Bathroom (Home Tour)

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After getting a look at the decor heights of our lovely bedroom, I thought I’d show you the disaster that is our bathroom. I will admit…. we chose that blue. I was 22 and inexperienced, and I have learned a lot since then. But anyway, some natural aging on the house means I get to make over  our awkward first paint and decor choices! There are tiles peeling off over the tub, so an overhaul on this bathroom is on the must-do list. I’m quite sure it will be easier and much cheaper than the never-ending kitchen project!

Walking in from the hall.

The grodiest shower in the developed world. I can’t even show you a picture of the inside. More grout comes out every time I scrub the tiles, so I’m never sure how hard I should work to get it clean. 

Someone brilliantly put wood trim around the shower door, so we have to be very careful about wiping it off after showers.

The sink is… very special. Also, the vanity is humongous and takes up half the bathroom. They had to make a cut-out so the door would swing open. 

This bathtub is also special. The shower extension doesn’t go high enough for a shower. And those fake brown tiles are peeling off!

I don’t really know when this will happen, but plans for the bathroom include: retiling the bathtub surround and putting in a shower head; turning the yucky shower stall into a linen closet; replacing the toilet; replacing the vanity with something skinnier; and repainting the walls gray.

I think deep-down, I would be more adventurous with color for the rest of the house, but Aaron likes to keep things very neutral since we will need to sell the house in a few years. I’ve heard that restrictions on creativity can actually be a freeing thing, and I think it’s true for how we’re putting the house together. By working to find things we both like, I think our house has a pretty clearly defined aesthetic that neither one of us would have found on our own. (Aaron actually cares about this quite a bit, which surprised me, but I bet if he was on his own it wouldn’t be a high priority.) This co-decorating sense makes it a little easier to pull together new projects, like our bathroom.  I like this first inspiration bathroom better because it feels a little more “grounded” with those black shelves. But no matter how it works out, I keep coming back to the gray-with-rustic-wood combo whenever I look for ideas, so I’m pretty sure we’re going for something like this!

My favorite inspiration bathroom! From Focal Point on my Pinterest boards.

More natural wood with gray! From a YHL Reader Re-design, on my Pinterest boards.

Our Room (Home Tour)

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I have some house pictures here. I truly meant to do these posts quite a while ago. I’ve been bugged to share house pictures by several friends and family members who can’t make it out to inspect in person. So here we go!

We’ll start off with the one room of our house that feels “done” to me. This is the only place we have bold color on the walls. Right after moving in, I tried a few greens that did not work. Finally, after wasting $70 on ugly paint, Aaron, who is partially colorblind, picked the color we have now. We love it. I don’t know what I will do when we move. I would absolutely think about using the same color again. My aunt visited last month and told me the green worked because we can see so many leaves in our windows. I think she’s right! It feels like an extension of the outdoors, which is just right for us.

The view coming in from the hallway. I got the blinds on a freak Lowe’s clearance for 70% off and my mom helped me make the curtains.

stepping in

Aaron’s side. I refinished the dresser as a surprise for him a few years ago; also, I spray painted the nasty old fan to look metallic black. The flower painting was a wedding present.

My side. Lots of books and baskets! Also, I made that bedskirt because our bed is too tall for regular ones, which is handy when you have lots of junk to hide. Which we do.

my book basket.

I bought this old record stereo on craigslist from one of our pastors. Painted the bottom, refinished the top, covered the speakers with old canvas. It’s great for storing linens!

My dresser. Antique from Aaron’s family. I refinished it.

Fake flowers from Walmart clearance; calligraphy from my sister; mail holder from goodwill; books; jewelry box; cool dish from goodwill.

There’s a great psychological effect to starting and ending each day in a space you love. I’m grateful to have such a cozy room… but I will confess that it usually has piles of laundry all over the place, which is less than relaxing.

it takes courage

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I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, really. A musician, an artist, a creator? Yes, but not much of a writer.  During my senior year of high school I had a tutor for my college entrance essay assignments, and I remember confessing this frustration during an editing session. Nearly every other form of creative expression came easily for me. I could write a song, arrange a collage, perform a piano solo, lead in a musical, knit a scarf, or decorate a room with confidence, but every time I tried to write, I questioned myself and was consistently unhappy with the results of my hard work. She listened patiently, and then suggested that frustration about my challenges as a writer might actually be a cover for the fear that my ideas weren’t valuable. Writing doesn’t have to come naturally to matter, she assured me, and good things are worth working for. I didn’t really understand what she meant for several years, and I rarely thought of this conversation after it happened. (I can recount this now because, in a move that is admittedly ironic, I recorded her comments in my journal, which is my long-standing habit after all thought-provoking conversations.)

Though I got plenty of challenging writing assignments once I started college (thank you, Dr. Freeh, et al!), I spent most of those years surrounded by absolute geniuses in every variety of written communication – literature analysts, poets, journalists, scriptural exegetes, curriculum editors, and columnists of every sort. I’m sure my writing competence sharpened significantly during this time, but I never felt like I was even close to average abilities. My insecurity might make even more sense if you know that I was tight with these writers: I married a scholarship-winning journalist, one of my wedding bridesmaids has now published a book, and several other friends from that life are in graduate school or regularly writing things read by people they don’t know. Spending my life with people who were beyond my own mastery in this one area was a fertile breeding ground for that long-held fear of inadequacy, the nagging sense that I just didn’t have much to say. I didn’t realize this was exactly what my tutor meant yet by then, or even in the following years when I would escape boredom at work by maintaining frighteningly voluminous email correspondence.

