Callapidder Days

Jan 23, 2012

The week in words

Barbara H. hosts a weekly blog carnival called “The Week in Words,” which is, as she says on her blog, “where we share quotes from the last week’s reading. If something you read this past week inspired you, caused you to laugh, cry, think, dream, or just resonated with you in some way, please share it with us…”

It seems I’ve been fitting in lots of reading lately — and from a variety of books. Here are some things that jumped out at me this past week.

From J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, which our pastor has challenged us to read as a church during January, February, and March of this year:

Many of us [would never] naturally say that in the light of the knowledge of God which we have come to enjoy, past disappointments and present heartbreaks, as the world counts heartbreaks, don’t matter. For the plain fact is that to most of us they do matter. We live with them as our “crosses” (so we call them). Constantly we find ourselves slipping into bitterness and apathy and gloom as we reflect on them, which we frequently do. The attitude we show to the world is a sort of dried-up stoicism, miles removed from the “joy unspeakable and full of glory” which Peter took for granted that his readers were displaying (1 Pet. 1:8). “Poor souls,” our friends say of us, “how they’ve suffered.” And that is just what we feel about ourselves!

Oh this struck home with me. How I long for a deeper knowledge of God, so that the heartbreaks of this world do fade to nothing in light of the joy found in knowing Him, so that disappointments and bumps in the road don’t matter, because my perspective is more like His.

I’m also reading The Next Story by Tim Challies (I’m going through it with my friend Jennifer). This past week, I read Chapter 4, where Tim talks about how very much we communicate in our culture. Between emailing, texting, and social networks, we face the very real potential for communication to be nearly constant. In light of all these words, Tim says:

The caution that marks our speech must also mark our texting, our e-mailing, our commenting, our blogging, and our tweeting. The fact that we communicate at all should cause us to stop and to consider every word. The fact that we communicate so often today and do so before so great an audience should cause us to tremble. As we communicate all day, we give ourselves unending opportunities to sin with our words.

Isn’t that the truth? “Unending opportunities to sin with our words.” It’s sobering, and makes me think I should probably be much slower to “speak” (whether it’s verbally or otherwise).

What have you been reading this week? Did anything really stick with you?

Visit Barbara’s blog to see what words others are remembering.

Filed Under: Books/Reading 4 Comments

Jan 11, 2012

The tale of a lost gift card

written by katrina · 12 Comments

On New Year’s Eve, after returning home from an out-of-town trip, I made a quick run to the grocery store. I needed to pick up something for dinner and enough snacks to get us through a night of many boardgames and and attempt to stay up til midnight to greet the new year.

In case you have never been to the grocery store at 4:00 on New Year’s Eve, allow me to give you some advice: don’t. Because everyone and their uncle will be there. You will park far, far away from the door. And you will sigh deeply as you find aisle after aisle difficult to maneuver. And you will wait in long — very, very long — lines when you finally get to the checkout area.

Or maybe that was just me.

Anyway, let’s just say that things were rather crazy at the grocery store.

And they were so crazy that somewhere between paying for my groceries and getting out the door, I dropped or misplaced or otherwise lost a gift card for the aforementioned grocery store.

(Small bit of background, not that you asked for it: We purchase grocery store gift cards through C.’s private school and do most of our shopping with those cards. It serves as a bit of a fundraiser for the school, and gives us a percentage off tution. Win-win.)

The gift card I lost was partially drained, but there was definitely still some money on it. And by the time I realized it was missing, two days later, I didn’t even know where I might have lost it and figured it was gone for good.

First, because there was no identifying information on it.

And second, because I was pretty sure that anyone who found a gift card lying around would rejoice in their discovery and tuck it away in their wallet.

While I was bummed about the loss, I just hoped that it was found by someone who really needed it.

Imagine my shock, when, 2 days after that (4 days from the original loss), I got a call from the grocery store, asking if, perchance, I had dropped something in their store within the last four days.

Incredulous, I asked if it was a gift card. And it was.

Someone had found it lying in the store, and rather than tucking it in their wallet, had turned it in to the store’s office.

