FONT TEST

I’ve been tutoring a colleague in how to work with blogs.
He has had some questions regarding using different fonts
And how things show up that are cut/pasted into blogger.
So I am testing this to be sure I know what I’m talking about before I tell him how to do it.
One of his concerns was that when he made changes to his text in blogger he could find no back button like he is used to using in WORD. I explained that Blogger does not have a back button.
It would be nice if it did, but sadly, there is none.
I sometimes wish LIFE had a do-over button. Don’t you?

Immediate Forgiveness

I was cruising through a bunch of different blogs by backtracking comments and seeing who THEY happen to read and found this sweet gem over on Anniethology

Sometimes when things are stressful, spouses say things they don't do mean or speak without thinking. At moments like this, give each other a pass. Make up a little coupon that says, "This pass entitles you to immediate forgiveness for the dumb thing you said when we were in a stressful situation." Give your spouse a few and keep some for yourself. They may come in handy. Don't dwell on it, harp on it, or drag it on. Just forgive.


Oh yeah, this is an idea I can support.

BOOK REVIEW

I recently read the book Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin. This was an incredibly powerful book. This is the first person account of a women who survived the horrific mass genocide that occurred in Rawanda in 1994. She did a lot more than survive that unimaginable atrocity. She emerged from the experience with a deep connection to God and found the power to forgive ... not just forgive those who said something nasty or slighted her in some way socially, but to truly forgive people who had brutally hacked her family to death with machetes. This woman does not sugar coat what happened. In harrowing detail she describes how her homeland unravelled into senseless violence that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of her people.
(From BBC News: "Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days")

She goes on to describe how she hid from the killing spree that murdered most of her family, spending 91 days huddled in a small bathroom with seven other women, nearly starving, waiting for the maddness in the street to stop.

During that time the thing that allowed this woman to hold on to her sanity was to immerse herself in prayer and scripture study. She gave over her whole soul to knowing God as everything she new unravelled around her. She rode through waves of terror and rage, absolute shock and horror - and yet came out the other side having found a level of peace that almost defies understanding.

This book raised so many questions for me.

How is it possible that human beings are capable of such senseless violence toward people they knew and cared about?

How is it possible for anyone to fully forgive that level of insane cruelty?

Why is it that so much of the world turned their backs on this atrocity, allowing hundreds of thousands to die without interveneing and yet when WHITE faces are the ones being murdered in other parts of the world (Such as Bosnia)we are so much quicker to step in.

How much did US policy contribute to what happened in Rawanda? Who's version do I believe? (Michael Chossudovsky gives some very unsettling accounts in Part II of Chapter 7 entitled "Economic Genocide in Rwanda", of the Second Edition of The Globalisation of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, 2003. This text is in part based on the results of an earlier study conducted by the author together with Belgian economist and Senator Pierre Galand on the use of Rwanda's 1990-94 external debt to finance the military and paramilitary. )

This book makes me seriously ponder many global issues. But it also moves me to reflect on my own faith and willingness to forgive those who have harmed me - in matters from the trivial to the profound.

The writing is clear. The message is clearer. We may be utterly powerless to control what happens TO us, but it is entirely up to each one of us to determine what happens WITHIN us in response to whatever challenges life brings.

Powerful book that I will be thinking about for a very long time.

Power of FOCUS

Today I am thinking about the power of focus.

Lots of stuff happens every day - some good, some not so good, some bizarre, some mundane. I decide which of those things I will pay the most attention to. I am in control of my own mental focus.

I believe I have the power to be in charge of my own mood and attitude by deliberately choosing to focus on things I am grateful for, things I am excited about, things that make me smile INSTEAD of staying stuck in dwelling on all that is not perfect in my life. There is PLENTY that is not perfect in my world right now. If I chose to focus on those things I could work myself into a pretty potent pity party. (say that five times fast!) Instead, I am working hard to keep putting my attention on the many things I have that are fantastic. There are a lot of those things in my world as well. It's up to me to decide which ones will get the bulk of my attention.

Recently I had an opportunity to go on a week long cruise with my husband and some other family members to Mexico. We took a Holland America ship to Mazatlan, Porta Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas. It was supposed to be a fabulous vacation in the sun, seeing interesting places and having the time of our lives.

Except I got sick. By the second day on ship I was coughing like crazy and felt kinda puny. So I went to the medical center to get some cough medicine. They took my temperature, did a throat culture and diagnosed me with flu A. Which means I was put into quarantine to protect the other passengers from my germs. I DID have fun in Mazatlan. But I did NOT get to go see Porta Vallarta or Cabo. Not only did I not get to see those ports of call, I wasn't even allowed out of my room. Not fun.

The first day I was very understanding about it. There are lots of little old people on cruise ships. I sure did not want to get anyone else sick. I thought with bed rest, pushing fluids and a course of Tamiflu I'd beat it pretty quick. However, my positive attitude about it pretty much went flying out the window by the third day of isolation. I was ready to go postal.

