Down in the Heart

 

Usually in this spot I recommend a YouTuber whose work I enjoy, but this time I’m going to post a shout out to one of my childhood’s greatest pleasures. My mother went off to a conference for Christian school teachers and picked up Dottie Rambo’s Down By the Creek Bank for me. A creek ran under our church/school so it was on the nose. It was love at first listen. I’d been on days to the country, and we all loved singing. Every song meant something to me as I listened to it over and over and over. The truth in those songs sank deep in my heart both guiding and comforting me.

My tape was completely worn out, so I rejoiced to find the album on YouTube. Give it a listen and play it for your kids.

https://youtu.be/Owr7_EfLHUo?feature=shared

Redecor

 

To say I don’t like video games is a polite understatement of the facts. Watching little electrons run around a screen accomplishing dolittle tasks strikes me as a great waste of time. But, here I am about to confess my delight in a video game. It has me wondering who I am and what I stand for. They have won me over with…interior decorating. You get a room full of furnishings that you have to choose the finishes for. You have a limited budget which means limited items which means greater creativity, unless you pay premium coin. I’ll do almost anything for new items, but I won’t do—ok I did I bought coins, twice! It is so satisfying when a design clicks. Using up scraps from past designs to make successful new ones is delightful. Voting on my fellow Redecor designer's designs is both fun and lucrative. 

I highly recommend this game. It has me playing! Who knew it could be done.

But Not in My Tea

  I, generally speaking, like bugs. It all began with an appreciation for the butterflies and lady bugs in our garden and was confirmed by Charlotte’s defense of a spider’s work in the world. I find their tiny lives interesting and heroic, but not in my tea. My tea I like clean, sweet and robust. Imagine my disgust when the peculiar off taste in my tea was a bug, a stink bug no less. The best I can figure it, it had been there for a while, and I was nearly done my tea. It was the not happy kind of surprise.

Spiritual Sprinkling

 

One of the fun things about being Catholic is that we get sprinkled with holy water as part of the service sometimes. Father takes a bowl of holy water and the sort of a round whisk broom and splashes it over us as we sing something about baptism usually. I’m one of those people who gets a little tense over things like this, so I tend to make a face until it’s over. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. There are so many unexpected things that could happen. Mostly it feels like being a kid in the sprinkler again, a holy sprinkler intended to wash your sins away. You Protestants ought to try it.

Matt Price: Mr. Make It Happen

Seafood is where he bagged me. I grew up close enough to the shore to enjoy it, and far enough away for it to be special. The occasional New Year’s shrimp feast, the here and there summer crab pick, and the grand splurge at a seafood restaurant all made shellfish precious to me. Now that I live in the midwest, seafood is nostalgic, so when Mr. Make It Happen was making it happen with crab meat he had my attention. A lot of other chefs don’t use crab so much, Marylanders like me can’t get enough.

The exciting thing was that Matt knew the way to flavor and cook these items in a way that makes me homesick. After  a while I looked him up. He’s from Virginia, just down the road. His momma raised him right.

If you want to do seafood right, and lots of other things, check out Mr. Make It Happen. He’s got the goods.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBW5KiJa8Ft42-XNIz4HCgg

Sequestering Carbon

 There are things in my life I try to protect other people from. Things that I am, things that have happened to me, I try to bury them deep inside myself for everyone’s good. But it’s terrible for me. I’m not so sure it’s good for the people I’m protecting either. They are robbed of the chance to grow and to learn more about love whether or not they would take the opportunity. So many of my relationships are stale beyond eating because the parts of me serving that are long dead.

Normally I’m a real cheerleader for mitigating the consequences of past mistakes, but perhaps it’s better to knuckle through them.