Category Archives: Stuff I Actually Think

Heaven Fest and the Church, big “C”

2 Mi Familia, Stuff I Actually Think

www.heavenfest.com

So, Worship and the Word Movement, the ministry led by Dave and Tara Powers (my very cool and anointed kids) is a non-profit 501 (c)(3).  The national artists and bands, my son-in-law is fond of saying,are  a piece of meat on a stick.  We are working to get the Body of Christ together in one place under one name for the purpose of making that name glorious!  And because together?  All of us?  We can impact the world for Jesus!  www.worshipandtheword.com

Contrary to the way some may see it, this isn’t some huge operation full of glitz and glamour.  It is a handful of incredible-hearted people GIVING their time and talent because we have chosen to go on this exciting Kingdom-mission together.  This whole sha-bang is volunteer-powered and  run on the sacrificial sweat and strength of godly people.  They have become my family.  This is what Body life is supposed to look like!

  

Left: Jen getting those sign-ups; Middle, not posed, really!  Right, Stephanie and her materials lists

And what I L-O-V-E the most?  We have leadership from tons of different local churches.  And churches, local congregations big and small, have opened their doors to us to have “Heaven Fest Sundays.”  These are just cool opportunities to disperse information about Heaven Fest, sign-up volunteers for the day of (we’ll have 1600 this year!) and collect donated items – everything from Kleenex to generators – loaned or outright given (we don’t accept loans on Kleenex, tho…that must be given outright, please ;p ).  

www.northernhills.cc

This past Sunday we were at Northern Hills Church, our very own HF birthing room and incubator, the safe spot Heaven Fest began in 2008: 70 bands on 7 stages on 70 acres = 12,500 people…then again a year later with 23,000 (!!).  It is home.  It’s “our” church.  And even though Heaven Fest is moving to a new location this year (Union Reservoir in Longmont), HF will always love and continue to partner with NHC.  That is a given! 

 

The cafe: an exciting place to be on a Sunday morning.

L’heure Bleue~

2 Mi Familia, 5 Songs I am Singing, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, 9 TV & Movies/Books & Entertainment, Stuff I Actually Think

THE BLUE HOUR

From Wikipedia:

“The blue hour comes from a French expression, l’heure bleue, which refers to the period of twilight each morning and evening where there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. The time is considered special because of the quality of the light at this time of day. The blue hour is considered especially flattering for people with blond hair in photography and is often also when the smell of the flowers is at its strongest during the summertime.”

I can’t remember the blue hour anywhere else I have ever lived, even though I am sure it was there.  And some say it cannot be experienced with the naked eye, only by camera.   But here in Colorado – I have seen it, touched it, breathed it and taken it in.  I see “the magic hour” sky as a blue with such great depth, such varied levels of intensity and such deep saturation that it stops me in my tracks – whether I am in the yard inhaling the pungent, floral scent of the early evening flowers or walking a country road or leaving Target with bags on each arm.  It just arrests me, intoxicates me.  The blue hour with a full, bright moon completel…dazes me (I slipped away for a moment…). 

It isn’t actually an hour long,  this richly saturated moment in time.  It is fleeting and may only last 20 minutes, during which it is ever changing and kaleidescoping across the sky in breath-taking beauty.  But when it happens?  Oooohhhh-la-la ~ it puts me in a mood.  Mesmerizing.

The twilight mood

L’heure bleue is…Suspension in time.  I am not young, but I am not old.  I am not running from anything, nor to anything.  It isn’t sad, but it isn’t grasping for happiness, either.  It’s not event, it is a moment, a sense.  It is breathing the atmosphere.  It is floating in the ocean as if you belong there.  It is standing on the summit after a long climb as victory strength surges through your body.  The blue hour is a feeling.  It is a sound.  It’s a taste.  It is the rhythm of your breathing, the steady pound of your heart.  It is the fleeting memory flash, recognition flickering, then passing quickly.  It’s coming to consciousness, then fading again just before your mind can become overloaded.  It is an emptying out, a filling up.  And voices from another room, muffled, but sweet laughter.  L’heure blue is a mix of the darkest sleep under heavy quilts and the brightest morning with a gentle breeze on a sheet-covered sleeping porch. It’s angelic choirs and total silence.  It is knowing you’re loved and knowing you love.  The blue hour is beauty.  The blue hour captures me, it holds me.  I am suspended when the hour is blue.

THE PERFECT SONG FOR THE BLUE HOUR~

This song from “The Big Easy” starring Dennis Quaid and the pre-surgically-enhanced Ellen Barkin (sung here by Dennis, Bonnie Raittt and Aaron Neville), captures my l’heure bleue mood beautifully, perfectly, maybe.  This is a summer’s eve drive under the heavy-romantic blue-hour sky.  Twilight. This is the song of l’heure bleue.  Oh, yes.

NOTE:  This song is my brother Joe’s favorite because it is about “the smell of morning in a rainy land,” Louisiana.  We lived there as kids and Joe carries the bayou in his heart.  He very sweetly shared this song with me not long ago and I am loving it.  But it is his.  It is only on loan to me.  And you can’t have it, either.  But close your eyes aand listen to this… Thanks, Joe-Joe.

