I See Things Upside Down

What looks like failure is success
What looks like poverty is riches
When what is true looks more like a knife
It looks like you're killing me but you're saving my life

And I give myself to what looks like love
And I sell myself for what feels like love
And I pay to get what is not love
And all just because I see things upside down

What looks like weakness can do anything
What looks like foolishness is understanding
When what is powerful has not come to fight
It looks like you're going to war but you laid down your life

But I give myself to what looks like love
And I sell myself to what feels like love
And I pay to get what is not love
And all just because I see things upside down

What looks like torture is a time to rejoice
And what sounds like thunder is a comforting voice
When what is beautiful looks broken and crushed
And I say I don't know you but you say it's finished

-Derek Webb "What Is Not Love" from the album I See Things Upside Down

Not a Baker

I had a strange desire today to make a pound cake. Then when I was looking for a yummy recipe, I decided to make pound cake cookies instead. So that I wouldn't have to bother with cutting the cake before it cools. And because I already had a recipe for pound cake cookies that looked really simple and delicious.

The problem with this plan is that I didn't have all of the necessary ingredients for the cookies and I really didn't want to go to the grocery store for just those 2 things. I'm going out of town in a few days so I'm trying not to buy any groceries this week and just use what I already have at home. I only had one egg (needed 2) and the recipe called for baking powder and I only have baking soda. But I started to make the cookies anyway, thinking that I can just substitute for the missing ingredients.

Somewhere on the internet, I saw a few suggestions of things that can take the place of baking powder. There were all combinations of at least 2 other ingredients. One of these suggestions was a little bit of baking soda with some molasses. Well, I just happened to have some molasses in my pantry. I don't really remember why I do, but it's there. I think I used it in a barbeque sauce I made or something like that. Maybe it was something I made around Christmastime. Who knows.

So I added the molasses and baking soda to my cookie dough instead of baking powder and I instantly knew this was going to be a mistake. I was on the phone with my sister at the time and her silent reaction upon hearing about my ingenius baking substitutions told me instantly that the chance of these cookies actually tasting good was slim to none.

I went ahead and kept trying to add ingredients to make the dough tasty and then tried to bake the cookies. I pulled them out of the oven, let one cool for a bit and then tasted it. Sure enough, it was pretty disgusting. I even trying sprinkling the cookies with powdered sugar and it was still pretty bad. Definitely not worth the calories to eat it.

Maybe the whole molasses issue was providential. I am trying to lose some weight and making cookies really doesn't fall into the weight loss plan. So making them gross definitely keeps me from eating them! All in all, I have discovered one more thing that I need directions for and that I don't need to try to "wing it." I can rule out any hopes of a career in baking, right? Rachael Ray has said that the theory is that people are either good cooks or good bakers. I think I'm actually a decent cook so that makes it okay that baking is just not my thing.

L'arte di cappuccini

This is amazing! This guy works in a bar in Florence, Italy and one of my friends went there for cappuccino recently. This is what she saw in her cup.

Consequentially, the barista who created this work of art has some videos on YouTube of how he makes them. Here is one of them. I miss Italy so much!

Spinning and the Backyard

I went to my first spinning class last night. I've always been too intimidated to go to one before. But after I did Boot Camp for a month, I wanted to find something that would kick my butt in a similar fashion because I'm not prone to push myself very hard when it's just me working out.

So I went to the class and for the first 15 minutes I hated it. It was so hard and my body is not used to moving like that when it is hard. I kept thinking I was going to fall off the bike or spin my legs out of control. But once I got used to it and by the end of the 45-minute class, I loved it. I was dripping wet from sweating and the instructor estimated that we burned about 800 calories during the class. Well, maybe she did, but I didn't always turn up the resistance when she said to. Regardless, I really liked it and I want to keep going.

But today, my butt is really sore from the bike seat. And my calves are almost throbbing. In fact, I'm writing this at 1am because I can't sleep. And the main thing keeping me from sleeping in the fact that my calves are so sore. They don't hurt really. I don't think taking any pain reliever would help. They are just really tight. So much that it hurts and is a little difficult to go down stairs. Maybe I'll take an Advil just in case.

I also bought a pair of biking shorts with padding in them to solve the seat problem. That should take care of it. The other reason I think I can't sleep is because Mandy, my new roommate, and I went walking in the neighborhood after dinner. It was kind of late for me to exercise (around 8:30) and I think my body has a hard time calming down after that. Even after a bath, some hot tea and a chapter from The Shack, I still couldn't fall asleep.

