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Friday, August 5, 2011
Friday, December 10, 2010
The 2010 Simons Christmas Letter
Hello Everybody,
It's been quite a year for us. If you've been reading the blog posts you already know about some of our adventures. Here are some highlights:
CHURCH
I'm starting with this section because, other than our families, I would say that this part of our lives has been the most important this year. We have felt welcome from the very beginning at Parker Hills Bible Fellowship and have already been given some great opportunities for ministry. Jim is teaching Adult Sunday school class right now and has been asked to lead a care group. I've helped with food-related activities, with my most recent project being the desserts for the adult Christmas party. I've also been given the opportunity to do some piano playing for services, something I had missed at our former church in DC, and am involved in teaching 5th and 6th grade Sunday school. Our pastor is young, energetic, and committed, and his sermons are excellent. (It's not every day that you hear references to Weird Al Yankovic in a theological framework.) We appreciate his emphasis on the sovereignty of God and have gotten to know lots of great people. The youth group is very active, with another young, energetic and committed leader. We consider ourselves very blessed to be there.
FAMILY
Our main reason for moving back here was to be closer to our families, and we love being able to spend time with them that's not bracketed by plane trips. (We were really glad this Christmas not to be involved in all the canceled flights that happened because of the storms in the rest of the country--and to be in wonderful Colorado where it was 50 degrees on Christmas Day.) Jim's father and stepmother are going strong, with church and square dancing a big part of their lives. We see them almost every week along with Jim's brother Ed, and we get together with my brother and sister-in-law a lot, too. We got to see all of my brother's kids (Gideon's only first cousins) at Cody's wedding this October. Jim's sister and brother-in-law made it out for a visit in August, which helped console us a little bit for their not being able to come for Christmas.
PETS
This is the last letter in which Lupita will appear, as we lost her on Memorial Day. We do miss her! She was such a great little character. I had so hoped that she would live long enough to see Gideon through high school, but that would have made her 18 years old.
She did achieve age 16, which isn't too shabby, and then th
e side effects of her heart drugs caught up with her. Although I love dogs, I just can't see us starting over again with a new one (especially one that's not housebroken), and getting someone to take care of a dog when you're gone on vacation is a real pain. So, at least for now, we have the three cats, whom we love dearly but who are NOT DOGS. They provide lots of laughs with their various antics and some angst over snags and scratches. We're finally moving their litterboxes out of the laundry room now that the basement is finished.GARDENING
We've actually had a much milder winter out here than Virginia did, so the big difference in gardening isn't so much temperature as WATERING. Virginia does tend to have a drought most summers and everyone's lawn dies, but we usually get plenty of moisture the other seasons. Colorado, on the other hand, doesn't have a reliable snow cover or ground freeze, so the main thing to remember is to water in the winter whenever the temperature gets to around 50 degrees. That's a hard habit to acquire, though. I'm afraid some of my new plantings aren't going to make it because I forgot to water them. We turned off the sprinkler system at the end of September and have had dry, mild weather pretty much ever since. I have hopes that the trees in the big front mulched area are going to make it through, and I may have caught the other things in time. We've gotten some fairly large projects done this year and have plenty more to do. I told Jim that in a decade or so we may have things the way we want them.
GIDEON
This year has been one of struggles and successes for Gideon. He has had trouble sleeping on and off since eighth grade after being a champion sleeper almost from birth. We finally got him into a sleep specialist who said his "circadian rhythm" was off and who recommended a biological clock reset. I must say, Gideon showed some great self-discipline in going through this process, which involved moving his bedtime later and later until he got into a normal schedule. He stayed up all night quite a few times, as we had to do the whole thing twice. But now he seems to be pretty well set, although we have to be very careful over the next few months to keep him on a pretty rigid bedtime. Next semester he'll have a very heavy roster of classes as he'll be going through some of the requirements for his International Baccalaureate diploma, so it'll be even more important than usual that he be able to function well in school. In spite of all this he's been active in various activites: youth group (with a missions trip this summer), game-making on the computer, and plenty of time hanging out with family. He and Jim haven't found a Tae Kwon Do studio to match the one back in Virginia, but they are going to make another effort in the new year.
JIM
Jim's activities show up throughout this letter, so I'll limit myself here to his job. We are very thankful for the opportunities he's had with his company/companies. Although he's never changed employment himself, the company has been changed for him a number of times over the years because of buyouts. He now works for L-3 Communications. He has great co-workers and is at work on a fascinating project. As he says, he just showed up at the last minute for the photo op. Working on government contracts can be a bit of a nailbiter as you wait to see if funding will come through (although that's true in the private sector as well), but things look favorable for next year. We say often that our provision is from God and not from the job, and we need to remember that whatever happens.
THE HOUSE
The house we had just closed on last December has now been through a fair number of projects. I have to laugh (a little) when I think that we bought this house partly because we thought it wouldn't need much done to it and then I look at what we have done to it. These items include: floor and deck refinishing, new carpeting, painting, new kitchen cabinet doors and drawers, new drapes, new furniture, new windows, and basement finishing. That last item has been the biggest headache, as we were very inexperienced (actually unexperienced) in the areas of building permits and contractor licensing. Now that we know all this stuff we'll never use it again--I hope. But it's almost done and looks great. A little drywall repair, some touchup painting and the carpeting, and we'll be done. Nothing is ever as simple as you think it will be! Probably one of our lowest points occurred when we were told that the window well for the egress window was too small--that it had to be extended a full 12 inches further. This change involved massive dirt digging, cutting out part of the deck, and moving a support beam. What a pain! I was glad someone else was doing that. But we've worked as a family on painting the basement (for which Jim stayed up all night) and sealing the deck, along with the yard work. We have already had several overnight guests and hosted many get-togethers, including an open house in November. We deliberately went ahead and invited people over even when things were still in disarray, as we knew that otherwise we'd be out of the loop for a long time. People were very kind about the moving boxes, protective paper on the floors, and empty walls. We should soon be out of project mode and into maintenance mode.
TRAVEL
Our big trip this summer grew out of Gideon's desire to attend the youth retreat at our former church in DC. I said, "But I want to go on a trip, too!" So Jim and I ended up folllowing Gideon out to DC and meeting up with him, doing some visiting in the area, and then heading for New York City and the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. If you'd like a more detailed trip description read my previous post: "Our Wonderful New York Vacation." And it was truly wonderful. I would love to visit NYC again sometime. When I look back over the years of our marriage, and especially the years since Gideon was born, it's our big family trips that stand out. Next summer will be our last before Gideon graduates from high school, so there's a big change coming. I'm so glad we've taken advantage of the time we've had. In keeping with our having a high school junior in the house we made a college visit in October, combining a trip to Cedarville University in Ohio with several days in Chicago. Our friends the Gollmers put us up in Cedarville and we stayed in one of our signature ratty-but-nice hotels in Chicago. Both places were great fun. I don't know what Gideon will decide about college, but this trip at least gave him some things to think about.
BOOK OF THE YEAR
I can't close this letter without mentioning a book that has truly been life changing for Jim and me: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. As I've said many times about this book, it isn't a Christian book but it is truly Biblical in many of its ideas. As the book makes clear, happiness isn't a matter of self-indulgence but of self-discipline. I was so pleased when our book group at church voted to read THP for its current choice. We've been having great discussions as we've worked our way through it. Jim and I both plan to launch happiness projects of our own in the new year, and I plan to post entries on this blog about my progress. Do get hold of a copy of this book and read it for yourself.
Well, that about wraps it up. I'm looking forward to doing some part-time teaching in the new year at an ESOL school that ministers to Russian immigrants. I did some substitute teaching there this fall and enjoyed my class greatly--and they seemed to enjoy me, too. I look forward to continuing on with ministries at our church, attending Community Bible Study, singing in the Parker Chorale, and getting on with my writing. We hope you have a great year, too. Come and see us!
Debi, Jim, Gideon, Dorrie (El Doro the Magnificent), Sandie (El Sando the Great), and Smoggy
Friday, August 27, 2010
SOME MORE GOOD BOOKS--MOSTLY TRAGIC MEMOIRS
I have found in the past few years that I'm less and less interested in reading fiction. I'll get partway through a book I would have found fascinating ten years ago and just can't keep going. Or I'll hear or read about a book that sounds good but as soon as I realize that it's a work of fiction I think, "Why bother? It didn't really happen." Apparently this change in reading taste is common as people (gulp) age. In compensation, though, I've become more and more interested in memoirs, but they have to be a certain kind. They have to have a compelling narrative voice and they have to be devoid of self-pity and narcissism. (So those requirements pretty much eliminate Julie and Julia, although I loved the film.) Gretchen Rubin says that she found memoirs of catastrophes helpful in building gratitude for her own life; the following titles all have something tragic in them. I've put some titles from Rubin's list on hold at the library and am looking forward to reading them but realized that I'd already read a fair number of this type of book. Here are some favorites from the past couple of years or so:
Together on Top of the World: The Remarkable Story of the First Couple to Climb the Fabled Seven Summits by Phil and Susan Ershler with Robin Simon, Grand Central Publishing: 2007.
This is much more than a mountain-climbing book. It's a love story, told alternately by each spouse. Phil Ershler has battled since high school with Crohn's disease and then developed colon cancer and had to deal with that before he and Susan could climb Everest. What I found so touching and amazing about this book was the total trust and respect that Phil and Susan display for each other.
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love by Carole Radziwill, Scribner: 2005.
Carole DiFalco married Anthony Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy's nephew, and became friends with John and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Three weeks before Anthony died of cancer, John and Carolyn crashed into the Atlantic. Carole was born in a small town and gives us very much of an outsider's view of the Kennedys; the book would be worth reading for that characteristic alone. But she's also written unflinchingly about what it's like to experience an ongoing tragedy that is unstoppably racing towards death and then, on top of that, to have another tragedy land out of the blue.
In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Bob and Lee Woodruff, Random House: 2007.
This is another book co-written by a husband and wife. Bob Woodruff is the reporter who was injured so terribly by a roadside bomb in Iraq; he was kept in a medically-induced coma for 36 days and had to have part of his skull replaced with metal plates. Meanwhile his wife, Lee, coped with his situation and with the care of their four children. Quite a story. There is apparently a new edition out with updates.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Knopf: 2005.
This book generated substantial buzz when it came out. I didn't read it at the time and can't remember why I eventually did as I thought of Didion as being some sort of radical feminist left-winger, and perhaps she is. Whatever her political leanings, however, it has to be said that this book is pretty astonishing. Like the Radziwill book, it's also concerned with an ongoing tragedy and a sudden one: Joan and her husband, John, were dealing with the potentially fatal illness of their only child (Quintana Roo--isn't that quite a name?) and were eating dinner in their apartment after having come back from visiting QR in the ICU when John collapsed with a massive heart attack and died right there in the living room. Didion is achingly clear in her portrayal of so-called "magical thinking": the idea we have, even though we know it's false, that we can somehow undo the past if we do or say the right things. It is a deeply affecting and courageous book.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken, Little, Brown and Company: 2008.
I know I picked this up from the new-book shelves at the library because of the weird title. It turned out to be a memoir of McCracken's having a stillborn baby. Would it sound just as weird as the title if I said that parts of it are wildly funny, even in the midst of the calamity? You'll just have to read it. (But I will give one example: McCracken and her husband are living in France at the time of the stillbirth, but they don't speak French very well at all, so when they are asked, "Would you like to speak to a nun?" they misunderstand and think they are being asked, "Would you like to speak to a dwarf?") I know I said that Joan Didion's book is "astonishing." Now I have to say the same thing about this one. I don't know how you write something that is so honest and so devoid of any self-pity and that still conveys the depths of grief and despair over the loss of someone you've never even met.
George and Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism by Charlotte Moore, St. Martin's Press: 2006.
Well, another astonishing book. Moore tells about her life as a single mother with three sons, two of them severely, and agonizingly, autistic. Her husband leaves because he can't deal with the situation. She lives in the house where she grew up, a huge, tumbledown farmhouse in the English countryside. She deals with the unbelievable complications of life with her sons, meanwhile carrying on as a journalist. As with almost all books these days, you can read at least parts of this one online. Read the Prologue, and you'll never feel sorry for yourself again.
Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Never-Ending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes and Knitting Patterns Included) by Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass, Ballantine Books: 2006.
Perri and Sheila are mother and daughter, and this book is a delight. After you've read it you should then track down all of Perri's non-fiction books (she writes about med school, the medical profession, and knitting), avoid her fiction (not worth the paper it's printed on, in my opinion), and see if you can find any of Sheila's (Everybody in this House Makes Babies is her memoir of living in the Caribbean with her husband at the time Perri was born; you'll have to find it on a used-book site). The two of them together are a hoot. I was extremely tickled to see that Sheila, at age 82, is on MySpace. Although this book is by no means a "tragic memoir," the death of Morton Klass, Sheila's husband and Perri's father, is explored, as are the difficulties in Sheila's life as she ages.
Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story by Isabel Gillies, Scribners: 2009.
Well! Another one of those books whose title grabbed me. It was obvious to me that the book had to be about a failed-marriage/wife-is-always-the-last-to-know situation, and indeed it is. But Gillies is so disarmingly naive and charming (and, dare I say it, clueless) that you have to like her. And she's absolutely gorgeous into the bargain, so it's either reassuring or unnerving to know that she could get dumped. Warning to the squeamish: you might want to skip her description of childbirth. I was completely hooked, pulled along by her energy and honesty.
Together on Top of the World: The Remarkable Story of the First Couple to Climb the Fabled Seven Summits by Phil and Susan Ershler with Robin Simon, Grand Central Publishing: 2007.
This is much more than a mountain-climbing book. It's a love story, told alternately by each spouse. Phil Ershler has battled since high school with Crohn's disease and then developed colon cancer and had to deal with that before he and Susan could climb Everest. What I found so touching and amazing about this book was the total trust and respect that Phil and Susan display for each other.
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love by Carole Radziwill, Scribner: 2005.
Carole DiFalco married Anthony Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy's nephew, and became friends with John and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Three weeks before Anthony died of cancer, John and Carolyn crashed into the Atlantic. Carole was born in a small town and gives us very much of an outsider's view of the Kennedys; the book would be worth reading for that characteristic alone. But she's also written unflinchingly about what it's like to experience an ongoing tragedy that is unstoppably racing towards death and then, on top of that, to have another tragedy land out of the blue.
In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Bob and Lee Woodruff, Random House: 2007.
This is another book co-written by a husband and wife. Bob Woodruff is the reporter who was injured so terribly by a roadside bomb in Iraq; he was kept in a medically-induced coma for 36 days and had to have part of his skull replaced with metal plates. Meanwhile his wife, Lee, coped with his situation and with the care of their four children. Quite a story. There is apparently a new edition out with updates.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Knopf: 2005.
This book generated substantial buzz when it came out. I didn't read it at the time and can't remember why I eventually did as I thought of Didion as being some sort of radical feminist left-winger, and perhaps she is. Whatever her political leanings, however, it has to be said that this book is pretty astonishing. Like the Radziwill book, it's also concerned with an ongoing tragedy and a sudden one: Joan and her husband, John, were dealing with the potentially fatal illness of their only child (Quintana Roo--isn't that quite a name?) and were eating dinner in their apartment after having come back from visiting QR in the ICU when John collapsed with a massive heart attack and died right there in the living room. Didion is achingly clear in her portrayal of so-called "magical thinking": the idea we have, even though we know it's false, that we can somehow undo the past if we do or say the right things. It is a deeply affecting and courageous book.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken, Little, Brown and Company: 2008.
I know I picked this up from the new-book shelves at the library because of the weird title. It turned out to be a memoir of McCracken's having a stillborn baby. Would it sound just as weird as the title if I said that parts of it are wildly funny, even in the midst of the calamity? You'll just have to read it. (But I will give one example: McCracken and her husband are living in France at the time of the stillbirth, but they don't speak French very well at all, so when they are asked, "Would you like to speak to a nun?" they misunderstand and think they are being asked, "Would you like to speak to a dwarf?") I know I said that Joan Didion's book is "astonishing." Now I have to say the same thing about this one. I don't know how you write something that is so honest and so devoid of any self-pity and that still conveys the depths of grief and despair over the loss of someone you've never even met.
George and Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism by Charlotte Moore, St. Martin's Press: 2006.
Well, another astonishing book. Moore tells about her life as a single mother with three sons, two of them severely, and agonizingly, autistic. Her husband leaves because he can't deal with the situation. She lives in the house where she grew up, a huge, tumbledown farmhouse in the English countryside. She deals with the unbelievable complications of life with her sons, meanwhile carrying on as a journalist. As with almost all books these days, you can read at least parts of this one online. Read the Prologue, and you'll never feel sorry for yourself again.
Every Mother Is a Daughter: The Never-Ending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen (Recipes and Knitting Patterns Included) by Perri Klass and Sheila Solomon Klass, Ballantine Books: 2006.
Perri and Sheila are mother and daughter, and this book is a delight. After you've read it you should then track down all of Perri's non-fiction books (she writes about med school, the medical profession, and knitting), avoid her fiction (not worth the paper it's printed on, in my opinion), and see if you can find any of Sheila's (Everybody in this House Makes Babies is her memoir of living in the Caribbean with her husband at the time Perri was born; you'll have to find it on a used-book site). The two of them together are a hoot. I was extremely tickled to see that Sheila, at age 82, is on MySpace. Although this book is by no means a "tragic memoir," the death of Morton Klass, Sheila's husband and Perri's father, is explored, as are the difficulties in Sheila's life as she ages.
Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story by Isabel Gillies, Scribners: 2009.
Well! Another one of those books whose title grabbed me. It was obvious to me that the book had to be about a failed-marriage/wife-is-always-the-last-to-know situation, and indeed it is. But Gillies is so disarmingly naive and charming (and, dare I say it, clueless) that you have to like her. And she's absolutely gorgeous into the bargain, so it's either reassuring or unnerving to know that she could get dumped. Warning to the squeamish: you might want to skip her description of childbirth. I was completely hooked, pulled along by her energy and honesty.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Three Books You Must Read
Oh dear! When you try to get people to read something it's usually futile. My mother used to leave books on my bedside table when I was a teenager in the hope that I'd read them, and I don't think I ever did. But I can at least write this post, and then I'm not buttonholing people in person. Let me first say that none of these is a Christian book; none will tell you how to get to Heaven. So I make no claims in that area for them. They are unashamedly secular self-help books, and so a big piece of the puzzle is missing. We can't really help ourselves; we can't change our hearts--only God can do that. At least some of the ideas in these books need to be matters of prayer for me. Having said that, I will say that theSE three books truly flipped a switch for me in some daily life issues. Maybe they can do the same for you--who knows?
If you're only going to read one of these, read:
THE HAPPINESS PROJECT--WHY I SPENT A YEAR TRYING TO SING IN THE MORNING, CLEAN MY CLOSETS, FIGHT RIGHT, READ ARISTOTLE, AND GENERALLY HAVE MORE FUN by Gretchen Rubin, HarperCollins, 2009.
You may have heard of this book--it has been on the best-seller list and has a popular blog associated with it. I can't say enough good things about it. What the author has done without being aware of it is to take the famous quotation from the great preacher David Martin Lloyd-Jones, "Too many of us listen to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves" and written a whole book about how to change that. (Lloyd-Jones is saying that we need to take charge of our thoughts instead of just passively letting them wash over us. He almost certainly got this idea from II Corinthians 10:5: "We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" NIV.) Rubin is in her late thirties, lives in New York City and before this had written books about JFK and Churchill. One day on the bus she realized that, though she had a wonderful life with professional success, a great husband, two beautiful daughters and a close family, she wasn't really aware of her blessings on a day-to-day basis--she wasn't happy, most of the time. Why was that? Could she change it? And thus she launched herself on this project. Her main model was Benjamin Franklin, who set himself what could be called a "virtue project." You may have read the section of his Autobiography that tells about this, as it's a staple in high school and college English literature books. I thought when I read her title that this was just a light, humorous book that would be fun to read and ended up being so impressed with it that I used it as our "trip book" to read aloud in the car when we went to New York recently. It's hard to describe. It's not sappy. It's not dogmatic or preachy. It's beautifully written and very funny in parts. And it's inspiring. Truly. There is a glut of books out there these days on the theory and philosophy of happiness, but the ones I've seen are way too general. Rubin isn't afraid to tell us about the details of her life, including the time she got mad and threw a pillow at her husband because he said she snored. One of her ideas is that we need to come up with our own set of personal commandments to help us with our own happiness, tailored to our weaknesses. If I follow these 12 commands (Gretchen and I both have 12!) I will be happier: that is, I will feel productive, connected and in control, and have less stress and guilt. Here they are:
1. The big things that you do once in awhile matter less than the small things that you do consistently. I had a dear friend and colleague a number of years who shared my approach to tasks, especially in the area of housekeeping. We were both single and living alone, and we used to joke that we were "on the burst" housekeepers instead of "steady state" ones. Now I find myself muttering, "Every day, Debi, every day," as I am tempted to put off until tomorrow the post-dinner cleanup or some other daily task. But this idea applies to far more than wiping off the bathroom counter or keeping up with paperwork. It especially applies to relationships. I'm reminded of something my mother said to me once. She was talking about my housekeeping propensities (or lack thereof) but what she said applied to the way I lived my life in general (and, I'm convinced, the way most people live theirs.) She said, "Debi, you get your apartment all cleaned up and it looks really nice, but then when you try to keep it cleaned up you get bored. So you let it get really messy, and then you have to you clean it all up and that's exciting because it's dramatic." That's a pretty accurate quotation. And she was completely right. That was exactly what was going on with me in the way I lived my daily life. In relationships, too, I think it's tempting to have long slides, big blowups, emotional reconciliations, and then back to the long slide. But if that's the way we handle things, in whatever area, then we spend most of our lives in the "long slide" part of the equation. The house is almost always messy. The laundry is almost always behind. And the relationship (this applies especially to marriage) is almost always in a state of low-level bickering, disinterest or neglect. I have been so saddened as I've thought about my father's last years when he lived in San Diego. He remarried in 1995 after my mother died and moved out to California. It turned out to be a very good decision for him in many ways, but he did miss Colorado. As his health failed he became more and more limited in his activities, and he was very lonely. I needed to call him regularly, maybe once a week for 15 minutes. A small thing. It would have cost me practically nothing in terms of money or time and meant a lot to him. I just needed to plan to make it happen. But my father and I weren't particularly close. And there was a three-hour time difference between Virginia, where we were living at the time, and California. I would think of calling him when it wasn't feasible, such as 9:00 AM my time, 6:00 AM his time, or when it was inconvenient for me, such as 10:00 PM, my bedtime, which would have been 7:00 PM for him, right after supper. I'd think, Oh, I'll call him tomorrow. But, as my husband says, tomorrow never comes. I rarely actually made the call. But, just in case you think that I was a totally neglectful daughter, I did make sure that we went out as a family to see him in San Diego on a pretty regular schedule every other year. When he went into a nursing home in 2006 I made a point of having us go out there during my son's spring break and see what his situation was. Trips to San Diego involved plane tickets, a hotel room, a rental car, and admissions charges for activities during the day. They were a big thing. And I'm sure that my dad enjoyed seeing us. But . . . if I'd had to choose the consistent small thing or the occasional big thing, I would have done best by making those weekly calls. Now he's gone.
2. Quit offering unsolicited advice. No one's going to listen to you anyway, and you'll just annoy people. (This advice doesn't apply to parenting. ) I am the queen of unsolicited advice, so this commandment really hits me hard. I want to be tactful, so I often phrase my advice as a question: "Why don't you . . . ?" I have a hard time drawing the line between giving advice and offering to help, but if I take a task off someone's hands I guess I'm free to do it my way. It's very hard for me to suppress my natural tendency to take people by the shoulders and give them a good shake, but that sort of thing hardly ever works. You do hear stories of people being told, and told, and told again about some action they need to take, finally being persuaded, and making life-altering changes. I just seem to put people's backs up when I try to do this, though. Maybe it's a gift I just don't have. So I need to bite my tongue and keep my mouth shut unless someone's doing something really life threatening--or unless someone actually asks for my advice.
