Things that are Likely to Happen this Weekend

Happy Friday!

Maybe the title is a little hopeful, but these are all things that I want to happen this weekend – or things that need to happen this weekend.

1. Today is pickup day for my area’s locally grown market. (Dang you, Barbara Kingsolver!). I finally found a source for locally grown, organic, free range chicken. Yay! And I don’t have to buy a whole chicken. I can buy just the bone-in breasts. I have no idea how to debone an animal. If you have tips, please share. I usually buy my meat boneless because it looks much less like a carcass that way. (Dang you, chickens for being so tasty!)

The locally grown market is pretty neat. It’s like a co-op, I guess. Local farmers list what crops they will have available on this website and you can order what you want. Then once a week, everyone comes into town and picks up the stuff they ordered. It’s an interesting way to get fresh foods and support local farmers.

2. Tonight I’m doing childcare for my church. Quite by accident, but that’s OK. I’m sure it’ll be fun. I’m supposedly going to watch grade school aged kids. I’m used to watching the babies at church. They are cute and cuddly, easily entertained, and not sassy at all. I might need to work out some sort of entertainment plan for the older kids because in my experience, when they get bored, that’s when the wheels fall off. I will ponder about that. You can give your entertainment tips too.

3. Tomorrow I really want to go see Harry Potter at the IMAX. It might even turn into a real live date! Fun stuff. Hey, Kelvy. I have a $4 off Olive Garden coupon that’s burning a hole in my wallet, if you want to be all classy and whatnot. :)

4. My backyard looks like a tropical rainforest. I feel badly for the dogs and for my neighbors (thank goodness for privacy fences!). In my defense, July was a record-breaking month in terms of the amount of rain we’ve gotten. And it takes forever for water to drain out of my backyard after it rains. I was going to weed eat it the other day in an effort to bring some order to it – since there’s no way I could push my mower through the mud. Which brings us to…

5. I need to exchange my weed eater. Long story short, I got a new one, used it once, and now it doesn’t work anymore. Thus, my back yard still looks like a rainforest.

6. And while I’m at Home Depot, I need to return the replacement fence planks (Dang you, neighborhood hellion kids!) I bought that are the wrong size.

7. And buy new light bulbs for my kitchen fixture. Mine had stopped working altogether until yesterday when I flipped the switch on out of habit and they turned on just as brightly as the day they were born. Very strange, but I don’t trust them to continue working and besides, they are the ones that were put in when I built my house 8 years ago. They deserve a break.

Wow, this has devolved quickly. I must go.

Wonderous Words Wednesday (8)

Happy Wonderous Words Wednesday to you! If you're new to this, it's a meme that Bermuda Onion hosts in which we share unfamiliar words we've come across in our reading.

My words this week are all from Diana Gabaldon's Dragonfly in Amber (big surprise!).

Kirkyard: (n.) churchyard.

Well, if it came down to it, a tramp round every kirkyard and burying ground in the general vicinity of Brock Tuarach was likely the best he could do in the short term. -- page 26

Banns: (n.) notice of an intended marriage, given three times in the parish church of each of the betrothed.

Lay one hand on that rosy flesh again, and they'd be calling the banns by next month. -- page 37

Insouciance: (n.) lack of care or concern; indifference.

The yellow silk of the background had faded to ochre, but the multicolored peacocks were bold as ever, spreading their tails with lordly insouciance, regarding the viewer with eyes like black beads. -- page 40


All definitions are courtesy of dictionary.com.

An Open Letter to My Beagle

Dearest Butter,

Why must you make life so difficult? Behind that cute little facade with the mile long floppy ears lurks an evil too terrible to contemplate.

Mommy paid good money to have gutters installed on the house. Why then, have you decided that they are delicious? What is it about sharp aluminum that is so appealing to you? I feed you more than your fair share of food, so I know you're not eating the gutters because you are hungry. Who would have thought that a little short squatty thing like yourself could dismantle something that it took four grown men to assemble?

Also, the privacy fence is not a toy. Continue to test me on this and I will turn the electric fence back on. I might even figure out a way to hook it to the gutters.

Love,
Mom

Thirteen LibraryThing Recommendations (TT 37)

Just for giggles, I clicked the recommendation link on my LibraryThing page to see what kind of books they think I'd be interested in reading. The way I do LibraryThing is I have a new one each year. So all they have to go off of in recommending something is the books I've read since January.

Below are the first 13 recommendations and whether I think I'll actually read them.

1.Undead and Unreturnable by MaryJanice Davidson (Probably not. I don't love the series enough.)

2.Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood (Eventually. I love this author.)

3.Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: And Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom by Celia Rivenbark (Absolutely! Very funny author...and it sounds like good advice to me!)

4.High Five by Janet Evanovich (No way, no how.)

