life

summer vacation 2012

/ abby hummel / 5 Comments

After spending the 4th of July visiting family for a week, mostly on lakes in northern Michigan, I’m pretty sure that vacationing is one of my spiritual callings in life. And maybe photography is not part of that vocation because I tend to forget about taking pictures until it’s all over.

We spent most of our time on a lake like this one, swimming, tubing, kayaking, paddle-boating, raft-fighting, and splashing. Even the water was warm!
Aaron had a pinched nerve and his sister led some Physical Therapy sessions at the cottage:
The final picture lends itself to an appropriate quote from Uncle Don, “You can’t upstage a baby.”
The best quotes from the trip are constant references to the “Amber waves of grain,” and the past-tense version of you-snooze-you-lose: “You snost, you lost.” Aaron also discovered Sour Patch Kids for the first time and is now obsessed with them.

We also stopped to see my family for a bit on both ends of the trip – their house is right on the way to the in-laws, and, conveniently, 10 minutes away from Lake Michigan. They have lots of comfy beds and are happy to see us anytime. We’re very blessed! There are friends living with them now, so Aaron got in some early-morning tic-tac-toe before we left.
We also saw my little-boy cousins briefly. Aaron titles himself “Tall and Sassy” in this photo:
We are so grateful to have family living in vacation-y places! The most exciting part of our week back at home, so far, was celebrating Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-Fil-A.

Let’s go on vacation all the time!

a (small) fruited plain (garden 2012)

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As in past years, any area of our yard that gets full sun is cultivated for vegetable gardening in the summer. Aaron is a gardening master. And while most people would say that I’m the stereotypical woman with all sorts of nurturing instincts and he’s more of the brute hunter-gatherer, when it comes to plants we are totally opposite. All the gardening successes are his, and we have already enjoyed 2 fresh tomatoes. The first one is pictured here, and Aaron chose not to smile because he wanted everyone to know he takes his agricultural projects very seriously. 

Then over here, I will confess my own gardening disaster. This is the third year in a row that I’ve entirely destroyed a bunch of plants. This isn’t supposed to be that  hard, and I’m determined to get the hang of this before I turn 30.  I started a bunch of pansies and something else from seed in the kitchen this spring, then transplanted them into pots, along with ferns, hostas, and sedum from the back yard. I painted almost all the planters to match each other and selected some stumps to use as plant stands. I give myself an A for artistic vision, a B on decor follow through, and a D on plant-nurturing. I won’t say an F since some of them are still alive. They started off well, which you can see in the big picture, but the two side pictures illustrate what it all looks like now.
 I should also mention that, since I wanted to make salsa this summer, Aaron ordered some onion plants and I carefully followed his directions for planting them in the big garden. They were also a total bust – they barely grew! We pulled them out to give more room for the tomatoes, so I chopped up what I could and threw them in the freezer. This way I can still say at least two of the salsa ingredients came from the garden.

A Canoe Race

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A warm day with slight breeze made a perfect setting for the department picnic of Aaron’s colleagues and coworkers at the end of the week. While the main dish was American standard KFC, the sides were potlucked, which is actually an adventure itself because so many international students and faculty bring dishes from their native lands and you never quite know what you’re going to get. (The innocent looking cucumber salad should have been rated four-pepper spicy; what we thought was a tamale was actually a sickeningly sweet sticky rice blob wrapped in leaves.)

This event concludes with an annual canoe race, which gets water-loving Michigan natives like us all antsy to beat everyone from landlocked Iowa. I was disappointed about not competing this year because we let someone else take my spot when one of Aaron’s labmates wanted to try canoeing. Perhaps this was for the best. After viewing the following movie, you can make your own educated decision about the fruitfulness of this canoeing venture.

Aaron took this failure very seriously. At the end, he starts to say “It was awesome,” but the camera stopped recording.

Following my own brisk experience in February, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one in our family who had an accidental underwater adventure this year.