3. Shut up and deal with it. I don't use the words "shut up" to anyone else, but I like the way this command works for me. In other words, get on with it. Do what needs to be done. Quit whining. And don't be squeamish. I read somewhere recently about a mother who taught her children that squeamishness was the least profitable emotion on earth. It accomplishes nothing. So, Debi, clean up that mess, take care of that situation. Hold your nose if you have to, but quit digging your big toe in the dirt and explaining why you can't do so and so, or aren't good at such and such. And for goodness' sake quit saying that you're "not that kind of person" when you need to be that kind of person! I've said many times, for instance, that I'm "just not the kind of person who remembers to have her cell phone with her." And, sure enough, there have been numerous times when a charged-up, turned-on cell phone would have saved me and others a lot of time and frustration. (I know, I know--there may be people reading this for whom a cell phone is as necessary as an opposable thumb. Trust me--there are lots of people around like me.) I have decided that there are few utterances more irritating than the constant refrain of "Oh, I don't know how to do this" or "I can't do this" or "How do you do this again?" These utterances often come from those of us who have attained a certain age and concern our (supposed) inability to deal with new technology. My poor patient brother has given me his cell phone number at least half a dozen times. I've finally put it in my cell phone address book. It sounds small, but it's not--not for me, anyway.
4. Say what needs to be said kindly and with a smile. Just this morning I got out of the shower and saw that my husband and son still hadn't left the house to go over to the in-laws'. My sister-in-law is in town and we're spending as much time as possible with her. But instead of saying, smilingly, "Oh, I thought you had left," I snarled, "Haven't you guys left yet?" In fact I could write an endless stream of examples of my snarling at my dear husband and son, mostly over things that they have done with the best intentions in the world. Take a deep breath and smile before you say something. Or, as the book of Psalms says, "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer" (Psalm 19;14, KJV). The pastor of the church I attended in grade school always ended his public prayers with that verse. Both the mouth and the heart have to be involved.
5. Respond appropriately when others are rude and disrespectful to you. It may seem strange that I would list this command in a discussion of how to be happy. But many of us, when we lie awake at night thinking about things that bother us, stew over what we should have said in various situations where people said or did something rude. We're not so much unhappy about what the other person said as we are about what we said, or failed to say. It has taken me a long time to realize this principle, and is it ever a struggle for me to implement it! As the British would say, I find it a bit of a facer when someone is rude. You'd think that my years of teaching high school would have given me the ability to come up with good comebacks, but that's not so. And snappy put-downs are not really the point, anyway. It's a matter of self-respect and of having the relationship on a proper footing. Sometimes the best thing is to ignore the rudeness; other times some type of answer or rebuke is needed. But when do you do what? I agonize over this. So far in my new resolve on this issue I've at least managed not to do what I usually do, which is to be taken aback and not want to make other people uncomfortable (including the person who's being rude!), and instead have shut down in such a marked fashion that the person (the rudee, as it were) has noticed and said something, which has at least meant that the incident hasn't just been glossed over. I'm so terrible at thinking on my feet and so good at realizing what I should have said when it's too late. I've been trying to think ahead about what would be appropriate things to say in certain situations; now I just have to implement them. (How about, "I'm sure you don't mean that to be as rude as it sounds"?) Otherwise I just have another incident to stew about at 2:00 AM.
6. Cultivate the habit of remembering where you put things (including the car). See "I'm just not that kind of person" above. It does no good for me to say that I never remember where I parked the car, or put my keys or sunglasses. The time I've wasted looking for things is enormous. If I truly take that time seriously I will be motivated to do something about it. Just today I spent a useless hunk of time looking for my billfold. I knew I'd brought it home. Where on earth was it? I couldn't leave for shopping without it. I looked every possible place at least twice. We all know the drill. It finally turned up--on the piano bench. Why on earth did I put it there? Beats me.
7. Recognize who's in charge and don't butt heads if it's not you. Be gracious and do things their way. Maybe you'll be in charge some day.
8. DON'T FUSS. The faults that most irritate us in others are often the faults we have ourselves. I'm a fusser! If someone else were doing it I'd be saying, or at least thinking, "What difference does it make?" But when it's me, then whatever it is that's bothering me is the most important thing in the world. Just last week we hosted a family get-together to celebrate my husband's birthday. I planned to have us eat outside on our beautiful deck, but for some reason there were a lot of aggressive wasps out there and everyone came back inside. They decided to reset the table in the dining room, on the almost-new, completely BARE and UNPROTECTED dining room table. People were clinking serving dishes and silverware down. It sounded like shattering glass to me. I stood there, quietly stewing, wanting to say something but not being able to think of how to phrase things without sounding like you-know-who. Fortunately, my dear sister-in-law stepped into the breach and said, "Shouldn't there be some kind of protection on this table?" And everyone decamped to the kitchen table. Whew! Somehow I need to learn to handle situation such as this one in a way that puts the comfort of people first but still prevents damage to my possessions, WITHOUT FUSSING.
9. DON'T COMPLAIN. I say this to my son, but I do it myself. Sometimes I complain in order to make conversation, but it would be better to have silence!
10. Don't be difficult; say "yes" whenever possible. Agree with the plans if you can. Maybe it's not your favorite restaurant. Maybe you think it would be better to sit over there than to sit here. Maybe the timing could be better, or you're not in the mood to do this but would rather do that. I think of the lovely evening one Friday when my husband said, "Let's go to the Free Shakespeare play tonight." It was perfect weather for a summer outing, a rarity in Virginia. But I just wasn't in the mood. I hadn't thought about going then. I was thinking we'd do something else. Whatever. So we didn't go. And when we finally did go, several weeks later, putting ourselves though an unbelievable odyssey involving car and bus travel, it was rained out. (He never said a word of recrimination.) Why couldn't I just have said, "Sure, why not?"
11. Be more "there you are" than "here I am." There aren't very many "there you are" people around. Many conversations, for example, aren't really conversations at all: they're competing monologues. You're telling me about your experience, and I'm supposed to be listening, but what I'm really doing is waiting for you to draw breath so that I can get in the story about my experience. Jim and I have talked about this human tendency a number of times. This desire to get in my story or opinion leads to my often doing something that I hate when someone does it to me: I interrupt a lot. Don't draw that breath in the middle of your sentence! If you do that when you're talking to me, you're lost. I have also begun to realize that when I look forward to having new people over for dinner what I really anticipate is that the company will be interested in hearing about me. I'm not too interested in getting to know them. I'm making a little progress, though. Last week a family friend e-mailed me about the trip he was taking from Seattle east to the Colorado Rockies. We took the same trip, only in the other direction, in 2008. I started to tell him that in my reply. Then I stopped. This was his trip. He didn't really want to know about mine. Instead I wrote back that it sounded like he was having a wonderful time and that I hoped we'd get to see his pictures. If I'm truly interested in him and his trip, by the way, then I won't be so tempted to try to prove, at least to myself, that my trip was better. A focus on others will help me avoid the insidious habit of always comparing myself to others, sometimes to my credit, but often in the other direction. Galation 6:4 says, "Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else" (NIV). What drives us to be constantly in a stew about how we stack up against others is the "here I am" mentality.
12. Plan ahead so that you're prepared and on time. Is this an original piece of advice or what? I'm constantly impressed, though, with what I'm going to call "the importance of five minutes." It's so wonderful to have that little cushion of time--it makes all the difference between being stressed and being relaxed.
I'm sure I can come up with more commandments; I'll do that when I've implemented these.
THE SKINNY: HOW TO FIT INTO YOUR LITTLE BLACK DRESS FOREVER by Melissa Clark and Robin Aronson, Meredith Books: 2006.
I caught a passing reference to this title not long after it was published and ordered a copy. While I have never had any type of serious weight problem I had gone around for years carrying 10-15 pounds more than I wanted and feeling that I either needed to lose the weight or give up and buy a size larger pants. I had read French Women Don't Get Fat when it first came out and had really liked it but never implemented her ideas. I think (sorry, Mireille) that she's just a bit too hoity-toity for those of us who shop at a regular grocery store and don't make several trips a year to France to buy prunes. (Yes, prunes. Well, maybe she does a few more things while she's there, but she does buy her prunes in France.) The Skinny is basically FWDGF for ordinary American women. Some of the writing is pretty cutesy, and Melissa's recipes for the most part sound pretty inedible. ("London Broil with Caramelized Pineapple"?) But the authors give excellent advice on the day-to-day business of losing weight and then maintaining that loss. Something about the book gave me the impetus I needed to get rid of those excess pounds. I did buy the new pants--but they were a size smaller, not larger, and I'm still wearing them over four years later.
And this whole weight-loss issue leads to an idea I've had recently: There are diets and there are philosophies of how to eat, and the two are very different. But the diet books sell the most, because they promise you some type of easy-to-follow formula. If you'll eat this and not eat this, whether it's fats or carbohydrates or cabbage soup, you'll lose weight. So people put their faith in the diet and then don't follow it, or follow it only briefly, because it's too hard to stick to it. Since the only tool they've been given is the diet, and they haven't followed that, they just go back to eating the way they always do, which causes them to gain back any weight they might have inadvertently lost on the diet in the first place. If you have some type of over-arching philosophy of what you eat and how much you eat, though, then you know that you're in control and that tomorrow you can always cut back if you overeat today. The one philosophy-of-eating book that has sold well is, of course, French Women Don't Get Fat, and the reason for its success is, I think, that the author seems so glamorous to us Americans. (I know, I know: I just said that she's too hoity-toity. But I did buy her book, even if I didn't really do what she said.) She has an adorable French accent and is the CEO of a champagne company. How glitzy is that? Her book is charmingly written and illustrated. Stripped of their trappings and associations, though, her ideas are very simple: Eat well, pay attention to what you eat, and make wise decisions along the way.
Two good but differing examples of weight loss have occurred in the church we used to attend in DC. One of the associate pastors, a man in his thirties, had gotten to the point at which he needed to lose 35-40 pounds, so he started following one of the low-carbohydrate diets decried in the previous paragraph. However, from what I overheard him saying to others and from his obvious success, it is clear that he used the diet as a tool, not as a magic formula, pairing it with a good exercise program. He felt that it helped him to have some definite guidelines laid out for him, and the weight came off and stayed off. (To be fair, any diet that keeps you from eating what I call "industrial pastry" has some value.) The senior pastor, on the other hand, after being told repeatedly by his doctor that he must, must, MUST do something about his weight, settled on a more general guideline, along the lines that he just had to realize that he can't eat everything he wants to any more. He's now lost a significant amount of weight and looks at least a decade younger than he did a year ago. Both men, I think, thought of losing weight as a means to the end of having a longer and more fruitful ministry.
SINK REFLECTIONS by Maria Cilley-The Flylady, Bantam Books, first published in 2002.
I'm more than a little embarrassed to list this book as one of my top three. Much of it is unbearably sappy and goopy, and the theology is more than a little off kilter. However, I'm in the ranks of the many who've found The Flylady's ideas to be very helpful in the area of housekeeping. You can subscribe to her e-mail service; I did so and unsubscribed after about a week--I couldn't stand all that stuff flooding into my inbox. I have read and re-read her book, though, and now that we've moved into a newer, much larger, house, I'm planning to follow her idea of drawing up checklists for each area of the house. (Gretchen Rubin is also big on checklists.) Her best idea as far as I'm concerned, an idea which I'm still struggling to implement, has to do with establishing routines so that you automatically do household tasks the same way each time instead of having to re-think them every time you do them. Other cleaning/housekeeping books also make this point, especially the ones written by Jeff Campbell and The Clean Team. The idea is that you have a certain way you clean an area and you do it the same way every single time, trying to get faster and more efficient along the way. "Routine" in this instance is not being used as an adjective to mean "dull, ordinary, everyday," but as a noun that means "a set way of doing something." After all, gymnasts and figure skaters have routines. They do the same set of moves, exactly the same way, for thousands of repetitions, in order to get it as perfect as is humanly possible. There's no Olympic event called "kitchen cleanup," but there should be! If I know that I have a plan to vacuum and dust the living, dining and family rooms, that everything will be done without my having to go back later and do something I forgot, and that there is a certain amount of time that this task will take, I'll be much more inclined to go ahead and do it.
