*Sigh*

Have you ever done this? Taken an accidental two-month sabbatical from your blog and then just wracked your brain fruitlessly for days, trying to come up with something really, really profound with which to break the silence?

It's just me, then?

I have had six thousand or so ideas sliding around half-formed in my summer-gelatinized brain. (Here's a sampling: The reason many pols and bureaucrats support abortion is that they're unwilling to tackle the more difficult task of dealing with pregnant women and the emotional complexities behind unwanted pregnancies. Modern American labor and delivery practices are sickeningly barbaric, and we've got the stats to prove it. Barbara Mouser's The Five Aspects of Woman is great, and I learned a bunch of stuff about womanhood listening to it. Why is U2 SO INCREDIBLY POPULAR?) But none of them, shockingly, have made the cut so far -- I just can't get stuff to congeal into anything coherent.

Once my schedule and my brain are working a little less... uh... Summer-time-ish-ly... I'm sure I'll develop one of the above topics (or, I mean, you know me, something completely different) into an actual post.

Tune in next time to see if I go for the controversial, the political, the theological, or the utterly vapid and meaningless! WOO!!!

Books, Thunderstorms, End of the School Year, and Other Miscellaneous Musings

Last night I went browsing at a couple of bookstores to try to find the Anne of Green Gables series in box set. The school has a few of them, and I've been reading (or, devouring) them this last week. Have you ever thought of books as friends? The Anne books are that for me -- dear old well-beloved friends. Monday night, when I was finishing up Anne of Green Gables, I sobbed -- sobbed! -- through the last four chapters, and laughed at myself for crying so hard, and then cried some more. If you've read it, you probably understand. It's been wonderfully restful to come home from school and sit in my comfy chair and just read for hours. I haven't done that in far too long.

On my way home from the bookstore, I got caught out in the worst thunderstorm of the year so far. Rain was coming down, hammer and tongs, with lightning streaking across the sky and downbursts of wind from the edge of the storm. When it started hailing, I pulled over in front of the Lyndon fire station, got in the rain shadow of the building, and prayed that the doors wouldn't suddenly open and a fire engine come roaring out! I listened in dismay as the hail pelted the back end of my car, and when it subsided, I pulled around to the side of the building just in case and waited for the rain to let up. It was wild! The hail turned out to be in the half-inch to two-inch range -- definitely the largest hail I've seen since I've been here.

I have two more academic days left at school, and then three fun days which will involve a baseball game, a field day, a talent show, an awards ceremony, and a picnic! And then three glorious months of Summer stretching out in front of me, waiting to be filled with cook-outs and visits from family and afternoons when it's too hot to leave the house and days by the pool and sunburns and hot, muggy air, and melty ice cream and all manner of other delights.

Do all teachers get a panicky feeling about how much hard-fought learning their students will inevitably forget between now and next year? Ooh. That reminds me. I need to get my hands on a couple copies of the books I'm assigning my 8th graders (almost 9th graders! Imagine!) over the Summer... Mwahahaha...

Ummmm...

*tap, tap*

Ahem.

This thing on?

Uh, sorry. I'm probably the worst blogger who ever blogged. It has been approximately seven million years since I blogged. My excuse is pretty decent: long school days followed by mental exhaustion compounded by zero inspiration to write. But.

I just couldn't resist blogging about the most boring subject in history, something so boring it's actually code for boring -- the weather.

Last "spring" (ha) we didn't really have much of a spring. We had a soggy winter, followed by a few half-heartedly springlike days, followed immediately by 24-hour-a-day air conditioning weather. It was hideous. But apparently God has been smiling on Kentucky these last couple of months and, boy howdy, have we had some unbelievable weather. Cool, breezy nights, and warm, sunny days, punctuated by big beautiful thunderstorms and enough days of soaking rain to keep us all from taking those sunshiny mornings and long languid evenings for granted.

Because the nights have been staying so cool, the flowers have hung on the trees much longer than in years past, and for one glorious week we had gorgeous, lacy dogwoods AND daffodils AND irises AND tulips AND the first azaleas. Cheeky azaleas -- I just can't get enough of them. They're like the girl at your first school dance who wears a sparkly, low-cut dress and makes all the boys stare. Brazen, those hot-pink azaleas, I tell you!

Hooray! It's supposed to get down to 49 tonight! It's a marvel, this weather. I wish it'd go on forever.

Frugal frugal frugal

When I was growing up, we lived on a pastor's salary while my mom stayed home. So... you do the math and figure out if we were the kind of family that ate out three or four times a week. Hint: no.

