Organized Chaos Called Home

http://hagakure.blogpeoria.com/

Today my husband is 30 years old!

Seth, each year you are more precious to me than before. Each year, you get older and your eyes become more wise of the ways of this world and they are beautiful to me.

While thirty is not really old, I want you to know that as you get older, I find you more and more precious, deserving of respect and praise. You are not the nineteen year old man I married. You are truly man who has grown in wisdom. A man to be respected in the gates of the city. Let me be a crown upon your head and bring you honor.

I pray we will spend many more birthdays growing old together.

“My beloved is dazzling and ruddy,
Outstanding among ten thousand…

I am my beloved’s,
And his desire is for me.
‘Come, my beloved, let us go out into the country…’ “

Song of Solomon

So I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time.  I’m going to try to talk my husband into going out into the woods with me and finding mushrooms!  I’ve never done mushroom hunting before.  I’ve done some reading about good Morels and bad Morels.  I am fairly certain I know what I am looking for.  And I know that I am supposed to go and look for certain kinds of trees and then look for mushrooms there.  Anyone have any thoughts or experiences?

 

Okay, so I won’t really pay you. But I’ve been doing some work on the Dark Omen Games website and I was hoping you all would go to the website and look it over for me. We have not announced it yet. But it is live. I need to know if it shows up right on your browser and specific computers and if all the links work for you and all that stuff. Any feedback would be helpful. Thanks!

For a few weeks now I had been wondering if I had a thyroid problem.  All of my symptoms showed low thyroid activity.  So I decided to have a test done.  I ordered a very complete test that would not only test for thyroid, but for many other things as well. 

It turns out that my thyroid is working well enough, but I am Anemic.  Which is something I knew that I struggled with.  But come to find out that Anemia symptoms can totally mimick the symptoms of low thyroid.  So I am starting on an iron supplement and some B vitamins.  Hopefully I’ll start getting some energy back!

 

Because Seth doesn’t like the typical business suit, I though I would experiment with suits of a different kind. Something with flair. Something that says, “I’m not normal.” This is what I came up with.

As I lie there in bed, with the window open, I listen to the gentle sounds of nature. Spring is here at last. I hear the birds chirping at this early hour of 4 a.m. I also hear the crickets. The house is silent, peaceful.

I am awake because something woke me up. I will know what it was in a moment because I will hear it again. There it is! The sounds of gunfire not far off. I didn’t know it was hunting season.

I am told that the reason our fence has fallen down on the left side in my backyard is because there was a deer in the yard. The owner of the house before us says the deer was frightened when he entered the backyard and it ran off, right over the fence.

I’m sure it is possible that there was a deer in someone’s backyard, and thinking that it would make a great meal for the family, someone got out their shotgun and went after it. That must be it. Why else would someone being shooting in the middle of the city at 4 a.m.?

I pray to God, just in case it wasn’t a deer. “God, please keep my family safe tonight.”

In a few minutes, someone else has a deer in his yard, off in a different direction. But I think the deer are getting smart. The deer shoots back with his own gun. I can tell it is return fire. It has a different sound than the first shots.

But I pray again, just in case.

Our lives are in the hands of God, I think. And so I try to go back to sleep. It’s only 4 a.m. I can get more sleep.

There is peace once again. Birds. Crickets. Peeling tires. More gunfire.

I must have dozed a bit because now it is 4:30. Somewhere closer, there is more gunfire. And return fire. I begin to wonder if there is an army of armed deer running about my neighborhood. I wonder how bulletproof my walls are. I wonder if a man missed his venison, because he slipped on a rock and accidentally shot the gun upward, so that the bullet went flying up into the sky and off into the distance, and then the bullet came back down, landing upon my house, how bulletproof my roof would be.

I pray again for safety for myself, my family, my neighborhood. I pray for the police.

By now I am sure that all the deer in the neighborhood must have been defeated.  Especially because some of those shots were too close together.  I don’t know much about weapons but I have been told that shots that close together must be automatic or semi-automatic.  I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I do know that means lots of shots in a little time.  Maybe I should know how to shoot just in case we get some deer in our yard.

The peace returns now that the deer have been defeated and there is silence for half and hour.  But I cannot sleep.  My stomach hurts.  I cannot stop praying.  I cannot stop wondering if the shots hit.  Did they get the deer?  Did the deer return fire successfully?  What if the deer are closer next time?  Now I am worrying.

I breathe deeply, pray again, and try to sleep.  I have sick children to care for in the morning.  Surely hunters must sleep at some point, right?

It is 5 a.m. and I am wide awake.  But the hunters are not a sleep.  There are apparently yet more things to hunt at this early hour.  And the hunted return fire.  Peeling tires.  

I cannot take it any longer.  My stomach hurts too much.  I go downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. 