On a completely different note, here are some pictures of our backyard. Thanks to Photoshop, I stitched them together so you get the whole panorama:



It is so gorgeous out the back door. It really is a nice garden and I'm so incredibly spoiled by it. The yard and the rest of the house. Daisy loves it too, of course. I just realized that I have to stay here forever because my standards have been raised too high by getting to live here. I don't know if I'll ever find a place to live that is as fantastic as this place!

Pictures of the House, Finally

I finally took some pictures downstairs. Tomorrow, when the sun is shining again, I want to take some pictures of the beautiful backyard. And when my room and the office area are finished and everything is in its place, I'll take pictures of those too.

New Chairs!

I love it when you find just what you want--even when you're not looking very hard.

I wanted 8 chairs that would go with my dining room table that actually match each other. But I not willing to pay hundreds of dollars for these chairs. So I have been looking on Craig's List and looking for deals, trying to figure out if matching dining room chairs were really that important to me.

Then today I was driving down the road, on the way to get my vacuum cleaner. And I saw a yard sale in a church parking lot where they had 8 matching chairs all together. I figured they would be sold already because it was 10:30am and usually all the good stuff is gone really early. But I pulled in just to be sure. And the chairs were still up for grabs! I bought them all and one of the guys running to yard sale actually loaded them up and delivered them to my house for me! On top of that, he took away the 4 old oak chairs I'd been using around the table and took those back with him to sell at the yard sale. It was too good to be true.

I really need to get a picture up here of the chairs and the rest of the house. The dining room even looks really different that the picture in the previous post, since I have matching chairs and curtains hung. I'll work on that tomorrow.

Fun at Bebecca's House

One of my 3 year old friends got in the habit of calling me "Bee-Becca" instead of Rebecca during the past year. This really caught on even with some of my twenty-something friends. So, to some, my name is now Bebecca. And I kind of like it because it makes me think of my 3 year old friend who has now moved far away!

So, we had our first dinner at "Bebecca's" house this past Monday and since I haven't taken pictures of the rooms yet, I'm putting this picture up of us in the dining room. You can't really see the room that well. I also just really like the picture of us doing what we do best. This is about half of my small group from church. They have all become kind of like family to me and they have all taken turns taking care of me in various ways during the past few months. I was so excited to finally host them at my house, in a place that was actually big enough for everyone and where 10 of us could sit at one table. I wanted to serve them a little bit because they have all served me so much and so generously.

Well, everyone ended up helping out so much that it really was like a family dinner (as it always seems with small group). Jennifer brought bread and Nan whipped together some peach cobbler, Ben took over the grilling duties and I'm sure had help from the other guys outside. Many different people were involved in chopping up vegetables and washing dishes after we ate. It was so great! We had a blast and we'll have to do it again soon. It just felt so good to have everyone where I live! Right before we ate, I told everyone that I feel so blessed to be able to live in such a great place that I feel like I need to share the wealth and have people over all the time!

More pictures are coming soon. But for now, here is a glimpse of fellowship in the dining room. The only thing different is that now thanks to two guys named Ben, there are curtains hanging in the dining room that weren't there when the picture was taken.

Nan's caption for the picture to the right is "She's nice to me and gives me cucumbers to eat..." because this baby likes cucumbers as much as cookies!

Will I ever finish?

I've been unpacking and putting things away in this house now for 10 days. I took a little break over the 4th of July weekend, so really I guess it has been a week of getting settled in. And there is still so much to do! First, I have so much more stuff than I ever realized. I can't believe I actually have enough furniture and more than enough wall art to fill up this house. It's not the biggest house ever, but it's definitely the biggest place I've lived since I've been on my own. Almost all of the furniture that belongs to me came from my grandmother or one of my great aunts. I am so blessed to have been given this furniture. I'm sitting on my grandmother's couch as I type with my feet propped up on my Ikea coffee table which is one of the few things in this living room that I actually purchased. I used to have a really nice coffee table from my Aunt Mary with a marble top, but last fall someone broke it when he tried to move it out of his way by kicking one of the legs. When it collapsed, I bought a new one that was cheap so that if it breaks it's not a big deal.

Really, all I have left to do is hang the curtain rods and a couple of other things on the walls that need holes drilled for the anchors. I have a friend helping me with that tomorrow. And I also need to unpack and wash all of my clothes that were in storage because they all smell like the storage unit. Then after I put those away and get the office area organized, I'll be pretty much finished. I guess I just thought I would have put everything away by now. I'm just still so amazed at how much stuff I have! And I'm also still in awe that I get to live in such a great house! Hopefully I will have pictures to post soon of what it looks like so you can all see how great it is too.