Inventions

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This morning brought about discussion that reminded me of the need for at least 3 new things in the first-world marketplace:

1) The Baby Pianist High Chair. (And no, I don’t mean we need it for us right now.) It would be something like a usual tableside clip-on baby seats, only set up just right for attaching Baby to a piano. This would be a great way to get kids experimenting on the keyboard as soon as they can sit up and I think it would make eventual piano practicing seem more natural.  2) A gravel-inhaling landscape vacuum. Basically, the opposite of a leaf blower. We definitely need this. I mean, have you seen our yard?

3) A Coffee thermos technologically marrying the beauty of a French Press Coffee Maker  with the portability and ease of a Camelbak water backpack, so we wouldn’t have to choose between the simple pleasures of drinking good coffee in the morning AND biking at the same time.  I would call it  the “Cafe Chameau,” which is a butchered French translation of the words Camel and Coffee.
Do you have the solution to any other world problems with your creative inventions?

Recent Reads

/ abby hummel / 4 Comments

We’ve had our first rhubarb harvest, every other dinner’s salad is fresh from the garden, and last night’s bike ride included nine bunny sightings. It’s not that warm yet, but summer has definitely started! One of the best parts of summer is… Well, who can pick just one? I like it all! But right now I’m excited about summer reading. I just finished a great Bible Study program that ran through the school year, so my regular book reading diminished drastically since September. This summer my work load is decreased a bit, and while I hope to maintain consistent study of scripture, I’m excited about extra time for real books, too. So I can’t say I’ve been reading two books a month like I did last year, but I’m going to blog about the past year’s worth of literary edification now in case you want to pick anything up for your own summer reading list. My natural bent is towards devotional, historical, nerdy, or “self-help”-ish books, but I have been richly rewarded by some intentional fiction reading, so I’m hoping to be more balanced with reading stories and “real life” in the future.
(These are listed here alphabetically by author.)

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
I’ve had Wendell Berry on the radar for years. In college I frequently babysat for the children of a Berry scholar (as in, wrote a real book about it), and sometimes I thumbed through the books on their shelf. But I didn’t get anything read start-to-finish until now, and I am kicking myself for taking half a decade to get around to it. This author is gently profound, and his prose beautifully marries an understanding of God’s dual revelation (in scripture and nature) with an uncanny knack for describing the human condition. Berry “gets” God, and he “gets” man. I will say that I found it especially intriguing that a confessing Baptist would write a story where the main character spends much of his life in confusion about faith and veers sharply off the path of orthodox Christian belief at the end, but I would still highly recommend this book as a story about loss, grief, growth and redemption.

“This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way, it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. … I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. …The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led — make of that what you will.” -Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.

***
When God Talks Back by  T.M. Luhrmann.
This is a huge volume based on an anthropologist’s report of spending years in two different Vineyard churches throughout the country. I feel like I’m cheating because I actually returned this to the library before I finished it, but I would like to finish it sometime, and I still recommend this to anyone who is intrigued by anthropology or curious about the psychological study of prayer. Which would be… probably no one. I’m okay with being a little nerdy here: I thought it was really interesting. And I truly appreciated that a non-believing author managed to write a book about evangelical prayer without an overwhelming air of cynicism. Though I don’t necessarily agree with some of her conclusions, I appreciated that she took people seriously and wanted to figure out how the human side of prayer works. My biggest beef with what I’ve read so far is that Luhrmann keeps using the word “evangelical,” while most evangelicals probably wouldn’t call the churches she visited mainstream. But, whatever. The evangelical Christian movement is almost impossible to narrowly define, even in a book that’s 300+ pages like this one.

