The mullett...

It was 80's night at youth group last night. Ha! This is Dan, the youth pastor, and Isaac, the mullet king. So gross.

Of coffee shops and books...

I am on vacation. Yes, a vacation. One where I have absolutely nothing planned, nowhere to go, no one to see. Just three free days of no class and no work. Of sleeping in and lazing around. Of biking around town just for the fun of it. Of coffee shops with good books, and baking until our cupboards are bare. Of Sweet Home Alabama and thick down comforters to snuggle in while I watch. Of cleaning house, and gardening. Of rest.

This, my friends, is a very nice thing which I plan to enjoy to the fullest.

Calling a spade a spade...

First things first, I have completed my first quarter back to school! And with flying colors, I might add. Nine weeks of going straight from work to class, then straight home to homework and the Nutrition class online. But alas, the end has arrived...for a mere ten days, albiet, but nevertheless, it has arrived! And we've brought in my vacation from school with style - a nearly completed garden! (I do apologize for the farcical amount of exclamation points in this post thus far, but I must confess these happenings are extremely exciting to our little family.) So without further ado, may we present our garden...

Saturday, 1pm. There she is, looking like she hasn't been touched for months, cold, neglected, piled with an array of garbage and rusted, old tools. But she's ours.

Being that we most definitely do not live south of any border that would ensure us warm sun throughout the summer, and also being that I am married to a man who eats tomatoes like they were candy, we decided we would be needing a greenhouse to foster our many tomato species we are intending to grow. Now while procuring a greenhouse may appear to be a rather large and complex endeavor for some of us, let's just remember that my husband is a creative genius and a jack of all trades. Put that together and we've got ourselves a homemade greenhouse assembled in about an hour! Man, I love that boy.

Saturday, 1:48pm. It starts with spading, which is the fancy term for digging up and turning incredibly wet and muddy soil using only your bare hands and an old fashioned shovel. I did that sweaty deed while Isaac used his muscles to pound the pvc pipe stakes into the ground. Okay, he might have helped me a little bit.




Saturday, 2:23pm. Up goes the frame...just pvc pipe all connected together at the top to a straight piece of pipe with little parts that the 'walls' fit into.









Saturday, 2:35pm. Next is the plastic, first on the ends, then a big sheet over the entirety of the frame. These are held on by those black clips that are actually just pieces of washer pipe that Isaac cut and slit so they would fit snugly over the pvc. Genius.




Saturday, 2:51. Then the real work started, shoveling (spading, if you will) the remainder of our plot. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but our plot is 400 square feet, which may not seem that big, when when you are the one who gets to till the soil by hand...let's just say we were glad we only got the two plots instead of the four that we originally thought about. We didn't take any more pictures of our handywork on Saturday, but ended up shoveling for another hour and a half or so before heading home. Then today we came back to finish the job. I came out for an hour or so while Isaac was leading middle school worship and started the spading again, gaining about another five feet I'm proud to say. After lunch, Isaac joined me back at the plot and we rolled up our sleeves to show nature how it's done.



Sunday, 1:45pm. Isaac starts by finishing up a door on our trusty greenhouse while I...any guesses here? Yes, took up spading once again. Apparently that's all one does when one has a garden.





Sunday, 2:13pm. Isaac built us a nice little fence so our friends, the deer, don't come munching on our produce. I, of course, continued spading. You see, I'd gotten so good at it after the past three hours of it...

Sunday, 3:49pm. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is what we had to show for our hours of physical toil. I say 'we' because after he finished the fence, Isaac grabbed a shovel and came to help out and to my relief, he turned out to be twice as fast at manual labor as I am. Imagine that. Also, I must point out that, although we neglected to take a picture, this was not our finished soil. After the spading, we went back through and hoed it to death into teeny tiny pieces, lest our hard work go uncredited. And with the clay-tasticness of our soil, I'm sure that wasn't the last time we'll be hoeing up that dirt before we can plant.





3:53. There she is. Our beautiful garden.










3:54. And there we are. Beautiful newlyweds. Tired, but happy. Well, at least I appear to be happy. Isaac is to, I promise. And with these parting words, I do want to add that the spading turned out to be quite enjoyable. There's something about tilling your own soil, putting your sweat, time and energy into working the land that will, in the end, feed you. We loved our time spent on our garden these past two days, as I'm sure we'll love the subsequent days this spring and summer continuing to prepare, plant, weed, and harvest our garden. And someday, we'll have a garden four times as large and on our own land.

And what a glorious day that will be.

I promise...

My thoughts will be back soon.
Love, Bec

My 8 hours

This is Isaac. I have never posted on this blog before, though I am in theory 1/2 of it's subject matter. The reason for this is that I seldom have the desire to display my musings on the internet to be read and misconstrued by family and friends. Today I am sharing part musing, part tour. I used to be a campus tour guide at WWU so hopefully I haven't lost my touch. You'll be touring my work, so you can see where I put my 8 hours in. Most of our family and friends know that I am a graphic designer and that I design and supervise the production of planners. Now you can also see where it happens.

If you click on the image it will get larger, but undoubtedly you can see already that I work in a land of cubicles. The sun is fluorescent light and the earth is light blue stiff carpet, and the trees and cliffs are padded beige cube walls which are aligned in a predictably linear fashion. The good news is that there is plenty of fresh water in this professional environment, and trips to the community water hole almost always ensure interaction with other inhabitants.

My part of this beige land is right here. I actually have 7 or 8 other desks too. I dont' work on all of them at once. In the summer our work gets so busy that I hire 7 or 8 more people to help. The other desks are for those people. I have an invasive species of paperwork that always tries to have it's run of the place. I spend time every day weeding and pruning it down so that it is manageable.

Next to my desk I have a window through which is see another place, a green, fresh world that is alive, organic, and raining. When my eyes tire of the computer screen I turn and gaze at this world. From my window I notice inhabitants from my land straying out into the sodden landscape, they cluster in little groups and stand smoking and shivering. Occasionally other inhabitants emerge from the woods. I don't know where they come from. Do they live in the woods? Once I saw one trying to hide a large knife in his sleeve. I don't go in the woods.

Occasionally I go out into the organic world to take a walk. When I do then I often wind through a neighborhood and take a friendlier trail which is well traveled, beautiful, and has no evidence of inhabitants with sharp objects. It takes about 15 minutes round trip and I return to my beige environment feeling much warmer then when I left.

I enjoy my job, and the place I work is very pleasant, but I'm often struck with the rigid gray structure of modern work environments, and contrasting that with the terrestrial was my aim in today's post. Thanks for reading, -Isaac