Living-Deliberately.com

a new friend, bringing in EGGS, after we’ve all been up all night blogging.  I swear….this foodie is freakin’ starving and those eggs, no matter how they’re cooked, are going to be fantastic!

Why are we blogging for 24 hrs. straight???? In an effort to Connect the Globe for Good! So head over to theworldsbiggestblogparty.com, choose a charity (or more) and click on their “donate” button! It’s that easy and the $$ goes directly to some very wonderful causes.

No donation is too small; just give! (and maybe spread a little of your own Saturday simple pleasure in the comments?)

Rob Thomas said it but it ain’t true tonight baby!

How did it become 3 am already?! This has been SO MUCH FUN! Now, things are quieter…kind of. We have Dave Matthews on a giant movie screen, hot cups of coffee, and drowsy blogging going on. And what is the best part?

HUMAN CONNECTION.

That’s right….people meeting people and empowering others. Getting outside ourselves, of our comfort zones. Reaching out to help another, to bring someone one and their cause into a larger light…for good.

Over and over again the theme of “relational connectivity” came out in the interviews and conversations. And that is what blogging is all about…this powerful tool called “the internet” has brought people into contact with one another that otherwise would not ever have met. It’s “web 2.0″ at it’s essence: getting to know the person behind the information.

A quick look at our world map shows were succeeding in our effort to “connect the globe for good”.

Onward!

It’s HHHHHEEEEEERRRRRRRREEEEEE!!! Tonight is the 24 hr live kick off event for the theworldsbiggestblogparty.com…Connecting the Globe for Good! I’m here at a table, in a room with several other live bloggers, watching belly dancers, in a velvet draped theater. It’s freakin’ FANTASTIC!!!!! This endeavor has just GROWN like a snowball…all week I’ve been meeting people I never would have come into contact with before. And we have a REAL CHANCE at raising ONE MILLION dollars for charities…check out the site…donate today. There are a bunch of them there and I tell you, amazing people and stories behind every single one. The vibe here is quite electric and fun!!!

And if you are local….get your hiney down here and live blog it yourself!! Choose a charity (I’m interviewing Casa De Sara and To Write Love On Her Arms myself tonight) and let’s get 1000 bloggers raising $1000 dollars each to CONNECT THE GLOBE FOR GOOD!

• my healthy, homey, parish that daily demonstrates the fullness of Christ and the church
• my two fantastic and much-loved priests and our matushkas; may God bless them.
• vision, the non-ocular type
• milk chocolate, in the 40% cacoa range
• all the funny things my kids say

Those are mine this week;  I really enjoyed reading all of yours last week! If you name 5 things you are thankful for on the Countdown to Thanksgiving, make sure to leave your link in the comments!

We interupt regular programming to report  a breakout of a dangerous condition that rapidly spreads and infects households around the nation. This highly contagious affiliction is debiliating and exhausting, quickly striking the environment it infects with filth, sluggishness, and a weakened immune system. One by one systems begin to break down until the infection builds enough momentum to allow for a pressure release. This release is often unexpected and will leave those experiencing it with fatigue, confusion, and accute denial.

Common treatments: anti-depressants, alchohol, chocolate, heaping plates of freshly cut french fries, and a great increase in the amount of martyred attitude.  All common treatments are ultimately unsuccesful, as they provide only symtomatic relief, leaving the condition to brew and stew and infect the remaining family members with intensity.

It it this site’s responsibility to provide you with the symptoms of this hideous affliction:

• is your bathroom’s currently-in-use roll of toilet paper sitting on the back of the tank, whilst the handy-dandy roller thingie sits vacant?
• does your laundry sour from not getting transfered to the dryer within two days’ time, whist the members of the household cry for their steady stream of clean clothing?
• do you frequently find yourself repeating the same request over and over, feeling that you are talking into thin air, even whist there sits a child of grown size within 3 feet of your person?
• when you get up at night to get some water for your parched, overly-strained, vocal cords and throat, do you find that all the lights you’d previously turned off before retiring were back on, even whilst every other member of the family was asleep in their beds?
• do piles  of things sit at the foot of your stairs, waiting to be transfered to the floor above, for weeks as though no one has traveled the path in that span of time, though beings frequently thunder both up and down the same stairs at least 50 times a day?

This condition has found it’s way to your household. It’s name?

OMCDI SYNDROME

                                             (Only Mom Can Do It Syndrome)

Until there is a cure, we must band together in definance of this hideous monster! Surely the progression of this disease can be restrained. Let the scales fall from their eyes! Let their ears be opened! Let them realize that yes! They too can take that wet cloth and wipe down that toothpaste spit they left in the sink!  Someone surely hath told them a lie…that this woman in the house is the only one in possession of these super-powers! Spread the truth!!! Empower the people!!!  We ALL can throw empty shampoo bottles away!!!