***
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is a beautiful story, told in letters from an elderly minister near death to his seven-year-old miracle son. (While every child is a miracle, one who is seven when his father dies of old age is more likely to be referenced as such, I suppose.) The San Francisco Chronicle said Gilead “explores big ideas while telling a good story,” and I would recommend this for anyone who has thought about God’s will, singleness, marriage, childlessness, parenting, grief, disappointment, ministry, or the meaning of life. Which means, everyone. I liked this so much that I listened to the audio CD a few weeks after reading the book, and I was so excited to share this novel with some friends that I recommended it to several people right away. Then I found out most of them had read it already. So I feel like I was late to the party, but you should read it now, because this is one of those things that isn’t worth missing!

“I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.” -Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson.

***
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren F. Winner
I have loved several of Lauren Winner’s other books, especially her conversion memoir “Girl Meets God,” so I was very curious about “Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis.” Written out of the spiritual torment she faced grieving her mother’s death and doubting her faith in a difficult marriage resulting in an (admittedly) unjustifiable divorce, Winner tells her raw story of doubt and faith. Many times, it seemed that her “journal-entryish” writing (like CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed,” but a bit more organized) left me feeling emotionally brutalized along with her – doubt is a painful thing, and it hurt to read about, too. In both knowing personally that Christian marriage is not all picnics and rainbows, and walking alongside a dear friend in the aftermath of marital dissolution, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for the trauma Winner faced after leaving her husband. I don’t know the whole story behind that, but I do know she reflected on those grave choices with honesty and renewed faith. It’s not as though she can go back and change it, and I am grateful God meets us where we are instead of where we should be. In many ways, this book reminds us that life is tough and God, though sometimes hard to understand, is good. Winner writes with a haunting narrative voice and her words are thought-provoking in some ways I didn’t expect. For that reason I think it deserves mention here.

“The enthusiasms of my conversion have worn off. For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone. …And yet in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know. … I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.” (‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ John 6:68, esv.) – Still, by Lauren F. WInner.

I have a few things on my summer reading list already (Eric Metatexas’ Bonhoeffer biography is in progress, Return of the King by Tolkien, the Huger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden, and Great Expectations by Dickens), but I’d love to hear more suggestions if you have any to offer!

Curb Appeal (Home Tour)

/ abby hummel

Most of the time I feel pretty discouraged about how much work there is left to do on our house, so in celebration of our 3rd year here, I’ve taken a bunch of pictures to record what we’ve done so far! And first on the agenda? The great outdoors. I’ve gotta say, we must have a great eye for living potential because these before shots from three years ago are really bad.
Here’s what we started with for “curb appeal.” Note the leaning trees, huge bushes, random rocks and lack of grass.

Realtor shot from the street.

We took out those ginormo bushes by the driveway and felled a few trees before my college BFF Esther dubbed this area the “stake-burning piles.”
 After those were out, we had a great feeling of progress, but still no grass to speak of. The trees didn’t get enough sunlight, the garage color was awful, and also, the apple tree was out of control.

Thankfully, it’s looking a little better now, because we took out more trees, Aaron has put forth massive effort on the grass with multiple reseedings and custom grass blends for our shady yard, we overhauled the “retaining wall,” and I stained the peachy colored bricks. We still need to decide if we’re going to put one more layer of stones on the hill or trim the weed barrier so it isn’t visible. The rest of the grass should fill in soon, too.

We’re still in the “Progress” stage, but everything out front is coming together so far! We have some big projects for the other side of the driveway… there is a steep path by the garden (we call it “the incline of death”) that needs some attention, so hopefully we’ll get that solved this summer!

finishing the tile! (kitchen, pt 9)

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It’s been a while… we misplaced the camera cord, and then my favorite free photo-editing website  became part of  the “Google+” social network and went berserk, losing some of the best features in the process, which made me dislike Google+ more than I already did. Yes, I’m a little bitter. And to think all this frustration took energy that should have been channeled towards house projects! For shame.

