On a scale of 1 to Pee my pants, I’m at about a 3

Ben’s having laser eye surgery today.  In fact, in about 5 minutes I have to go pick him up from work and take him to his appointment.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m a little bit nervous.  “Oh it’s nothing”, Ben states. ”They’re just going to cut a slit in my eye and peel back my cornea”.

Awesome.

I know that there is a very slim chance something could go wrong, and of all the thousands and millions of these surgeries that happen, very very few don’t go well.  Ben will be ok.  And deep down I know that.  But I’m still taking this one into my meeting with God today. 

The things consoling me, are that fact that in about 2 hours, Ben will be able to see! Perfectly! Without glasses!  YAY for that.

Also? I get to mock him tirelessly for the ridiculously large, old-school sunglasses he’ll have to wear for the next little while.

A Celebration of Life

In a few weeks (Nov 14th, to be exact), Ben and I are going to a “Celebration of Life” party.  I’ve never been to one of these before, and I imagine that most people that will be there (should be close to 300), are in the same boat.

It’s for my friend, and old youth pastor, (my first one), Andrew.  For the past 9 years, he’s been living with a brain tumour.  He’s done remarkably well, surpassing every parameter of time the doctors have given him to survive.  Anyone who knows Andrew, knows that one of his most shining qualities (among the very many), is his sense of humour, and many times over these nine years, I’ve still had the privilege to joke with him, laugh with him, and hear the lighter side of living with cancer.  I didn’t think there could be one. 

I can remember first meeting Andrew (and his wife Marilyn), they came over to our house for breakfast the weekend they were candidating for the youth pastor position.   I can remember how he was the first one who told me I should play piano for worship, and even when I told him I wasn’t good enough – he assured me that he was worse on the  guitar, so we’d make a great pair.  I can remember spending one of my March Breaks painting the youth portable with him, and how on one of the panels, he insisted that we draw a life sized Far Side comic (one of his favourites), so we did.  I can remember when his first kid was born, and how the next day we had a worship practice at church, and he literally couldn’t wipe the massive grin off of his face.  We cut the practice early and went to the hospital to meet his son.  I remember his love for The Simpsons.  I remember how he formed a Student Leadership Team, which I got to be a part of, and somehow, he managed to find enough corresponding, relevant words, that the team could be named W.A.R.T.S.  (Willing, Available, Reliable, Teachable, Serving…just in case you ever needed a handy acronym for a leadership team).  I remember being on the winter retreat, and Andrew tricked me into closing my eyes, and doing a situp…right into a plate full of whipped cream. And I remember one time, in the summer, the youth were up at a cottage, and for some reason, a few of us had to come back early, so Andrew came with us. My brother, and the other girl who we were with, fell asleep in the back, and Andrew and I talked for 2 hours on the way home, and I felt so special. 

About 9 months ago, Andrew found out that the treatments weren’t working.  Nothing was stopping this cancer from growing.  He was dying.  Andrew and Marilyn decided to throw a party. While he was still here.  To celebrate his life in the way they wanted – dinner, dancing, raising funds to support their 2 kids once he’s gone, all their friends and family, and of course, many laughs.

Ben and I get to go.  As I said, I’ve never been to one of these before.  I imagine it will be somewhat of a holy moment.  Giving honour to someone who deserves it, while they’re still here to hear it. 

I found out a few nights ago that things have gotten worse.  Andrew might not make it to Nov. 14th.  Cancer sucks.

Betty Crocker does not live here

After posting a picture of my messy, messy kitchen a short while ago, I thought I should try and redeem myself.  You know, just so my mother in law doesn’t have to worry that she married her son off to a total delinquent of a wife.   I’m caring like that.

A while back, I went apple picking with some dear friends of mine (Hi Lisa, Jack and Grace!), and came home with a lot of apples. I was feeling the whole fall season, and thought it would be fun to do all sorts of apple baking over the Thanksgiving holiday.  We were at my parents for the weekend, and I thought – “what a better way to relax than to bring home all my baking supplies, and bless my family with my superb baking skills?” 

The more I thought about it, the more excited I got. I could do crisps! And sauces! And dips! All of the apple variety, of course.  I had visions of the days over that weekend spent creating my desserts with ease, as if I was created to bake, as my family relaxed around me; laughing, lounging, and (naturally) all dressed in the typical fall attire of dark blue jeans, and that sweater that just exudes autumn.  You know which one I’m talking about – it’s probably brown, or green, warm enough to wear on it’s own in the cooling fall weather, and somehow, looks even better if you’re holding a hot mug of cider while wearing it. 