The time I was down was pretty grim. Not only did I feel terrible, I hated missing out on the only vacation I am likely to get this year. Also, I am by nature a pretty social person. Being in solitary confinement all that time was hard to take. However, when I finally DID get to get out of my room (on our way back home) I had an amazing day. Dolphins surrounded the ship by the hundreds, jumping out of the water right up next to the boat and all across the sea. After that we went through a pod of whales. Over and over again they came up to the surface within just a few feet of where I was standing on the deck. They were truly awesome to watch. I saw amazing islands, I enjoyed some good meals. Besides all that, I felt very grateful to simply be able to BREATHE without coughing and to have the freedom to walk around again.

When I think of that trip I could define it as a miserable experience that I spent locked up most of the time. Or I can think of that trip as the vacation I took when I got to commune with dolphins and whales. The choice is up to me.

For me, the most positive way for me to define that cruise to Mexico is to clearly remember BOTH parts of it. Rather than having to view my life experiences in terms of either/or good/bad dichotomy, I prefer to embrace both/and. This vacation was the trip when I got sick AND the trip that I saw dolphins and whales.

I do not want to put on blinders to my experience of being ill. It was a very difficult, painful, disappointing thing to have happen. Yet it also was a reminder to me about how very fortunate I am to have generally good health. There was a point that every free breath I took without going into spasms of coughing truly felt like a precious gift from God. (I was really sick!) It was interesting to watch how long it took for me to start taking breathing for granted again. It wasn't very long. I am trying to HOLD ON to that feeling of gratitude for things as basic as my breath. Remembering my period of illness gets me closer to feeling a deep appreciation for it.

I give meaning to what happens to me on a daily basis. I can whine about the things that do not meet my expectations. Or I can look for the blessings and lessons that are in ALL things that occur, even the painful ones.

I will definitely have pain. Whether I allow that pain to make me miserable is up to me. I really do believe that there are blessings in ALL my experiences. Some float right up to the surface, like those breaching whales and leaping dolphins. Others are harder to identify. But if I look deep, they are always there.

RESILIENCY

Today I am thinking about Resliency.

RESILIENCY: Able to recover quickly from misfortune; able to return to original form after being bent, compressed, or stretched out of shape. A human ability to recover quickly from disruptive change, or misfortune without being overwhelmed or acting in dysfunctional or harmful ways. As in "Our team showed great resilience," or "Our team had good resiliency."

One of my friends on FaceBook posted a link to a story about a pilot who had the misfortune of having his plane rather seriously mangled by a bear in a remote area of Alaska. The piolt called for help - NOT to rescue him from the bush. Rather, he had two new tires and a few cases of duct tape delivered. Yeah. Duct tape. He pieced his plane back together and FLEW IT HOME where he could have it repaired further.

Now THAT's what I call resilience.













To take a quiz to see how relient you are, go HERE.

Life on the Farm

Columbia Basin Research Farm


Morning at the farm


Where I go walking nearly every day


Blue Mountains in the background


Lovely Oregon sky


Weather Station


Greenhouse


Where I live

Hope & Disappointment

I've been giving a lot of thought to the relationship between hope and disappointment.

Every broken dream that causes me to cry is a direct result of having reached for a place, a person, a thing, or set of circumstances I want to draw into my life. When what I long for doesn't happen, how badly I feel about it seems to be in direct proportion to how much I had hoped. In my mind, the definition of pain is the distance between what IS and what I hope for. Little distance = little pain. Big distance = devastated, bleeding, bruised and battered heart whimpering in a ball on the floor. What it comes down to, for me, is this: if I could stop HOPING for certain outcomes then I would never be disappointed.

Recently I allowed my hopes to go flying sky high.
Today, my disappointment has my heart crawling lower than a snake's belly.

So was all that hope a mistake?

I don't think so.

I prefer to hold on to the words of Martin Luther King who said: "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."

It is an inevitable part of living in this fallen mortal world that we will all experience some shattered dreams and big disappointments. How we choose to respond to those events will shape how we experience our lives.

Sometimes it may seem a bit masochistic or misguided to keep flinging my heart skyward with hope, giving room for deep longing for certain outcomes to happen. More than one person has recently advised me I'd be better off to practice more "acceptance" and appreciation of whatever actually comes into my life instead of forever chasing passionately after different paths. I know that advice is well intended. But it's not for me. I am determined to keep hope alive.

I am a dreamer at my core. I like being optimistic as I reach for different possibilities. It's not without a price. But it is a price I'm willing to pay. A lot of the things I reach for never come to pass. Some of those missed dreams cause me to shrug my shoulders and say "oh well!". Others have sent me huddled into fetal position wailing for days. But I will accept that risk. I would rather have a life of scars from the crashes than play it safe by never striving. I will take the heartbreak. Because I choose to continue to reach for the stars.

Silly girl.

BOOK REVIEW

I just finished reading the book "Am I Not A Man? The Dred Scott Story" by Mark Shurtleff. This was a powerful book.