~Onward!!!

“Lately I’ve really had an affection for mustard.”

Earlier this year a friend told me about the movie The Secret, which I watched online, and was quite honestly changed and challenged within the time span of it’s running. I know there are mixed reactions to the presenation, packaging, some of the claims….and like a lot of things in my life these days (is it the age?), I’m no longer interested in the debate but rather, if I value something being said, quietly taking it and applying it to my own life.

And so I began to allow the Law of Attraction to alter my thinking. Wait. That sounds a little more passive than it was. The process began as a breakdown of some of the things I frequently said, most within inner monologue, and the message I was reinforcing every time I did so.

For instance, I frequently said, “I’ll never get out of debt!” EVEN THOUGH I was working hard on a Total Money Makeover, we lived on a “beans and rice” budget, and were making great headway on the Debt Snowball. The negativity was thwarting my belief. My discouraged-self would then go shopping, where I already felt defeated, and then I’d break my budget! After watching the movie, I changed that inner groan to one of inner confidence, “We are becoming financially free!” I didn’t even want to USE the word “debt”. And so it went….when I don’t feel well, I try to say, “I’m so grateful for my strength and healing.” becuase regardless of how weak I might feel, it ALWAYS could be worse and boy oh boy am I glad it’s not! Funny thing happens….I start to cope better with the challenge. And that financial freedom? Well, sure enough we acheived it.

Around that time my business began. From the start, I’ve had articulated goals for what I want that business to bring into our lives. If it does not help us reach them, it will be instead thwarting them with it’s time consumption. I do believe the work is a gift from God and was given so that we can meet the needs of our family. “Failing to plan is planning to fail” wasn’t in The Secret to my memory, but I found the sentiment applied. I started to plan…to succeed. Why did that matter? More than touchy-feely motivation, it was instrumental in knowing how much I needed to charge, how many clients I would need to make the venture worthwhile, and where my income would fit within our greater, joint income. I know how much is too much to take on and what is not necessary or time/cost effective. We know if David’s raise will make an impact, other than just a dent in the cost of living inflation, and what kind of advancement goals are necessary to reach our goal.

How? The process of deciding what we wanted to attract, (in this case with our finances, though we’ve done it/blogged it with spirituality, food, environmental impact, etc), we broke down what we would do to then welcome that into our lives. This is different than blindly deciding one wants something and sitting around waiting for it to fall in their lap! So:

• we articulated our need (and sometimes, our want)
• we investigated what was necessary to achieve/sustain it (in this case, a dollar figure)
• we stated what we would do to bring this about (a+b=c)
• we kept our focus on the end goal

This means, if our end goal is “to be financially responsible”, we say that over and over, in the present tense. In the meantime, things around here changed a bit. Our bills became current. Then our debt was paid off. David got a raise. I got a new business. The new income is not vague: it was planned, it has a home, it meets a need. This results in wise spending, which is…being financially responsible.

The question around The Secret is “Can you have it all”. I’ve always lived with the idea that “I can have it all…just not all at once.” This means there is time to have babies and have other interests…but maybe not all at once. This means that living on one income for the sake of devoting one’s self to babies and young children can be done, even in this day and age, but it’s often not sustainable forever, but babies are not young children forever either!

I guess we have to all define what “all” is to us. I know how I answer that for myself, in light of my christianity, my responsibilty, my desires, how I was created. I beleive I can have all that God means for me have, whatever that means. And if He means for me to have it, He will give me the means to achieve it. I can deliberately seek after all that He means for me to have and I can prayerfully contemplate what that is and how I should strive to welcome it into my life.

So yes, I do believe I can “have it all” under that definition. I will seek to attract that “all” into my life. I will also seek not to thwart it’s coming through self-sabotague and negativity. When I fall, I will confess, get back up, and try again. We can call it a secret but it’s as old as time.

This post was created for the “Having It All”  blog Carnival, hosted by John Assaraf.

Each Wednesday until Thanksgiving I’m going to list 5 things I’m thankful for. I invite you to do the same and leave your blog link in the comments.

• rooms that are defined by purpose and boundary
• a warm squeeze on the hand
• slowly falling leaves
• family (and after a week like last week, that’s no pat answer!)
• surprise chocolate bars

Shout out to Dalissa who found Ron’s “Election 08″ add on for her facebook page and made me have to have one too!

Go Ron!! The only candidate really talking about CHANGE!!!!!