I finally remembered the admonition about writing-insecurity hiding my idea-insecurity again at the end of our recent Michigan vacation when I was packing up a box of my belongings from my old bedroom in my parents’ house. It’s been four years since I “officially” moved out after graduating from college and marrying Aaron, and we own our home so I don’t have many things left there. This final load was a collection of my journals, now chronicling over half of my life. There were twenty-five notebooks that I brought home, with dates stretching back to 1998. I was twelve years old then.

After arriving back in Iowa, I organized this small library by date and added my other recent journals, which brings the total number to thirty-four. While setting things in order, I thumbed through a few books and recalled God’s kindness and my growth with laughter and cringing. I’m glad I don’t have to go back to middle school… or high school, for that matter!

And maybe it’s a sign of that same kindness and growth that in the middle of this project (besides wondering where on earth I am actually going to keep these) I couldn’t help but think: It’s probably time to stop pretending I don’t write. And I should stop being afraid of my ideas, too.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
– e. e. cummings.

great things He hath done!

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I recently asked if we could go on vacation all the time, and, as life would have it, this summer it was high time that some of our college friends got the knot tied. Since we drove twelve hours from Iowa to Kentucky, stayed in a room by ourselves and didn’t do much cooking, I think we can safely call this trip a vacation. The bride, Hannah, who was one of my room-mates at Hillsdale, is an artist and photographer so I tried to take lots of pictures in her honor. (It was the snap of the button that was in her honor, not the end quality of the shots.) After arriving back home, we realized we have lots more memories than photos! Of course!

Aaron and I had our fourth anniversary during the festivities, and it was a delight to commemorate the special day with such a joyful wedding weekend. We’ve been in separate countries for two of our anniversaries, so it seemed quite trivial to complain about the fact that we were spending our time at the bachelorette parties instead of celebrating a romantic evening alone. (Party preparations for the ladies were so frenzied that we kept calling the boys’ shooting-grilling-drinking-and-cigar gathering a “Bachelorette” as well.)

The hours the wedding support team spent preparing food trays for parties, wrapping shower gifts, running errands, cleaning the outdoor reception pavilion, dipping flower balls in tubs of water, practicing piano for the ceremony, wrapping twinkle lights around banisters, scrubbing chairs, and tying tulle after driving twelve hours to get there was a tangible witness of our commitment to support Hannah and James in their marriage as the months and years pass. We were entirely thrilled to see so many college friends and participate in this happy wedding!

Since there was a little bit of empty time on our agenda before the wedding, we explored the gorgeous area and went hiking by the Kentucky River. You can note my oh-so-appropriate foot attire. Kentucky hiking is a little more intense than Iowa hiking!

As slightly older friends, just barely ahead of Hannah and James in our own marriage, we have a little bit of sage advice to offer about their life together.
I played piano for most of the wedding music, but when I think back on the songs they selected I keep hearing the glorious organ hymn they played for the recessional. It’s the exact soundtrack I want to play in my mind when I remember this day.

image from Zach Stone

“…Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the earth hear his voice!
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the people rejoice.
Oh, come to the Father through Jesus the Son,
And give him the glory, great things He hath done!”
– To God Be The Glory, lyrics by Fanny Crosby.

customer service

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[Image via emilymcdowelldraws on etsy]

Last week marked one full year since I finished my old job so I would have more time for my music studio to make a living teaching piano. We have both learned a lot this year, and I am overwhelmed with thankfulness that the life I had turned into the life I have now.

I worked at a bank for three years, and somehow I think I’ve blocked out most of my bad customer service memories. It was especially amusing when people tried to lecture me about bank policies, as if they were training me or I could change anything about it. Word to the wise: in almost any business, that first person behind the counter has 0% power and deals with 90% of the complaints. It’s a grating position to be in. I loved many of the customers I worked with, but it’s hard to deal with difficult people when you can’t enforce healthy conversational boundaries. The negative interaction that tops them all came inside my first six months there. It began when a customer came in flustered and crying. In addition to expecting me to approve of some dangerous financial practices, my role became difficult when she explained that she just found out her 30-year-old son in the military was being sent to Afghanistan. She didn’t understand why his Commanding Officer wouldn’t change the orders – or give her the time of day – when she called to complain about it.

I had to say something like “Oh, that’s too bad. That must be frustrating,” when I wanted to say “HELLO?! You can’t make a phone call to get your son out of fulfilling his duty to the country just because you’re mad about it. Nobody wants to send their son to war, but he wasn’t forced to enlist. And, by the way, he’s 30!”

Perhaps because my supervisor was standing right over me, I didn’t mention my own experience in this area: I’m a military wife, my husband was deployed (dangerously so) while we were dating, and I’m working here in the midwest because additional deployment scheduling conflicts meant we moved to Iowa instead of southern California after our wedding. Apparently my lack of pity for her helicopter parenting was evident, and she finally wailed, “Well, what am I saying? It’s not like YOU’VE faced any hard times so you’re probably too optimistic or naive to know what I’m talking about.”  Well… not quite.

I have been thinking the combination of people becoming ruder and standard customer service practices are a bit dehumanizing to the people who work behind cash registers. Self-employment is not quite as easy as it sounds, but I’m grateful for the freedom to do things I’m good at and the flexibility to decide who I work with.

summer vacation 2012

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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

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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!