And the piece de resistance would be… my apple blossoms.  How great, I thought, it would be to create these little apple delights – I was sure they would be the hit of the weekend -everyone would be coming back for more, just because of how quaint and delicious they would be.

Well, the problem with my little theory was that I had never made these so called apple blossoms before. (Nor did I have a recipe…) My inspiration came from the professionally baked ones that we bought from the apple farm where we went picking.  But “how hard can it be?” I thought to myself.  I will just make the same  filling that you would put in a pie, and then manipulate the pastry dough into beautiful little blossoms. 

I should probably mention that I’ve never actually worked with pastry dough before. (Unless you count eating it raw as my mom would bake…).  Nor have I ever baked a pie before.  (Unless you count taking it out of the box and turning the oven on to 350.  (“Minor details“I thought to myself)

So I forged ahead, and all was going fairly well.  At first.  Then reality kicked in and I realized that things maybe wouldn’t be going as well as I had envisioned.  I had flour everywhere, the dough wasn’t rolling out evenly, there was no hot cider anywhere to be consumed, and I certainly wasn’t in a fall sweater.  I cut out circles with a cookie cutter, and proceeded to plop a serving of my apple filling into each circle. 

Now came the part where I would somehow magically create beautiful flower-like blossoms.  But that didn’t happen.  On some of them, the dough had been rolled too thin and kept breaking as I tried to fold all of the sides in.  On others, the dough was way too fat, and the sides wouldn’t stay folded in.  And the biggest problem was that there actually WAS no sides.  In my genius planning, I neglected to realize that I probably should have cut out square pieces of dough. 

As I surveyed my surroundings, the situation was getting more and more grim.  I had more flour on me, the apple filling was starting to ooze out of the bottoms of the dough cups (yes, I resigned myself to the fact that these blossoms weren’t going to so much be blossoms anymore), my family was not as enthralled in my baking skills as I had planned, and I still had no cider, or a fall sweater on. 

In the end, I realized that the blossoms I had hoped for, would not be, and just started to squish, pinch and prod pieces of dough together, in hopes that I could create some sort of container to hold the measly apple filling I’d put in the middle.

The outcome? Not really something to write home about…

(Go ahead, say they’re ugly. I know you’re thinking it…)

All in all though – I think they tasted ok.  I’m hoping that by next Thanksgiving I will have perfected the art of pastry dough manipulation and will be able to create anything and everything apple.  My family ate them all, so they couldn’t have been that bad.  And for the rest of the weekend, I stuck to things I knew something about: eating far too much turkey, potatoes and stuffing.

(Oh, and I also made a big batch of apple sauce and some apple dip).   

The Best Kind of Saturday

I woke up on my own. No need for an alarm clock, meetings, work, or something else pressing, to force me out of bed. 

I spent an hour with just me, as Ben laid in bed for a while longer.  After I’d showered, I went back to our room as Ben was getting up.  We proceeded to spend the next hour in bed just chillaxing, laughing, talking, wrestling and just being together after a busy week of not. 

By the time we got going, it was after noon, and the perfect time for a breakfast of eggs, toast and OJ. 

After breakfast at noon, (some might even call it brunch), we took a walk to the mall.  It was beautiful out, sunny enough to not need too many layers, but crisp enough that you knew you were soaking in the perfect kind of fall day.

I found 2 pairs of jeans that I liked, and that fit. And were on sale!  (That should help ease the desperate situation of lack of pants that i was currently living in).

We also managed to get our apartment cleaned and take care of a few errands. 

Tonight we’ll cap things off by heading to a pub to celebrate Ben’s brother’s birthday with some nachos, beverages and good hang outs.

A perfect mix of rest and productivity, time alone and with friends. 

It’s the kind of day I’m thankful for. 

And to top it all of, Sarah Palin is appearing on SNL tonight.  I think that has hilarity written all over it.

Tea with Jam and Bread

Last Tuesday (as in 9 days ago…) Ben got all dressed up:

He then told me to do the same:

 

And then he surprised me with these:

And it was beyond wonderful.  I am a pretty huge Sound of Music fan, and have seen the movie more times than I should probably admit to.   I was pretty jazzed about getting to see the musical in Toronto.  I laughed, I cried (yeah, I did, so what if I’m emotionally attached to 7 kids singing in lederhosen??), and I was sad when it ended. 

