A tale in photos
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White Lake maundering
A tale in pictures
Appliance addendum
The garbage disposal sprung a major leak during our Mocksgiving cleanup.
I’ve lost count of how many appliances we’ve had to deal with in the last three months. (Do cars count as appliances?) I’ve told my boss I’ll be working from home one day a week indefinitely to deal with whatever contractor related issues arise.
He says that sounds like a reasonable response.
The Pantry Challenge
I was raised in a small town about 20 miles from the nearest grocery store. Those nearest grocery stores (one in either direction) are not exactly gigantic. There are 3 or 4 aisles, and they’re short on produce (which is expensive to get there and which has fewer people to eat through it). My father was retired military, so we had base privileges. Once a month my folks would make the long trip to the nearest military commissary and we’d load up on everything you needed for a month – chicken thighs, cereal, pasta, milk. We might add one or two things when we went to town, but in general that food that we got once a month was the food that we had for the month. When I was born, it was much harder to get groceries (I was born in a tiny village in the heart of Africa). My mom tells stories about how they had one Coke a week, and treasured it.
I live in the halo of one of the great cities of the world. It’s about a quarter mile to a grocery store with 16 aisles and vats of produce. (Which, ironically to me, isn’t considered a “nice” grocery store – there are much bigger ones within a 10 mile drive.) Even that convenience isn’t convenient enough for me. I get my groceries delivered once a week from Peapod. I’m pretty methodical about how I go about shopping for it. Any staples that are used are written on a list on the ‘fridge. Then I go through recipe books and pick 3 – 4 recipes I plan for the week, and add any special ingredients I need for those recipes. I also have a list of standard items I buy every week. (Which might be why we currently have about 20 bags of pretzels.) For about half the year I’m signed up to a farm share where vast amounts of fresh produce enter the house every single week. Finally, if I’m missing something or need inspiration, there’s a Farmer’s Market once a week, two blocks away. Oh, and we eat out a lot.
My current life is about as far from the food desert I grew up in as you can get.
This great bounty is a great privilege – and one I recognize as such in part because I know what it’s like to live somewhere where it’s NOT easy to get healthy, tasty food. But I find that this abundance leaves me with a few problems. Most obviously, it leaves me with an abundance of self. It’s amazing how little food it takes to eat 2000 calories in this environment. That is, perhaps, a story for another day.
The second problem is that my sons are not exposed to the appreciation of having healthy and abundant food that I got. It’s wonderful to be able to provide my sons for everything. But while I (mostly) know what to do if that food budget gets slashed and pennies need to be pinched, my sons would have no clue. Which costs more, lasagna or split pea soup? How do you get enough protein if you can’t afford the best cuts of meat? How do you make the recipe serve the ingredients, instead of the ingredients the recipe? What is it like to budget and made trade-offs in your food allowance? These are life skills that I hope my children don’t need, but that I’d like them to know exist in case they ever DO need them.
The third problem is that the cupboards are wastefully overflowing. There are ribeye steaks in the freezer from a farm share, which I’ve just never found the right time to cook. There are cases of pasta and beans in the basement. There are boxes of cake mix and bags of rice kicking around the corners of the pantry. I find it easier to just order a new thing than to check and see if I already have it.
So I’ve hatched a plan to tackle problems 2 & 3. My plan is to not buy any food for the month of June.
Between our two camping trips (Memorial Day & 4th of July), I’m giving us a budget of $50 a week for ALL our food purchases. So that’s one pizza order, plus some milk and eggs. Or maybe that’s one brunch at a local diner. Or we could buy ingredients to round out the supplies in the pantry we’re working our way through. According to a Gallup poll, 8% of Americans have $50 a week or less to spend on groceries. I’m guessing many of those folks don’t also have pantries brimming to overflowing with supplies, and a farm share to kick in produce halfway through the month. (And heck, an excellent book on foraging!)
I’m hoping this will do several things. First, I plan on working through this with the kids, so they can understand making trade-offs of convenience, tastiness, nutrition and better appreciate how lucky we are to usually get all three. Second, I’m hoping it makes ME less lazy about honoring the resources I have, and using them more efficiently and less wastefully. I feel like wasting food is being ungrateful for what I’ve been given.
Then, once we’ve all come to appreciate what we have more, I’d like to take some steps to make sure everyone has enough food to eat. Assuming my math is right here, and assuming we can stick to this plan (a big assumption), we’ll save well over $400 in groceries in the month of June. (And that doesn’t count how much we’ll save by not eating out!) I’d like to give that savings to The Greater Boston Food Bank which does an amazing job of getting food to those friends and neighbors who need it.