We had a garden. We bought ingredients instead of prepared food and cooked all our meals from scratch. We bought beef once a year from a local rancher. We didn't waste food, ever.

For my mother, it wasn't such a stretch. She, like many in my parents' generation, was raised by folks who grew up during the depression, whose frugality wasn't an affectation, but a characteristic learned by bitter necessity. But somewhere in the prosperity of the last thirty years, my parents' generation struggled to pass the skills of frugal living and frugal eating along to my generation. And for many people my age, we had little motivation to learn those skills. In times of unparalleled economic growth and national wealth, it seemed unnecessary to many of us to learn how to bake our own bread, how to plant a garden, how to make a roast chicken stretch into three meals, how to can and preserve food.

But I'm blessed to have a stubborn mother whose dad was the youngest of eleven and grew up on a farm. Gardening, baking, canning, and generally saving money were second nature to her. I basically grew up in her kitchen. And now that we seem to be in for a long haul with this recession, I'm more glad than ever for that fact. I can bake bread (and I do!). I can make delicious meals with frugal ingredients. I can home-can produce and beans. And these skills are saving me money.

I was talking with my awesome, gorgeous sister-in-law last night and, on the topic of stretching grocery budgets and feeding ourselves and our loved ones with less meat and more love, I said, "By golly, if our grandmothers could do it, so can we!"

Too often what hinders people (especially women) in my generation from really mastering domestic frugality is just plain fear: fear that it's too hard, that it's not worth it, that we really can't do it even if we try. But that's just not true! We can do everything our grandmothers did to steward our finances and care for our families. We truly can.

More Awesome Linkage

Man, I'm so lame. All I'm doing is sending y'all to other people's stuff right now. My excuse: I'm too tired to think and too busy to watch basketball (*sob*). So I'm copping out and giving y'all (both) another link. I need to update my links on the right over there to include this one, because it's so excellent!

SojournKids blog, managed by the brilliant and illustrious Jared Kennedy, whose intelligence is exceeded only by... his wife's intelligence. I'm just sayin'. Sista is SMART. ;)

Contributors include a bunch of other be-smarty-pantsed Sojourners. Check it out.

YEE-HAW!

It's a blog roundup!

Of sorts.

Christine linked over to the Most Excellent "Making Home" blog not too long ago, and I've become addicted. Ladies, it's highly recommended whether you're married or single. Yes, as a married woman and one with a teaching ministry she does discuss marital intimacy with some frankness, but -- I have literally never come across someone who does so with so much tact, nor with so much joy. Her blog is neither preachy, nor clinical, nor wishy-washy, nor lewd. It's a realistic, encouraging picture of the life of an ordinary Christian wife and mother. (Oh, and gents, I'd recommend reading all the articles but the comments sections frequently contain some very honest woman-to-woman discussions that you might not find edifying.)

Please, if you haven't done so already, head over to Last Night's Dinner and check out Jenn's gorgeous photos and inspiration. While you're at it, swing by Cook Eat Fret and take a gander at Claudia's salivary-action-inducing caramel cake.

Tonight's dinner for me?

An Ommegang Hennepin that took me hours to drink
a dozen or so Sicilian olives (might go down and get some more, actually...)
a wedge of this award-winning, smelly, gorgeous goat cheese
a handful of "everything" cracker-bread
a scoop of Huber Farms peach butter

And a very satisfying dinner it was, I must say. Delish.

We were out of school Monday and Tuesday because of Hurricane Ike, which was still (strong) Tropical Depression Ike when it knocked out power for around 300,000 people in the Louisville-metro area Sunday. I was blessed to have electricity back by Sunday night (apparently our development is on the Valhalla circuits...), but many folks in the city will continue to live a compulsory Amish life for another week or more!

Go check out Mikey's blog. He's one of the elders of Crossroads, the church Mike and Christine are a part of, and where I attended while I was in Hobart. It's an amazing church and Mikey is a pretty awesome dude with some unique and interesting theological insights.

That's all I got.

Bloggy bloggy blog blog

Well, a few things have been checked off my list of Things Which Must Be Done In The Next Two Months:

Start new job... check.
Survive first week of new job... check.
Move into James and Terra's spare room... check.
Make an offer on a condo... check.

The rest of my list looks increasingly manageable but still pretty hectic:

Continue new job
Read absolutely stacks of books for new job
Accept counter-offer on condo
Do innumerable closing-related condo tasks
Move AGAIN
Have nervous breakdown
Find time to go to Indianapolis and retrieve dining set and hutch of my Grandma's that now belongs to me and has home in condo

After that... well, I'm sure life in the asylum will be very peaceful. I wonder if they'll let me out every afternoon to teach my 8th graders?