Power of Introverts

Susan Cain is the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. A good friend recently recommended it to me to read.

I found Susan Cain's TED's Talk about introverts, which is featured below. I love her beginning segment, where she talks about going to summer camp for the very first time with a full bag of books that her mother helped her to pack. She came from a family who enjoyed reading together, each with his/her own book. That sounds like my family!

Whether you are an extrovert or an introvert, this 19 minute video is entertaining and interesting! I hope you'll take the time to watch it.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

"Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths."

"Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale" by Dan Albergotti from The Boatloads.© BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008.

Turkey Chowder

I made turkey chowder tonight, which is a family tradition after Thanksgiving and Christmas. I chopped up too many potatoes, so then added more carrots--and ended up doubling the recipe. I used to do that when our four children were at home, but now there's only Chuck and me here. I'll give some soup to friends tomorrow, while we'll have some for the next few days.

Turkey Chowder

1 ½ Tbsp. butter

1 onion, thinly chopped

(optional ¼ cup chopped green pepper—I don’t use)

1 ½ cups chicken or turkey broth

2 cups diced carrots (about 3 medium)

3 cups peeled, diced potatoes (about 3 medium)

1 cup thinly sliced celery

½ tsp. salt

3 cups cooked, diced turkey or chicken

1 17-oz. can cream-style corn or pour in frozen corn kernels

½ tsp. dried thyme leaves

½ + tsp. Mrs. Dash

some drops of Tabasco Sauce

3 cups milk

1. In a large saucepan, melt the butter, and sauté the onion (and pepper) until they are tender.
2. Add the broth and carrots. Heat the chowder to boiling, reduce the heat, cover the pan, and simmer the chowder for 5 minutes.
3. Add the potatoes, celery, and salt. Simmer the chowder, covered for another 10 minutes or until the potatoes and carrots are tender.
4. Stir in the turkey, corn, other spices, and milk. Heat the chowder thoroughly, but do not let it come to a boil.

Brody, Jane. Jane Brody's Good Food Book. NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985. 347.

Photo of Chuck and Jan

Daughter MJ took this picture of Chuck and me before we went to a wedding yesterday.

Thanksgiving Blessings

Happy Thanksgiving!

Our New Wooden Floors!

The hardwood floors were finished yesterday. Now the finish has to set for the next seven days. THEN we'll have to move everything back into these three rooms! We are really happy with how they turned out.

Living room looking into the dining room

Looking at the entryway from the living room

Dirty Dishes

Lots of dishes get dirty when cooking a big dinner. Although I am not officially cooking the Thanksgiving Dinner that will be at son DC and daughter AA's house, today I cooked a 14 lb. turkey with stuffing. I also made candied sweet potatoes and a pecan pie, which is baking right this minute.

The latter two items are traveling to Austin for the bigger Thanksgiving dinner. Chuck and I already ate some of the turkey this evening for dinner. The turkey and stuffing will be left for future leftovers (especially turkey sandwiches with stuffing and cranberry sauce) IF son BJ leaves us any!

27 year old BJ is bringing his girl friend to Corpus Christi on Thanksgiving Day, while only the dogs and cat will be at home.

While up in Austin, our youngest and oldest children will gather together with AA's family and Chuck and me to share the Thanksgiving meal. We'll also celebrate Avery's "real" second birthday, even though her party was this past weekend.

I know that daughter AA and her partner KA would like to celebrate Avery's birthday here, but they traveled from Seattle for Halloween. They'll be staying there, where they are enduring a flooded basement in their rented house, which hopefully has not damaged their furnace. 

And tonight we still have lots of dirty dishes, pots and pans, etc. in the kitchen waiting to be cleaned. I am fortunate that husband Chuck has always cleaned up after my cooking messes!

I am thankful for my family, wherever they may be.

Dog/Human Training

Young Book Lover!

Avery found the book aisle at a toy store and started looking at books! This warms my heart. I am glad she loves books, like her parents and grandmothers do.

Pre-Holiday Griping

While re-reading the FF "mulleygrubs" poem, I decided that I needed to learn more about its author, Ginger Andrews. She was born in 1956 in Oregon and works as a janitor and cleaning lady; she has also won many awards for her poetry. Her two books of poetry are out of print. A search of the internet leads one to sites featuring her poems, especially Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Here is another of her humorous poems about Thanksgiving. This one is about the approaching holiday season (like on MINDIGHT of Thanksgiving Day!):

“Pre-Holiday PMS,” by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer (Story Line Press). 
 

I don't want to be thankful this year.
I don't want to eat turkey and I could care
if I never again tasted
your mother's cornbread stuffing.
I hate sweet potato pie. I hate mini marshmallows.

I hate doing dishes while you watch football.
I hate Christmas. I hate name-drawing.
I hate tree-trimming, gift-wrapping,
and Rudolph the zipper-necked red-nosed reindeer.
I just want to skip the whole merry mess—
unless, of course, you'd like to try
to change my mind. You could start
by telling me I'm pretty and leaving me
your charge cards
and all your cash.

Stained Floors

Our house with the storage van for the floor guys who are doing our floors.

Stained wood--done today. No walking on it. Two finishes will be applied next week.

Sawdust over everything. They filled an entire garbage can with sawdust they swept up.

Friday Five: Thanksgiving Soon!

An old-fashioned American Thanksgiving!