Well, the last recorded kitchen update had us with half the tile laid and no grout, like this:
We grouted it right away, and then had to take a little unscheduled break in the tiling for a minor freak-out while deciding what to do about  Aaron’s job offer in New York, but we got busy with the rest of it on another sunny weekend. And when I say “got busy,” I mean that I spent hours chipping out the old cork flooring and ended the night with five blisters on my hand. There are no pictures of this process. I was in a hurry, and my goal is always to get the project finished, not just get a good blog post out of the whole deal. I also have no pictures of Aaron with the tile saw, but rest assured that he slaved away to get everything cut correctly while I spread the thinset adhesive and laid the tile in place. As usual, we are modeling superior footwear safety measures during all construction projects.

It was so fun to see everything start coming together. I’m amazed at what a difference the new streamlined flooring made! You can see that the first half is already grouted while we’re laying the second half.

I started talking about my dreams for the bathroom overhaul on the schedule for this fall. Aaron looked at me like this:

Finally, we got all done:

The tile floor was a little higher than the previous cork/linoleum/carpet combo from before, so we had to make the back door shorter.  This was the perfect opportunity to use the antique plane Aaron’s grandpa passed down to us earlier this year.
 And then, just when the dining area was completely tiled and we could shut the back door again, we proceeded to cover most of the new floor. This is where things got, if you’ll pardon the pun, a little rugly. Since we don’t want our table or chairs to be scooting harshly along the floor, we decided a rug was needed right away. First, I got one rug that was the perfect style, but was a foot too long.

Then I couldn’t find anything in the right size that looked good. Rugs are expensive, and I have West Elm taste with a dumpster-diving/hand-me-down budget. As we often say to ourselves, “Wal-Mart clearance shoppers can’t be choosers.” After driving all over looking at what was available, I picked up this yucky, boring, dull, “off,” brownish one because the price was right ($19.99) and I have some DIY ideas up my sleeve to jazz it up in the future.

For my records just as much as sharing with you, for the floor we used “Rialto White” 12′ and 6′ tiles to make this pattern. For the counter’s back splash grout, I used a mixable recipe and I thought I just hated the grouting process. I would not recommend the Spectra-Lock Stain Proof mix-it-yourself grout to anyone. It was sticky, it made the tile shiny, and my hands are itchy just thinking about it.
 Because I was unhappy with that experience, I shelled out an extra $6 and tried a different  pre-mixed style for the floor and I really LOVED IT. For the kitchen floor we used TEC Sanded Premixed Grout in Vintage White. It went on and wiped off smoothly without adding any unwanted shine to the tile themselves. I think there was a lot less waste with this kind, too. If we do more tiling, which I’m hoping is the case (hee hee), I’m getting this kind again.

This “Vintage White” color is a little “yellower” than I would have chosen, but the tile has a slight gray tint and they balance each other out to mimic the carpet, which was our goal! We are so happy it’s done!

(If you want to catch up on our kitchen project from the start, you can see all the posts HERE!)

And on another house-related note, this week is our 3 year homeowners anniversary! Our potential moving scare gave us a chance to pause and reflect about what we have going on with our house, so we have culled a little furniture and finished a few other “little” projects that have been waiting around forever. We also did a bunch of spring cleaning, gardening, and organizing. It’s such a good feeling… and there are pictures to share, so stay tuned!

a well-examined birthday

/ abby hummel / 16 Comments

There is a certain realization that comes upon a person examining life on their 26th birthday: I am no longer in my early twenties; I am closer to 30 than 20. While I know, deep-down, that this is good, exciting, and normal, it is a little unsettling. So I have done some thinking about the next four years before I hit that big milestone and come up with a list of 30 things I want to do or accomplish before my 30th birthday. Planning like this can be a dangerous thing. Life is very much out of my own control and for as much as I plan, I can’t guarantee that  circumstances will fall in line with my plans. But it also seems wasteful to live without intention and dreams. So, in whatever ways I can make things happen, which may be not at all, I have thirty goals – some big, some small – for the next four years of my life. It is my intention to complete this stuff before April 12, 2016, but, to quote our favorite online hunting show, Midwest Whitetail, “We’ll see what happens.”

