You Hobbitologists, just get me irked! I am up to Chapter 5 and I am in agreement with Al Stewart---"Time Passages"

Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight!

In other words the working out of these riddles with Gollum has got me down, since I first met him! He makes me quiver and want to give up, when I saw his eery huge eyes depicted in the movie or when I am introduced to him in chapter 5. He makes me say, like Al just let me not have to think about the riddles and be the last one on the train to die. I just want to live long and prosper. Why are there bills of thought to pay? Why are there so many riddles to try to snatch your soul from your body? Everybody meets Gollum. Everybody has a burning question that lives in the darkest night of their soul; The answer to which is life or death to your faith and life. Once you have met him, you can't get away from him. Whether he is responsibility or thinking, I simply don't know.

He is everywhere, maybe because the dark nights of my soul have been long and frequent. Maybe he stands beside the grave and that is the darkness that in view in the chapter.

I know that he is the reason why I put that book down so many times, as a child. I know that he was almost the reason that I didn't finish watching the movie, except that I had my dear Ethan the Hobbit interpreter with me in the darkness of the viewing. I know that I am stopped in the mid-chapter 5 and counting the very moments until I can get away from him and his "Time Passages". I stopped at 30 minutes of the reading and TIME was the very word that I stopped at and I had no idea that that was the riddle's answer, when I stopped there. I am intrigued by his relevance to my experience, but I hate him, just the same. I always have to ask my Hobbitologist friends, does he win in the end? Is there a time after Gollum? Don't worry mother, they always comfort me. I shan't worry and I will perservere in the reading of this essential exercise in perserverance in these...

Time Passages!

The ecstatic joy of soup making!

Veggies and broth and there is something akin to a medicine that is created. It is a dominance over sickness that God has granted to mothers as we pray for healing to the horrors of mucus and sick children.

I had a bag of hot peppers in the freezer, since my eye dilemma. There was a day that I was processing the peppers for storage, when I touched my eye in the middle of a sermon about Joseph and his brothers to my Ezzy, to occupy him in the chore of saving the seeds. I had a view to storing all of the pepper seeds for a crop this year. I only succeeding in nearly blinding myself, not realizing that most of the peppers were of the hot sort. I froze them and dreamed of taking them out to put in a soup one by one. Each time I did, it was sad at the excuses that I gave to myself about how hard it would be to take one frozen pepper off of the bunch. A year or so past and I was determined in this pre-Easter purging to make something of them. I blended them into a soup and made an onion soup out of a little of it.

O drank about 2 bowls swiftly and the heat of the mixture of peppers and onions with just a pinch of ginger,was certainly refreshing to my pallet. I liked it. I drank and then I felt the heat from the inside of my body and it scared me. I stopped. I drank 2 cups of water to try to dilute, what I had put in my body. Every pore in my skin seemed to open up and I wasn't sweating, but I felt like I had sweat out something. It was good tasting, but probably too concentrated.

I think it kept me from catching the sickness that was going around the house. Your dad was sick and Em was sick and I felt this congestion come together in one huge cough and clearing of the throat and that was it.All better, once I had gone to the bathroom and emptied my entire colon.

I gave one teaspoonful to Ezzy and he didn't get any sicker because he complained of aches. I put it in the freezer for medicinal uses.

The Cantada at Grace seemed like the musical form of my soup. It was concentrated and heated and a mixture of genre and spiritually completed a task in my soul that was so similar to what happened in my body from the soup. I was lifted and encouraged on the darkest day of my year. Halleluia, What a Savior!

May the road rise to meet you and may the heat of your relationship always be greater than a microwave and an oven!

A Prayer of thankful anticipation of great things in life, for the good help my dear eldest son afforded me by cleaning under the microwave!

I was initially annoyed. I was expected to come in and cook with my kitchen discombobulated and my microwave and toasteroven on the same side of the stove! The morning after it wrought a delightful conversation between myself and my son, with observations of his generation the general topic. I chimed in with my observations of wrangling in prayer like Jacob for his children. All of them had a blessing from him and I have committed that all of mine should have the same. I have often meditated and sat at the feet in thought about this great patriarch about how he could have negotiated such humongous favor for his progenitors from God. Tell me the secret, I begged him. He is still telling me about it, every day! I speak in jest, but I use the things that they do and the things that we talk about as the fuel for those prayers, deep within my heart. I hardly have time for anything else. I know that God has the right timing for the future generation to come out and I trust that timing. My heat instruments and my cooking surfaces serve as begging blocks for God to hear me and complete the wonderful recipe that He has started in our family. I trust His mighty and intricate process! Amen.

