Sorry No Posts for a While... But Please Accept This Goaty Goodness

The guy who coined the euphamism "like a deer in headlights" had to be kicking himself after he saw this...

Our beige house

For those of you back home we thought we'd finally put some pictures of our furnished home up here. What I've realized after putting all these pictures on the computer is that our home is very beige. I guess we are the kind of people who need to be more adventurous with color.

Up until Saturday (2 days ago) we lived in this house with no blinds or curtains. We put a navy blue sheet on our bedroom window the night we moved in and just left all the other windows uncovered. I had thought that covering the windows would be a priority - we planned to do it right after buying the appliances....but somehow it just never seemed that important. We loved the windows and they brought color into our place a little. I just ignored the fact that the neighbors could see straight into our home. I really didn't even think about it.

Well we finally broke down and got temporary blinds on Saturday. We had wanted to get blinds before we left for Christmas but we weren't ready to buy real ones yet. All this time we had been resisting buying temporary ones because we couldn't stand the idea of spending money on something disposable. Finally, we decided to use a Home Depot gift card we had gotten for buying an energy star refrigerator and we got the temporary shades. They cost $60 total for the whole house. Yes, we're that cheap. I don't know why we didn't do it sooner. We'll leave these up for a good long time to make that $60 worth it!

So now we have privacy but our house is even MORE beige and I miss the windows and the color and light they brought.

So here are some pictures of the house before we covered it up with cheap ugly temporary blinds.





And if you want to see even more of the beige-ness, here's an album full of house pictures.

Our house

We get to meet her in a couple of weeks...

Our newest niece: Sophia

Sameer makes me laugh

The other day Sameer sent me an email that said only this:

"You've never seen a burrito as big as the one I am about to eat. Pray for me."

The humor broke the monotony of a very dull day.

As it turns out, he survived the burrito.

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.

At His feet the six wingèd seraph,
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High!

from the Liturgy of St. James (4th century)

Taking advantage of the University

Last night we went to hear Handel's Messiah at Duke Chapel. Thanks to my parents who played recordings of this quite often during my childhood it is very near to my heart. It is also extremely long and after it was over I had to promise Sameer that in the future we will only go to performances of "selections" or "highlights" of the Messiah.

In spite of the uncomfortable pews it was a perfect way to begin the Advent season. I couldn't find my CD of it this morning but thanks to the world wide web I am listening to various performances of my favorite selections online.

"Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever. Amen." Revelation 5:12,13

Missing the little pup

After our puppy sleepover (that involved more playing than sleeping) we had to put him in the neighbor's back yard in his make shift house with our blanket. It was so sad. We hated to leave him out there but the neighbor said someone was coming to pick him up that day. We worried about him the whole rainy day while we were at Duke but we hoped someone really had picked him up. We found out that our neighbor is severely allergic to dogs and that's why she left him outside.

When we got home he was sitting on our back patio pressed against our door and of course we brought him in. For about 20 seconds we considered keeping him but then neighbor came over and told us someone should be coming by that night to get him. We got to keep him for the evening until around 10:30 when a nice girl who seemed to really want him came and got him. It was a sad goodbye but we're very happy he found a home. We were so torn - we really wanted to keep him but we're gone for 10-12 hours a day and that's no way to raise a puppy.

We've been missing him ever since. He was such a sweet little thing.

puppy update

In the late afternoon we put him back outside with a blanket for a couple of hours. When we saw lights on at the neighbors' house we went over and talked to them. She said someone was coming to get him tomorrow and she had forgotten he was still in the backyard. We asked if we could keep him for the night and she heartily said yes.