Mark Shurtleff, Attorney General for the State of Utah, spent five years carefully researching the story of Dred Scott, an illiterate slave who sued for freedom in the 1800's. In law school Shurtleff had studied the case of Scott vs. Sanford - a case that is very significant because the Supreme Court had overturned an act of Congress. Years later Shurtleff became interested in the case again, only this time he sought to more fully understand the person of Dred Scott rather than just the facts of legal precedent. He also became very interested in the various members of the Blow family who fought so tirelessly to assist their former slave to win his freedom after having sold him off to help pay their own debts.

The book is very meticulously researched and clearly details many incidents of the time in stark accuracy according to the documents Shurtleff uncovered. While the "personalities" involved are of necessity conjecture, assigning motives, thoughts, and dialogue that are entirely creations of the author, the EVENTS that are reported throughout this book are very real.

Historical fiction is an interesting genre. With some it is difficult to sort out where the history starts and stops and when the fiction begins. This book was a strong departure from that pattern. And that, perhaps, is both the strength and the weakness of this book. There were times as I was reading it that I had difficulty assigning a "voice" to the story as it vacillated between the writer's attempt to create believable characters against the backdrop of such detailed historical accounts. Clearly much of what is included comes from the various letters, newspaper reports, court records, deeds, wills, and other tangible evidence of the times. I found myself continually switching tracks in my mind. Just when I would begin to get caught up in caring about the PEOPLE I was reading about, the tale would then segue off into various factual tangents... a detail about Francis Scott Key or a sideline about various Indian treaties. I found it distracting. YES, they helped portray a more complete picture of what was going on at the time. But for me, too often those details, even though true and sometimes quite interesting, were not entirely germane to the story of Dred Scott. So I felt the narrative was cluttered with way too much of the HISTORY and weak when it came to the FICTION.

I suspect that Shurtleff would be an excellent writer of non fiction accounts that would be fascinating to read. He is clearly an intelligent, articulate guy who has very carefully studied every detail of this time period and of the parties involved.

FICTION writing, however, has more to do with imagination. I would like to see what Shurtleff might do if he were to attempt a straight fiction piece - simply weaving a story of believable characters sorting their way through some sort of conflict or struggle. It would be fine if the backdrop were loosely based on actual events. But to mix the fiction with such detailed research was frustrating for me. I could never fully engage in unfolding of the plot enough to fully care about the characters. Juxtaposed as they were against all the detailed facts kept bringing me up short in how I responded to the book, never letting me give myself over to the degree of willful suspension of disbelief that can make fiction reading so delightful. Still, I could never entirely immerse myself in enjoying the analytical world of related facts that generally appeals to me in reading non-fiction because that kept getting interspersed with dialogue that seemed to me a bit contrived.

So I was both fascinated and frustrated by this book. In many ways it remains a good read and taught me much about our nation's history of that period that I had not known previously. It also made me hungry to know more about the Blows. I was very curious about what led them to have the moral courage to stand up for their friend Dred Scott the way that they did, at considerable risk and expense to themselves. As a follow up to this book I would love to see Shurtleff attempt a retelling of the same period exclusively from their point of view - only this time really allow himself to give way to the fiction. I believe he could accomplish much with that by staying true to the characters he clearly has much admiration for (and rightfully so) if he could manage to avoid being so married to the details of the research.

NOTE: You can read reviews of what others thought about this important book by following links to their blogs listed for the Virtual Book Tour HERE.

STUFF

You would think that somebody who has moved as many times as I have would have gotten rid of most of the unnecessary clutter in their lives. Somehow, however, I seem to have accumulated A LOT of stuff.

As I am preparing for a possible move to Alaska, I am re-evaluating how important to me every thing I own really is. It is VERY expensive to ship things up north. So it just makes sense to get rid of anything I currently own which I do not either a)USE or b) really love.

Sounds simple enough. Until I start going through all the boxes I have stored in my basement and in the closets. Oh my. I have things stored there which I have not even LOOKED at in over a year. That by definition should mean I can get by just fine with out it, right? Um, well, sorta. But not THIS piece. ARGH!

I have A LOT of framed photos. When we lived in our big house they were all over the walls. Now they are in boxes. Granted, I spent a lot of money on those frames and some of them are very nice pictures. But I've managed just fine this long without having them out. And chances are, my next house will be as small or smaller than this one. So...what to do with all these pictures???

Then there is the furniture. What about that? Obviously some of it will go with us. But not all. What about the pieces we choose not to take?

I think that's the hard part for me. It's not so much that I have to keep them. I am just very torn on the best outcome for my things. They are way too good to just throw away. I do not have interest or suitable place to have a yard sale. I don't have the time or energy to do Craig's list or eBay. So do I really just give it all away?

Yep. I have enough. There are people who do not. I can give away the things I don't need.

I believe that. Really. I do.

And then I start coveting my own stuff....

WHY would I care about a fancy dish that has been in a box for a year?
WHY would I care about a framed picture I absolutely know I'll never hang again?
WHY would I care about any number of material things I do not use ever?

It simple, really. Each one of these things has so many memories attached. I know the drill - take a box of index cards and WRITE OUT the memory you associate with the thing. If you want, take a photo of the thing to attach to the card. KEEP the memory. Get rid of the THING. It makes perfect sense.

Still, for whatever reason, for me that's really hard to do.

Deep breath. LET IT GO...