And the diagnosis was....

Well, that was a longer blogging hiatus than expected :( Basically, as soon as the sleepies started going away life kicked into high gear getting ready for out of town guests. On the plus side though I have a perfectly ducky little guest bedroom now! It took lots of thrift store hunting and a few coats of paint, but I got it all put together in two rather long weeks of painting furniture at 11pm. It's now one of my favorite rooms in the house - lots of blues and greys to calm down the multicolored chaos in the rest of my house with little pops of orange and purple just to remind people that this is my house after all :) What can I say? I loves the colors.

Anyway, my doc said my fatigue should go away in 18-20 years or once the kid heads off to college. Yep, I'm pregnant! Need to post a picture soon, but not having a scanner makes that a little harder. Anyway, I'm at 20ish weeks and muddling along. And with that said I've got a chiro appointment and better be getting along. Hopefully blogging hiatus will be over. Hopefully.

how marriage and food bloggers are alike

(I'm sort of forcing myself to post this because apparently I'm existing in a brain fog. Doctor said it should clear up in another month though. In the mean time I do sort of really hate that this fatigue set in right after I decided to make a public commitment to blogging more. Way to save face there, Natalie.)


Ok, so why are marriage blogger and food bloggers alike? Because a lot of them post based not on what is normal but on what is abnormal. And even if they're supposedly writing about what is "normal" (marriage bloggers) they often come out of abnormal contexts. Let me give you an analogy. What does a healthy person eat? A healthy person eats ice cream and carrot sticks and pizza and salad and bagels with jam and grilled salmon and occasionally washes everything down with an ice cold root beer. If you're absolutely aghast at what I'm writing then I invite you think hard about your own life. Why do you eat healthy? Because at some point you felt really lousy and decided to change your diet. You were unhealthy. If you're still not getting it, let me further point out that, based on what I see around the internet, most people who are switching over to a "healthy" diet aren't doing it because they were eating a steady diet of cheetos and twinkies. They ate a perfectly normal diet that sustains hundreds and thousands of perfectly normal people. Who is the healthier person? A person who can eat a hamburger and fries without feeling like they're about to die or the person who ends up curled up in a bed a week later?

Now, because this is the internet and people assume things, let me hasten to add that not all hamburgers are made alike and not all diets are made alike. On the other hand, a Five Guys burger shouldn't actually make you wish you were dead. Go ahead make your own burgers from grass fed beef and freshly milled flour - sure it's going to be healthier and quite possibly tastier. Go ahead and eat plenty of veggies because they're so good for you. I'm totally in favor of that. Just understand that when your body really is strong and healthy and whole it doesn't require a whole lot of catering to in terms of allergies and sensitives and things like that. It can handle it.

So on to marriage bloggers. I'm thinking about a few blogs I know of either through reading them regularly or the contributions of their authors in other contexts. Most of them are written by people from rather dysfunctional backgrounds. These are people who experienced, either first or second hand, (ie through their spouses) promiscuity, infidelity, addiction, etc. The Driscolls would be another fairly high profile case (of Mars Hill Seattle fame). I don't have any particular insight here, but it does make me curious about the prevalence of dysfunctional people turning around and teaching others about marriage. Perhaps since so much marriage is dysfunctional now that's exactly what we need? Perhaps people who have seen abnormal can teach us more about normal? Is it possible that a couple who married young and made it work with minimal fuss for fifty years really can't articulate what made their marriage so strong?

Ok, that last thing sounds suspect to me. Like I said, I don't really have anything insightful to say here. It just struck me as odd that we take health advice from a blogger with a list of allergies longer than my grocery list for the week and we take marriage advice from men/women who were promiscuous growing up or who slept around for the first ten years of their marriage and yet now consider themselves very, very capable of pointing out just how wrong other people are. And sometimes they really do have valuable insights. I get this. On the other hand, there are some wounds you really only grow around and not over. Like a tree shaped by a boulder or the wind, the impress is still there, and I occasionally wonder if a person from a normal background and a normal marriage would see the same issues and if not does that tell us more about marriage in general or about the people critiquing it?

If I can try to bring this home - God uses wounded people. This is one of my chief comforts in life. Sometimes though, I wonder if maybe we're ignoring the ordinary stories. Why aren't we learning more from the altogether functional family of six that honestly does get along pretty well? Why not take a little health advice from the 75 year old cake lady at church?

I don't know. You tell me.

Still tired - still hanging around

Yeah, so this is a basically a place keeper post for all the cool stuff I've been wanting to write lately. I was hoping that last week would be a good week to get ahead on some blogging chores, but then I decided to try knitting a baby blanket in 5 1/2 days. Some of y'all might have wonderwoman flash fingers and be able to whip these little projects out over a latte, but for me that meant several days whose sole agenda consisted of "Eat. Knit. Repeat." My friend liked it though, so it's all to the good :) However, I do generally recommend against scanning your knitting stash and deciding less than a week prior that you're going to be starting a fairly significant project.