If you're only going to read one of these, read:
THE HAPPINESS PROJECT--WHY I SPENT A YEAR TRYING TO SING IN THE MORNING, CLEAN MY CLOSETS, FIGHT RIGHT, READ ARISTOTLE, AND GENERALLY HAVE MORE FUN by Gretchen Rubin, HarperCollins, 2009.
You may have heard of this book--it has been on the best-seller list and has a popular blog associated with it. I can't say enough good things about it. What the author has done without being aware of it is to take the famous quotation from the great preacher David Martin Lloyd-Jones, "Too many of us listen to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves" and written a whole book about how to change that. (Lloyd-Jones is saying that we need to take charge of our thoughts instead of just passively letting them wash over us. He almost certainly got this idea from II Corinthians 10:5: "We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" NIV.) Rubin is in her late thirties, lives in New York City and before this had written books about JFK and Churchill. One day on the bus she realized that, though she had a wonderful life with professional success, a great husband, two beautiful daughters and a close family, she wasn't really aware of her blessings on a day-to-day basis--she wasn't happy, most of the time. Why was that? Could she change it? And thus she launched herself on this project. Her main model was Benjamin Franklin, who set himself what could be called a "virtue project." You may have read the section of his Autobiography that tells about this, as it's a staple in high school and college English literature books. I thought when I read her title that this was just a light, humorous book that would be fun to read and ended up being so impressed with it that I used it as our "trip book" to read aloud in the car when we went to New York recently. It's hard to describe. It's not sappy. It's not dogmatic or preachy. It's beautifully written and very funny in parts. And it's inspiring. Truly. There is a glut of books out there these days on the theory and philosophy of happiness, but the ones I've seen are way too general. Rubin isn't afraid to tell us about the details of her life, including the time she got mad and threw a pillow at her husband because he said she snored. One of her ideas is that we need to come up with our own set of personal commandments to help us with our own happiness, tailored to our weaknesses. If I follow these 12 commands (Gretchen and I both have 12!) I will be happier: that is, I will feel productive, connected and in control, and have less stress and guilt. Here they are:
1. The big things that you do once in awhile matter less than the small things that you do consistently. I had a dear friend and colleague a number of years who shared my approach to tasks, especially in the area of housekeeping. We were both single and living alone, and we used to joke that we were "on the burst" housekeepers instead of "steady state" ones. Now I find myself muttering, "Every day, Debi, every day," as I am tempted to put off until tomorrow the post-dinner cleanup or some other daily task. But this idea applies to far more than wiping off the bathroom counter or keeping up with paperwork. It especially applies to relationships. I'm reminded of something my mother said to me once. She was talking about my housekeeping propensities (or lack thereof) but what she said applied to the way I lived my life in general (and, I'm convinced, the way most people live theirs.) She said, "Debi, you get your apartment all cleaned up and it looks really nice, but then when you try to keep it cleaned up you get bored. So you let it get really messy, and then you have to you clean it all up and that's exciting because it's dramatic." That's a pretty accurate quotation. And she was completely right. That was exactly what was going on with me in the way I lived my daily life. In relationships, too, I think it's tempting to have long slides, big blowups, emotional reconciliations, and then back to the long slide. But if that's the way we handle things, in whatever area, then we spend most of our lives in the "long slide" part of the equation. The house is almost always messy. The laundry is almost always behind. And the relationship (this applies especially to marriage) is almost always in a state of low-level bickering, disinterest or neglect. I have been so saddened as I've thought about my father's last years when he lived in San Diego. He remarried in 1995 after my mother died and moved out to California. It turned out to be a very good decision for him in many ways, but he did miss Colorado. As his health failed he became more and more limited in his activities, and he was very lonely. I needed to call him regularly, maybe once a week for 15 minutes. A small thing. It would have cost me practically nothing in terms of money or time and meant a lot to him. I just needed to plan to make it happen. But my father and I weren't particularly close. And there was a three-hour time difference between Virginia, where we were living at the time, and California. I would think of calling him when it wasn't feasible, such as 9:00 AM my time, 6:00 AM his time, or when it was inconvenient for me, such as 10:00 PM, my bedtime, which would have been 7:00 PM for him, right after supper. I'd think, Oh, I'll call him tomorrow. But, as my husband says, tomorrow never comes. I rarely actually made the call. But, just in case you think that I was a totally neglectful daughter, I did make sure that we went out as a family to see him in San Diego on a pretty regular schedule every other year. When he went into a nursing home in 2006 I made a point of having us go out there during my son's spring break and see what his situation was. Trips to San Diego involved plane tickets, a hotel room, a rental car, and admissions charges for activities during the day. They were a big thing. And I'm sure that my dad enjoyed seeing us. But . . . if I'd had to choose the consistent small thing or the occasional big thing, I would have done best by making those weekly calls. Now he's gone.
2. Quit offering unsolicited advice. No one's going to listen to you anyway, and you'll just annoy people. (This advice doesn't apply to parenting. ) I am the queen of unsolicited advice, so this commandment really hits me hard. I want to be tactful, so I often phrase my advice as a question: "Why don't you . . . ?" I have a hard time drawing the line between giving advice and offering to help, but if I take a task off someone's hands I guess I'm free to do it my way. It's very hard for me to suppress my natural tendency to take people by the shoulders and give them a good shake, but that sort of thing hardly ever works. You do hear stories of people being told, and told, and told again about some action they need to take, finally being persuaded, and making life-altering changes. I just seem to put people's backs up when I try to do this, though. Maybe it's a gift I just don't have. So I need to bite my tongue and keep my mouth shut unless someone's doing something really life threatening--or unless someone actually asks for my advice.
3. Shut up and deal with it. I don't use the words "shut up" to anyone else, but I like the way this command works for me. In other words, get on with it. Do what needs to be done. Quit whining. And don't be squeamish. I read somewhere recently about a mother who taught her children that squeamishness was the least profitable emotion on earth. It accomplishes nothing. So, Debi, clean up that mess, take care of that situation. Hold your nose if you have to, but quit digging your big toe in the dirt and explaining why you can't do so and so, or aren't good at such and such. And for goodness' sake quit saying that you're "not that kind of person" when you need to be that kind of person! I've said many times, for instance, that I'm "just not the kind of person who remembers to have her cell phone with her." And, sure enough, there have been numerous times when a charged-up, turned-on cell phone would have saved me and others a lot of time and frustration. (I know, I know--there may be people reading this for whom a cell phone is as necessary as an opposable thumb. Trust me--there are lots of people around like me.) I have decided that there are few utterances more irritating than the constant refrain of "Oh, I don't know how to do this" or "I can't do this" or "How do you do this again?" These utterances often come from those of us who have attained a certain age and concern our (supposed) inability to deal with new technology. My poor patient brother has given me his cell phone number at least half a dozen times. I've finally put it in my cell phone address book. It sounds small, but it's not--not for me, anyway.
4. Say what needs to be said kindly and with a smile. Just this morning I got out of the shower and saw that my husband and son still hadn't left the house to go over to the in-laws'. My sister-in-law is in town and we're spending as much time as possible with her. But instead of saying, smilingly, "Oh, I thought you had left," I snarled, "Haven't you guys left yet?" In fact I could write an endless stream of examples of my snarling at my dear husband and son, mostly over things that they have done with the best intentions in the world. Take a deep breath and smile before you say something. Or, as the book of Psalms says, "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer" (Psalm 19;14, KJV). The pastor of the church I attended in grade school always ended his public prayers with that verse. Both the mouth and the heart have to be involved.
5. Respond appropriately when others are rude and disrespectful to you. It may seem strange that I would list this command in a discussion of how to be happy. But many of us, when we lie awake at night thinking about things that bother us, stew over what we should have said in various situations where people said or did something rude. We're not so much unhappy about what the other person said as we are about what we said, or failed to say. It has taken me a long time to realize this principle, and is it ever a struggle for me to implement it! As the British would say, I find it a bit of a facer when someone is rude. You'd think that my years of teaching high school would have given me the ability to come up with good comebacks, but that's not so. And snappy put-downs are not really the point, anyway. It's a matter of self-respect and of having the relationship on a proper footing. Sometimes the best thing is to ignore the rudeness; other times some type of answer or rebuke is needed. But when do you do what? I agonize over this. So far in my new resolve on this issue I've at least managed not to do what I usually do, which is to be taken aback and not want to make other people uncomfortable (including the person who's being rude!), and instead have shut down in such a marked fashion that the person (the rudee, as it were) has noticed and said something, which has at least meant that the incident hasn't just been glossed over. I'm so terrible at thinking on my feet and so good at realizing what I should have said when it's too late. I've been trying to think ahead about what would be appropriate things to say in certain situations; now I just have to implement them. (How about, "I'm sure you don't mean that to be as rude as it sounds"?) Otherwise I just have another incident to stew about at 2:00 AM.
6. Cultivate the habit of remembering where you put things (including the car). See "I'm just not that kind of person" above. It does no good for me to say that I never remember where I parked the car, or put my keys or sunglasses. The time I've wasted looking for things is enormous. If I truly take that time seriously I will be motivated to do something about it. Just today I spent a useless hunk of time looking for my billfold. I knew I'd brought it home. Where on earth was it? I couldn't leave for shopping without it. I looked every possible place at least twice. We all know the drill. It finally turned up--on the piano bench. Why on earth did I put it there? Beats me.
7. Recognize who's in charge and don't butt heads if it's not you. Be gracious and do things their way. Maybe you'll be in charge some day.
8. DON'T FUSS. The faults that most irritate us in others are often the faults we have ourselves. I'm a fusser! If someone else were doing it I'd be saying, or at least thinking, "What difference does it make?" But when it's me, then whatever it is that's bothering me is the most important thing in the world. Just last week we hosted a family get-together to celebrate my husband's birthday. I planned to have us eat outside on our beautiful deck, but for some reason there were a lot of aggressive wasps out there and everyone came back inside. They decided to reset the table in the dining room, on the almost-new, completely BARE and UNPROTECTED dining room table. People were clinking serving dishes and silverware down. It sounded like shattering glass to me. I stood there, quietly stewing, wanting to say something but not being able to think of how to phrase things without sounding like you-know-who. Fortunately, my dear sister-in-law stepped into the breach and said, "Shouldn't there be some kind of protection on this table?" And everyone decamped to the kitchen table. Whew! Somehow I need to learn to handle situation such as this one in a way that puts the comfort of people first but still prevents damage to my possessions, WITHOUT FUSSING.
9. DON'T COMPLAIN. I say this to my son, but I do it myself. Sometimes I complain in order to make conversation, but it would be better to have silence!
10. Don't be difficult; say "yes" whenever possible. Agree with the plans if you can. Maybe it's not your favorite restaurant. Maybe you think it would be better to sit over there than to sit here. Maybe the timing could be better, or you're not in the mood to do this but would rather do that. I think of the lovely evening one Friday when my husband said, "Let's go to the Free Shakespeare play tonight." It was perfect weather for a summer outing, a rarity in Virginia. But I just wasn't in the mood. I hadn't thought about going then. I was thinking we'd do something else. Whatever. So we didn't go. And when we finally did go, several weeks later, putting ourselves though an unbelievable odyssey involving car and bus travel, it was rained out. (He never said a word of recrimination.) Why couldn't I just have said, "Sure, why not?"
