How Old Am I?

MrsPages and I are in the throes of some personal and relationship healing. We’re both really looking at ourselves and each other and talking about why certain things keep happening and why certain other things aren’t happening. It’s been wonderful to look at our lives, discuss things, pray over them and then look back and say “Oh yeah! I’m a selfish git about that! Wow, I never realized,” and then ask and get forgiveness and truly work on loving each other even more.

During a walk to Forbidden Flavours (a local coffee shop) for two large decaf Melanges, MrsPages was talking about her latest revelation: her over-developed sense of duty. She will deny herself things even when it’s not entirely necessary, because “duty” says that’s the right thing to do.

In the midst of the conversation, she came out with this gem: “Of course the choice was clear to me and my duty-head…” I giggled. I laughed. I daresay I even guffawed. MrsPages stared blankly.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“You have a duty-head! MrsPages is a duty-head!” (say it out loud…)

Okay, so she didn’t find it that funny. The interesting thing is that none of the women who have heard this story think it’s funny either, but all the men giggle like schoolkids.

Then, of course, we make fart noises with our armpits and then go ring doorbells and run away. Maybe this will come up in the course of our relationship discussions.

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It was one of those days yesterday. You know. The kind where everything just seems mixed up and strange.

Our meal chaos plan yesterday included:

Lunch for Breakfast (We had mini pizzas and leftover brownies.)
Breakfast for Lunch (We had raisin oatmeal and OJ.)
Snack for Dinner (We had cheese chunks, marshmallows, and cookies)
and
Dinner for Snack. (By the time I got back from the grocery store, it was 7pm! We had smokies on buns, with salad and chips)

And I’m a self-proclaimed health nut?!

I wasn’t sure if I should share this.

I really want our blog to be an encouraging place. A place where people come and go away smiling.

But that means I don’t feel like blogging, because I don’t feel like smiling and I can’t think of anything that might make others smile.

I went to Halifax, once, when I was fifteen. I remember walking down the beach in the evening, and enjoying the view of the endless horizon. Then we began peering intently at our feet searching for washed-up sea treasure. Suddenly I looked up and could see nothing. I was surrounded by a thick grey fog. I could hear the beach waves, the distant freighters, and my friends, all who seemed a short distance away, but I could see nothing, nothing at all.

I’ve struggled with times of darkness for as long as I can remember. And they feel just like that evening on the beach. I am intently trying to live my life and I pause to look around and find that I am surrounded by a grey cloud that obliterates the view. I know life is going on around me, but I can’t seem to find it. I feel cut off, cast off, alone.

And God seems very far away.

It’s even hard to hear His voice. And I begin to wonder if there’s anything at all past the fog, past the grey cloud, past the darkness.

And so I wait. Like a lost hiker. Trusting in Him, though I feel Him not.

Psalm 13

How long, Lord, will you continue to ignore me?
How long will you pay no attention to me?
How long must I worry, and suffer in broad daylight?
How long will my enemy gloat over me?
Look at me! Answer me, O Lord my God!
Revive me, or else I will die!
Then my enemy will say, “I have defeated him!”
Then my foes will rejoice because I am upended.
But I trust in your faithfulness.
May I rejoice because of your deliverance!
I will sing praises to the Lord
when he vindicates me.

We’ve been stressing for a long time about this.

The way our house is laid out, you can see almost every wall on the upper floor from the front door. There is a place in the living room that you can see the living room, front hall, hallway, bathroom, kitchen and dining room walls. There is no place that is a clean break between all these walls, so they pretty much all have to be one colour.

Choosing this colour has paralyzed us for a long time, but now that the new front hall is primed and ready for paint, it was go time. So we did it. 3 trips to Home Depot to pick up paint chips resulted in nothing but more choices, so MrsPages decided we’d hold a Survivor/American Idol showdown. She bubble sorted every single colour chip from the paint store. Then she cut swatches of all the colours we’d been looking at and stuck them on our largest white wall.

Then we started voting chips off the island.

We stood in the afternoon sunlight, a good distance away from the wall. We decided that no matter what we thought of a chip, if the other didn’t like it, it was gone. One vote was enough. They decreased in number, quickly at first then more slowly.

It all came down to a few shades of taupey brown, two shades of light blue and two shades of more dramatic green. We both decided that the blue just wasn’t us. The taupey browns were similar to a colour that we put on a wall as a test a year or so ago, and we decided we didn’t want to go there. So green it is. Behr Tint 410E-3, “Rejuvenate” green, that is.