Oh, and the fatigue is still clinging to my legs and slowing me down. Not to worry though! The good medical folks I know had some good suggestions, and I expect things to start clearing up in a couple weeks. Possibly sooner if the rain will stop and let me get some sunshine. Rainy, cloudy days will put me to sleep under the best of circumstances.

Art of Virtue

Ignore the video because it has absolutely nothing to do with the song, but this song has consistently been one of my favorite Pandora picks for the past couple months. I can't help but smile when it comes up because it's not every day you hear such a catchy little domestic sermon. It's almost like a good girl anthem for us indie/folk women :)

You can find more of her stuff here if you're interested: http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/AdrienneYoung . The album this song came from looks pretty good. It's on my "need to buy" list.

(And yeah, I don't why anyone would think otherwise, but nobody asked, bribed, or otherwise persuaded me to write this post. I just thought it was so neat to find a song actually titled "Art of Virtue." It's a far cry from what the Rihanna's and Katy Perry's are putting out today.) 

Take care of all the things?

I've been sketching out ideas for blog posts, and I've even got a some pictures to share. Tonight though, I'm tired. I'm really, really tired. Allen and I had a long talk about how we can get back on track, but the jist of it is that over Christmas I mentally pushed aside a lot of the things that are bothering me now because, hey, it's more important for Christmas to be awesome than for the laundry room to be organized. But now, even though Christmas is down and mostly in boxes, those boxes don't really have a home. Because the stuff that should be in the laundry room is in the closet, and the stuff that should be in the closet is in a room full of stuff that should be in my closet. And why isn't it in my closet? Because that's where I stashed all my candles and vases and brick-a-brac back when my clothes where all in another closet entirely. And that's not even touching on all the painting and patching I still need to do before I can start hanging pictures and shelves and whatnot. So basically we're in the remodeling/moving in/holy cow this house is huge stage in which everything is endless and overwhelming and not as much fun as we (I) thought it would be about twelve months ago. I thought I'd be planning my garden now and not trying to mentally calculate whether it would be a fair exchange of money for sanity to just hire someone to paint about three rooms and at least one closet and possible a few doors (the ones where the paint starts peeling when you prep-sand them so that you end up an hour later thinking about just buying new doors) so that I don't have to deal with it anymore and can move on to sewing kitchen curtains.

And on top of everything I've got a little side project at church. It's nice to talk about having time to serve your community, but my problem is that I'm long on time and short on energy. It's a good cause and fits my skill set, which is why I volunteered in the first place, but I'm about ready to move on to the "friends over coffee" part and spend less time on the driving back and forth and having to copy five people on every e-mail part. I'm just praising God I didn't actually send that other e-mail volunteering for one more project. Poor Allen would never eat a home cooked meal again. He'd come into the den at dinner time to find me knitting away with my latest BBC crush and a bag of jalapeno cheese curls  =) Now I want some jalapeno cheese curls.

Anyway, regular life will hopefully be resuming....sometime? Just wanted to say that if you don't see me around her for a little while or if my cognitive abilities seem stunted you know why.

The Progressive Christian Impulse

Growing up if you'd asked me about my political beliefs I would have answered in the stereotypically conservative vein. Basically life was a whole lot better in the 40's and 50's, and our country would well to return to that period. Or you could bring back Ronald Reagan. Either one would be acceptable. As I grew up though my thinking began to change. I began to ask more questions. I also started dating a man who thought monarchy wasn't actually all that bad and could go on for hours about the problems with the Federal Reserve. We started debating things like minimum wage and moral/constitutional approaches to taxation. I learned about things like "just war" theory. During that time I was also studying English literature and philosophy. Since most of my classes were in political philosophy I spend long hours among all the various ideas that have comprised "good government" since before the rise of Christendom. My English classes applied as well because I saw these ideas translated into communities and families through the medium of text and observation. I was still a conservative. The last time I voted for a mainstream presidential candidate I voted for Bush (although with reservations).  Something didn't fit though. More and more I found myself questioning old values and our perceived need to return to some magical era, be it Queen Victoria's reign or Eisenhower's presidency, in which our ills would cease and life could once again relax into pleasant lines. Some years later the pieces have all fallen into place, and I can say quite truthfully that I'm a progressive leaning Christian.

Who didn't vote for Obama.

Who detests abortion.

Who supports traditional marriage.

Who loves Church history.

Who marvels at hymns written hundreds of years ago.

So what makes me a progressive? Perhaps it would be easier to understand if I said that I'm largely a conservative with progressive impulses. I just hate to put it that way because it sounds inherently ludicrous, and I think my position is anything but that.