11. Be more "there you are" than "here I am." There aren't very many "there you are" people around. Many conversations, for example, aren't really conversations at all: they're competing monologues. You're telling me about your experience, and I'm supposed to be listening, but what I'm really doing is waiting for you to draw breath so that I can get in the story about my experience. Jim and I have talked about this human tendency a number of times. This desire to get in my story or opinion leads to my often doing something that I hate when someone does it to me: I interrupt a lot. Don't draw that breath in the middle of your sentence! If you do that when you're talking to me, you're lost. I have also begun to realize that when I look forward to having new people over for dinner what I really anticipate is that the company will be interested in hearing about me. I'm not too interested in getting to know them. I'm making a little progress, though. Last week a family friend e-mailed me about the trip he was taking from Seattle east to the Colorado Rockies. We took the same trip, only in the other direction, in 2008. I started to tell him that in my reply. Then I stopped. This was his trip. He didn't really want to know about mine. Instead I wrote back that it sounded like he was having a wonderful time and that I hoped we'd get to see his pictures. If I'm truly interested in him and his trip, by the way, then I won't be so tempted to try to prove, at least to myself, that my trip was better. A focus on others will help me avoid the insidious habit of always comparing myself to others, sometimes to my credit, but often in the other direction. Galation 6:4 says, "Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else" (NIV). What drives us to be constantly in a stew about how we stack up against others is the "here I am" mentality.
12. Plan ahead so that you're prepared and on time. Is this an original piece of advice or what? I'm constantly impressed, though, with what I'm going to call "the importance of five minutes." It's so wonderful to have that little cushion of time--it makes all the difference between being stressed and being relaxed.
I'm sure I can come up with more commandments; I'll do that when I've implemented these.
THE SKINNY: HOW TO FIT INTO YOUR LITTLE BLACK DRESS FOREVER by Melissa Clark and Robin Aronson, Meredith Books: 2006.
I caught a passing reference to this title not long after it was published and ordered a copy. While I have never had any type of serious weight problem I had gone around for years carrying 10-15 pounds more than I wanted and feeling that I either needed to lose the weight or give up and buy a size larger pants. I had read French Women Don't Get Fat when it first came out and had really liked it but never implemented her ideas. I think (sorry, Mireille) that she's just a bit too hoity-toity for those of us who shop at a regular grocery store and don't make several trips a year to France to buy prunes. (Yes, prunes. Well, maybe she does a few more things while she's there, but she does buy her prunes in France.) The Skinny is basically FWDGF for ordinary American women. Some of the writing is pretty cutesy, and Melissa's recipes for the most part sound pretty inedible. ("London Broil with Caramelized Pineapple"?) But the authors give excellent advice on the day-to-day business of losing weight and then maintaining that loss. Something about the book gave me the impetus I needed to get rid of those excess pounds. I did buy the new pants--but they were a size smaller, not larger, and I'm still wearing them over four years later.
And this whole weight-loss issue leads to an idea I've had recently: There are diets and there are philosophies of how to eat, and the two are very different. But the diet books sell the most, because they promise you some type of easy-to-follow formula. If you'll eat this and not eat this, whether it's fats or carbohydrates or cabbage soup, you'll lose weight. So people put their faith in the diet and then don't follow it, or follow it only briefly, because it's too hard to stick to it. Since the only tool they've been given is the diet, and they haven't followed that, they just go back to eating the way they always do, which causes them to gain back any weight they might have inadvertently lost on the diet in the first place. If you have some type of over-arching philosophy of what you eat and how much you eat, though, then you know that you're in control and that tomorrow you can always cut back if you overeat today. The one philosophy-of-eating book that has sold well is, of course, French Women Don't Get Fat, and the reason for its success is, I think, that the author seems so glamorous to us Americans. (I know, I know: I just said that she's too hoity-toity. But I did buy her book, even if I didn't really do what she said.) She has an adorable French accent and is the CEO of a champagne company. How glitzy is that? Her book is charmingly written and illustrated. Stripped of their trappings and associations, though, her ideas are very simple: Eat well, pay attention to what you eat, and make wise decisions along the way.
Two good but differing examples of weight loss have occurred in the church we used to attend in DC. One of the associate pastors, a man in his thirties, had gotten to the point at which he needed to lose 35-40 pounds, so he started following one of the low-carbohydrate diets decried in the previous paragraph. However, from what I overheard him saying to others and from his obvious success, it is clear that he used the diet as a tool, not as a magic formula, pairing it with a good exercise program. He felt that it helped him to have some definite guidelines laid out for him, and the weight came off and stayed off. (To be fair, any diet that keeps you from eating what I call "industrial pastry" has some value.) The senior pastor, on the other hand, after being told repeatedly by his doctor that he must, must, MUST do something about his weight, settled on a more general guideline, along the lines that he just had to realize that he can't eat everything he wants to any more. He's now lost a significant amount of weight and looks at least a decade younger than he did a year ago. Both men, I think, thought of losing weight as a means to the end of having a longer and more fruitful ministry.
SINK REFLECTIONS by Maria Cilley-The Flylady, Bantam Books, first published in 2002.
I'm more than a little embarrassed to list this book as one of my top three. Much of it is unbearably sappy and goopy, and the theology is more than a little off kilter. However, I'm in the ranks of the many who've found The Flylady's ideas to be very helpful in the area of housekeeping. You can subscribe to her e-mail service; I did so and unsubscribed after about a week--I couldn't stand all that stuff flooding into my inbox. I have read and re-read her book, though, and now that we've moved into a newer, much larger, house, I'm planning to follow her idea of drawing up checklists for each area of the house. (Gretchen Rubin is also big on checklists.) Her best idea as far as I'm concerned, an idea which I'm still struggling to implement, has to do with establishing routines so that you automatically do household tasks the same way each time instead of having to re-think them every time you do them. Other cleaning/housekeeping books also make this point, especially the ones written by Jeff Campbell and The Clean Team. The idea is that you have a certain way you clean an area and you do it the same way every single time, trying to get faster and more efficient along the way. "Routine" in this instance is not being used as an adjective to mean "dull, ordinary, everyday," but as a noun that means "a set way of doing something." After all, gymnasts and figure skaters have routines. They do the same set of moves, exactly the same way, for thousands of repetitions, in order to get it as perfect as is humanly possible. There's no Olympic event called "kitchen cleanup," but there should be! If I know that I have a plan to vacuum and dust the living, dining and family rooms, that everything will be done without my having to go back later and do something I forgot, and that there is a certain amount of time that this task will take, I'll be much more inclined to go ahead and do it.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
OUR WONDERFUL NY VACATION--SUMMER 2010
This is a very detailed, day-by-day account of our trip to New York City and the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Please feel free to skip this if you just want the RD version! You can read that in the Christmas letter. So . . . for those still with me, this whole trip had its genesis in Gideon's desire to go to the youth retreat at our old church in DC. I thought Jim and I should come out to DC, join him, and do something we could have done much more easily during the 15 years we lived in Virginia: go to NYC. After we sent Gideon off on July 10 to visit with friends and attend said retreat, Jim and I flew to Minneapolis on Friday July 16 in order to attend Jim's Fourth Baptist Church and School reunion on Saturday, flew to DC Saturday night, visited Capitol Hill Baptist Church Sunday, did get-togethers in the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning got on the DC/NYC bus. 4 1/2 hours later we were dumped off on the streets of New York. Here's how it went:
Day 1, Tuesday, July 20:
Our first task was to figure out the subway system and get to our hotel, which wasn't too difficult. We had spent a fair amount of time figuring out a not-too-expensive hotel that wouldn't require a lot of travel time to get to what we wanted to see and had ended up with a place only 3 blocks west of the middle of Central Park. The block was beautiful, lined with old brownstone buildings, but the inside--well, it was clean. Narrow hallways, bathroom down the hall, layers and layers of paint. Gideon said, "This is the crummiest hotel we've ever stayed in." At first I thought
he was saying that it was the COOLEST hotel. My heart did sink a little at the thought of staying there for four nights, but it actually turned out to be fine. The beds were clean with sheets changed very day, there was only one time that I wanted to get in the bathroom and it was in use, and it was very quiet. There was a nice little cafe on the corner and a subway stop only 3-4 blocks away. We dumped our bags and headed for the Empire State Building. Our guidebook said that midweek and during the dinner hour were the best times to go, and we were hitting them both. Wait times can be hours, but we spent perhaps half an hour getting up to the top (or at least the 80th floor--we didn't spring for the extra $15 to go up on the spire), got in a picture of me with King Kong right before he took off at 5:00, and got the great views from the top. Altogether a very successful start to our trip. Well, we thought, let's see about getting tickets for a show. It's a weeknight, so things shouldn't be too booked up. Our first option was to see "The Addams Family," a new musical that we saw advertised on 
a brochure in the hotel registration office. (Don't you just love the way we plan ahead?) Our second option was to see "Wicked," which sounds awful but which is apparently quite delightful. So we ended up in Times Square, which Gideon says he really liked but which I was decidedly unimpressed with, found the discount TKTS booth, were told that "Wicked" and "Addams Family" weren't discounting tickets, trekked over to the theater for AF, were told that the cheap seats ($51.50!) were sold out, sent Jim to reconnoiter about Wicked, found out that it was COMPLETELY sold out, SIX YEARS after it opened, with a lobby full of little girls dressed up as p
rincesses, or good witches, or whatever. Jim said he didn't think they wanted a big sweaty male in there anyway. So we ended up getting cheap seats ($56.50!!) for AF for Friday night. Oh-kay. Now we needed dinner. Our guidebook said that there was a good pizza place near TS, so we ended up there. I didn't think the pizza was all that great, but it was a fun place--very big, very noisy, and very fast. An extremely friendly elderly gentleman stopped at our table to welcome us to New York--his wife said that he thought he was the mayor. We made our way to Rockefeller Center, poked our noses into St. Patrick's Cathedral, and then decided to head f
or the hotel. And we did end up there--eventually. Please note: always have a plan in mind if you're taking a mode of transportation for which it is possible to get split up. Let's just say that Jim's gallantry in trying to find me cost him and Gideon a fair amount of time and frustration.
Day 2, Wednesday, July 21:
I had heard on NPR about a new book detailing the culinary history of immigrant families living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. The author was the director of a museum there, so I thought it sounded worth a visit. We chose the garment workers' tour and were given a real glimpse into the lives of people who landed in NY and ended up sitting in stifling little rooms hunched over treadle sewing machines or handwork, being paid by the piece. Water had to be carried upstairs from a pump in the yard. Laundry had to be hung from a line in the kitchen. People slept in all sorts of strange contortions, the most memorable being that of the boys who had their upper bodies on a couch and their feet on chairs. The woman of the household had to keep schlepping that water, no matter what. After this fascinating tour (which I would highly recommend and which isn't on the top list of attractions in NY) we sp
oiled tourists went across the street to get gelato from a famous place and then headed to somewhere that isn't even IN most guidebooks: Wave Hill Gardens in Brooklyn. I had read about this place in a gardening book and had thought vaguely that maybe I could go there and Gideon and Jim could do something else, but we all went--no more splitting up for us! It ended up being quite an expedition, but we made it, and it is a truly lovely place. I wish we had had a little more time and that I had worn my hat, but we enjoyed it. Just don't expect the Hall of Armor to have any actual armor in it. Our trip back was MUCH easier, as we caught the shuttle that took us directly to the
subway station. We headed toward Ground Zero but couldn't see anything to speak of at all as it's all fenced off and full of cranes and cement trucks. We were told later that there was a memorial chapel there on the other side from where we were, but to me simply being there was haunting. For some reason I've always thought that the World Trade Center was right on the water and off by itself--I had no idea that it was just there on the street. Kind of ignorant of me, I guess. What it must have been like to have those huge buildings collapsing right there in the middle of everything! And now the surrounding buildings are carrying on as usual. We were reminded of how long the cleanup/construction effort has been going on by the fact that the little deli where we ate was still offering a 15% discount to anyone in a hard hat. I'm not sure what else we crammed in for this day, but we had earned our rest in our crummy cool hotel by the time we got there.