Also, I did end up eating the salmon and I'm still okay--not in the hospital or anything. And I bought a new Pyrex dish today. All is well.

Trying NOT to eat glass

I cooked salmon for dinner tonight, but there was a little problem. When I took my Pyrex dish out of the oven after the fish was cooked, I set it down on the stove top like I always do. While I was admiring how yummy the honey mustard sauce looked glazed on top of the salmon, the dish shattered right before my eyes! It was almost like a tiny invisible bomb was inside the dish with my fish and it blew out the corner of the glass and cracked the rest of it.

I called my mom while I was picking up the shards of glass across the kitchen floor to see what I had done wrong that made the dish shatter like that. We decided that there may have been a tiny hairline crack in the Pyrex from my move that I never even noticed because it was so small. That could explain why it seemed to explode spontaneously after being heated and then set down to cool.

Then we were debating whether or not it is safe for me to eat the fish. My mom said no because there are probably slivers of glass either on top of or inside the salmon fillets. In fact, I could see a few sliver glimmering in the light on top of the delicious honey-mustard glaze. And seeing as how I still do not have health insurance (I need to get on that, pronto!), I don't want to risk swallowing some glass that could cause some internal bleeding and who knows what kind of damage to my digestive system. My mom reminded me that if I have to have surgery because of swallowing glass, I'll end up paying everything I have for the surgery and then I'll have to go on welfare and get food stamps. So eating glass is not a good idea.

So I washed the fish off and got rid of most of the yummy honey-mustard that was baked onto the fish. I was only growing hungrier by the minute while I was inspecting each fillet for glass specks. And I might add that generally when I cook a meal for myself, I actual make about 4 servings and eat leftovers the next day and freeze the rest for another day. It's just more efficient for me to do it this way. So I'm not just talking about one salmon fillet, this is about 1.5 pounds of salmon we're talking about so I really wanted to try to save it. (Salmon is not cheap!)

I think I got all of the possible glass off and I can make more sauce to put on top of it. I decided to eat a salad for now, but I'm still debating whether or not I should try to eat the fish! I think all the glass is gone but what if I missed some or it's too small to see? What do you think I should do?

Judges that Care

I had to go to court today for my speeding ticket. I won't go into it--I just ended up pleading guilty to speed much faster than I was actually going. It doesn't matter so much now and I need to stop whining about it. One friend I talked to today really put it in perspective when she pointed out that there are probably many times in my driving history when I actually was driving way too fast and I just didn't get caught. So I know I deserve to have to pay a fine....blah, blah. And going to Defensive Driving School can't hurt me, right? It's never a bad thing to learn how to be a safer driver I guess.

But what I really wanted to write about was how impressed I was with the Judge in this particular court. When I went today, evidently the Solicitor was not expecting me. So I presented my papers that said to be there and they went off in search of my paperwork. In the meantime, I was sitting through all of these kids who had to appear before the judge for DUI and underage drinking charges. Maybe it's just because I have never been present for the conversations between judges and defendants before, but it seemed like this judge really cared about what she was doing. For each case I witnessed, she required drug and alcohol awareness and counseling. But she didn't just assign this in general--she assigned the defendants to have counseling at a very specific place in Athens because she knows they do it well. She also had some of them write an essay about the importance of being responsible with alcohol or something along those lines. When she explained why she was giving these sentences, she expressed that she didn't want these kids to end up in a court again for DUI (if they weren't already) or in a bad accident or developing a serious problem with substance abuse that could ruin their lives. Her approach was kind of like getting caught is the best thing that could have happened to them because maybe they will learn something from it before spiraling to worse things.

Like I said, this could be the norm for most Municipal court judges. I just didn't know. I don't know what I expected her to say, but I was really surprised that she seemed to care so much.

New House

The house may not be new, but it is kind of new to me. I say kind of new because I've spent a lot of time here when my friends were living here before me. Now that they have moved, I'm so lucky to have it as my new home! Not only is it an awesome house with an even better fenced-in backyard--but it comes with lots of good memories for me from hanging out here with the previous residents. Either way, this is my first night sleeping in the house as an official resident. I really wish at least one of my roommates was here already to spending it with me, but that will come soon enough. Tonight, it's just me and Daisy (my dog). I wish I had some pictures to put up, but my camera doesn't really work well and it's difficult to upload pictures. I'm realizing as I type just how exhausted I am. I guess I'll go up to my enormous, way-to-big-for-just-me bedroom to go to sleep so I can get up early tomorrow morning for Boot Camp!