As I write this post, it is 6 a.m.  I hear out my back door yet another gun shot.  Just one this time.  Followed by sirens.

I pray to God that morning would come quickly. 

So I’m a bit of a health nut. I don’t know if you all know that about me. See, Seth is crazy about two things, well three counting me, God and games. All of our conversations come back to God and games. But I am crazy about two things, three counting Seth, God and health. All of our conversations come back to God, games, and health.

I am convinced that most health problems in our culture are related to poor diet. Psychological problems are usually related to too much sugar and processed foods.

Take the typical school aged boy with a behavioral problem. The obvious solution is drugs, right? Or maybe we could examine his diet. What does a young, hyper little boy on ritalin eat? He might eat Fruit Loops for breakfast, if he has a breakfast at all, then for lunch you feed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, understanding that most peanut butter is a few peanuts loaded with corn syrup and the jelly is a little fruit juice with added sugar, corn syrup and coloring, and white bread is a simple carbohydrate, that is the same as eating a spoonful of sugar, then throw in a chocolate milk or better yet, a can of soda, and a little snack, like say, a juicy fruit chew, filled with high fructose corn syrup and drop of fruit juice, just so we can call it healthy. After lunch, send him back to his classroom and expect him to sit still and focus on learning.

Why can’t kids, or even adults for that matter, sit still for very long? Why has the average attention span of today’s child decreased so much? Did you know that television today flashes through images much faster than it used to, just to keep the attention of the children? It’s because kids are eating junk food, ALL the time. Even food that claims to be healthy is often still junk food.

To understand why this is so important to me, you need to understand a little bit about me. I grew up like this little boy. Though I was never on drugs for behavioral problems, I had a high sugar, junk food diet my whole life. My morning breakfast was a sweetened cereal, IF I ate anything for breakfast. Sometimes I would just grab a soda on my way out the door. For lunch it was the same; a soda, a little bag of chips, a candy bar. For supper, when I was younger, my mom, who usually worked, would make a quick meal of hamburger helper or something, though occasionally she would make some really yummy things like chili or lima bean soup or roast. But life was busy and so was the food. And as I got older, I would eat fast food. It didn’t help when I started at KFC and could get free food all the time.

My diet was very poor and so was my emotional well being. I was depressed all the time and manic when I was not. I was seen by counsellors and even was admitted to a mental hospital once. Though I had my share of real problems in my life, I was in no place to emotionally handle them when I was on a sugar high one second and a sugar crash the next.

For a while, after I was married, but our diet had not yet changed, I suffered from some really bad depression and was finally put on Zoloft . But then we had other problems, including panic attacks, weight gain, decreased sex drive, insomnia, and what I can only describe as a feeling that something inside me died.  I could no longer cry or express deep emotion.  I still cannot, to this day. 

I really think the best way to ease a person’s depression is to give them panic attacks so they think they are dying of a heart attack, make them gain weight and feel like a big, fat ugly person, ruin their sexual relationship with their sponse, deprive them of sleep, and keep them from emotional expression.  That is really a good way to heal depression!

Eventually, we discovered that the Zoloft was hurting me and not helping and I weaned myself off of my addiction.  And began looking into more natural means of dealing with depression.  And this research has brought me to where I am now. 

Now I look around me and realize that the food we eat, the way we prepare it, the way we grow it or the way we raise it, the lifestyles that we lead, are all very damaging to us and are the main causes of most of the diseases and psychological problems we have in this culture.   

So now I pursue to live and feed my family in a healthier way and so hope to eliminate truly preventable emotional and psychological problems in myself and my family.   

So we are getting farm fresh milk now.  And what better to do with that milk than make cheese?  So I decided to make mozzarella cheese. 

So I warmed the milk a bit and added the citric acid.  Since I didn’t have cheese quality rennet, I added extra Junket rennet.  At first it didn’t form curds, but then eventually it did.  Then I noticed that the thermometer hadn’t been very deep into the milk.  I soon discovered that my milk, which should have been 110 degrees was really 150 degrees.  I hoped this wouldn’t be a problem. 

So then I strained the curds and squished as much whey out of it as I could.  Then, with my industrial strenth rubber gloves, I kneaded the cheese, reheated, kneaded, reheated, added some salt, kneaded, reheated, kneaded and reheated and kneaded some more.  This is the point the cheese should get really stretchy like taffy.  My cheese got somewhat stretchy, but never quite like taffy.  I kneaded forever and kept the cheese really warm… but my cheese never became taffy.

In the end I put the very small ball of cheese (it’s hard to believe that a gallon of milk only makes a very small ball of cheese) in some ice water and waited.  Then in great excitement, Seth and I sliced a piece of cheese to taste what my book said should be delicious, semi-soft and creamy.  Instead, my cheese was tasteless, hard, and waxy.  So I thought, surely, it must be that I didn’t add enough salt.  So I sprinkled salt on top of a slice and tried again.  This time it tasted quite a bit like salty wax.  An improvement…but I still don’t enjoy eating wax, or salty wax for that matter.