UUUUGGGGGHHHH! too much lemon juice!

Yesterday, I was making my afternoon tea. I had gotten some wonderful Earl Grey tea and was relishing the moment when I could enjoy a cup and make some sweet cold tea for later. My water had whistled and I was preoccupied as usual, with cleaning dirty things in the kitchen and making someother snack for later on for everybody. I had poured my concentrate into the cup and was about to squirt a "little" lemon juice into the brew for a flavor enhancement. I unscrewed the top, instead of flipping the top of it. I turned it upside down and immediately realized what I had done. Half of the bottle had been dumped into my Earl Grey, making it a lemonade brew, instead of tea. I don't mind making lemonade, but I wanted tea.

I paced the floor to think of what to do. I decided to make some lemon jello. I had a package of the Knox gelatin and it worked perfectly and the amount that I used made me able to keep the teabag for my cup of tea. I enjoyed my cup of tea and my iced tea, later on and the lemon jello is enough for a couple of days. C'est la vie.

for a one cup brew, I included 1/2 cup of sugar to my brew...{don't forget the sugar}

It was yummy!

Now, I am working on a chocolate jello, that might be a delicious and fat free alternative to pudding. MMMMMMM! It's in the fridge right now, hardening.

I finally completed a log for my birdfeeder

Elusive to me, was this task. My birds were nagging and wondering how I could sit on this bag of seed for months, without having even thought about their cold and hunger.

My excuse in February was that it was in the 70s for weeks and I thought that the insects and sprouts that came out were enough for the birds. I also had found this recipe for a log, using gelatin and I was planning to use it.

I had compiled the ingredients, some of which took some thinking. I nearly always have gelatin of somesort. I thought about using an expired box of banana gelatin, that I didn't care for. How would that look to my friends? Now think about it. I may still use that in a later project for them. I am not that fastidious with my friends as you might have thought. I imagined myself using a pringles container or one of the sundry coffee containers for the log. The time and the container were the most illusive of the ingredients of the project. Yesterday was the day and your fathers old coffee cup from our trip to Evie was the container. {He keeps coffee for days and sips it and I was determined that 3 days of old coffee was more than enough tolerance, on my part.}Here it is. My first attempt and just after Purim a gift for my little friends in the neighborhood, what do you think?

Democracy has the effect of taming even the most aggressive of lions in the jungle!

The America that we have seen recently has become so feminine and antiaggressive that every masculine and competitive expression of our president is scrutinized as outlandish. He jokes masculine. "Maybe, I will be king forever?" Our forfathers were men like that. That is why they crafted a constitution and government to tame such behaviors. I cannot find the quote from Teddy Roosevelt that he said that the sedentary nature of England made his aggressive passions rise. He wanted to kill the monarch was the thought he expressed. Sad, perhaps, but masculine. Controls and stops are in place for such a concern.

Lets not kill masculinity, just because a woman hasn't had a chance at the helm of our country, yet. Nobody is truly qualified. Life of the innocents is more important than pedigree, for sure. Our President is unabashedly masculine and we are recuperating from the femininization of our leadership. Let's go back to the center of the court, or when the men rebel we won't like what happens.

You think?

Letters from Teddy this is the link to the online book.

Recognizing the beauty and bounty of small mercies!

There is very little, more beautiful than watching the important discoveries that little ones are making. Watching the light of knowledge and understanding turn on in the minds of our dear little ones is becoming diminished under the scrutiny of data. Isn't that the most important data there is? Documenting those first little steps of mind and feet and hands in our own hearts and prayers are a treasure chest of jewels shut up for us in earth and in heaven. Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal, we know. But, Earth has no greater treasure than the beauty of the children's growth.

I am so glad you have taught me that!

Keep filling your hope chest with the most important things first.

How do we speak to those we respect, but have not the responsibility of submission?

Women and men on the tennis court have different ways of evoking intimidation from an opponent. In law and in the workplace there are rules of interaction. If sexual harassment is a man's sensitivity, provocation and deliberate instigation, may be a woman's. Yet, on this situation there are few accusers of the women. Men suck it up and chalk it up to their own sensitivities. Men fire women for temperamental reasons sometimes. Men may change locations because of a quote, unquote Personality conflict, that may be the emotional tendency of a woman to cut him down to size on a regular basis. Some women do this to everyone, male and female and some take a peculiar delight, it seems to find the jugular of males that are their counterparts.