We’re mostly DONE. Mom and Dad rolled out of here this morning; all that is left is a lot of clean up, touch up, and organization. The baby wrapped up what is hopefully the last of the stomach bug around here for awhile yesterday and today I am finding my way back to Life As We Live It. Here’s the pictures:

Celia’s room was done first; here it is before we set her mattress. For all the kids’ beds, Mom is doing their quilts at home and mailing them. Celia’s is bright  pink, green, and black.  She spent hours arranging her dolls, her pictures, and her papers.

The colors downstairs are “Glowing Ember” and “Baroque”, which is the color of butterscotch. We now have actual couches and no more beds in the living room! Feels good.

We got the colors from our rug:

The hallway:

It was time to take down Baby’s Crib….and he was NOT so excited about that idea!

The boys’ room…..

The view from Andrew’s “cave” end towards the closet; all the beds will get these curtains but Mom will send them as we ran out of fabric.

He stayed in his big-boy bed all night!

Thanks for following the saga! We went through over 3500 staples, 12 gallons of paint, 10 days of labor, 1 major stomach virus, $2800, 7 trips to hardware stores, 2 big bottles of wine, 32 homecooked meals, 4 trips to the dump, 1 visit by the police, and much, much more! The best part…everywhere I look is a memory, and most of it, a happy one!

onward!

I’m behind on posting updates only because we’ve been pumping all we have into this project + the curve balls. I underestimated this on every single level and that thought stuns me anew regularly. It has taken more money, more time, more effort, more mess, more everything than I could have imagined. What’s inane about that is that I am the daughter of a builder; no home we’ve ever lived in has ever been “finished”, and EVERY project comes with hidden surprises. But really…who would have thought we’d get a family stomach virus on top of this?! Yes, we all stand there with our paint brushes, with audibly gurgling intestines, not complaining as much as we can, while we get the next coat on, build the boxes, lift the items upstairs, make meals, referree arguing children… it makes for an interesting pace. I’d started the week intending to maintain my work week in the twilight hours; the virus did that in. We need our hours of sleep and while others take vacations, I’m taking time off to work my tail off with my parents and to concentrate on not concentrating on what it feels like to be nauseated 24/7. And yet I feel guilty about this…. someone tell me why?

So, to catch those following this saga up, I’ll back up to Wednesday. Mom and I had to shop for 3 mattresses and 1 bed set, which was fascinating because I do not understand HOW one mile of commercial district space can support 5 or more different mattress stores. They seem to be everywhere and all have cars in the parking lot…..someone tell me why?

We did find a great deal at Beds For Less; good mattresses with mismatched fabric (like I care?) right at our budget.

After mattresses we had to find Celia a headboard/footboard, which we did, for a beatuful $25 at the Habitat for Humanity Store. The finials are solid brass and it’s old, which I love. We are painting it black to match the fabric we got for her quilt. Speaking of her quilt, and the boys’, we got most of the fabric from the mecca of quilt stores: Mammaw’s Thimble. This place was decadently organized by color; Mom isn’t going to have time to make the quilts until she gets home but we had a lot of fun getting the stuff. Well, I say, “we”, but maybe not so much the youngest among us!

Wednesday also brought the start of box construction for the boys’ berths! Into Thursday we got pink paint on Celia’s walls, “Glowing Ember” on the stairwell, brown on the hall and closet floors…I forget what else.

Today, Friday, everything that needed it still got primed. The painting has spread into the living room, as “Glowing Ember” looks atrocious next to the olive in there, and they touch. Unfortunately, the color I had mixed looks more like calamine lotion, so tomorrow it’s back for another shot. Dad got the berths fully constructed, save for the drawers, which will get done tomorrow. David heads back to the city to pick up the mattresses and Celia will likely move into her very pink room! The list of details is piling up; the fun outings we had planned along the way are getting cut in order to

finish closer on time (they may have to stay an extra day as it is).

I may not post it until this is all done but several times I’ve been reminded of how GREAT a crock pot can be when cooking for a crowd with little time to actually cook! I started this week with a written meal plan and it was one of the smartest things I did. I also am compiling a mental note of what I didn’t do, that I’ve learned the hard way from, that will likely become a separate post, such is the length of the list!

With no TV and the living room Full.Of.Stuff, this is where we have “break time”. We also sit chatting after dark out here.

The weather finally checked the calendar and it’s chilly! We even had to start the wood stove to not affect dry-time.

The evidence is everywhere:

Sewing the new futon cover:

First time with a roller:

When I was loading the images, I saw that Andrew had taken my camera and gotten a shot of his dog. Good job!

