by jphilo | Dec 17, 2010 | Daily Life
The spirit of the grinch invaded our Christmas tree this year. Our saga began the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the day we traditionally decorate. It’s early, yes, but I like to get the tree and garland up so there’s extra light in the house, a mood-booster as the nights grow longer.
But our pre-lit tree, such a clever idea some years ago when first purchased, was a major disappointment as about 1/3 of the lights didn’t work. Hiram was bummed, so I tried to help by volunteering to pick up lights and string them on the bad branches. The little trick worked like a charm and we finished decorating. All was well for a week until some of the other pre-lit branches quit working.
Now, our tree is a blotchily lit spectacle.
My inner grinch rises when I look at it, but there’s no time to take off decorations, string more lights, and replace the ornaments. Of course, some beautifully wrapped presents – or any presents, for that matter – would have distracted attention away from the tree. To be perfectly accurate, there was one present beneath its untwinkling boughs. Hiram brought it home last week and plopped it down, a wide open, unwrapped box. “It’s for you,” he explained, “don’t look inside. When I objected to being home alone all day tempted by an open box, he sealed it shut with a single piece of masking tape.
Then he asked, “Is that better?”
Yesterday, I finished the Christmas shopping. One store offered free gift wrap, so I scored big there and shoved those packages under the tree as soon as I got home. Then I placed a package of nicely coordinated papers, stickers, notes, and ribbon purchased at Target next to the unwrapped box. Usually, I’m too cheap to buy pretty paper, preferring to shop the after Christmas sales and then forget where I put the paper by the time the next Christmas rolls around. I thought the pretty paper would be good motivation to wrap presents while watching Christmas specials on TV. Except our TV only gets one channel. So I’ll watch my Netflix DVD instead.
House, Season 2.
The grinch made flesh, if ever there was one. Should be quite the present-wrapping party in our living room tonight. Coordinated paper, life-threatening diseases, tree lights dying by the hour, and a pill-popping doctor diagnosing what’s wrong with the world.
Anybody want to come and join the fun?
by jphilo | Dec 7, 2010 | Daily Life
Our son said they got 12 inches of snow right before the weekend. I looked out the window at our brown, dead grass untouched by winter snow. With superhuman restraint, swallowed the tee-hee-hee rising in my throat, and bit my tongue to avoid shouting “Sucker!” to our Minnesota boy.
The phone call got me thinking about what our weather was like a year ago today. When I read this blog entry from December 4, 2009 and yelled, “Yes!” And don’t think I’m going to wipe the grin off my smirking face. It’s hanging right where it is from now until the first scoopable snowfall. You might grin too, once you read this weather report from a year ago today.
Sunshine Addicts, Unite!
For weeks I’ve been in denial about the arrival of winter. Above average November temps helped me ignore my sunshine cravings as the days got shorter and shorter. My enablers, who meant well but have left me in a terrible fix, were the brave little violas in the garage flower garden and the optimistic snapdragons and dianthus blooming near the foundation of our sun porch.
But when it snowed yesterday and the temperatures plummeted into the teens last night, I went into a major withdrawal. Spiders on the wall, pink elephants, tremors – you name it, I’ve got it – and believe me, it’s no way to live. Therefore, I’ve decided to join a twelve step program. It’s time to admit the truth or I won’t make it through the winter.
I’m a fair weather friend. I mainline sunshine and warm temperatures on a daily basis for nine months of the year, and I need to stop. I need help to make it through the winter, more than watching Elvis, Annette Funicello, Donavon and Gidget frolic at the beach. Vicarious sunshine on a grainy DVD doesn’t even touch my cravings anymore, and with two kids getting married soon there’s no money for week long sunshine fix in Cancun this year.
However, I can’t do this alone. I need the support of others struggling with sunshine and warmth addictions and the encouragement of former users. We need to band together and meet every week in a dingy church basement. We can all bring our seasonal affective disorder happy lamps and bask in a greenish glow while we eat lots of dark chocolate to boost our antioxidants.
