Windows, cupboards... farming?

Allow me to take a break out of my regularly scheduled avoidance of this blog to play a little catch-up.  I got smart and wrote "update blog" on my to-do list again, so ta-da!  Here I am.

I've been busy.  After VBS it was gearing up for conference, and then conference, and a whole week of company, and then New York for the weekend.  Basically, just another snapshot of our crazy life.  : )

Farming Game with way too many people

Fun times were had by all.  I assume.  I know I, personally, had a nice time.  Hopefully our company did, too.  We had a cookout, and ran through our town fountains, and frolicked in the river, and went swimming, and played The Farming Game way too much.  All in all, a grand week.

What I'm actually writing to say has nothing to do with frolicking in rivers or pretending to be farmers.  Honestly, I wanted to focus on the "getting ready for company" part of the story.  I spent a week and a half cleaning the house like a maniac.  I cleaned all the cupboards in our kitchen inside and out.  Would you like to know how many drawers/cupboards are in our kitchen?  Fifty.  Exactly fifty.  I counted.  And I cleaned them inside and out.  Have you ever cleaned under your sink for the first time in a while?  Ew.  And, since I'm slightly insane, I wasn't content to clean out the cupboards and then put everything back; I had to clean all the spice containers and reorganize the cupboards.

Anyhow, the kitchen looks good.  There's that.

Also, I washed all the windows inside and out.  Would you like to know how many windows we have in our house?  That... I have no idea.  But I will tell you that when I was outside the living room windows, I couldn't get the ladder to fit under the awning, and the neighbors got a kick out of my struggles.  The Mr. Neighbor finally came over and asked if he could lend me a more suitable ladder.  I got it worked out eventually, much to their amusement.

I utilized Pinterest, too.  I'll get to that another time, when I don't have three niecews (I got tired of saying nieces and nephews) begging me to jump on the trampoline with them.  So... another time.  : )

Oh little town of Awesome

In our house we have a "winter snow village," kept on the buffet between the microwave and filing cabinets.  The little houses have lights in them, and on dark evenings it actually looks quite cozy.  It's a replica of the one of maternal grandparents had for years, and we have many fun times setting it up and admiring it from Thanksgiving through January and fondly remembering seeing the same snow village at their house in days gone by.  There are different designs, and when we were kids (also... now) we had it all worked out as to who had which house.  There's one that is for my parents, and each of us kids (and their respective families, whether or not they know it, haha) "have a house" so that we refer to it as theirs.  For instance, when a bulb goes out, it doesn't just go out in "the yellow house," but rather we say "Oh, the bulb burned out in Dad and Mom's house!" and we all know what we're talking about.  The village had been unchanged for years, until...

My mom was at CVS last year doing regular-type shopping, and happened to see some buildings that looked enough like the regular village to put with them.  They weren't just regular houses, though, one was a hotel thing (for our overflow company), and one was... my house.  As you can see from the picture, my mom got a library and now we just call it my house.  Fare thee well, houses with turrets and bridges.  My Christmas Village house is a Library.  Sweet!

Spice it up

What you are looking at is a picture of the back of my closet door, in addition to an over-stuffed closet.  I have pretty much everything I own shoved in my closet right now, due to some space wars in my sister's two closets.  It's all good, but now I have to go through and get rid of everything because I sort of have more clothes than I thought.  Just love me some closet cleaning!  Um, or mostly not.  : )

Anyhow, my library has a basket set out of free book covers.  They apparently worry that kids are going to chew on the paper covers, so they take them off and have only hardcover books.  Smart of them, and handy for me.  See, I really tend to like clutter.  Yes, 'tis true, I like to see stuff.  My walls are evidence of that.  I have a sister who lives like someone in a concentration camp, and her house is almost frightening, due to a lack of, you know, stuff.  But anyhow, all that to say, I take the book covers and tape them haphazardly on the back on my closet door, so that when I open my closet in the morning it's a bit more cheery.

I was realizing though that I really haven't read many of the books represented on my closet door.  Which I should remedy.  Or take down the book covers, I suppose.  Oh, the hard decisions in life!

Airborne hogs

Pigs flew last week.  Honestly they did.  Just in our own household there were two reasons that caused that old proverb about pigs flying come true.

First.  Our family got *drum roll, please!* Air Conditioning!  If I knew how to make the font all glittery and do a little dance, I would.  My parents have notoriously held out on getting A/C because we like fresh air and such.  But over the summer as the temperature climbed to the high 90s with at least one brief foray into the double digits, and the humidity topped 100% more than once, it was just... not a fun summer to rely upon the power of fans and fresh summer breezes.

