor had a perfect life up to 3rd grade, therefore my rule book wasn’t formed from perfect impressions. Problems come when my rule book clashes with John’s internal rule book. Dr. Leman says that’s the time to stop, talk about the whys behind the problem and find out what rules are clashing, examine those rules and see if one or both need to be revised.

So God sings to me from his rule book in Psalm 103 - rules he will ALWAYS live by - he will  forgive me, he will  heal me, he will redeem my life from destruction, he will be tender towards me, he will satisfy me with good things, he will renew my youth, he will not hold my sins against me nor reward me by my sins - past, present or future sins - he will show me his ways, he will show me his acts, he will always have mercy towards me, he will remember my children, he will direct the angels for me, he will rule the kingdoms I live in. And the best thing is that God’s rule book is perfect.

So when my rule book clashes with God’s rule book, we sit down and talk about why and look over both rules and see which one is true and good, which one to keep and which one to readjust.  Isaiah 1:18 says it this way, “Come let us reason together,” says the Lord, “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they should be red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”

You may wonder why this makes more of an impression on me than saying Psalm 103 lists God’s promises to me. Because I learned early and have a ‘rule’ that promises are made to be broken and 95% of the time are. I like rules and automatically distrust promises. When I hear someone make a promise my first thought is what’s the loop hole? But a rule is set in my mind - such as the rule of gravity; I throw the cat up in the air and down she comes (OK, I don’t go around throwing cats up in the air, but a little levity here helps.)  I can understand the (internal) rule book because I live it without even thinking about it. A promise has to be thought about and ‘kept,’  - something you do, not something you ARE. Is my ‘rule’ correct? No, but now that it’s mentally out in the open I can deal with it. I can ‘reason together’ with God. We can talk about how to overlay his true rule (God doesn’t lie, what he has spoken he will accomplish) over my incorrect rule.

Do you have some rules in your internal rule book that might conflict with God’s true rules? I didn’t think I did but obviously I do. Maybe this New Year’s is a good time to sit down with God and say to him, “Come let us reason together, show me how my rule book matches up to yours.” Maybe it’s time for a fresh start, regardless of how big or small.

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An Early Christmas

December 23, 2009 by Debbie.

Since we had an early Thanksgiving, an early Christmas feels just right. Actually, John and I haven’t opened our gifts but we have splurged a little. John has been patiently waiting for us to reach several financal goals and, thanks to God, we have reached the goals we set four or five years ago. Long term goals are not always fun but such a relief to accomplish.

John was able to shop for a treadmill. He decided on a NordiTrack, based on price, construction and warranty.  I’m proud of how he’s kept up his workouts at the gym but having the treadmill at home will allow him to work out 5 days a week instead of just the 3 at the gym. 

I’ve used the treadmill two or three times and plan to use it routinely …… soon. Right after we got the HUGE thing set up in the bedroom, Heide walked over and climbed on the running track like “So what’s the big deal about this???” The treadmill size cramps the dogs’ style as it takes up one of their nighttime sleeping spots.

But our dogs are adaptable - Bud likes his breakfast in bed by the fireplace as long the fireplace is roaring and the hot air blower is on.

This is the other part of the ‘early Christmas’ - the dogs got new beds this year. Poor Pudge, who died a month ago, used to chew up all the beds and quilts I made for them so we quit buying replacement beds. I wonder if Pudge is chewing a gold lined bed up in heaven???

We had our family Christmas last Sat. at John, Jr. and Tiffany’s (dil) home. They do such a fantastic job hosting the meal - house is always decorated and the table is overflowing. I was proud to watch John, Jr. fix a plate for a elderly single neighbor lady and to hear daughter Debbie plan a shopping trip with all 3 teenage girls (her two and John, Jr’s daughter) to spend their Christmas gift cards. Both familes give from their hearts - best early Christmas present.

Today is suppose to be beautiful, close to 70 with rain coming in later. Then a cold front is due in to bring us down to the 40’s tomorrow. Texas roller coaster weather. We’ve got fire wood stacked in the living room firebox, a turkey ready to roast, a cheesecake in the fridge, a stack of new books from the library and Scrooge video from the library. What’s that Christmas song, “The weather outside is frightful, but …. something, something, something, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.” Just not here. But the cold frame is shut up tight so maybe a tad of snow would be alright.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night!

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A Day in the Kitchen

December 18, 2009 by Debbie.

I love listening to Live365, old time radio via the internet. The Fiber & Molly show is my favorite and it runs alternately with The Great Gildersleeve. These shows are the source of 99% of the commercials I hear and it’s amazing how different the commercials are from then to now. The ‘then’ commercials make me want to spend time in my kitchen. The ‘now’ commercials try to convince me I deserve to be out of the kitchen. I like my kitchen.

Here’s a few of the recipes I’ve fixed recently. Bear in mind, to me a recipe is a suggestion, not instructions written in stone. You’ve got to have leeway to change ingredients to use up anything that needs used up.

One-Pan Granola

Heat in a large shallow pan-

1/2 to 1 cup oil or 2 sticks of butter (or half and half)

1/2  to 1 cup honey, molasses or maple syrup (time to use it up after 3 years anyway!)

1/c cup water

2 teaspoons vanilla

Heat til butter is melted or all the ingreds are warm and thinned out.

The stir in

5 or 6 old fashioned rolled oats

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Up to 6 cups of  a mixture of

wheat flour

dry milk powder

wheat germ

soy flour

coconut

unsalted nuts

sunflower, pumpkin, sesame seeds

Bake in a 250 oven for up to 2 hours, stirring every 20 minutes, til done.