1) Figure out gardening. (Spoiler alert: this is in progress already because it might take all 4 years to turn my black thumb green.)
2) Learn Greek. I own the books and I’ve played around with this on my own, but I get distracted while writing out the alphabet. The shapes are pretty and they make me think about other things. I might need to take a real class if I want to make serious progress. I swear, some days it  is no small miracle that I can get anything done at all.
3) Grilling. I should figure out this miraculous thing that occurs when I hand raw meat to my spouse and he magically turns it into a delicious main dish with appealing crosshatch lines.
4) See the Grand Canyon.
5) Get back into the Guitar. I have played guitar for about 10 years, and I always get to the point where I really get the hang of playing bar chords without having to look at what I’m doing… and then forget about it for months. Also, I should probably learn to read tablature notation. This is very important, because it occurred to me that God may call me to a Bluegrass ministry, and if so, I should be prepared to follow.
6) Make and can salsa from our fresh garden tomatoes. [Done! Summer 2012]
7) Finish the Lord of the Rings books. [Summer 2012. Slogging through some parts of Return of the King is the killer, but totally worth it.]
8) Go Camping. Tents. Campfire. French press coffee. ROASTING S’MORES.
9) Real Vacation. This means no cooking and sleeping in real beds. [Mexico, 2013.]
10) Leave the Country. I have been to 23 countries, but not in the past 6 years. [Mexico, 2013.]
11) Go out with Aaron while he is hunting.
12) Go fishing and catch something I can eat.
13) Read my camera manual so I can take better pictures. 
14) Keep my car. I can’t control if it gets run over or something,  but I want to keep it as long as possible!
15) Become a parent (and save extra money in case this means pursuing an adoption.)
16) Keep my closet photo-ready for a month.
17) Get my PhT (“Put him Through”) so you all can send your Christmas cards and wedding invitations to Dr. and Mrs. Hummel. [December 6, 2013!]
18) Get nice family pictures of us. 
19) Visit a winery and go on a tour.
20) Finish my wedding scrapbook and then stop pretending like I care about this hobby enough to make time for it and get rid of all my stuff. (We have been married almost four years.)
21) Try downhill skiing.
22) Learn 4 new challenging piano songs. At least one a year.
23) Make donuts.
24) Buy a new couch that I love. I need to love how it looks. Probably from a real store, unlike our current furniture. [Update: Possibly off the agenda until 2017 or later.]
25) Have a house with a real guest room. You know… one that has a bed for company instead of a Craigslist couch that is, I promise, actually pretty comfortable.
26) Get the hang of cookies. I have had a few successes and a lot of failures in cookie-baking already, but I’d love to find consistent success. I have a feeling it may be connected to my current disdain for strict recipe-following.
27) Go shooting with Aaron.
28) Do another photo-booth with Aaron because the one from when we are dating is, to be honest, totally adorable.
29) Teach myself to like olives. [If they are excellent quality, I’m happy with them plain and no longer pick them off Greek Salads, so I’m calling this a win.]
30) Hold off on getting a smart phone as long as possible. [Bit the dust November, 2013.]

love is the lesson

/ abby hummel

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day,
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin:
And having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we for whom thou didst die
Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin,
May live for ever in felicity.
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again:
And for thy sake that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

-edmund spenser.

holy week and the death of dreams

/ abby hummel / 11 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was really starting to feel like I had it made in life. Not that things are perfect or how I would plan them! You know, I had to work for years in a job I didn’t like, but I was delightfully strategizing about increasing my teaching load, coordinating to tutor homeschoolers in the fall, and preparing for more ministry endeavors with my flexible schedule. While I’m not particularly happy about turning another year older without any accompanying littler birthdays to celebrate, I have a deep appreciation for many things I can do now that would be nearly impossible if we had children to care for. And we’re managing on a very tight budget, but we love our little house and someday Aaron will graduate, and even now we have a lot more than most people around the world. I want you to know that my gracious acceptance and good attitude here was not easily won. It took a lot of work to get there! But for a short, short time I was able to rest in the comfortable beauty of surrender and acceptance. And then, it crashed down when I got one of those heart-stopping calls that you never expect to get, the kind that makes you look at the phone afterwards and say “Did that just happen? Really?”