And my husband deserves EXTRA props – because not only did he plan the whole thing, he doesn’t even LIKE the Sound of Music and he still was willing to go.  (Although he did have a good time and really enjoyed the production.)  I did ask him if because he liked it, it meant we could watch the movie together…and was met with a resounding “no”.  But I’ll keep working on him.    I figure it’s either watch the movie and listen to professionals make beautiful music, or listen to me butcher The Hills Are Alive as I shower each morning.

This is what happens when you go from having a dishwasher, to not having one

 

Pretty bad eh?  The secret is now out to my mother-in-law:  I’m a bad housekeeper.

Ok, so that’s not entirely true (but partly, if I’m being honest…) So the real story is that we had to get a new faucet because our old one was leaking, so Ben disassembled the old one, but didn’t have time to put the new one in for a few days.  And in that few days we had company, made lots of food, and well, just built up a lot of dishes I guess.

By the time we had the faucent installed, and had enough time to do dishes, the situation was pretty bad: We had ZERO forks, yo.  We also had zero free counter space, which pretty much eliminates my motivation to want to make anything other than toast. 

I’m happy to report that after only 1.5 hours of washing dishes, things have been restored and our cutlery drawer is now an overflowing cornucopia of clean utensils.  (Did you like how I threw a very holiday appropriate adjective in there? eh? eh?)  

I’d like to say that we have vowed to never let it get that bad again, but we’re realistic, and although we won’t always have the lack of a faucet to blame on the stack of dishes piling up, there’s no real guarantee that it won’t happen again.  Although toast for lunch 4 days in a row was a pretty good motivation to stay on top of things from now on.

 

Happy thanksgiving to all of of you – I hope you have a great looooong weekend eating your face off.  (Americans, although your weekend won’t be long, I give you permission to gorge yourself in honour of our thankfulness)

Sixty*

*pardon all the sentimental-ness of this one. I imagine my cousins will probably get more out of this than the rest of you – but I’ll let the rest of you “listen in” as well…

Yesterday my grandparents celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary.  They won’t be reading this blog, in fact, I’m fairly certain that if I tried to explain what a blog was, they’d be left scratching their heads.  But I did want to stop, and acknowledge the fact that their marriage has lasted far longer than many of those in our world. 

There was a celebration for them out in Saskatchewan on Saturday, which we couldn’t be at, but all of the grandchildren made videos with our favourite memories of Grandpa and Grandma.  As I thought about the memories I have of them, there were almost too many to narrow down – but a few did stick out, that I shared on the video:

• The games we would play: Whether they would be visiting us out here in Ontario, or our trips out west, it was guaranteed that there would be many hours spent playing games.  These hours were often accented with grandma’s cookies, root beer, bugles, and grandpa throwing in the odd german word from time to time.   As I grew older, the games evolved from Battling Tops and Kerplunk, to Skip-Bo and Ten Pennies, but everything else stayed the same.  Even this past summer, at the age of 26, there was something so familiar and comfortable about sitting at their kitchen table, listening to Grandpa whistle quietly as he picked up another wild card, as I picked up another cookie and ate it. 
• The time I puked in Grandma’s hand: Yes, this memory is gross…but can you see how it just maybe could stand out in my head?  I don’t know too many people who would be willing to catch my vomit….and I know even fewer people who would have the cat-like reflexes to react quick enough to my gagging sounds. Only a grandma could and would do that.  (and if you’re wondering….I did include this memory on the video)
• Listening to them pray.  This was probably the most vivid memory I have of them.  When we would go visit them, the rooms we stayed in (the Pink room for me, the blue room for Dallas and Dustin) were upstairs.  On many, many, many occasions I would be settled under the covers, after secretly and quietly playing a few rounds of Pong on the old black and white tv in my room, and I would hear their slow, steady voices coming from the kitchen.  Every night, they would pray for each of their children and grandchildren.  It was a sound that often lulled me to sleep, although I’d always try and stay awake long enough to hear my name, which inevitably would come.  Each morning, I’d hear them doing the same, as they did their devotions together.

I think that right there is the secret.  I don’t think my grandparents will ever know the example they set for me, as they remained faithful in their walks with God.  And I’m certain that is why they just celebrated sixty years of marriage. 

Happy Anniversary Grandpa and Grandma.

Love Karmyn