If you’re ready to admit your sunshine addiction and find help, leave a comment or send me an email. Won’t it be wonderful to be free and able to live normal lives again? Together we can make it happen. I know we can.
Sunshine addicts, unite!
by jphilo | Nov 30, 2010 | Daily Life
Between the holiday hubbub and writing the first draft of Different Dream Parenting, time continually runs short. So I’ll be implementing some conservation efforts for however long it takes to complete the first draft – hopefully only a month or two.
First, I’m stocking up on peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, and Uncle Ben’s Rice, ingredients for quick and easy meals. Second, I’m swearing off housework and letting the dust mount between the cleaning lady’s visits. (The sacrifices I make in the name of art!)
Third, once a week I’ll recycle some blog posts from previous years. When Prairie Home Companion rebroadcasts former episodes, Garrison Keillor calls them “encore performances. But I prefer “recycle” which sounds more environmentally friendly and more Lutheran with its overtones of frugality and sacrifice. Funny Garrison didn’t think of that.
But I digress. Back to today’s recycled post, Hand Lotion Grace. It first appeared on December 6, 2007. Reading it makes me thankful for today’s weather conditions, which are windy and cold, but without ice or snow. And it makes me grateful for the many modern conveniences I take for granted too often, including hand lotion.
Hand Lotion Grace – Recycled
The weather turned cold here right around Thanksgiving, and it’s stayed cold ever since. Nobody was quite ready for it, except the local ski hill owners, but I thought I was adjusting pretty well. Every morning I dressed warmly and took my morning walk, until last Saturday when a mixture of sleet, rain and snow coated Iowa roads with two inches of ice. No more walks down my gravel road until there’s a thaw and the forecast doesn’t hold hope for one.
So I find creative ways to exercise indoors and try not to whine about the cold, but last night I started complaining. I was snuggled in bed, able to concentrate on my reading once my body heat had warmed the sheets. Then I noticed my hands were dry, itchy dry. I needed hand lotion, but that would mean getting out of the warm bed and shivering in the cool air again. Finally, I made a run for the lotion and then dived into bed again.
As the sheets warmed and my hands softened, my heart did too. I thought about all the women before me who never have hand lotion and how painful their cracked, chapped skin must have been. And if they had anything to rub into their skin, I wondered how bad the lard or goose grease smelled, and how cold the run from bed to lotion and back was for them. My attitude changed as I rubbed my hands and thought about those pioneer women. Instead of complaining, I was grateful for a warm house, for new sheets and a comfortable bed, for smooth skin and for legs that function.
So I’m coining a new phrase – hand lotion grace. Whenever I get whiny this winter, a sure symptom that my attitude is growing calloused, I’ll head for my hand lotion and let it’s luxurious grace soften my dry hands and my hard heart.
While I’m thinking of it, I’d better add hand lotion to my shopping list. I’ll need a lot of it this winter.
by jphilo | Nov 29, 2010 | Daily Life
One of my high school English teachers was big on vocabulary. Even in his composition class for college bound seniors, all of us full of ourselves and sure we had the world by the tail, he pinned five new words on the board every day, Monday through Thursday. On Friday, he quizzed us on the meanings and spellings of our twenty new words, whether we liked it or not.
Lately, I feel like I’m back in school for a vocabulary refresher course. Only this time, it’s one word day after day – dependent. And I’m not being quizzed on spelling and meaning, but on the application of the word in my spiritual life.
The refresher course began a few weeks ago when I started reading Randy Alcorn’s book, If God Is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil. It’s part of the research for my new book. Alcorn explains over and over why we can trust God in the face of suffering, why he is trustworthy, what he has done to prove himself so. The more I read, the more I understand that trusting God is an admission of his strength and my weakness. Which makes me dependent upon him.
The next lesson came at Thanksgiving, when I was pulled Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle off the bookshelf at my daughter and new son’s house. (She’s the author of A Wrinkle in Time, one of the best young adult novels ever.) In the books, she shares her thoughts on what it means to be a Christian artist. Over and over she talks about being dependent on God.