So…. let’s see how this goes? I’ll be posting updates in a Google+ Collection for those who want to follow along. If any one else is inspired to try something similar, I’d love to hear about it!
Red Sox: In good times and in bad
So….. I didn’t make it to the “Write a blog post” portion of my weekend this weekend. Apologies. Instead, on this snowy opening day of baseball season, I’m offering a reprise of my love of the sport!
Red Sox fan – Fenway 2009
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a baseball season that made me so passionately excited about football as this 2012 Red Sox season. I’ve been a baseball fan since 1995 – a respectable time now. I started as a Mariners fan and – without dropping my hope for the Ms to do well while bowing to the realities of being 3 time zones away – I’ve become an ardent Red Sox fan.
I’m definitely not alone in having come to Red Sox fandom in the last decade. I attended my first game at Fenway in 2000. 2001, for reasons that will be instantly understandable to those of you who live in the Northwest of follow baseball closely, I lived tied to the MLB broadcasts on my computer – up until late at night. After that, though, I started following the Sox. I lived through…
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De Sacredote in Nuptiis (or, Five Reasons Why You Want Your Officiant at Your Wedding Rehearsal)
2015 Christmas Letter
One thing I love about this time of year is the chance to reflect back on the year that was, and think ahead to the year that will be. This is the reflecting back – that public facing summary of what the year has done and been; of how we’ve all grown and changed. Some years I look back and feel like I have nothing to say. Some years the news is sad. Some years I worry that I’ll sound braggy if I’m honest. My mother-in-law gave us some old Christmas letters my husband’s father wrote during the Gulf War. They are a lovely snapshot of my husband’s family at a pivotal point. I can only hope that writing down what I see from the vantage of the end of the year eventually feels the same for my children!
The year started in Washington state, in the only cold weather they got last year. We were all together for over a week – a very unusual thing for us. We were celebrating my brother’s wedding, and thoroughly enjoying being together as a family. We hiked in the winter woods. We took a trip to Portland. We went to the Mineral Headquarters Tavern for the first time ever in our lives. Every time I am with my family, I’m forcibly reminded how much I like them. I often wonder why we live so far apart, but then I remember the family ethos of adventure and independence and have a sneaking suspicion I’m also training my children to move continents away when they’re older.
While I was in Washington, I got a call about an interview at Google. It was extremely exciting even to make it to the interview round. Since I was working in staffing and recruiting software, I knew by reputation that Google was one of the hardest places in the US to get to interview at. Over the next few months there were back and forth conversations with them.
Meanwhile, shortly after a Patriots vs Seahawks Superbowl where I couldn’t figure out who I wanted to win, the snow started to fall. You might have heard that Boston had just a dusting of snow this past year. (AHAHAH! Yeah.) It was epic, as week after week another foot would fall on banks where the last snow had not melted a jot. By the time of the last major storm, as we dug out, I had the incredibly uncomfortable feeling that if we got another major storm I would not be able to dig out because there would be nowhere to put the snow. The claustrophobia got so bad we rented snowshoes so that we could be outside, with horizons wider than the trapping paneled walls of our house. Even when spring should have been advancing – on the last weekend of the maple tap – we walked the woods in the snow and had an epic snowball fight.
Which meant that on the first week of March, when I went into Cambridge for my interview with Google, what should have been an hour long trip took about two. I’d given myself extra time, and I needed every second of it. The interview went very well, and not too long after, I found myself signing an offer and planning to work in Kendall Square. I still can’t believe my amazing luck and good fortune!
There was a little time before I had to start, though… so we took an impromptu trip to Cozumel to celebrate.
Ahhhh… there is something about a tropical island vacation that is everything you want out of a tropical island vacation. Thane opened the door on chapter books. Grey read extensively. The kids learned how to snorkel (on the surface). Adam and I got some quality snorkeling time together too. We played games. The only even minor blot was that on one of my dives I seemed to come up with water that wouldn’t leave my ear. It was actually a barotrauma (very rare in snorkeling) and I have since permanently lost very high notes in my left ear. (Or rather, I have them all the time as a persistent and extremely annoying ringing.) I still think it was probably worthwhile!
The summer was absolutely full of camping, the way I like my summers. I went camping five times – our standard three trips, plus a camping offsite for work, plus a week long trip with just my husband to New Brunswick which was very cold and very wet but where we went sea kayaking and saw some really really cool fossils. Camping with the kids has only gotten more fun. They read and play and hiked and rode bikes. I love camping, and camping with these guys continues to improve.