No, we didn't get a dog

So we have this adorable puppy wrapped in a red blanket sleeping on the kitchen floor right now. Over the weekend we noticed that there were 3 adorable puppies learning how to walk in our neighbors' backyard. There is no fence between our yards so it seems more like we share a backyard. Last night I saw the three little ones cuddling and this morning they were there too. It's getting kind of cold now and it's been raining off and on. This morning while we were watching the puppies from the window we saw the neighbor come and pick up two of them and go inside. She left this one in the backyard. When we got home from church this little guy was still there all by himself. He was getting brave walking around and I was worried he would wander out to the street and get hit by a car. Sameer went out to visit him and a few minutes later it started raining. He (the puppy - not Sameer) started crying. We couldn't resist. One thing led to another. I held him in my arms for a while and he seemed so content. I rang their doorbell to see if they were home. All the lights were out. No one answered. We just couldn't leave this little guy out there in the rain without shelter so we brought him in and he's warm and happy; dreaming his puppy dreams. I left a note on their door. Hopefully we didn't ruin some grand dog training plot. I actually have a feeling that he's not their puppy - perhaps they are dog sitting. We told them once that we wanted to get a dog someday and they said they didn't like dogs....


So maybe we did the wrong thing. We couldn't resist. I know, I know - we should probably return him to the patio.

Last weekend

Roadtrip to New Haven. Little traffic. Many tolls. Sermons and Music. View of Manhattan. That smell in New Jersey. Crazy drivers in CT. Bakalava from Sahara. Christ Pres Coffeehouse. Happy reunions. Friendly faces. Buffalo wings from Archie Moore's. Tropical Storm Noel. Suddenly broken umbrella. Cold fingers. Beer at Richters. Lance and Cassie. Claire's Lithuanian coffee cake. The Wine Thief. The Green. The old man who wears the red hat. Autumn colors. Sunsets. The Owl Shop. BAR. Joel and Tiffany. Pizza with eggplant. White pie with mashed potatoes and bacon. Worship at Christ Presbyterian. Communion with the church. The walk to lunch after church. Drive to the top of East Rock. View of the haven. Koffee Too. Books. Copper Kitchen breakfast special. Watching squirrels. Walking through the green once more. Delightful. And it was only a weekend. And yes, that was quite a bit of eating for "only a weekend".

Sometimes I feel like I live in the zoo

From 8 to 5 on weekdays, at least. My "corner" of the office is almost completely surrounded by windows. I love that I face a wall of windows and that I can see the sky and trees. To my left are another 2 large windows that face an inside hallway of the Divinity School. A few times a week one of the people from Admissions will be giving visitors/prospective students a tour and they'll come and stand right in front of those windows for a few minutes. I'm sure she's telling them all about the Institute on Care at the End of Life (where I work) but as I sit there trying to make sure I'm exhibiting good posture and excellent typing skills I imagine that she's saying, "And here we have one of those strange office workers that has to wear two bulky wrist braces as she types..." and then they all just stand there for a while and I feel awkward and paralyzed and can understand why those monkeys at the zoo we visited last summer kept trying to hide.

The Bible Bus

The first Sunday morning that we lived here I saw a yellow school bus pull up to the house across the street from us and pick up a few kids. A man in a suit went up to the door and knocked. Then the kids came out. My first thought was, wow, what personalized service and isn't 9:00 kind of late for a school bus? Then I remembered that it was Sunday and we were getting ready to go and visit a church. Then I read the words on the side of the bus and realized it was a church bus. That bus comes here every Sunday morning and picks up those kids. I love seeing that bus.

**Update: The family who gets picked up by the "Bible Bus" just rang our doorbell, introduced themselves and invited us over to dinner at their place. They said a bunch of people from their church were coming over. I see them now going around to all the houses on the street. (we have no window coverings yet so it's really easy for us to spy on everyone and I'm sure they're spying on us too...) It's nice to see this kind of neighborly outreach going on. I think we'll go over and get to know our neighbors tonight.**

Security?

Everyone in our neighborhood seems to have a home-alarm system installed, with the reassuring little sign out front warning any prospective no-goods that they had better not come-a-thieving, because "This House is Protected by ADT!!" or some such.