Then on Saturday, I wrote the rough draft of the next chapter of my book. The title assigned to the chapter in the outline written last spring was Dependent Advocate. On Sunday our pastor, who is working his way through a sermon series our church’s core values, tackled the one called Utter Dependence. And since I’m teaching an adult Sunday school class called Sermon Reflections, guess what the topic of my morning Bible study is this week? Dependence.
Though I’m not always quick on the uptake, I do notice when someone repeatedly hammers me on the head. So I’m shivering in my boots, wondering why God has selected “dependence” as my word of the week, day, hour, and minute.
Why is he calling me to meditate on dependence?
What temptation lies ahead, luring me to think I can go it alone?
What experience awaits, requiring the admission of my dependence on God?
How will I live dependently today?
How should I pray?
by jphilo | Nov 16, 2010 | Daily Life
Philo Christmas gifts have become depressingly predictable in recent years. Three years ago, the furnace made a fuss in December. Last year, the range bit the dust in November. Now, the refrigerator’s belching rudely before, during, and after meals.
“The compressor’s going out,” HIram announced yesterday. “Better start shopping for a new fridge.”
“But, but, but…” I sputtered as visions of impractical presents flew out of my head.
Hiram interrupted. “Or would you rather have it go out completely and lose the food in it?”
Who can argue with that kind of logic?
“Guess what the money you’re giving us for Christmas goes to this year?” I asked Mom when we went out for breakfast this morning. “A new refrigerator!” I put a brave face on it. “I not surprised. The kitchen appliances were new in the early 90s when we remodeled the kitchen. They’re wearing out, one by one.”
Mom’s eyes twinkled. “My old refrigerator still works. John keeps it in the garage.” With a smirk she asked. “When did I buy it?”
“1965 or so.”
“Never had a day’s trouble with it.”
Gloat, gloat, gloat.
I almost told my smug, Methodist, teetotaler of a mother that her son John stores B-E-E-R in her old refrigerator. But I held my tongue. No need to upset her so close to her annual writing of the Christmas checks. Not when the washer and dryer are shaking and shimmying with an alarming lack of rhythm every laundry day.
Our appliances are dropping like flies, which means extra cash flow could be the only thing between the Philos and empty stockings this holiday season.
Merry Christmas!
by jphilo | Nov 11, 2010 | Daily Life
They’re ba-ack! Little Mickey and Minnie, fresh out of food in the fields and shivering in their boots once the temperature dipped below freezing, invaded the garage last week.
As per their fall routine, the Goldilocks imitators left Hiram’s truck alone.
Too hard.
They turned up their shiny black noses at Grandma’s more luxurious sedan.
Too soft.
But the sight of my little white economy car set their ears to quivering.
Just right!
With that, they moved in, creating a mess that did Goldilocks proud. In addition to their deplorable bathroom habits, they gnawed through the handle of a cloth shopping bag and chewed the corners off the AAA pamphlet. Obviously, they don’t care about the environment or keeping women drivers safe on the road.
Inconsiderate beasts.
I told the resident mighty hunter (aka Hiram) about the new tenants, and he laid a trap line. So far, a half dozen mice have met their spring-loaded maker. I half expected one of them to have golden hair, a porridge mustache and a sleepy expression. But they were all normal, run-of-the-mill critters with limited fairy tale potential.
The little car wreckers.
Since turning our garage into a death factory, Mickey and Minnie have left my car alone – except for one night when one of them sneaked in to eat the bait off the trap on the floor of the back seat. Grrr! But the next morning, when I backed the car out of the garage, the trap in the middle of my parking place sported a smug-faced corpse.
Served him right.
Sunday, I felt sure we had overcome the Disneyland invasion. So, I vacuumed my car, shined the windows, and washed the dash board. So, everything’s still clean. It better stay that way, or I’m putting an open jar of peanut butter in bed of Hiram’s truck and lining the sides with plastic army guys. They’ll have shoot to kill orders for anything that moves and wears mouse ears.
I mean business!