And then the manager went out of her way to track down where and when the card had last been used, and whose store discount card had been used with it… and then located my information and called me.

I was surprised, thankful, and amazed to be reunited with the gift card. And to be honest, I was a bit humbled as well. Humbled that the extra kindness — out-of-the-way, above-and-beyond kindness — of two nice people had saved me from my own flusteredness or disorganization or whatever it was that led to losing the card in the first place.

I truly appreciate their kindness, and I am officially on the lookout to pass that same kindness on to someone else.

Filed Under: Everyday Life 12 Comments

Jan 11, 2012

Wordless Wednesday — Lego Missions

written by katrina · 4 Comments

…because sometimes, all the Lego men and women have to embark on dangerous missions that involve balancing on a steel beam, far above the earth. I’m not sure what they have to do there, but I’m sure it’s very important.

Visit 5minutesformom to see more Wordless Wednesday participants.

Filed Under: Family, Wordless Wednesday 4 Comments

Jan 10, 2012

Harry Potter series…film version

written by katrina · 7 Comments

We are not huge movie-watchers in this house. We’ll occasionally stream something from Netflix, or take the kids to see some family-friendly offering, but aside from a few old favorites, we just don’t watch a lot of movies.

We do, however, enjoy seeing movies based on some of our all-time favorite book series. We love the Lord of the Rings trilogy (and are anxiously awaiting the Hobbit movie coming out at the end of this year), and have enjoyed the three Chronicles of Narnia movies out so far.

And recently, Chad and I decided to (finally) watch the Harry Potter movies.

Both of us read the Harry Potter books as they came out, eagerly anticipating each new installment. And although I’m the only one who cried during books 4 and 7 (at least, Chad hasn’t owned up to crying), we both left the series with that sad, “I’m not quite ready to leave this fictional world” feeling. We had grown attached to the characters, involved in their story, and knew it would be a long time before another equally-enthralling book series would come along for us.

But yet, we hadn’t watched the movies. We’d seen the first two, and at least parts of the third, but that was it.

So recently, when Amazon.com had an awesome deal on the DVD set, I picked it up and last week, we finally decided that we were going to engage in a Harry Potter movie marathon.

Some notes about the phrase “movie marathon”:

When you are old like us, an “eight-movie marathon” does not mean watching eight movies in a row, hour after hour, like it might to some spry, energetic teenager. For us, it means watching movies during your leisure time every night until you are done with the aforementioned “marathon.”

And also, when you are old like us, and when you have a teenager who does not go to bed at a reasonable hour like your 5-year-old does, and who is not permitted to watch the movies because he has not yet read the books (we have a book-before-movie guideline we like to follow around here)… then a movie marathon involving very long movies might also mean that several of the movies require two nights of movie-watching to complete.

That being said, we embarked upon our movie marathon with excitement.

Our teen was not nearly as excited, though. He knew that every night, we would “encourage” him to head upstairs a few mintues early to read before bed, so we could get started on that night’s movie. We knew that we turned into pumpkins around 10:30 (and 10:30 is actually fairly late for us), so we had to get started as early as we could.

C.(13) was a good sport, though, and mostly just rolled his eyes at his silly parents who wanted to watch movies about magic and danger and the epic theme of good vs. evil.

Chad and I found that although we split the first two movies into two nights apiece, we then became eager to finish the rest of them, and stayed up as late as it took (we paid for it the next day) to watch movies 3-8.

Our conclusions?

We genuinely enjoyed the movies, and loved our week of Harry Potter, but we had some issues with the ending.

Even though we had read the books, we still felt loads of tension during the movies.

We were surprised by how much of the story we had forgotten. Though the movies made some deviations from the books, we often found ourselves saying things like, “Oh yeah… I had forgotten about that part.”

We were pretty disappointed with the very, very end. I won’t go into detail, so as not to spoil either the book or the movie, but suffice it to say that the very end was drastically different from the end of the book series. We figure it was probably done so they could engage in more “cinematic effect,” but we, personally, thought the book stood well on its own and didn’t need any “help” to make it more dramatic. But this disappointment did not detract from our overall enjoyment of the movie series up to that point.