Here’s the colour, and the action in time-lapse. The first frame is the huge pile of chips we started with. The black marks on the right side of the wall are a triple-light switch without the cover on and the hole where the alarm system wire goes.

[edit - pics of the painted ex-closet area are here]

We used to have a closet at the front door. It was a pain to get to, as it was right behind the opened front door. In the winter, as all 7 of us pile in the front door, the first few in would get pushed off of the postage stamp of linoleum reserved for dirty boots. No one could hang up a coat until everyone moved into the living room so the door could be closed, exposing the closet.

This is was not good.

So, we decided to tear the whole thing out. We’d have an open entryway with hooks on the wall and a bench, and we’d expand the linoleum area by at least a factor of 3. In the picture of the demolition, it’s LittlePage3 holding the hammer, but off to the left is MrSnowy. Ash and MrSnowy helped with tearout and the cleanup. We hate cleanup. We love MrSnowy and Ash for helping with the cleanup.

When we drywalled the newly framed hallway area, MrBrad was there with his tools for 3 days, assisting with the drywall installation and doing the mudding. We hate mudding. We hate dust. We love MrBrad for doing the mudding.

The floor was a wreck under the linoleum, and we needed to cut out some of the hardwoods to put the new floor area down. MrMike is a friend of ours who is also a flooring installer. He came over and did an absolutely beautiful job of putting subfloor in and framing it with leftover hardwoods. He’s just waiting for us to decide on a linoleum pattern and he’s going to install that for us too. We love MrMike for doing the floor. Sorry, MrMike, no pictures of the floor yet.

Ash had some time one her hands and decided she wanted to come over. She spent the time she was here painting the new front hall with drywall primer. MrsPages and the kids did school and normal schedule, Ash just came and painted. She was covered in paint specks and she was tired at the end of the day. We love Ash for coming over to paint “just because”.

This is all just great, but looking back on our whole set of house renovations (not just this closet) I see this pattern repeating itself again and again. Our pictures of the projects are full of friends giving up time and sweat (and occasionally blood) to work with us and spend time here. We feel so unworthy. I’m not sure what we did to deserve the friends we have. Heck, we don’t even serve caffeinated coffee.

I can only hope that we can in some way repay the love shown to us by our friends. Not just happy phone calls and handshakes at church (though those are important too). Love that holds the other end of a sheet of drywall or cleans a roller cover or sands a butt-joint on the ceiling for the third time. Love with feet on.

Love that keeps us going.

[edit - See the painted closet area here.]

I just noticed we have a category called “Blogs We Read”. I like that, and whoever put it there is a genius. (Thanks dear!)

I’ll add to the list by mentioning christdot.org.

Christdot (”X.” to the regulars) is a smallish site that posts recent news articles relating to faith in many ways and allows discussion.

The difference between Christdot and the other “christian discussion” sites that I’ve found is threefold:

1. Christdot encourages discussion. Real Discussion. No flames. No “you suck” posts. Real, mature discussion. (Well, mostly mature…). Knee-jerk reactions are called out as such and the reasons behind them discussed.
2. Actively posting Christdot members include laity and pastors alike. There are Orthodox-ers, Emergents, Reformers, Messianics, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Atheists and likely any other major faith you care to name (and a few more). This might be seen as a bad thing on a Christian site, but the moderators at Christdot do a fantastic job at keeping conversations Christianity-centered and intelligent. There is a regular Muslim poster that is very well-read and asks real questions that provoke quite deep conversations. It’s wonderful to hear an Orthodox take on the quickly changing “protestant” side of the house, etc. etc. etc.
3. Through all this, Christdot manages to keep the entire site attitude fun, Christ-centered, respectful, intelligent and interesting.
   

Members can submit stories for the admins to consider placing on the front page, and also have a “journal” (similar to a blog) where they can post their own stories and thoughts for comment and discussion.

It’s one of my “check many times a day” sites.

I read this article today about the tragic deaths of two different five-year-old Nunavut boys in a month. The boys were both sledding into the path of vehicles, and were struck and killed.

Some excerpts:

The death of a five-year-old boy from a vehicle collision in Whale Cove late last week — the second such death to hit Nunavut in the past month — has raised questions about who should be responsible for keeping children safe.

Has it really? Do these incidents suddenly make us wonder who is responsible for a child’s safety? I think any normal person would assume that a parent is responsible for a child’s safety, especially a five-year-old sledding into the street.