RECENTLY SEEN:  The Blue Hour in decorating at www.houzz.com

NOTE TO SELF: June 26, sometime after 9 o’clock  pm….the magic hour & a full moon.  Watch for it…

I Love a Rainy Night

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 5 Songs I am Singing, Stuff I Actually Think
…I love a rainy night
I love to hear the thunder
Watch the lightning
When it lights up the sky
You know it makes me feel good

I do love a rainy night – especially after a sunny day. I am not really a fan of several days of rain, but a rainy night is good.  Very good.   I love the green the rain brings.  And I love how the garden looks because water from a hose just isn’t the same.  Rain from the sky is magic.  Green magic!

Well, I love a rainy night
It’s such a beautiful sight
I love to feel the rain on my face
Taste the rain on my lips
In the moonlight shadow

Galoshes

On the way home from church today I saw the cutest little girl in my neighborhood running up the driveway in her pink galoshes and pink and yellow rain slicker.  She was so cute twirling her pink and yellow, floral umbrella.  It took me back to the 1960s when we all owned galoshes and rainslickers and umbrellas and placed them in the cloak room at school.  Yes.  I am that old.

Showers washed
All my cares away
I wake up to a sunny day…

I saw this at church this morning:

 

I got permission to snap some shots of some little girls at church.  I don’t know them, but aren’t they sweet?

Puts a song
In this heart of mine
Puts a smile on my face every time
‘Cos I love a rainy night…
Yeah, I love a rainy night

Oh – and look: The Gav borrowed Aunt Stormie’s umbrella

Yeah, I love a rainy night…
Well, it makes me high…
I love a rainy night
You can see it in my eyes….*

And as Gemma always sings: The sun will come out tomorrow…which is what I am hoping for!

But this rainy night is luscious, too.

Gemma at Cold Stone with Aunt Stormie recently. The sun always shines on GemGem.

*LYRICS:  I Love a Rainy Night, Eddie Rabbit

Another Layer of the Onion

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, Stuff I Actually Think

“Someone” {ahem} said from the previous pictures of my garden onions-turned-bouquet which I posted HERE, you couldn’t actually tell the size…that they might have been 10 or 12 inches in heighh from my posted pictures.

So just to clarify, I snapped a couple of shots with the yard stick.  They are 42″ for the highest several stalks, maybe 43″.  Do you call them “stalks”?  Anyway, days later, they are healthy, tall and making me smile.  Did I mention they are tall?

 

Just saying.

A good kind of tired

3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, Stuff I Actually Think

7 Things that wear you out, but for good reason

  1. Weeding in the garden, fertilizing the soil.  Hard labor in God’s creation.
  2. Throwing big, joyful family birthday celebrations with homemade gifts and silly songs and specialty cakes and desserts and decorations to reflect the recipient’s interest – just going a little bit over-the-top to say I LOVE YOU!
  3. Helping a friend who needs you even when it isn’t on your schedule, especially when it isn’t on your schedule.
  4. Growing really, really good tomatoes.
  5. Laughing your head off at ridiculous things: like finding out you are just as forgetful as your mother – right after you have made fun of her.
  6. Two+ hours singing old songs at the top of your lungs with your mom and dad from the sheet music case in dad’s office: the songs he loved when he first found Jesus in the 50s (Ira Stanphill, Mosie Lister) and the ones he and mom and I sang together in the 70s (Lanny Wolfe, Dottie Rambo).
  7. Laughing so hard you can’t breathe with people who love you enough to resuscitate you if you fall over cold from it

4 Things that drain the ever-loving life out of you and probably won’t be worth it

  1. Working hard to be number one in your chosen field; being the first one to work and the last one to leave.
  2. Being the best at everything.
  3. A perfectly clean house, one where every single thing is in its’ place and where there are never ever kid fingerprints on the patio doors and no dog hair in the vacuum cannister and the laundry is always finished the day it is started.  You know-a house that reveals nothing of the people living there…
  4. The burden of always being right.

  

Pictured: early morning from the patio.  Left, “Snow on the Mountain” near the pond trickles toward the house. Middle, an unplanned pot gets whatever flowers I haven’t used elsewhere and will declare its’ own identity eventually.  Today the white ruffly petunias are asserting themselves.  Right, white petunia to snow-on-the-mountain, “Hello.  How is it going down there?”

The conclusion of the matter~

All has been heard, all has been said and done; the end of the matter {the conclusion} is: Fear God [revere and worship Him, knowing that He is] and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man [the full, original purpose of his creation, the object of God’s providence, the root of character, the foundation of all happiness, the adjustment to all inharmonious circumstances and conditions under the sun] and the whole [duty] for every man.

Ecclesiastes 12.13 The Amplified + other words I think fit

 

The Russian Sage, left, thinks it is ok to naturalize and extend its’ borders.  We will have to have a talk.  Balloon background, right, from Wrex’s birthday.