We loved the portrayal of certain characters — especially Professor Snape and Professor McGonagall.

I’m thinking I might want to re-read the HP series sometime this year. I’ve said that in other years, but have never done it. But the movies made me want to re-visit Hogwarts and the rest of the HP world.

I stand by my belief that for the most part, books are almost always better than their movie counterparts. That is certainly true here. The books held so much more, and delved more deeply into the characters and the backstory. But the movies were a nice accompaniment to a much-liked series. I’m glad we finally made the time to watch them together.

Filed Under: Etc. 7 Comments

Jan 9, 2012

Hobby Focus

written by katrina · 19 Comments

I didn’t really make any New Year’s Resolutions this year. In part, because we were traveling on December 30th & 31st, and I just didn’t have the time to get alone, sit quietly, and articulate my hopes and goals for the coming year before January 1st struck. And in part because I’m not convinced that I do a very good job with New Years Resolutions.

Don’t get me wrong — I can’t help but approach a new year with that “fresh slate” feeling, full of dreams and ideas of how things might look if I would make some key changes and commitments. But sometimes, when I write out grand-sounding “Resolutions,” I become rather all-or-nothing about them. And then, somewhere around January 20th or February 17th or April 5th…when it becomes apparent that I have not attained the goals I was shooting for, I tend to give up completely.

So this year, rather than a list of resolutions, my approach is simply to implement a few small changes in a couple areas.

One of those areas is my lifelong tendency to dabble.

The truth: I am a dabbler.

I love to research and I genuinely enjoy attempting new things that intrigue me. But it seems that I often jump from one thing to another, especially in the realm of hobbies. I learn just enough to feel like I’ve made progress and then it’s on to the next thing. I end up feeling a bit like a “jack of all trades, master of none” when it comes to hobbies.

Some things I’ve dabbled in:

knitting (I believe I’ve completed about 3 items — all baby hats)
sewing (one pair of pajama pants and one backpack completed)
photography (took a photography class and played around)
baking bread (one fall season of learning, er…attempting, to bake bread)
computer programming (barely stuck my toe in the water there)
writing (wrote magazine articles ages ago…then let it go)
learning Adobe Illustrator (lots of playing around, but little lasting knowledge)
gardening (one summer wherein I was mostly defeated by the local bunnies)

While each of these little hobbies have been enjoyable in their own ways, I regret that I haven’t stuck with any of them long-term. I don’t regret the time I’ve spent with them — they are all good skills to have.

But I decided that this year, I want to spend some time going a little deeper in a few of them. I want to bring a bit more focus to my hobbying.

What am I hoping to gain?

First, I’m hoping to become a bit more proficient in a few hobbies. I don’t need to be a professional, but it would be nice to feel some level competency in the things I really enjoy.

Second, I want to discover which of those hobbies I would truly enjoy long-term. I believe that along the way, I might realize that some of them were nice to learn, but I don’t want to invest hours and hours into them over the long haul.

And third, I might come to the conclusion that for me, hobby dabbling is just more fun. And that’s okay too.

But for now, I’ve decided that each month, I’ll focus more deeply than usual on one of my hobbies. I’ve given myself permission to continue with a hobby for multiple months if I end up having tons of fun with it. But the bottom line is that I want to dedicate a good chunk of time to one hobby each month.

January’s hobby?

Knitting.

My husband, Chad, had asked for a knitted scarf for Christmas. Since he made the request in December, you might well imagine that…well…it didn’t exactly happen in time for Christmas. But we still have a few cold months left, so I dove into knitting last week:

I finished the scarf last night, but don’t have a picture of the final product to show you. However, Chad is very pleased with it. And I’m pleased that I have another project, and some more knitting experience under my belt. Now on to the next knitting project!

How do you approach hobbies? Are you a dabbler like me, or do you have a few that you remain committed to?

Filed Under: Everyday Life, Home stuff 19 Comments