So.  We have A/C.

Second piece of mind-blowing news.  I discovered a piece of Cubist art that I liked!  WHAT?  After years of shuddering at the very name Picasso (we were once going to name a cat Picasso and my brother and I vetoed it in favor of Billy Josephus because we couldn't stand to have a Picasso in the house), I found an artist whose work not only could I stomach, but enjoy.

Yes, please.  Take your time.  Let it sink in.  I said it:  I enjoyed the art.

Wow.  It's hard to even write.

Anyhow, Juan Gris is the artist who turned my anti-Cubism work upside-down.  Not all of his stuff (I looked him up after I came home from the museum at the which I saw some of his artwork), and in fact, the two I saw were two of my favorites of his work in general, and I certainly don't prefer a lot of his stuff.  But I saw the work called Pen and Pipe and really enjoyed it.

So.  There's that.

Also, I have a whole new level of respect for Alexander Calder.  I read a book about him once (well, sort of.  Some kids like his art and have adventures based on stuff about mobiles) and thought, meh, he's not that cool, but recently had seen a bunch of his stuff and liked it, in that "Oh goodness, I actually know what I'm looking at!" kind of way, but over the weekend when I was at the museum there was a display where you could create your own mobiles a la Calder, and it was a lot harder than it looked.  I am officially impressed with his vision.

I'm sure you all really wanted to hear about art today, right?  Ahem.  Yes.  And now I leave you to your own life.

To throw, or not to throw

I'm currently (with the help of my brother) packing up my grandparent's house. It's been sort of a large job, and not exactly getting smaller, in addition to the fact that we don't have a lot of time in which to work. But we go over, put in a few hours here and there, and it's a pretty good system.

One thing that we've been doing, that I'm not sure my grandparents really had in mind when they suggested this job to us, is throwing away stuff. Fake flowers? Chuck them. Broken toys? Toss. Things that look odd and we don't know how to label? Adios.

Now, to our credit, we're pretty familiar with my grandparents and their wishes/tastes. When I throw things away I think 1) will they miss this? and 2) would they miss this if they knew about it? I've pretty much decided that using those two simple questions, I should be safe.

But my brother and I have had many interesting conversations about what we'd keep and throw away in our own home, should our parents pass away and leave the cleaning-out job to us. (My brother, just last night: "We'd be able to pay the property taxes, right?" For some reason that struck me as funny.) The thing is, our house has a ton of books. Loads. I don't even know what we'd do with them, or how we'd divvy them amongst our siblings, or whether we'd just pack them into storage. But my brother and I were talking about the books, most of all. The other things in our house, apparently, have almost no relevance to us. We don't like our couches, though, so they'd have to be tossed.

Anyhow, I must admit, I don't intend on ever having to sort through my parent's things, due to the rapture, but I find it interesting to take a step back and ponder what's really important, apparently, to my brother and I.

Books.

I'm not all that surprised.

Mama Mia

A friend and I were having this discussion the other day: what do we want out of life? I'm not the type of person to worry about what I'm missing out on, and that type of thing, but here's the deal--I figure it's something to at least consider. I'll do whatever the Lord intends for me to do (have I mentioned recently that I have a job in insurance?) but the little secrety inside version of myself wants to have a family. Children. Crayon stains on the wall and meals and laundry.

That's what I miss when I work. Cooking. Laundry. Well, I still do laundry sometimes, and dishes all the time, but only when I'm rushed. I can't even tell you the last time I vacuumed, because I don't have time.

And one day I'm sure I'll look back on these carefree days and wish I had them back because I'll be tired of cooking every night of the week, and tired of yard work, and tired of silly putty in the carpet. I'm sure that day will come.

But even then, when I think about what parts of life are really worth experiencing, I can't help but think that a husband and children would feel more fulfilling than getting a raise for the dozenth time.

Disclaimer: I'm willing to do whatever the Lord wants me to, and if that means being single for my entire life, that's fine. But my natural inclination is to want a family.

By the way, why are families so unpopular these days? I actually read a magazine article one day stating that people should be brave enough to say that they don't want children. You have to be able to live your own life.

And I'm not saying you shouldn't live your own life (though I like to think of my life as bound up in Christ's life), but the article was presented as if children were a disease or something. Seriously.

An earthly home

I'm pretty sure that most young girls (maybe not most, but some, be among them) know that sure, earthly things are only temporal, but wouldn't it be fun to have your own house to decorate with these swell most-and-rust-will-certainly-corrupt type objects? But moth-and-rust aside, honestly, it's a fun thought.