Day 3, Thursday, July 22:
I had been told a couple of weeks before we left on this trip that I needed to book our tickets for the Statue of Liberty ahead of time as they tended to get sold out. Well, alas for us, the tickets to go up into the crown were sold out well into September. However, there were still tickets for climbing up onto the pedestal. The only time that seemed feasible for us to go during our stay was 8:00 AM on this day, so I had a total heart attack getting us going, urged Gideon to wait on breakfast until we were sure we were going to get there on time, and then, of course, ended up realizing that there was no big rush. In spite of the fact that we were in the first batch of the day we didn't get on that ferry until well after 8:00 and would have had plenty of time for breakfast. Oh well. You never know. Other than the statue itself my favorite memory of this outing is that of a little woman showing a policeman a page with something highlighted on it, trying to get some kind of information. The policeman said, "Lady, I can't read that--it's in Japanese!" I must say that coming into the harbor and seeing that gigantic statue is pretty heart-stopping. You see pictures of it all the time with people and buildings around it to give it scale, but I at least didn't quite take in how big it (she?) is. (I still want to find out what she's doing with her back foot. Jim thinks she's pulling free of chains.) Of course, once you get onto the island and climb the pedestal you can't see much of the statue itself, but I made sure I did lots of peering up at her anyway. Jim's friend Vince (of whom more later) said that he always just tells people to take the Staten Island ferry instead of the actual SOL one. It's free, and the view is just as good. However, our tickets also includ
ed Ellis Island, something I wouldn't have wanted to miss. Another thing I didn't realize: EI was for the steerage passengers. The richer passengers were processed by customs and immigration onboard the actual ship. The poorer ones, who had already endured weeks at sea in appalling conditions, were herded onto ferries (since the ship couldn't come in that far) and taken to EI, where they could be told that they 1) were free to come in, 2) had to stay in the hospital/quarantine area because they had some type of physical or mental problem, or 3) had to go back. And only one person could stay with you if you had to stay for treatment. We got in on an extra tour of the hospital building that's still being restored, which was a big plus. Between Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum I came back inspired to do more reading on what the whole immigration experience was like. After we got back we thought we'd try to get in a view of the Brook
lyn Bridge at sunset, but Gideon and I kind of wimped out. That is a long bridge! I had thought we'd walk all the way across it, but then we'd have had to walk back . . . so Jim walked up to the first tower, about a third of the way across, while Gideon and I waited for him. There's a pedestrian/bike walkway over it, so mixed in with the tourists were plenty of people just going home from work. It reminds me of seeing the Circus Maximus in Rome and noticing that there was someone jogging around it. It was just his normal routine. Anyway, we needed to make a stab at Chinatown and had read in our guidebook that there was this fabulous ice cream place there, so, somewhat restored by our wait on the bridge, we hiked over there, passing a seafood shop with an squid (or possibly a misshapen jellyfish) hanging in it. We managed to get our ice cream and headed home to bed.
Day 4, Friday, July 23:
We had our tickets to the show for this evening, so with that in mind we decided to hit a few final big items. Since the M
etropolitan Museum of Art is one of the biggest attractions in NY we decided to go there first, hitting a "Hot and Crusty" place for breakfast. Great pastries. (Gideon is a serious bread and pastry man.) I got very tickled with a woman on the subway who tried to tell me that we had passed the museum way back and were going the wrong way on the wrong side of the park, and I had to show her on my map that I did indeed know what I was doing. She was trying to be helpful, but it was pretty funny--she had the art museum mixed up with natural history one. The MMA is pretty much like the Louvre--too much to take in, confusing, but stuffed with great stuff. We kept gett
ing split up (so much for our good intentions there) and Jim and I were rushing around trying to find Gideon when we passed that very famous Rembrandt of "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." I said, "Oh look!" and then we were past it. We did end up wandering by there again, though. I was most impressed by the Egyptian rooms, including as they do a genuine temple. Statues, paintings, armor (a suit worn by Henry VIII!). Tiffany windows. At least one Vermeer. Blur, blur, blur. Click, click, click. At some point in this trip I said that the days were rushing by just like the windows on the subway. We land back outside. That visit's over. Where to next? Let's walk across Central Park, take a look at some sort of castle and the outdoor Shakespeare theater where free performances are given every summer and people line up the night before in order to get tickets. For some reason I keep thinking of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had an apartment looking out on Central Park during her last years and for whom the reservoir in the park is now named. Let's peek inside the Museum of Natural History. It's after 4:00, so it's not worth it to buy tickets. We'll just take a look at the dinosaur skeletons in the lobby. Back out the door. Let's get some dinner. Let's get to our theater. Let's get milkshakes since we have some time to kill. Whew!
I found the musical interesting on a number of fronts. (In case you're wondering, we're huge fans of the old Addams Family TV show and also liked the first AF movie.) The theater is cramped (originally built in 1901) and doesn't have the greatest sightlines in the world. I hate having heads in front of me, but there wasn't a choice here. The performances were quite good, although if I may say so I think Bebe Neuwirth could have done a bit more with Morticia. The plot is basically "You Can't Take It With You" with dead ancestors thrown in. Of the choices we had for seeing a Broadway show I think we made the best one. In spite of terrible reviews when it opened this past April it's still doing quite well. I don't expect it to still be running five years from now, though. It's amazing, really, that legitimate theater is still going, since we're so spoiled with our special-effects/raked seating/multiple showings/bargain matinee moviegoing habits. It was kind of . . . hopeful. And sweet. Anyway, I'm glad we went.
Day 5, Saturday, July 24:
We checked out of our hotel, lugged our bags to the subway, and set out for Queens, where an old college roommate of Jim's, Vince Sawyer, is the pastor of a church: Faith Baptist Church, "the church with a heart, in the heart of Queens." After a few quandaries over directions we found the church, with Vince and his wife Terri welcoming us. What hospitable people! We had planned to visit the Museum of Moving Images in Queens, which was going to be a real treat for Gideon because it includes an exhibit on video games. Alas. It was closed for renovations, as the Sawyers had helpfully found out. So we went to the Science Museum for the afternoon. Vince took off to play softball in the upper-90's heat. And then we got in on a truly wonderful and unexpected treat: a concert by someone I'd never heard of, Marty Goetz, a Messianic Jewish singer and pianist. What a great evening! Here we were, in downtown Manhattan, in some sort of synagogue or temple or something-or-other, listening to this funny, talented, engaging man talk about his early years in New York City and his conversion to Christianity. I would have hated to miss out on him, and we would never have gone had it not been for the Sawyers.
Day 6, Sunday, July 25:
Church at Faith Baptist, with a rich and theology-dense sermon by Vince and friendly people. We took off after the regular service and headed out for ONE LAST MUSEUM in NYC, the Intrepid Land, Sea and Air Museum down on the docks. We ended up grabbing genuine NYC bagels on the way at the H&H Bagel Company. We've seen a ton of these ship museums over the years, but this one was fun. It was
raining, though, and cold. We persevered. We went through the nuclear submarine. We saw a presentation on Pearl Harbor. We went down the plane elevator. And then we headed back to a little pizza place we had picked out on the way there, had a very mediocre pizza, and made our way to JFK airport to pick up our rental car for our driving trip into upstate New York. That was quite an experience, but everyone was very helpful and the signs were good. Vince had lent us his GPS and given us a map, so we were able to navigate with only a few confusions back to their house, which is a ways from the church and nowhere near a subway station. The Sawyers were gone to a family function, so we had the house to ourselves. It was nice to relax on a couch and watch our Netflix DVD of Monk episoldes that we'd brought with us from home.
Day 7, Mon
day, July 26:
We had actually planned to leave on Sunday afternoon for our foray into the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, but Vince had offered to take us out on the ocean in his motorboat, so that was on tap for today. I had vaguely thought that we were just going for a short boat ride and that we'd be on our way out of town by early to mid afternoon. Well, au contraire! We went FISHING. It was QUITE an expedition. Vince is an avid fisherman and loves any excuse to go out, but he hadn't gone since the spring. So it worked out wonderfully for everyone: he got to go out and we got another totally unexpected bonus from our visit with them. Terri and I battled bouts of seasickness, but it wasn't too bad--we just couldn't sit for too long in any one spot. Gideon had a ball hauling up fish after fish--all of which had to be thrown back. Poor fish! I decided just not to think about it. We had a few fairly high-speed dashes with the spray flying. I don't think I'd ever been out in a motorboat before. It was totally great. And then it was time to go. We were trying to beat rush hour out of town but didn't really get going until almost 4:00, and our Googlemaps directions were a little confusing, but in the end all was well. It was a little wrenching to leave NYC, but we had other fish to fry. (Terrible, I know.) Our beginning destination was Watkins Glen, at the bottom of Lake Seneca, the largest of New York's Finger Lakes. And why were we going there, you may ask? Well, our reason for visiting this region in the first place was that my parents lived here in 1951 when they were first married. I was born at Sampson Air Force Base hospital in 1952. And my father always talked about the beautiful Finger Lakes. I had memories of a trip up here about 33 years ago one summer when my parents picked my brother Dan and me up from college and drove Dan to his summer job at a camp in New York State. We had driven by the closed-down base, looked at the lake, and gotten a nighttime view of Niagara Falls (and gotten lost on the way back to the hotel, but that's another story). I had a clear memory of seeing a sightseeing boat on the lake and wishing I could do that. Well, this was my chance! We needed a definite destination, and I had some vague idea that Watkins Glen was a nice place, or something my parents had mentioned, or something of the sort. We ended up getting there around bedtime
.
Day 8, Tuesday, July 27:
Sometimes it's good not to have any preconceived notions about a place you're visiting. We pulled into the parking lot at the state park and discovered that WG is this gorgeous gorge with waterfalls, trails, and 800 steps. It was a lovely surprise. We spent all morning there, hiking up one way and down the other. (Gideon did say when we got to the top, "Wait--we have to go all the way back down?" They did have a shuttle, but that would have been GIVING UP, and then we would have missed the water lily pond.) I'm sorry to say that the highlight for Gideon was probably the ice cream bar vending machine that flipped open the freezer lid and then picked up your bar with a weird vacuum hose. After our boat trip on the lake we headed up to Geneva, which is at the top of Lake Seneca, looked for a boat rental place, and ended up driving around back roads for awhile. We got to know a stretch of road called Route 96A pretty well and never did find any boats for rent. We stayed at the hotel in Geneva that was right on the lake, our biggest hotel splurge of the trip, and sat on a bench watching the light fade over the lake. It was a real treat.
Day 9, Wednesday, July 28:
Today, finally, we could visit Sampson State Park and see the museum housed in one of the old buildings from the days when this was a military base. We had to wait until today because the place is closed Monday and Tuesday. The website hadn't looked all that impressive, but we had wanted to go because of my father's time there, and of course it turned out to be much more of a big deal than we'd thought. Sampson was a huge naval base during WWII with 40,000 men and then started up as an Air Force base during the Korean War, which is when my dad was there. The naval section of the museum is run by the state since the WWII veterans are now too old the staff it; the same thing will happen soon with the AF area. For now, though, it has some extremely sharp people on site who really know their facts. Jim and I got to talk for some time to one of them, a former training instructor. After our time at Sampson we were left with an afternoon before heading to Niagara Falls. I had done some research about old mansions/homesteads in the area that might be of interest, but we ended up visiting Rose Hill Mansion, a place we had passed on our many passes up and down Route 96A. We thought we'd take a quick peek and then be off and instead had an hour-long tour guided by a very knowledgeable young man who was obviously interested in the families who had lived there. Even Gideon enjoyed it, and he's usually not a big fan of old house tours. And then it was time to head off to the Falls. We found a hotel, were told by the desk clerk about the Wednesday night fireworks (only during July and August), managed in spite of the very confusing signs to park and to there in time, and so ended our day in a very dramatic fashion.