Which was another cool thing about this year – the kids both really learned how to ride their bikes! We went on a bunch of bike rides this summer, and watched them as they went from wobblers who fell down all the time, to fast and confident riders. We did a nine mile bike tour of Boston (which Thane was truly not ready for and which took years off my life) … but we did it! I feel like bikes are truly resurging. My children will be more independent for this skill!
During that trip I took with my husband to New Brunswick, we had lots of quality time together in the car. (We listened to some awesome podcasts together!) But then we got to talking about “what we wanted to do” yadda yadda. And at some fateful point, Adam announced that he was going to do a renovation of our dining room. We got a great deal on our house, in no small part because the decor was disastrously 70s. Drop ceilings and cheap paneling covered the 120 year old plaster walls. We just needed to take down the paneling and drop ceiling and maybe redrywall. Might take a couple weeks. It actually took three months of Adam working nights, weekends and taking Fridays off to work more. It turns out there was no insulation in those walls (despite our having hired a company to blow in insulation – they drilled holes and messed up our siding, but didn’t blow in any insulation). So that added a bit. He reframed a wall. Drywall is hard. But it looks amazing now. And makes our living room look bad….
Around the time the drywall was being mudded and sanded, my brother came to live with us. The wedding that had kicked off the year was not a durable match, and his contract in Denver had come to an end. On the drive back from New Brunswick my husband invited him to come live with us and as the summer crossed to fall he did. He’s been kicking off his Steampunk Vicar officiating services and is looking for a IT helpdesk type job while he contemplates the next chapter in his life.
Another new start in the life of the Flynns. I won’t pretend that Grey’s decision to play trumpet hasn’t made me extremely pleased. Even better – he’s been incredibly dedicated in his practicing. He’s practiced on average once a day since Thanksgiving. He can now play “Ode to Joy” very well (which is *not bad* for two months in on a new instrument!) I’m trying VERY HARD not to get ahead of myself with this one.
There has also been a lot going on in the life of the church. This year I am teaching 2nd – 5th grade Sunday School (which is usually pretty fun). I’m also running a mission study taskforce. We’re using the New Beginnings process, which is a significant investment in prayerful thought and time. Because I’m crazy, I’m also running the Christmas Pageant this year. If your Christmas Card is late this year, that’s why.
This year has been a phenomenal one for me. It’s been full of the kind of adventures I like best, the people I love and new opportunities. I think 2016 is going to have a very tough time topping it, but I’m willing to give it a chance!
May your reflection on your year be filled with as much joy, and may your year ahead be even better!
I usually select about 100 pictures to choose from when I’m making my calendar. Here are this years top pictures!
A decade old
The full retrospective of ten years of Grey is going to be next Monday’s post, but I feel as though it’s wrong to let his birthday pass without note.
Grey, my son, is 10 years old today. I have only one child left in single digits.
Happy birthday Frodo and Bilbo Baggins
Today is the day I always wished was my birthday. Given my appallingly behind-ness on blogging this week, I figured I’d reshare my birthday wishes to the Misters Baggins!
It’s also worth noting – Grey just finished reading the Hobbit!
Today is the day that ought to have been my birthday, by all rights. Today is the first day of fall. More importantly, to my young self, today is Frodo and Bilbo Baggin’s collective birthday. Do you have any idea how much it would’ve mattered to me to be the SAME as those two notable halflings in such an important event? I used to try to work out with the time zones and Zaire (my place of birth) whether I had REALLY been born on the 22nd and this incontrovertible FACT was masked by my impossibly-distant place of birth. Or maybe bad record keeping. Or SOMETHING.
Of course now, thinking about it, I’m pretty sure my mom wouldn’t have minded. I was three weeks later than expected. My due date was Labor Day. I used to think this just meant my mom was bad at counting, until I myself went…
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Laudato Si’ – His Holiness Pope Francis on Climate Change
I love these thoughts of my brother’s. I’ll add that he’s disappointed it wasn’t published in Latin, but it sounds like there’s plenty to think about in there anyway. One wonders if this is not, perhaps, the most important mission in a fortnight of great changes.
If you’ve been attending public worship here, then you know that the theme for this summer is “growth.” We are talking about spiritual growth, personal growth, about growth in the church, and about how things grow – what it means in our culture and society to grow.
It seemed fitting to me, then, that as I was crafting sermons and messages on issues of growth, the publishing offices of the Vatican should release Laudato Si’, a Papal Encyclical letter addressed to the whole of the human community. His Holiness writes that “We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.” These letters, often written merely for the Catholic Community, speak to the critical moments and concerns of our time. In this case, the letter reaches beyond Catholicism, beyond even Christianity and into our common human…
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My Truant Pen 