After completely cool, add dried fruits and/or raisins. Don’t add before baking or you’ll have REALLY dried fruit. Don’t ask how I know but the first batch was very crunchy.

The real recipe is from the 1981 Whole Foods for the Whole Family

 

Ham and Spinach Soup

1 T olive oil

2 med onions, chopped

garlic

Saute onions and garlic in the oil for about 10 minutes, then add

8 cups chopped spinach

2 T sugar

Italian spices - Penzey spice company has the best Italian spice mix (guess where I got the receipe???)

Cook for about 10 minutes until spinach shrinks down. Stir as needed.

Add to cooked spinach-

8 cups chicken stock

and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and add

1 cup mini bow tie pasta

2 cups chopped ham

2 cups navy bean soup (how buys navy bean soup?? use soup left over from a prior meal)

Black pepper

Simmer for 20 minutes.

The ‘real’ recipe is at www.penzeys.com

Freezes well and goes great with homemade bread, such as …….

Five Herb Bread

1 3/4 cup water

3/4 cup undiluted evap milk (goat milk works great)

2 packages of yeast (2 1/2 t. loose yeast for EACH package)

1/2 cup Paramesan cheese

5 teaspoon of mixed herbs (I use the same Italian spices  as for the Spinach Ham soup above) - such as chives, parsley, oregano, basil, sage - almost any of the ‘green’ herbs.

garlic - use as much as you’d like. I don’t count it in the 5 teaspoons of herbs above cause I really like garlic

1/4 -1/2 cup sugar

2 T. oil

2 t. salt

5 to 6 cup flour

Dissolve yeast and sugar in lukewarm liquids with the Paramesan cheese. spices and oil. Add in the flour until a stiff dough is formed. Knead for about 8 minutes, working the salt in as you knead the dough. After  the dough feels as soft as a ‘baby’s bottom.” Cover with a damp cloth and let rise in a warm place (pilot light in the oven) til doubled. Punch down and form into 2 loaves. Place in buttered loaf pans. Cover and rise til doubled again. Carefully brush with melted butter and sprinkle a little more Parmesan cheese on top. Bake in a slow oven (325 degrees) for 30 - 35 minutes. Bread is done when the bottom sounds hollow when tapped. Cool on a wire rack if you can wait that long. I recommend slicing off the heels and slather on some homemade butter! Add some homemade mozzarella cheese sliced thin, sprinkle with Italian herbs and lightly broil.

This recipe  came from a magazine that has since lost it’s cover …… not sure, maybe a Texas Travel magazine. The manager at Williams Buick in McKinney said I could take it. I found the recipe while waiting for a car repair many, many years ago.

That bread recipe makes good bread sticks or smaller loaves to pull apart at the table, dunking them in a garlic/herb oil.

It must have been a soup week as I also made Tortilla soup. I got that recipe from First Place cookbook but if you don’t already have a favorite, just google for a recipe and ad lib. BTW, true to form, I didn’t follow my recipe religiously and did not add the tortilla strips. Instead I buttered a couple of warm tortillas and we dipped them in the soup as we ate it. I knew we’d have left overs and didn’t want excessively soggy tortilla strips left in the soup. This soup does freeze well if you don’t want to mess with leftovers right away.

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Borrowed Rant

December 16, 2009 by Debbie.

Today has been hectic so forgive me for posting this borrowed ‘rant.’  I saved it from an old email. Sorry I can’t give credit to who wrote it as I don’t know. Wish I had. Next best thing is sharing it so I can take time today grocery shop, make homemade granola, chop and freeze all the large size veggies & meats from Sam’s. BTW, $200 worth of groceries should not ALL fit in my little red wagon at one time. And a big thank you to all who prayed for our two ‘orphan’ goats. Everyone is doing fine and the two orphans are thriving once more.

Enjoy!

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice-pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE. and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah … and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front step, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

 

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Nap Time at Beulah Land

December 2, 2009 by Debbie.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. John was on vacation (figuratively speaking) the week of Thanksgiving. By Monday he’d received over 15 phone calls from work so you can see why I’m skeptical of calling the week a vacation. We did go out to lunch twice and he turned his phone off while we were out eating. The end of the week was calmer than the beginning and almost all of us found a place and time to rest.

The babies all crowded in a small dog carrier to cuddle and keep warm.

The mommas napped in the sunshine while they could … producing milk takes a lot of energy so they have to conserve when they can!

The ‘house people’ were giving the goats a run for their money, starting with John! I tried to ignore the open computer and phone right beside him but I had a baseball bat at the ready in case either beeped!

I found Heide and Bud sleeping in this very unusual position. I’ve never seen them lay this close to each other in such a small area. Usually Bud likes to have a way of escape as Heide can tend to be a grouch at times. She has pms, too, you know!

We didn’t think the baby goats sleeping together would be a problem but it has become one. That and since each doe had triplets there are times when two babies are nursing when a cousin will slip in between them and take over the rightful baby’s teat.  A momma goat recognizes her babies by smelling their tail end, which should smell like her milk. The nursing thief’s tail end no longer smelled like their momma’s milk and their momma rejected them. AND the other momma also rejected them. We’ve had to go out and hold the correct mommas and force them to nurse their correct babies. We’ve also had to supplement the milk supply as the mommas don’t seem to be able to produce enough milk for triplets yet, which will add an additional milk smell confusion to the mix.

Good thing we got our naps in early - won’t be any more for awhile!

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