I suppose the story starts, quite innocently, the week before the phone call when Aaron mentioned he had a special one-on-one meeting with his advisor. He wasn’t particularly worried, but noted that this seemed very unusual. There were hours of conversation while we were tiling the kitchen, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have said anything in the first place. I forgot about this until he said something before leaving on Monday morning, and I wasn’t very alert because I’d barely slept from excitement about the kitchen progress and Aaron’s recent “75% commitment” to redoing the bathroom this fall. So I said a quick prayer and forgot about it until I got a text message later. While I would love to pretend we are a syrupy couple who constantly express our mutual undying affection in 160-character snippets, Aaron does not text me during the day. So even seeing that was a little unsettling, and then I read “…wanna move to Ithaca NY?” Um, what? I was confused and asked him to call me, and he did. Aaron also does not call me during the day. And I knew the news was big because he called and then he unfolded the story of his professor moving their lab across the country, telling me we were invited but not required to come, that he would get a raise and potentially an Ivy-league doctoral degree if we left…and I can’t even remember what else he said, but I knew we were thinking very seriously about moving right away. (When I prayed that I wouldn’t have to keep the deer head in my living room, I meant that the deer head should move, not the living room.) The next few weeks of our life became a massive blur of questions about selling our house, sacrificing all the music and job stuff I have worked for, and figuring out what else we should consider to make a decision about the whole thing. And because this move would mean we’d want our house sold by August, we gave ourselves a deadline of less than two weeks to make a final decision.

It would be far too laborious to go over all the aspects of this huge decision-making process here, but I will say that, miraculously, we concluded that it is best to stay where we are for now. We made the choice pretty quickly and it seems like the answer is the “easy” one, but this was not a “snap” decision. I’m grateful that this was a very short trial, but it was a time when it seemed like everything we worked for in the past few years might be given up quickly and the future looked like one big, giant, and possibly scary mess.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” –yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (James 4, esv)

Yes, in the chastening lesson of this all we must remember we are a mist, we are vapor, we are dust. And if we who have eternal souls can be compared to dust and ashes, how much more transient are the products of our striving – our dreams, our plans, our business, …our tiled floors? I find profound connections here to ponder this week when we Christians especially contemplate the mystery of Jesus’ passion. It is overly dramatic to say this, I admit, but in the midst of that confusion and anxiety I really felt like I had grabbed onto a bit of what massive heartache the first “Holy Week” must have been – the political and religious landscape was in uproar, Jesus had to dread the cross before him, and for the disciples it looked like their hopes and dreams were destroyed. We miss a lot of the compassion and beauty in the Resurrection if we forget that emotional turmoil.

And I know this sounds crazy, but in deciding to stay we also had to give up the new dream of the life we would have after moving. We planned on becoming kayak bums in beautiful upstate New York and spending a few years exploring the East coast. It’s hard to lay that dream aside, even when I know there is no way to have both things I want. In articulating the confession, this reminds me of the time I was watching a friend’s baby who had a pacifier in her mouth and found another one on the floor. At a certain point, she was hanging on to the second pacifier and realized she would have to take out the first one if she wanted to suck on the second from her hand. She found the dilemma so distressing that she cried too hard to have either one in her mouth at all. And I don’t want to spend my whole life like that, but I’m sure that’s what I must look like to God right now.

(I think our awesome patio is my favorite part about living in this house, so I am consoling myself by focusing on how much I like it out here. And if the background is blurry, I can forget  how much work there is left to do in the yard.)