Consider what we know about the conservative movement. As one would expect given their title they are frequently trying to return to something. They want to return to a particular era or set of morals or a time when a certain law wasn't in place. They talk about how things were under Reagan or when they were children or when their grandfathers was growing up. To a large extent they are interested in preserving a certain moment in history when everything seemed to be working. To be sure, I'm describing the principled conservatives here. I think most modern or "moderate" conservatives exist merely to keep the two party system afloat. Since they can't run as blue, they might as well run as red and try convince us that they are two very different things and not merely two different shades of purple. I, personally, have a hard time with the conservative impulse. Although I appreciate that are generally trying to preserve something worth having I think they often fail to see the problems in the era to which they wish to return and the kinds of thinking that have, by and large, led us into progressively more liberal policies. You must remember that the conservatives of one hundred years ago were often the liberals of one hundred and fifty years ago. The problem is knowing exactly what you're conserving and what you're going to do with it afterwards.

This is where the progressive impulse can be valuable because, in their skepticism of the past, they are able to look past some of the trappings to what was going on underneath. The 60's and 70's came after the 40's and 50's for a reason. There was the pseudo-religious hysteria surrounding WWI, Prohibition, the rhetorical posturing that war should be about secular ideals like democracy, Vietnam, the push for "no fault" divorce, and a hundred other things that happened but don't seem to figure very prominently into the conservative idea of what "life was like back then." Obviously I'm painting in rather broad strokes. There will be exceptions, but I believe the general outline are accurate. The point is that there are naturally parts of our historical understanding of gender relations or education or church liturgy that need to be scrapped as we move forward in the work of building Christendom. It's the job of progressives to clear away the brush and deadwood of bad ideas and jumbled thinking from around the oaks of righteousness so that the whole thing doesn't go up in a blaze at the first spark. It's the job of conservatives to make sure progressives don't start mistaking an oak tree for a privet hedge and run around yanking up anything with a working root system. We need both impulses, and its a pity that our modern understand has so completely divorced the two and left the progressive impulse to the liberal mindset which, as I hope you can see, is completely unnecessary.

I believe that the Church today needs to better integrate these two ways of thinking. For instance, now you've got college kids thinking that they've just now discovered what community means when the truth is that people have been dealing with largely the same issues since the beginning of time - or at least since the beginning of modern English hymnody. Speaking of which, there's something a little screwy when the conservatives all are singing Mat Redman songs, and the crazy libertarian/progressive kids are all singing Issac Watts and Charles Wesley. It's not completely true, but it's enough true to make you think.    Anyway.    Progressives need conservatives to keep them grounded and to puncture their smug bubbles of "self-awareness" and "radical" faith. Conservatives need progressives to keep them honest about the problems of the past and focused on the issue of conserving an actual, defineable moral good which we wish to remain present no matter what form society takes. This isn't progress for progress's sake or conservation for conservation's sake. This is two different groups of people seeing their need for each other and being willing to work together to overlook each other's blind spots in order to build an enduring Christian vision.

What do I think this means practically? I'm really not sure. It probably just boils down to boring stuff like talking to folks at church and realizing both the good and the bad in their political and social impulses and realizing the same about your own. But I do think it means that for those of us who aren't as conventionally conservative it's ok to have your own perspective. That perspective should be submitted to God, but God can use both of you. Sometimes God calls us to return, and sometimes He calls us to leave. A lot just depends on what he's saying to you now and whether or not you're listening.

Brussel Spouts are yummy

There. That's probably the most controversial blog title you'll see all year.

As you can guess I am firmly, much to my own surprise, in the pro-brussel sprouts category. If you don't believe me just go to P. F. Chang's and order their lemon brussel sprouts that have been shaved and cooked on the wok until just tender and slightly charred. They will change your mind forever. That's not all you can do with them though. Basically my technique is to avoid anything like steaming or boiling and instead focus on roasting and sauteing so that you get as much flavor into the sprout as possible. I had pretty good success this evening with a simple vegetable and sausage casserole.

After spending a long weekend down at the beach and eating fairly standard restaurant fare I was filling the need to bring in some serious vegetable power. Fortunately pinterest gave me some inspiration. The original recipe is here, but I'm sure you can guess I didn't follow it completely. Basically I browned some kielbasa while I cut up sweet potato, carrots, a turnip, mushrooms, onions, and pound of brussel sprouts. I tossed the veggies with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper and poured a vegetable broth that I'd seasoned with lemon juice, garlic, sage, and tarragon over the top. Then it all went into the oven as described. It came out quite well, and, even though I'd cooked the brussel sprouts with some liquid, they still came out very tasty. While I'm not a rabid seasonal cook, I do like generally cooking with the seasons, and this really easy root vegetable casserole (although it's more of a roast) was a great choice on a day when my brain was fogged up with "just back from a trip" and "let me take a flying leap at these responsibilities I haven't thought about for four days."

Pictures coming soon. I really like my new 50mm lens. It does stuff my other lens just can't do, as you'll see.

Also, I have a post in the works on Christian progressivism. I've just got some church stuff I need to get sorted out before I move on to play time.

And yeah. Eat your sprouts. They're good for you.