I'm not saying it's really that fun when it comes down to it, of course, especially since most newly married young ladies tend not to have an overabundance of money to spread around for useless things like fun-shaped bookcases and turquoise spatulas, but the idea is a fun one. For instance, I've always wanted walls painted with that chalk-board paint, or maybe the dry-erase paint, so you could just write all over your walls. Wouldn't that be so awesome for a kid's room? Terribly messy on the carpet if you went the chalk route, but overall worth it, perhaps.

Sometimes I wonder what life must be like for people who aren't expecting the rapture. It's not that I avoid life down on earth in deference to the rapture (I have a job. In insurance. 'Nuff said.), but it's something that crosses most of my thoughts.

For instance, my parents are going away this weekend, Lord willing. Half of that Lord willing is acknowledging that something could happen to them or their car and they might not go, but half of it is simply acknowledging that the Lord could come, um, now. I love pondering that!

So if the Lord doesn't come, and I marry a rich-type guy, stop by my house... who knows? Maybe I'll have sweet-looking bookcases everywhere!

Wendy and the insurance company

I often get those epiphany moments where I realize that I never want to grow up. Not so much like Wendy and the Lost Boys and all that, but more like... real life is not fun.

What brings about this particular moment of revelation is insurance. Not mine, of course, because I'm trying to avoid things like real life (including insurance) for now, but I've been working with my grandparents on their insurance recently. Good practice for when it will be my own insurance, no doubt, but it's a little hard to be thankful for such a wonderful opportunity at the moment.

So here's the deal: they are thinking of switching insurance companies. Not a problem, I can check up on other insurance companies for you. So my grandpa got all his information together, along with a sheet of places he wanted me to price check, and off I start. Well, first of all, the websites ask these crazy questions that I don't understand. Why would insurance be different depending on how much education you had? So, my grandma did high school and that's it; are you seriously going to charge higher or lower insurance because of that? There are bazillions of questions about firewalls and alarm systems, which I mostly don't understand and fudge.

So auto insurance: I'm supposed to know how many cylinders their car has. What? I hardly even know what cylinders are. Well, I do, but how am I supposed to know that? So then it's all like "LD" or "SS" and it has something to do with the car, but all I can think is "Lord's Day?" "Sunday School?" and that's not what they're asking.

On top of that, some of the companies ask about liters. Huh? Liters for gas? something about pressure? What? I have no idea what this stuff means. And the first time a website asked me something about garages, I thought it had something to do with where the car got parked at work or something. I was looking around for a place where I could click "we don't use parking garages frequently, y'all crazyson" but it didn't have it. And then I realized that it just was talking about where we park it in a garage. Which town. Oh, never mind.

So then I had to call a few places (felt like a few dozen places, honestly) to speak directing to representatives, because, well, the Internet hates me. So then they realize that I'm just a granddaughter and need authorization. "My grandpa's at Costco, can you get it from my grandma?" so I stick my grandma on the phone. All I can hear is her side of the conversation, which goes something like this: "Yes, that is my name... Yes... No, I'm the grandmother, she's the granddaughter... She can tell you what you need to know, she understands more about this than I do..." it goes on for a while until I get back on the phone with that particular guy, who begins to ask all the same questions the website wanted to ask me five minutes previously.

Education: "Well, Mike," that was his name, in case anybody was worried that my name suddenly became Mike "I asked him that this morning and he said that he has years more experience than any of the goons working for your company, so I'm not sure where that puts him." The insurance guy laughed. Which was good, because I'm not sure if you're supposed to tell people who are helping you that they're little more than goons. But hey, somehow it worked.

So this particular guy (we're sticking with Mike stories, for now) figured that since I was just a granddaughter, I wouldn't know anything about insurance. So he explains every little thing to me, and so I'm guessing he was paid by the hour, because I've got to say, I did not need so much background info on every part of the policy plan.

But then I was mentally speculating about his life, and wanted to ask personal questions. I mean, is that allowed? I don't know proper protocol, but he was talking about his family, and then he mentioned that he's usually in the office until 10:00, which doesn't sound like a guy who has a family who means a whole lot, if you ask me.

But, of course, none of this was about asking me.

Anyhow, after explaining to Mike multiple times that we didn't need rental insurance ("Mike, the whole point of me being a granddaughter is that if their car does break down and go into the shop, I'll just drive them around for a while") and didn't need roadside assistance ("AAA, Mike, AAA") we were ready to get the quote.

And then his computer went all weird for a while and I got put on hold. Not that I mind hold, but the suspense just about killed me. And then, of course, it was way too expensive and totally not worth it.

So Mike got to waste about an hour of my time, and now I can't get that hour back.

Is there insurance for missing time? Because I want some.