Day 10, Thursday, July 29:
Last day of our trip before flying home! We certainly made the most of it, with trips on the Maid of the Mist boat at the base of the falls (windshield wipers for your sunglasses or perhaps a coating of Rain-X would be helpful; if you keep your glasses on you can't see through the water drops and if you take them off you're blinded by the spray) and to the so-called Cave of the Winds tour, which used to consist of actually going behind the small section of the falls called the Bridal Veil but which now just includes a visit to the so-called "Hurricane Deck," where you have the privilege of getting royally soaked. (Ponchos are provided.) I was a little disappointed in that. We did lots of walking around, looking at the falls from every angle possible, but fairly soon we felt that we had done all there was to do. Since we had been sure to bring along our passports we decided to drive over to the Canadian side. (Originally we had thought that we could land on the Canadian side from the Maid of the Mist but that's not the way it works: there are separate boat trips from each side.) As we came up the road that runs right in front of the falls someone was pulling out from one of the very small number of parking spaces there and we grabbed it. Jim paid for an hour, and we got to see the falls all over again, this time from a much better vantage point, watch a glassblower, visit the gorgeous gardens in Queen Victoria Park, and (for me) almost buy a very expensive hat. It was great, and well worth the rather long wait to get back over to the US side. Our last stop for the day was Buffalo, where we were to catch our flight home the next day. We had quite a time finding a hotel--who would have thought that Buffalo would be so booked up? Super 8 came through for us, though.
Day 11, Friday, July 30:
We were due to arrive home at 11:30 AM after a not-too-bad one-layover flight; that's not what happened, but we did make it by about 5:30. A long day, but the cats were on hand to greet us when we finally got home. What a trip! Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed experiencing it, both originally and while writing this post. We're already planning our next one, a driving trip during Gideon's fall break to visit Cedarville College and take a jog up into Chicago. Keep an eye out for that one.
Day 1, Tuesday, July 20:
Our first task was to figure out the subway system and get to our hotel, which wasn't too difficult. We had spent a fair amount of time figuring out a not-too-expensive hotel that wouldn't require a lot of travel time to get to what we wanted to see and had ended up with a place only 3 blocks west of the middle of Central Park. The block was beautiful, lined with old brownstone buildings, but the inside--well, it was clean. Narrow hallways, bathroom down the hall, layers and layers of paint. Gideon said, "This is the crummiest hotel we've ever stayed in." At first I thought
he was saying that it was the COOLEST hotel. My heart did sink a little at the thought of staying there for four nights, but it actually turned out to be fine. The beds were clean with sheets changed very day, there was only one time that I wanted to get in the bathroom and it was in use, and it was very quiet. There was a nice little cafe on the corner and a subway stop only 3-4 blocks away. We dumped our bags and headed for the Empire State Building. Our guidebook said that midweek and during the dinner hour were the best times to go, and we were hitting them both. Wait times can be hours, but we spent perhaps half an hour getting up to the top (or at least the 80th floor--we didn't spring for the extra $15 to go up on the spire), got in a picture of me with King Kong right before he took off at 5:00, and got the great views from the top. Altogether a very successful start to our trip. Well, we thought, let's see about getting tickets for a show. It's a weeknight, so things shouldn't be too booked up. Our first option was to see "The Addams Family," a new musical that we saw advertised on 
a brochure in the hotel registration office. (Don't you just love the way we plan ahead?) Our second option was to see "Wicked," which sounds awful but which is apparently quite delightful. So we ended up in Times Square, which Gideon says he really liked but which I was decidedly unimpressed with, found the discount TKTS booth, were told that "Wicked" and "Addams Family" weren't discounting tickets, trekked over to the theater for AF, were told that the cheap seats ($51.50!) were sold out, sent Jim to reconnoiter about Wicked, found out that it was COMPLETELY sold out, SIX YEARS after it opened, with a lobby full of little girls dressed up as p
rincesses, or good witches, or whatever. Jim said he didn't think they wanted a big sweaty male in there anyway. So we ended up getting cheap seats ($56.50!!) for AF for Friday night. Oh-kay. Now we needed dinner. Our guidebook said that there was a good pizza place near TS, so we ended up there. I didn't think the pizza was all that great, but it was a fun place--very big, very noisy, and very fast. An extremely friendly elderly gentleman stopped at our table to welcome us to New York--his wife said that he thought he was the mayor. We made our way to Rockefeller Center, poked our noses into St. Patrick's Cathedral, and then decided to head f
or the hotel. And we did end up there--eventually. Please note: always have a plan in mind if you're taking a mode of transportation for which it is possible to get split up. Let's just say that Jim's gallantry in trying to find me cost him and Gideon a fair amount of time and frustration.Day 2, Wednesday, July 21:
I had heard on NPR about a new book detailing the culinary history of immigrant families living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. The author was the director of a museum there, so I thought it sounded worth a visit. We chose the garment workers' tour and were given a real glimpse into the lives of people who landed in NY and ended up sitting in stifling little rooms hunched over treadle sewing machines or handwork, being paid by the piece. Water had to be carried upstairs from a pump in the yard. Laundry had to be hung from a line in the kitchen. People slept in all sorts of strange contortions, the most memorable being that of the boys who had their upper bodies on a couch and their feet on chairs. The woman of the household had to keep schlepping that water, no matter what. After this fascinating tour (which I would highly recommend and which isn't on the top list of attractions in NY) we sp
oiled tourists went across the street to get gelato from a famous place and then headed to somewhere that isn't even IN most guidebooks: Wave Hill Gardens in Brooklyn. I had read about this place in a gardening book and had thought vaguely that maybe I could go there and Gideon and Jim could do something else, but we all went--no more splitting up for us! It ended up being quite an expedition, but we made it, and it is a truly lovely place. I wish we had had a little more time and that I had worn my hat, but we enjoyed it. Just don't expect the Hall of Armor to have any actual armor in it. Our trip back was MUCH easier, as we caught the shuttle that took us directly to the
subway station. We headed toward Ground Zero but couldn't see anything to speak of at all as it's all fenced off and full of cranes and cement trucks. We were told later that there was a memorial chapel there on the other side from where we were, but to me simply being there was haunting. For some reason I've always thought that the World Trade Center was right on the water and off by itself--I had no idea that it was just there on the street. Kind of ignorant of me, I guess. What it must have been like to have those huge buildings collapsing right there in the middle of everything! And now the surrounding buildings are carrying on as usual. We were reminded of how long the cleanup/construction effort has been going on by the fact that the little deli where we ate was still offering a 15% discount to anyone in a hard hat. I'm not sure what else we crammed in for this day, but we had earned our rest in our crummy cool hotel by the time we got there.Day 3, Thursday, July 22:
I had been told a couple of weeks before we left on this trip that I needed to book our tickets for the Statue of Liberty ahead of time as they tended to get sold out. Well, alas for us, the tickets to go up into the crown were sold out well into September. However, there were still tickets for climbing up onto the pedestal. The only time that seemed feasible for us to go during our stay was 8:00 AM on this day, so I had a total heart attack getting us going, urged Gideon to wait on breakfast until we were sure we were going to get there on time, and then, of course, ended up realizing that there was no big rush. In spite of the fact that we were in the first batch of the day we didn't get on that ferry until well after 8:00 and would have had plenty of time for breakfast. Oh well. You never know. Other than the statue itself my favorite memory of this outing is that of a little woman showing a policeman a page with something highlighted on it, trying to get some kind of information. The policeman said, "Lady, I can't read that--it's in Japanese!" I must say that coming into the harbor and seeing that gigantic statue is pretty heart-stopping. You see pictures of it all the time with people and buildings around it to give it scale, but I at least didn't quite take in how big it (she?) is. (I still want to find out what she's doing with her back foot. Jim thinks she's pulling free of chains.) Of course, once you get onto the island and climb the pedestal you can't see much of the statue itself, but I made sure I did lots of peering up at her anyway. Jim's friend Vince (of whom more later) said that he always just tells people to take the Staten Island ferry instead of the actual SOL one. It's free, and the view is just as good. However, our tickets also includ
ed Ellis Island, something I wouldn't have wanted to miss. Another thing I didn't realize: EI was for the steerage passengers. The richer passengers were processed by customs and immigration onboard the actual ship. The poorer ones, who had already endured weeks at sea in appalling conditions, were herded onto ferries (since the ship couldn't come in that far) and taken to EI, where they could be told that they 1) were free to come in, 2) had to stay in the hospital/quarantine area because they had some type of physical or mental problem, or 3) had to go back. And only one person could stay with you if you had to stay for treatment. We got in on an extra tour of the hospital building that's still being restored, which was a big plus. Between Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum I came back inspired to do more reading on what the whole immigration experience was like. After we got back we thought we'd try to get in a view of the Brook
lyn Bridge at sunset, but Gideon and I kind of wimped out. That is a long bridge! I had thought we'd walk all the way across it, but then we'd have had to walk back . . . so Jim walked up to the first tower, about a third of the way across, while Gideon and I waited for him. There's a pedestrian/bike walkway over it, so mixed in with the tourists were plenty of people just going home from work. It reminds me of seeing the Circus Maximus in Rome and noticing that there was someone jogging around it. It was just his normal routine. Anyway, we needed to make a stab at Chinatown and had read in our guidebook that there was this fabulous ice cream place there, so, somewhat restored by our wait on the bridge, we hiked over there, passing a seafood shop with an squid (or possibly a misshapen jellyfish) hanging in it. We managed to get our ice cream and headed home to bed.Day 4, Friday, July 23:
We had our tickets to the show for this evening, so with that in mind we decided to hit a few final big items. Since the M
etropolitan Museum of Art is one of the biggest attractions in NY we decided to go there first, hitting a "Hot and Crusty" place for breakfast. Great pastries. (Gideon is a serious bread and pastry man.) I got very tickled with a woman on the subway who tried to tell me that we had passed the museum way back and were going the wrong way on the wrong side of the park, and I had to show her on my map that I did indeed know what I was doing. She was trying to be helpful, but it was pretty funny--she had the art museum mixed up with natural history one. The MMA is pretty much like the Louvre--too much to take in, confusing, but stuffed with great stuff. We kept gett
ing split up (so much for our good intentions there) and Jim and I were rushing around trying to find Gideon when we passed that very famous Rembrandt of "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." I said, "Oh look!" and then we were past it. We did end up wandering by there again, though. I was most impressed by the Egyptian rooms, including as they do a genuine temple. Statues, paintings, armor (a suit worn by Henry VIII!). Tiffany windows. At least one Vermeer. Blur, blur, blur. Click, click, click. At some point in this trip I said that the days were rushing by just like the windows on the subway. We land back outside. That visit's over. Where to next? Let's walk across Central Park, take a look at some sort of castle and the outdoor Shakespeare theater where free performances are given every summer and people line up the night before in order to get tickets. For some reason I keep thinking of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had an apartment looking out on Central Park during her last years and for whom the reservoir in the park is now named. Let's peek inside the Museum of Natural History. It's after 4:00, so it's not worth it to buy tickets. We'll just take a look at the dinosaur skeletons in the lobby. Back out the door. Let's get some dinner. Let's get to our theater. Let's get milkshakes since we have some time to kill. Whew!I found the musical interesting on a number of fronts. (In case you're wondering, we're huge fans of the old Addams Family TV show and also liked the first AF movie.) The theater is cramped (originally built in 1901) and doesn't have the greatest sightlines in the world. I hate having heads in front of me, but there wasn't a choice here. The performances were quite good, although if I may say so I think Bebe Neuwirth could have done a bit more with Morticia. The plot is basically "You Can't Take It With You" with dead ancestors thrown in. Of the choices we had for seeing a Broadway show I think we made the best one. In spite of terrible reviews when it opened this past April it's still doing quite well. I don't expect it to still be running five years from now, though. It's amazing, really, that legitimate theater is still going, since we're so spoiled with our special-effects/raked seating/multiple showings/bargain matinee moviegoing habits. It was kind of . . . hopeful. And sweet. Anyway, I'm glad we went.