5.She's Gone Country: Dispatches from a Lost Soul in the Heart of Dixie by Kyle Spencer (This is the first I've heard of this one, but seeing as how it only has a rating of 2.75 on LT, I doubt I'll mess with it.)

6.Love Is a Many Trousered Thing by Louise Rennison (I've already read it. It's great!)

7.Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding (Enjoyed it. Liked the movie too.)

8.World Without End by Ken Follett (I liked the first book in this "series", but these books are SO long. Not sure if I'll get around to this one.)

9.Undead and Uneasy by MaryJanice Davidson (See #1)

10.Undead and Unpopular by MaryJanice Davidson (See #1)

11.Undead and Unappreciated by MaryJanice Davidson (See #1)

12.Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver (Another author I love. This one is already on my TBR shelf.)

13.A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett (I'm not familiar with this one. I kind of doubt I'll get around to it.)



See more Thursday Thirteen posts.

Wonderous Words Wednesday (7)

It's been a few weeks! I did finish Outlander and I had a ton of words I meant to put in a WWW from my last week of reading it, but by the time the next Wednesday had rolled around I had moved on to something else. You're welcome! :)

However, now I'm on the second book of that series, Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon. I've only read the first chapter, but I ran into an unfamiliar word on the FIRST page of chapter one. It's going to be a long book! This week I only have one word, but by next week I should have several more.

Antimacassars: (n.) a small covering, usually ornamental, placed on the backs and arms of upholstered furniture to prevent wear or soiling; a tidy.

He thought the feeling largely justified, insofar as he was surrounded: by tables covered by bric-a-brac and mementos, by heavy Victorian-style furniture, replete with antimacassars, plush and afghans, by tiny braided rugs that lay on the polished wood, craftily awaiting an opportunity to skid beneath an unsuspecting foot. -- page 3

Definition is from dictionary.com

To see other Wonderous Words Wednesday posts, check out Bermuda Onion's blog.

Rescue Fail

Do you know of the funniness that is Failblog.org?

I saw this one yesterday and it made me laugh, so I'm linking to it.

On Grace

Stephanie at Across the Gypsy Flat Road has written a great post about grace and sacrifice. It's not a time-consuming read. I'll wait here while you go read it.

Done?

I think she brings up some interesting points. My favorite part is this:

It is in this climate that I'm faced with my own calling to love God and my neighbor more than I love myself. I'm not exempt from loving those who hate the people I love, who think I'm wrong, who do not love me back. And I'm faced with the responsibility of raising children who will choose their own path of faith. I cannot choose their steps, but I do have some measure of control over their trajectory. I will tell them who God is, and - terrifyingly - they will probably believe me.

I think that for too long, I have taken stories from the Bible only at face value. There are wonderful lessons, even at face value, but I don't think that's the point of the Bible.

I've read stories that tell me how I am to behave, but I haven't realized that the stories are about more than that. They also reveal a little bit about God's character and how He feels about his children. And the funny thing is that I was content to subscribe to some dogma and think as long as I could recite the bullet points on the statement of beliefs, I knew all there was to know about God. My team had gotten it right. Game over.

But the more I try to delve in and learn about God's character, the more I realize that I've only scratched the surface.

I grew up being told that God is merciful and all that jazz, but apparently that only applied to people who believed and looked exactly like we did. I think there was a big quandry over how to extend grace to someone who didn't believe the "right" things like we did. After all, if you love someone too much and extend too much grace, you're condoning their behavior, right? Where is the line?

I remember nearly losing my cool with one of my parents' elderly friends one time. She was upset because some girl had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and a few people had gotten together to throw her a little shower to help with the essentials.

She was outraged that people would condone her sinful behavior by getting her gifts. Her baby's bottom doesn't need diapers?

Somewhere along the way we have gotten confused about who God is. Does He set guidelines for us? Yes. Does He expect us to follow them? Yes. Is He displeased when we don't follow them? Yes.

But does he offer us forgiveness? YES.

Do we stop loving someone when they make a mistake? Is that what God does? No. If you only love someone while they're doing everything right, it's not grace.

Romans 5:7-9 (New International Version)
7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Sewing Tutorials for the Astonishingly Dim

...in other words, sewing tutorials geared toward remedial sewers (ones who sew...not waste management thingies) like me.

I just ran across this funny and EXTREMELY helpful tutorial for sewing on bias tape.

This lady must have been eavesdropping on me the one and only time I attempted to use bias tape, because her "no swearing" method was definitely needed at that point in time.

Just being honest!

She makes it look so easy.

Here's another tutorial on how to do the folds on homemade bias tape. I would have never come up with this!

And here's a tutorial on making your own bias tape from beginning to end. Very helpful and easy to follow!