SENT TO ME IN AN EMAIL FORWARD, and o-so-true….There are five things that you cannot recover in life:

         (1) A stone…………..after it’s thrown,
         (2) The word……….after it’s said,
         (3) The Occasion….after it’s missed
         (4) The Time……….after it’s gone.
         (5) A person…………when they’re gone

When all has been said and done, most of what we worry our pretty little heads over (people’s opinions of us, status, getting ahead) won’t matter 5 minutes from now, let alone 10 years down the road.  I really want to figure out how to be tired for the “right” reasons.  The good kind of tired….

Digging In

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, Stuff I Actually Think

It is almost 100 degrees.  My sweat actually drops into the soil I am planting.   

I move landscape timbers, build trellises, water, plant seeds and seedlings.  I weed and re-arrange and haul and feed.  I pot and dig and sweep and fight off mosquitoes, spiders. I instigate a battle against wasps. 

My reward?  I tuck a spring of  lilac into my hair behind my ear and the sweet scent, released by the emmanating heat of garden labor from my body, surrounds me.  Everything aches, {ooohh…worn out}, but it’s a good kind of tired.

Garden Debris as Decor

4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, Stuff I Actually Think

Onion.

As thoroughly infatuated as I was watching the red onions carve out their architectural space in the garden (I wrote about it HERE), they were not invited to that spot.  No, not all all.  In fact, that particular space in that specific 4 x 4 (see Square Foot Gardening) had been called for by another crop and we signed the lease some time ago.  However, I was happy tp let them homestead until time to plant the new crop.

I pulled them out today.  I was ever-so-slightly reluctant, as the flower heads would have popped into their glorious splendor later this week for certain (at which time they’d have sent their seed frolicking and invading the rest of the backyard and garden).  But my pre-soaked green bean seeds could wait no longer.

    

No pre-thought-out arrangement.  I just stuffed them into my biggest container, where they were free to shoot in whichever direction they so desired..

Gathering the uprooted reds to carry to the house, I decided I’d dry and use the bigger onions, but throw the rest in a vase for my own enjoyment.  I have them on the coffee table where they are emitting the very slight, subtle and truly sweet perfume that an onion possesses. 

Yes, they had put down roots where they didn’t belong and had tried to claim the middle square as their own, but I couldn’t just leave them out on the street, could I?  We are enjoying our mutually satisfying arrangement.  I have quenched their thirst in a cool house and they are looking very green and happy and structural for me.  It is a win-win.

 

Other garden debris you can enjoy

I also like using pruned shubbery twigs in vases, painted tree linbs on walls or in containers with uplights on them, zinnias from the pots, and rocks.  Garden castaways can have a second life if you can take the time to find the beauty.

Black Spiderman Cake for a Red-Headed Kid

2 Mi Familia, 3 Celebrations & Festive Events, 4 Home & Garden/Food & Seasons, 6 Looking Back // Memories!, Stuff I Actually Think

Gavin wanted Spiderman.

 

Pictured: Black Spiderman Cake

 

Yes.  Spiderman is hot-glued to a non-stick spray cap.  That’s right, what of it?

I hand-carved the small Spiderman figurine using  from-scratch fondant…  NOT!  Bought him at WalMart.

10″, double-layered chocolate cake with chocolate icing, tinted black.  I used pre-made icing and augmented DH mixes.  I cut notches in a piece of cardstock and ran it around the side to create the comb-effect ridges.  A little white icing from a tube.  A little red icing from a tube and voila!

And to think: my first “specialty” cake ever (or at least since the ridiculous venture into Wilton-type cake decorating in the 1980s…maybe someday I will have the courage to share those pictures…) was for Gavin’s 4th birthday when his mommy requested a dinosaur cake. I plotted for weeks-it nearly did me in. {sigh} June 2007.  Time flies…and I get a little more laid-back about the cakes with each birthday.  Nicer for everybody!

On the occasion of the celebration of Gavin’s birth

His mommy got him a Spiderman costume.  And Aunt Jovan got Uncle Rocky one, too.

 

 

Averi looked lovely in lavender and yellow, from her two-piece and cover-up to her flip-flops and matching bag, not to mention her sippy-cup and sunglasses.  Her accessories and coordination were flawless.

 

Guini was all smiles and cuddly-ness.

  

The girls looked summery.  And it was 90-some degrees out, so – that seems appropriate.

As long as everyone has their own purse, everything is just fine.

 

Grilled chicken sandwiches on bolillo with the sweetest corn on the cob ever!  The boys were on edge with some intense Battleship strategy against Aunt Dessa (and with her accusations of foul play, who could blame them? tsk.)…

 

First grandbebe dip in the pool this year.

Simple toys are best.  A freshly cut lawn for running and staining feet bright green.  And good, old-fashioned latex balloons, all while using “outdoor voices”.  Entertainment in its most basic form!

   

Click on thumbnails for a larger view

 

   

Family get-togethers before Gavin-the-first-grandkid  was born were much much quieter.  And less colorful, too!

Cake devoured.  Black-tooth smiles.  Good times!