If we find ourselves in the cultural bent of the extremity of feministic expression, we must find a way to come back to the center of the court and become more civil in our verbal expressions to all in the work place. We mustn't let our intimidation or our cultural habits take authority. We must learn to utilize our femininity in other ways than to manipulate and subjugate our masculine counterparts. Perhaps, a pair of gloves could remind me to put on my femininity, were I in the situations of playing male tennis on a regular basis. Were I equal to them in ability, I would still wish to retain the femininity that God had blessed me with. I would not want to be the monster of a masculine expression of strength and ability. It would not give me any sense of accomplishment to win the match, should I lose my feminine identity.

I needn't apologize for needing to correct a peer. I needn't cowtow and genuflect to their masculinity. I need only use the correct inflections and cadence to accomplish the goal. My anger and my desire to fiercely defend my point and uncover the truth of an investigation must never ever forget the position and age and respectability of the target of that investigation. I have a different responsibility to my President in my tenor and tone than to my newsboy. We must never speak to an elder in the same tone as our babies. Sometimes the feminism of our age has erased the importance of polite society. The use of feminine intonations is not an expression of weakness, but an expression of the distinction of our point of view which is different from our masculine counterparts. If we want them to respect that difference and that vantage point, we must respect it and their vantage point, as well.

Time to put your head down and time to pick your head up?

Isn't "there a time for everything" and haven't you found that to be so?

Yesterday, your father and I walked around Bailey Rd. Park about a mile and I was happy that I could accomplish it. There was a short span of the walk that my eyes saw from a distance as being beyond me. It seemed straight up. I had said to myself, the old knees are not going to like that hill. I convinced myself that if I didn't look at it, the knees wouldn't know what hit them. That turned out to be the case. I put my head down and trudged on, just one step at a time. The knees ached, but I didn't give them any creedance. Your father's talk was at its height and so I didn't have time to say, owwwww.

I lived with my head down for years and years. Feelings of lesser than and humiliation from situations and grief. Perhaps those were also times of walking up a steep hill to "find the worth of my own soul". {A meditation from the Christmas Cantada- Oh Holy Night} "The soul found it's worth" When you find that Christ's birth and sacrifice was a loving gift there is awe and humility, but when you own His sacrifice you may grow to see that Christ's sacrifice is for the lifting of the head.

It took me a couple of weeks to meditate on this personal perception of a people group.

In the opinion of Pickering, the Siamese are undoubtedly Malay; but a majority of the intelligent Europeans who have lived long among them regard the native population as mainly Mongolian. They are generally of medium stature, the face broad, the forehead low, the eyes black, the cheekbones prominent, the chin retreating, the mouth large, the lips thick, and the beard scanty. In common with most of the Asiatic races, they are apt to be indolent, improvident, greedy, intemperate, servile, cruel, vain, inquisitive, superstitious, and cowardly; but individual variations from the more repulsive types are happily not rare. In public they are scrupulously polite and decorous according to their own notions of good manners, respectful to the aged, affectionate to their kindred, and bountiful to their priests, of whom more than twenty thousand are supported by voluntary contributions in Bangkok alone. Marriage is contracted at sixteen for males, and fourteen for females, and polygamy is the common practice, without limit to the number of wives except such as may be imposed by the humble estate or poverty of the husband; the women are generally treated with consideration. from Anna's Book that Elyse and I are reading

This is Pickering's perception, but the fact that she felt obliged to give the reader this generalization is curious to me. She had the emotional crushing experiencing of having been taken advantage and used in her service, with no real protection over her. I cannot imagine the vulnerability that she experienced, but I am very sensitive to the European need to categorize people groups in terms of their standards, especially in those days. This is not a Gospel aimed observation, but it did become an evangelical purpose eventually. Can we evangelize minus our ethnic sensitivities? Maybe we can now, but the 1800's were another time and circumstance.

When I got to these observations in BB Warfield's writings, it turned me off to doctrine altogether for a time. How could someone of such high mental acumen in doctrinal terms have such a negative view of the service of another human race? How could he not have seen the dehumanization of his practice and perspective? Well, it didn't daunt my pursuit of truth, altogether; though it did make me despise a certain time period of readings. Now Anna became BB to me and I had to change my perception of her reason for writing and for going to Siam. I overcame my antipathy and read on to find the real woman that everyone else saw and reasoned to myself that I am just like that when I am angry at my circumstance. My anger then turned to myself for my prejudices and misperceptions of peoples because I don't know them individually yet. Praise God that He overlooks such prejudices in our hearts and answers our prayers on peoples behalf anyway.