The Cure

Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk, I'm not really asleep
when my sister calls
to say she's just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bed ridden.
Aunt Bert says
it's snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She's been suffering
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn't do it, put on a red dress.

--Ginger Andrews (from Hurricane Sisters)

 
So this Friday before Thanksgiving, think about Aunt Bert and how she'll celebrate Thanksgiving! And how about YOU?

 
1. What is your cure for the "mulleygrubs"?

Well, eating chocolate always helps. Talking to one of my children or being with a friend. I am always helped by my two walking buddies--on Saturday mornings and on Sunday evenings.

2. Where will you be for Thanksgiving?

This year for Thanksgiving we will be in Austin, where we will also celebrate Avery's second birthday! Daughter MJ will be there from Salt Lake City, as will our in-laws who are Avery's other family.

 
3. What foods will be served? Which are traditional for your family?

 There will be a brined turkey, which is my daughter-in-law's specialty. I am bringing a pecan pie, cranberry sauce and candied sweet potatoes from Corpus Christi. There will be more yummy options.

 
4. How do you feel about Thanksgiving as a holiday?

It has always been a day of eating and football in my family, which is a lot of work. It won't be as much work for me this year and more fun seeing Avery and Margaret, so I am looking forward to it. Where's the feeling? Anticipation!

 
5. In this season of Thanksgiving, what are you grateful for?

I am grateful for my family and friends. After spending two days at the Lebh Shomea retreat center in Sarita, TX this week, I am appreciating the ways people have shown and nurtured me on this spiritual path, especially in silence.

BONUS: Describe Aunt Bert's Thanksgiving.

Lots of pies and rolls!

Hand = Image of Divine

Bede would hold up his hand. Imagine that that the 5 world religions were the fingers of your hand. If you look at your fingertips, they are so different. If your thumb represents Christianity and your little finger represents Buddhism, these 2 religions appear to be 180 degrees apart.

But as you follow your fingers down to your palm, they draw closer together. And so do the different religions. When you reach the palm, the fingers merge into one space. As do the religions, all converge onto the same sacred concept of the Divine.

Go to Bede Griffiths, Spirituality for Today for lovely and profound thoughts about this mystic.

Bede Griffiths OSB Cam^[1] (17 December 1906 – 13 May 1993), born Alan Richard Griffiths and also known by the end of his life as Swami Dayananda ("bliss of compassion"), was a British-born Indian Benedictine monk who lived in ashrams in South India and became a noted yogi. He has become a leading thinker in the development of the dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism. Griffiths was a part of the Christian Ashram Movement.

How Our Cat Copes

With all the noise and ruckus from our floors being redone, our cat often goes into seclusion in our main bathroom, which is where she sleeps at night.

Continued Home Saga

 There is this big pod in our driveway for the biggest furniture in the front three rooms of our house: the entryway, the living room, and the dining room. I park my car on the left side and must maneuver around the pod to back out. Chuck rescues me often!

 The openings into the kitchen and the family room are sealed off with plastic sheeting. This is the entryway with all the boxes of wood piled to the right.

Yesterday was their first full day of floor preparation. They ground down the cement flooring and even poured more cement. More leveling today before they start laying down the wood. You can see how they are measuring the uniformity of the flatness with the measuring devices on the floor.

Our cat is not too happy with the noise and blockage from her roaming areas.

Dining Room Color!

After much indecision and paint samples, I decided upon the painting color for our dining room. Samples have been a dark purple that looked brown, rose, orange, and peach. This morning I awoke with the idea of celery green! Chuck got that sample, and we decided to go with that for our dining room that used to have dark green wallpaper with pink and red flowers and birds on it.

Here is a picture of Chuck painting. In the background you can see the boxes of wood for the new floor. They'll start on that on Monday.

And here is what the space looked like with the wallpaper (and furniture):

Your True Self is WHO YOU ARE

"Your True Self is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16.26). Your essence, your exact “thisness,” will never appear again in another incarnation. . . .

"You (and every other created thing) begin with a divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, an absolute core that knows the truth about you, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, an imago Dei that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. As it says in Romans (5.5), “It is the Holy Spirit poured into your heart, and it has been given to you.” . . .

"John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), the Franciscan philosopher . . .called each soul a unique “thisness” (haecceity), and he said it was to be found in every act of creation in its singularity. For him, God did not create universals, genus, and species, or anything that needed to come back again and again to get it right (reincarnation), but only specific and unique incarnations of the Eternal Mystery—each one chosen, loved, and preserved in existence as itself—by being itself. And this is the glory of God"

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

Friday Five: HAPPY!

Today's Friday Five for RevGalBlogPals is brought to us by Revkjarla:

Give us five "I haz a happy"s...... for your Friday Five.  AND, bonus points for photos!!!!!

1. I am happy that I could visit youngest daughter MJ in Utah this past week and also see autumnal leaves!

MJ at Liberty Park in Salt Lake City

 2. I am happy that daughters AE and KA came to visit in Austin around Halloween and that we could see them, our granddaughter Avery and her parents.

Avery with KA at pumpkin patch

AA, Avery, and DC at pumpkin patch

3. I am very happy that husband Chuck is painting the walls that used to be covered with wallpaper!

Chuck painting out entryway this morning!

4. I am going to spend two days at Lebh Shomea, silent retreat center, in Sarita, TX next week.

5. I am happy that I have good friends, some of whom are pictured below.

Nov. 5, 2012

MJ's 23rd birthday with me in Salt Lake City.