Day 5, Saturday, July 24:
We checked out of our hotel, lugged our bags to the subway, and set out for Queens, where an old college roommate of Jim's, Vince Sawyer, is the pastor of a church: Faith Baptist Church, "the church with a heart, in the heart of Queens." After a few quandaries over directions we found the church, with Vince and his wife Terri welcoming us. What hospitable people! We had planned to visit the Museum of Moving Images in Queens, which was going to be a real treat for Gideon because it includes an exhibit on video games. Alas. It was closed for renovations, as the Sawyers had helpfully found out. So we went to the Science Museum for the afternoon. Vince took off to play softball in the upper-90's heat. And then we got in on a truly wonderful and unexpected treat: a concert by someone I'd never heard of, Marty Goetz, a Messianic Jewish singer and pianist. What a great evening! Here we were, in downtown Manhattan, in some sort of synagogue or temple or something-or-other, listening to this funny, talented, engaging man talk about his early years in New York City and his conversion to Christianity. I would have hated to miss out on him, and we would never have gone had it not been for the Sawyers.
Day 6, Sunday, July 25:
Church at Faith Baptist, with a rich and theology-dense sermon by Vince and friendly people. We took off after the regular service and headed out for ONE LAST MUSEUM in NYC, the Intrepid Land, Sea and Air Museum down on the docks. We ended up grabbing genuine NYC bagels on the way at the H&H Bagel Company. We've seen a ton of these ship museums over the years, but this one was fun. It was
raining, though, and cold. We persevered. We went through the nuclear submarine. We saw a presentation on Pearl Harbor. We went down the plane elevator. And then we headed back to a little pizza place we had picked out on the way there, had a very mediocre pizza, and made our way to JFK airport to pick up our rental car for our driving trip into upstate New York. That was quite an experience, but everyone was very helpful and the signs were good. Vince had lent us his GPS and given us a map, so we were able to navigate with only a few confusions back to their house, which is a ways from the church and nowhere near a subway station. The Sawyers were gone to a family function, so we had the house to ourselves. It was nice to relax on a couch and watch our Netflix DVD of Monk episoldes that we'd brought with us from home.Day 7, Mon
day, July 26:We had actually planned to leave on Sunday afternoon for our foray into the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, but Vince had offered to take us out on the ocean in his motorboat, so that was on tap for today. I had vaguely thought that we were just going for a short boat ride and that we'd be on our way out of town by early to mid afternoon. Well, au contraire! We went FISHING. It was QUITE an expedition. Vince is an avid fisherman and loves any excuse to go out, but he hadn't gone since the spring. So it worked out wonderfully for everyone: he got to go out and we got another totally unexpected bonus from our visit with them. Terri and I battled bouts of seasickness, but it wasn't too bad--we just couldn't sit for too long in any one spot. Gideon had a ball hauling up fish after fish--all of which had to be thrown back. Poor fish! I decided just not to think about it. We had a few fairly high-speed dashes with the spray flying. I don't think I'd ever been out in a motorboat before. It was totally great. And then it was time to go. We were trying to beat rush hour out of town but didn't really get going until almost 4:00, and our Googlemaps directions were a little confusing, but in the end all was well. It was a little wrenching to leave NYC, but we had other fish to fry. (Terrible, I know.) Our beginning destination was Watkins Glen, at the bottom of Lake Seneca, the largest of New York's Finger Lakes. And why were we going there, you may ask? Well, our reason for visiting this region in the first place was that my parents lived here in 1951 when they were first married. I was born at Sampson Air Force Base hospital in 1952. And my father always talked about the beautiful Finger Lakes. I had memories of a trip up here about 33 years ago one summer when my parents picked my brother Dan and me up from college and drove Dan to his summer job at a camp in New York State. We had driven by the closed-down base, looked at the lake, and gotten a nighttime view of Niagara Falls (and gotten lost on the way back to the hotel, but that's another story). I had a clear memory of seeing a sightseeing boat on the lake and wishing I could do that. Well, this was my chance! We needed a definite destination, and I had some vague idea that Watkins Glen was a nice place, or something my parents had mentioned, or something of the sort. We ended up getting there around bedtime
.
Day 8, Tuesday, July 27:Sometimes it's good not to have any preconceived notions about a place you're visiting. We pulled into the parking lot at the state park and discovered that WG is this gorgeous gorge with waterfalls, trails, and 800 steps. It was a lovely surprise. We spent all morning there, hiking up one way and down the other. (Gideon did say when we got to the top, "Wait--we have to go all the way back down?" They did have a shuttle, but that would have been GIVING UP, and then we would have missed the water lily pond.) I'm sorry to say that the highlight for Gideon was probably the ice cream bar vending machine that flipped open the freezer lid and then picked up your bar with a weird vacuum hose. After our boat trip on the lake we headed up to Geneva, which is at the top of Lake Seneca, looked for a boat rental place, and ended up driving around back roads for awhile. We got to know a stretch of road called Route 96A pretty well and never did find any boats for rent. We stayed at the hotel in Geneva that was right on the lake, our biggest hotel splurge of the trip, and sat on a bench watching the light fade over the lake. It was a real treat.
Day 9, Wednesday, July 28:
Today, finally, we could visit Sampson State Park and see the museum housed in one of the old buildings from the days when this was a military base. We had to wait until today because the place is closed Monday and Tuesday. The website hadn't looked all that impressive, but we had wanted to go because of my father's time there, and of course it turned out to be much more of a big deal than we'd thought. Sampson was a huge naval base during WWII with 40,000 men and then started up as an Air Force base during the Korean War, which is when my dad was there. The naval section of the museum is run by the state since the WWII veterans are now too old the staff it; the same thing will happen soon with the AF area. For now, though, it has some extremely sharp people on site who really know their facts. Jim and I got to talk for some time to one of them, a former training instructor. After our time at Sampson we were left with an afternoon before heading to Niagara Falls. I had done some research about old mansions/homesteads in the area that might be of interest, but we ended up visiting Rose Hill Mansion, a place we had passed on our many passes up and down Route 96A. We thought we'd take a quick peek and then be off and instead had an hour-long tour guided by a very knowledgeable young man who was obviously interested in the families who had lived there. Even Gideon enjoyed it, and he's usually not a big fan of old house tours. And then it was time to head off to the Falls. We found a hotel, were told by the desk clerk about the Wednesday night fireworks (only during July and August), managed in spite of the very confusing signs to park and to there in time, and so ended our day in a very dramatic fashion.
Day 10, Thursday, July 29:
Last day of our trip before flying home! We certainly made the most of it, with trips on the Maid of the Mist boat at the base of the falls (windshield wipers for your sunglasses or perhaps a coating of Rain-X would be helpful; if you keep your glasses on you can't see through the water drops and if you take them off you're blinded by the spray) and to the so-called Cave of the Winds tour, which used to consist of actually going behind the small section of the falls called the Bridal Veil but which now just includes a visit to the so-called "Hurricane Deck," where you have the privilege of getting royally soaked. (Ponchos are provided.) I was a little disappointed in that. We did lots of walking around, looking at the falls from every angle possible, but fairly soon we felt that we had done all there was to do. Since we had been sure to bring along our passports we decided to drive over to the Canadian side. (Originally we had thought that we could land on the Canadian side from the Maid of the Mist but that's not the way it works: there are separate boat trips from each side.) As we came up the road that runs right in front of the falls someone was pulling out from one of the very small number of parking spaces there and we grabbed it. Jim paid for an hour, and we got to see the falls all over again, this time from a much better vantage point, watch a glassblower, visit the gorgeous gardens in Queen Victoria Park, and (for me) almost buy a very expensive hat. It was great, and well worth the rather long wait to get back over to the US side. Our last stop for the day was Buffalo, where we were to catch our flight home the next day. We had quite a time finding a hotel--who would have thought that Buffalo would be so booked up? Super 8 came through for us, though.
Day 11, Friday, July 30:
We were due to arrive home at 11:30 AM after a not-too-bad one-layover flight; that's not what happened, but we did make it by about 5:30. A long day, but the cats were on hand to greet us when we finally got home. What a trip! Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed experiencing it, both originally and while writing this post. We're already planning our next one, a driving trip during Gideon's fall break to visit Cedarville College and take a jog up into Chicago. Keep an eye out for that one.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
The Simons Family 2009 Report
Hi All,
This is going to be interesting, writing my trademark l-o-n-g Christmas letter in a blog. We'll see how it goes. You should have gotten a postcard or an e-mail (or both) telling you that we've moved and giving our new physical address and this blog address. So here goes . . .
The Big Move
We've been talking for at least a decade about moving to
Gardening
No gardening to speak of this year! This spring we were looking to put our house on the market soon (ha!) and so I decided to cut off the tulip leaves right away before they had a chance to die back. They hadn't made all that great of a show anyway, and I didn't want to deal with the dead foliage later. Then we didn't actually put the house up for sale until July, so I sacrificed 2010's tulips for nothing. I did very little this summer beyond some deadheading and weeding, as my motivation was completely gone. Now that we're in the new house, though, I'm very much back in business. Our house is in a covenant-controlled community and all landscaping has to be approved by the HOA. At first I was a bit taken aback by all this formality--even a backyard vegetable garden has to be approved. The more I thought about it, though, the more I actually liked the idea. I tend toward impulsivity in gardening (Jim would say, "tend?"), and these requirements will force me to think things through. Having lived for 15 years in a non-covenant neighborhood I know how difficult it is to get neighbors to clean up their yards, so even though I foresee a certain amount of frustration involved I think it's a good thing. We're planning on an asparagus bed, a strawberry patch, and a row of raspberry bushes. We have a huge back yard (our lot is about 14,000 square feet, nothing compared to my brother's ten acres, but still!), so we have great plans. We'll have to lay it out well to get it approved, so that will be fun. There's an enormous deck off the back of the house, so I'll have great swathes of railing on which to put pots. It's going to be great! Watch for pictures throughout the year on this blog. (Another "ha!" is probably appropriate here.)
Gideon
As mentioned above, Gideon has not been thrilled about our move. I had picked out a Christian school here in the area that I thought would be good, but when he visited the school in April he didn't feel that it was a good fit for him, and I had to agree. He really wanted to get his International Baccalaureate diploma, a program he had started in Fairfax County, so he is now attending Smoky Hill High School, a highly-rated public school about 1 1/2 miles from us. It's kind of tough to start a new high school. His computer teacher is a Christian, though, his chemistry teacher likes to tell bad jokes, and he'll be taking a really cool class next semester in computer animation and graphics. (That class had a waiting list, but somehow his Grandma Jan got him in--we're not sure exactly what she did, but it's extremely hard to say no to her!) Our new church, Parker Hills Bible Fellowship, has a very active youth group, with a regular Wednesday night meeting that pulls in a number of non-church teenagers and a good roster of activities. He and Jim have found a Tae Kwon Do school very close to us, taught by someone who knows their great teacher back in
Jim
Jim went from being the manager in charge of a group of about a dozen people, having a cubicle, and running around with his hair on fire most days, to having an office with a view of the mountains and not many people around and spending his days doing more writing than computer-wrestling. He's excited about the project he's involved in, though, and has climbed quite a ways up the learning curve. He's stayed in touch with his former colleagues, and all the news he's heard has made him more and more grateful that he's not there any more, what with layoffs and furloughs and general upheavals. Jim's friend who replaced him always says, "I hate you!" when they talk. As we settle into our new church he will doubtless get involved with the men's bi-monthly Bible studies and something called "theology breakfast" (which was also a feature of our former church) involving theology but no breakfast and a very early start to Monday mornings. We managed to plan things so that he has a fairly short commute. He has recently spent a number of hours working on the plans for our basement remodeling. The permit has been issued, but we're going to have to enlarge the egress window so that it's another foot out from the house. That's a lot of dirt! At least we don't have to rip out any concrete. He and Gideon will get to do some digging when the weather warms up.
Pets
Well, in the 2006 letter I told the story of how we got Smoggy after years of my saying that we would not be getting any cats because I hated cats and was allergic to them. Note the past tenses. When we were discussing our possible move I told Gideon that if we moved to
So that’s about it for now. I’ve been looking for teaching jobs and have about decided that I should at least investigate getting certified to teach in
Jim, Debi, Gideon, Lupita, Smoggy, El Sando the Great and El Doro the Magnificent
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