The pace has changed around  here a bit! This makeover will not emcompass so much of the house after all and we are confronting the age of this house in many ways. It is, after all, over 110 years old, and has had many makovers in that time, some of them with very, very shoddy workmanship and materials. It’s never good taking apart anyone’s work; one always find the zits and pimples and corners they cut and thought they could hide. We’ve made a few of those ourselves and in 10 or so years, someone else may uncover what we’ve done.

So yesterday’s work:

It was all yellow…. this is the color we chose for the hallway walls:

I was wondering how we were going to get that spot….

Starting Celia’s floors:

Which made her ecstatic!

“Break Time” is a frequent refrain.

and in the rain, we got a second coat on the baseboards:

Lots of Father-Son time; Andrew using the nail gun:

David showing W how the saw works:

Today is more floor installation, floor painting, plaster re-coats, and shopping for mattresses, bedding, and quilt fabric.

I have found over the course of this year that writing about Orthodoxy has been very difficult. I can scarcely articulate the wonder and joy it brings me, nor the reason why… it is overwhelming at times with it’s vastness and crowdedness and a whole host of words that may have to be experienced to (not) understand. More irony I suppose. It is also quite deeply “my sacred” and I hold it close. I find I can not hold it out there to be opinioned against, such as I could a lifestyle choice I recently made or deliberate goal I’m working on. For more reasons than could be counted I am grateful for my priest, Fr. Stephen Freeman, but one of those reasons is his blog. Today he has a stronger-than-usual position post on how differently the ancient church viewed both the church and salvation than does our modern culture; it is these very differences that ring true to me, having come from modern “traditions” with manufactured authority structures and a random-feeling, situational and fluid stance on what role the church plays (or should play). It was with ideas such as this,

“Anyone who does not know that the Church is what salvation looks like has not begun to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. We cannot love one another unless there is another to love. Indeed, the New Testament, with the exception of the Book of Philemon and the Pastoral Epistles is written only to the Church. And those exceptions are written to men only in regard to their place within the Church. The New Testament belongs exclusively to the Church. If you are reading it as an individual and not as a member of the Church to whom it was written, then you are reading someone else’s mail.”

that, upon hearing, was like a light switch of rationale….a peg of a certain shape finally finding a fitting nest.  At times, Orthodoxy reminds me more than I ever could have imagined to remove the largest idol I have, my self, finally placing me into the context that was meant in the beginning.

I do not have a comment policy on this blog currently in place. Though for this post, and any that tremble so close to what is dear to me,  I would ask commenters tread gently and respect whose space this is; I share in an effort to present myself authentically, which should not be mistaken as an invitation to debate certain things.

What the boy had, turned out NOT to be a flare up of his disease, but rather was just the first of us all to fall for a bit of a stomach bug. Oh fun, fun ‘eh?  I’m on hour 22 of what had better be a 24 flu! What misery contant queasiness can be.

Yesterday was weird, project wise. With Andrew down with the bug, papa had a quiet morning of getting the patch work done with the drywall and got the wiring going. Mom and I had the kids in town for my bone scan and quilt-fabric shopping for the kids’ beds. Indeed the bone scan was stunningly easy though there is something quite distrubing when the tech says, “well the radiation is coming from you and the machine simply measures it.” Incidentally, the purpose of the test is to discover if the pain I’ve been having since July is a broken back or not. I tend to think I’d KNOW something like that, as in, have memorable impact or something, but apparently fractures and such can happen in a variety of ways. We’ll see…we’re waiting on results.

When we got home it was to work: we are still undecided if we are going to include the porch enclosure or not in this week but it’s looking less and less like we will. The kitchen lighting needs to be redone, since we’re in the floor upstairs and can get to it, AND it went out this very week! The hallway is an extension of the bedrooms and needed a bunch of work, so we are bleeding over into it and making changes. Mom and I primed the baseboards and dresser and half of the hall floor; Dad and David plastered and wired. Today will be more mud, the AC work, and the beginning of box constuction for the beds and drawers.

Working after dark:

The trailer and job site:

Meanwhile…

Let there be light!

not that there often is LOL….but this is a week for going from Thing to Thing, with as much stamina as possible. Doctor appointments work their way in, plaster is gonna happen for days, work is done near moonlight. In the meantime, I’ll keep live bloggin’ the home improvements and sharing gems from around my blog routine. This morning: a piece on fear by my friend Sarah, that will be food for thought as I lie on the table for a bone scan today (yes, I have been afraid of this), play in the mud (plaster mud is one of my favorite things and no, I’m not joking!), and otherwise go from Thing to Thing. Enjoy.