Arnie Brown, the public works superintendent in Rankin Inlet, said his hamlet has had to ruin children’s fun by erecting snowbanks to prevent them from sliding onto roads.

This comment is indicative of the whole problem. They are actually thinking, even in a small part of their brains, that this is ruining the kids’ fun instead of keeping them alive. I’d even be so bold as to guess that they’ve heard that phrase from a parent which is why they used it.

“Perhaps what is missing in the whole picture is direct adult supervision,” he said.

…in the Understatement Of The Year.

“I think if parents are keeping track of their kids, and they know they’re playing in a safe area, that it’s that much better,” Brown said.

… in the close runner-up for Understatement Of The Year.

Another CBC article regarding previous deaths of this type mentions:

Iqaluit vehicles failed safety checks, were being driven with broken reverse alarms, and how young children had been wandering around heavy equipment or on the streets without supervision when the accidents occurred.

Does anyone else see the huge glaring final phrase in that sentence? I’ll repeat it because it bears repeating: “young children had been wandering around heavy equipment or on the streets without supervision when the accidents occurred“. Yes, there were problems with the back-up alarms, but those are secondary, last-ditch safety devices. If a five-year-old needs to hear the beeping to realize he shouldn’t be playing near a city truck, there’s larger issues at stake.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. These deaths are tragic. I’ve had my own (large) share of “inattentive parent” moments where things have gone wrong. I can’t imagine what it must be like to bury your five-year-old.

But where were they? That’s the question no one seems to be asking. The jury recommendations are about how to make sure that unattended five-year-olds don’t get hurt again. How about avoiding unattended five-year-olds?

But now, because of poor parenting (yes, there, I said it) those drivers will have to walk around with the guilt of having been involved in the death of a child. Because of poor parenting, parents will have to live with the memory of a dead child. Because of poor parenting, municipalities that can’t afford it will have to make infrastructure changes and run “awareness” programs that won’t change anything because they only work when parents assist their children in internalizing the message and the ones that will do that are the ones that don’t need to hear the message in the first place.

Parenting has been an important, passionate issue of ours for a long time. We’ve talked about beginning some parenting seminars for our church and for the downtown neighbourhood that surrounds it. We know a number of people with experience directing these seminars that we could bring in.

This might just be the impetus we need to actually do it. And we will be sitting in the front row, because the Pages Chateau certainly has lots of glass.

Page1 likes to write. Sometimes she has trouble thinking of ideas and so will ask MrPages for a topic. A few months back he challenged her to write a poem about camping with cows. She liked the assignment so much, that last night she asked for another poem topic.

MrPages, always on the lookout for ways to challenge our Little Pages, suggested she write a poem about purple. There are only two known words that rhyme with purple, both archaic. She rose to the challenge though…

A Poem On Purple
by LittlePage1

What first comes to mind is Auntie Joanne,
And one of my friend’s beautiful fan,
And the head of a Grackle that shines in the sun,
And the glittery neck of a certain Pigeon.
The colour I see when I think “lilac bush”
And the colour they made a puppet named Cush .
It’s the colour I see on a violet’s soft petal.
I saw once in a store a purple tea kettle.
To write a poem on purple some people won’t dare
But I just have, SO THERE!

A few translational notes:
Auntie Joanne lives in a purple house with purple flowers, has purple nails and wears purple everything. Auntie Joanne likes purple!
Cush is a purple puppet from the old days on TreeHouse TV.

Web host switch complete.

After being down for the morning while I set up WordPress and fixed some links, it appears that we are up and ready to go.

If you find ANYTHING odd, please let me know, as this is an entirely new method of setting up the site and how everything works, and I can’t possibly have tested everything.

“Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel, but thou art bound to arise.

God loves thee whether thou feelest or not.

Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last.

Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes not because thou changest. Nay, he has an especial tenderness of love towards thee for that thou art in the dark and hast no light, and his heart is glad when thou dost arise and say, “I will go to my Father.”

For he sees thee through all the gloom through which thou canst not see him.

Say to him: “My God, I am very dull and low and hard; but thou art wise and high and tender, and thou art my God. I am thy child. Forsake me not.”

Then fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in quietness until light goes up in thy darkness.

Fold the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go and do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend.

Heed not thy feelings: Do thy work.

~George MacDonald in his Unspoken Sermon: The Eloi ~