Best of Waco, Back in Action

That's right, our having a second child and starting a scrapbooking business have encroached on our enjoying-Waco time, but you will forgive us for this, of course. In any event, we're back in it: our friends in the BOW club, the Barnards, brought over some malts from Health Camp (don't let the name fool you; I believe I gained a pound per spoonful).

What's most important here is probably the flavor of the malts, but that is an inadequate way to approach the subject. It is in inadequate in that it misleads the reader to think that the best way to describe what we enjoyed was a malt with some added flavors, those being peanut butter and hot fudge. This would be a serious error in description. No, what we enjoyed would be better described as a 16 oz. Styrofoam cup of intensely sweet peanut butter with a hint of some melty ice cream and some hot fudge smeared on the inner wall of the cup. Not a malt with some flavors; a FLAVOR in the shape of a malt. But "intensely sweet" is not the best way to describe the peanut buttery-ness; think Reese's Peanut Butter Cup peanut butter, volume turned up to 10. The peanut butter was equal parts sugar and peanut: sug-nut butter (pronounced shug-nut), pea-nugar butter, peanut sug-butt (that doesn't seem right, but its close).

We all agreed that adding hot fudge to a sug-nut butter malt is good in theory, but smearing it on the inside of the cup in small quantity seemed not to produce the same results had it actually been mixed in.

We recommend these malts, but you should hawk-watch the kid mixing the mix: when he says he's finished, ask him to return to the mixer for another spin, and add some more fudge, buddy.

Here's some pics (look closely at my right side...that love-handle? All the malt's fault):

From Waco to Musashino-Shi

I have to say I am very proud of Diane. d. reeves design house is going very well; Diane's gifts and creativity are really shining, and are being confirmed by others in the scrapbook industry (there's an industry? yep, a whole industry). Consider this one expression of my rising up and calling her blessed...
An editor of a Japanese scrapbook magazine (the industry is global? yep, global) ordered a sample of d. reeves products for a mini-album story she is doing for the mag. We just tracked the shipment: it has left Waco, spent a few minutes in Memphis, and promptly flew to Narita-Shi, Tokyo, Japan. Final destination: Musashino-Shi, Tokyo, Japan. I know! All the way to Musashino-Shi! We did a quick Google search for Narita-Shi to see where it sits in relation to Musashino-Shi...we didn't find much, which, incidentally, adds to the exotic mystery.

If you have extra time, Google the Shi's of Musashino or Narita and send us a map. Make sure its got those neat red lines like in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom".

Emma's Gallery

For her birthday, Emma received a nice easel. This seems to have set her right-brain to turning; these three pictures she called "Circles". Click the pics to see them larger.





After her "shape study", Emma drew this, which she called (no joke) "Rain on a Window":

"Birthday, the 3rd: a photo narrative, part the third"

"Birthday, the 3rd: a photo narrative, part two"

"Birthday, the 3rd: a photo narrative"

Our Own Lives?

I have a friend who is spending the summer in the Middle East working on some sociology project. She mentioned on her blog a conversation she had with some of her friends there regarding the marrying of men based on their level of cleanliness (in context, the conversation made loads more sense than it sounds here).

While I don't have any immediate insight with regard to the "messy/tidy" man question, I am interested in this sentence from the conversation:

"Would she (a wife who excels at keeping her husband "tidy") have time for anything else if she is always cleaning after her husband? Maybe a messy-looking guy is preferable because his wife would have more time to herself and have her own life, but compromise with a less-than clean-looking husband."

It is a strange expectation, in my sometimes-not-humble-enough opinion, that once a man and a woman become "one flesh", that either of them would maintain anything that would warrant being called his or her "own life." A man and a woman enter into the marriage covenant precisely because they have discovered that it is not good to be alone, and that it is very good to be together; why would they, then, want to go on being alone?

This seems to me a symptom of an already and implicitly accepted centering of the individual, where everything is ushered through the filter of the survival and happiness of "I". Sure there are communities, but they are understood primarily as the individual-voluntary gathering of individuals who have implicitly agreed that "I can come and go as it suits me, and I will remain here in as much as it is good for me and my interests or it holds my attention span." This life is much like a rave: sure I'm at the "club" (a quick nod to the idea of community), but I am dancing my own dance in my own space; near other people, but certainly not with them." And in case you can't tell, that sentence is meant to be critical.

Imagine a community whose members, rather than primarily seeking to hold onto their own lives, actually seek to give up their own lives in service to the others. Imagine a marriage that works this way! Imagine individual people who seek to enter into marriage in order that they might give up their "own lives" in service to their spouse! Here's an interesting test: if the preceding sentences sound repulsive, we should ask "why?" "Do I consider myself 'first' or 'last'"?

This is surely all a great mystery, as Paul was quick to declare. But it is a good mystery, for it is to push us forward to a better Marriage, the consummate Marriage of The Husband and His Bride: the One lays His life down for the other, the other returns all praise and thanksgiving to the One.

Jeremy