So now my very small ball of wax is sitting in a brine solution, and perhaps something will make it better.  But I must go now and check on my yogurt and ricotta cheese.  I do not give up easily. 

So today I ventured out on a mission to find a suit for Seth for worship. Or at least a nice shirt and sportscoat. My mission: to find a black coat, not too hot, not too bulky, not uncomfortable, no buttons if possible, not stupid looking, not business looking, solid…no stripes, and the right size. In addition, a dress shirt, long sleeve, no visible buttons, no collar or band collar, comfortable, doesn’t look stupid, fits right. Could this be done?

My first stop: Menswear on University. There was a huge store filled with suits ready to be worn by men. By many different kinds of men, big and small. Would Menswear be the place for my man?

After they got over the initial shock of a *woman* entering a men’s store, they asked if they could help me. I told them that I was looking for a suit for my husband. I gave his measurements. They proceeded to show me a number of suits that I knew Seth would not like. I explained that I was looking for black, contemporary suits. “Ah, we have that!” the man exclaimed. He showed me their *very* stylish suits with four buttons instead of the normal three. “These are very stylish,” he explained. Hmm… four buttons. Wow. Hmm…

I asked if they had shirts with the band collar. But he informed me that it was very much out of style now. The trend of the businessman of the day is the pointed collar. This is a the typical business collar dress shirt with very sharp points. In the end, I found a pair of pants that I kind of liked, but they didn’t have it in his size.

I guessed I wasn’t really shopping for a business suit. Are we going to worship to do business with God? Drop the cash in the plate to guarantee a blessing from God? Is that the business we are in? I think not. Why do our clothes look like we are going to a business meeting with God?

So, I found myself at the Casual Male. That is where I go to buy Seth’s casual clothing. But they also carry suits. I thought they might have dressy casual suits. I browsed and in the end I found a single sports coat that I liked. I wasn’t sure he would like it though. It was black suede. Then I found a nice grey shirt to go under it. But the shirt was hung really high. For the typical customer of the Casual Male (Big and Tall), this is not a problem. But for a woman of a whole 5 feet, I couldn’t reach it. So I looked around. The cashier was busy with another customer. But nearby was a very large black man. So, I asked him if he could reach it for me. He looked at me and laughed a bit, friendly, but still, he laughed, and then reached it for me.

Not sure what to think of the shirt and coat, and noticing that the black man was dressed nicely, I decided to ask his opinion.

“What do you think of this,” I asked. He looked it over and laughed and said, “Well it would be just fine if you want to look like the Partridge Family.” Hmm… I guessed that meant that he thought it looked stupid. He said that the suede was soft and wasn’t the kind of coat the a real man should wear. I thought Seth would probably agree.

Then he said, “You know where you should shop? You should head down to Fifth Avenue Clothing. I get all my dress clothes there. They aren’t real expensive and they’ll hook your man up with a real nice outfit. Tell Z that Mr. King sent you down and he should hook you up with a two piece. He’ll make your man look good.”

I said thank you and left the store. Now when I consider the way white people look when they dress up for church and the way black people look when they dress up for church, I tend to think that the black people look really nice and the white people look like stuffy business men that cannot be trusted. So I took his advice and headed down to Fifth Avenue Clothing (down on Main Street).

Now you have to understand. This is a store for black gentlemen. As many of you have noticed, Seth is not black. As I walked into the store, I noticed a very big difference between the clothing at Menswear and the clothing at Fifth Avenue. The difference being that when you walk into Menswear you will see black, blue, grey and tan. When you walk into Fifth Avenue you will see orange, yellow, pink, and purple. I had a hard time imagining Seth in a pink suit, with a black shirt underneath, a silk hankerchief in the pocket, a pair of shiny shoes, and a noir looking hat with a matching pink band. But indeed, they had this suit there on display. And I must say, the black mannequin doll looked very classy. On my husband… I shudder to think about it. Because as I said earlier… my husband isn’t black.

So the man asks if he can help me. I say that I need a nice suit for my husband. I give the measurements. I say I want black, solid suit with a black or grey undershirt, with a band collar, no buttons. He shows me the suit (Seth’s size would have to be ordered). It’s nice, black, kind of longer than a business suit, comes with matching pants, a vest if we want it. It was kind of silky soft, but still looked like a regular suit. He showed me his shirts, with band collar and no buttons visible. He said that they offer free tailoring to custom fit it to Seth’s size. Overall, pretty decent, but very limited selection considering they had like two suits in black and that was all.

Of all the places, Fifth Avenue Fashions showed the most promise. Though none of the stores ultimately ended in a purchase. We will continue our mission for the right suit. Only God knows if we shall succeed or fail in our mission.