A guy from an ADT competitor company - "Vector" - had come by and talked to Whitney before about getting one installed, you know, because he was terribly worried about our safety. Well, we talked about it, but thought, "nah - civil society is based on trust" (i.e., "We can't afford $50/month!!!!").

That didn't stop this concerned citizen from continuing to come by and leave Vector signs and literature on our door, reminding us that we could have the edge over any scurrilous curs who dared to breach our hallowed sanctuary and sully our utopian domescticity. Ok so that's not what the signs on our door actually said - but that's what they meant.

Anyway, so we came home from school today and found THIS inside our house:



Uh... did that guy just break in to our house to leave this thing here? At first I thought perhaps he shoved it through the door and it fell onto the carpet, but I don't think it fits through the door, and we found it way over by a piece of furniture a few feet away from the door.

I took a good look at that sign and wondered whether being an "authorized dealer" authorized this simp to trammel my haven. It advertised "Quality, Integrity, Customer Care" -- I think to be more accurate it should have read, "Vector - we KNOW crime..."

"Things that make you go hmmmm"

There are lots of things in North Carolina that make us go "hmmm..." I'd like to share with you this morning's "hmmmm...".

I was driving to work and listening to some random radio station that did NOT happen to be a Christian radio station. In between songs some church has a commercial slot where they share "wisdom and encouragement" with listeners. Today's went something like this (with soft piano music in the background): "Naomi thought God wanted a change in her life so she quit her job and started taking classes, reading her Bible and praying all day long. After a while she was discouraged because she wasn't sure what God wanted her to do with her life. Then her friend, a new believer, had a conversation with her and gave her this amazing piece of wisdom, 'Naomi, be patient. A pickle don't get made in a day.'"

That was it. Then the next song came on.

Water Conservation (on a lighter note)

One of the reasons that our home qualified as a "Green Home" is because we have one very special toilet. When we had our "walk through/homeowner orientation" with the builder, they pointed out that our toilet has two flush buttons. One for "solids," one for "liquids." It took me a second to understand what the guy was saying. It's a very special toilet indeed.

Our agent suggested we label the flush bottons "1" and "2" to avoid confusion. What do you think?

Analysis: Our Refrigerator

**I wrote this last Saturday but didn't post it because blogger wasn't allowing me to upload pictures for some reason.....so I'm posting it here even though this picture is awful. (as if the other pictures on our blog are great) What is that bright light in our freezer? It's kind of creepy.**



A picture of the happy fridge, as per Catherine's request. I guess the freezer doesn't look very different from the empty picture below but it does happen to contain the first piece of meat that has been brought into this home. We've been vegetarians at home since we moved in for reasons that were more financial than dietary. It's actually been great. Vegetarian recipes are fun and colorful. In the refrigerator you'll notice the eggs - those are the first eggs that have been brought into the house. I just haven't had occasion to use them yet but a spinach/pine nut quiche is on the menu this week so they were a must. At the top of the fridge is the first bottle of milk this kitchen has seen (wow, what a splurge at the grocery store this week - lots of firsts I had been avoiding for a while.) Also at the top of the fridge is one of our favorite treats: Fage yogurt* (Greek yogurt) with honey. We eat it with walnuts. It's delicious. I wish we could eat it everyday. What you can't see is the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. It is completely full of grapefruit, tangerines, oranges, lemons and limes. Sameer is developing a serious juice drinking problem. He squeezes it all by hand and it is excellent. It's bordering on excessive but I keep buying his citrus for him because I'm sure it's good for both of us.

*A note about Greek yogurt - I don't even like yogurt (it makes me gag) and I love this stuff. It's the best dessert. Last spring I was at this little store in New Haven looking for yogurt because someone had scared me about osteoporosis and the fact that I don't drink milk (don't worry - I eat a lot of dark green leafy vegetables). All they had was Fage yogurt and it looked weird so I didn't buy any but a week later I decided to try it and I am now a fan. It is strained so it's really thick and not watery like regular yogurt. Try it!! (You can find it at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's but it's way more expensive than your "everyday" yogurt)

Shopping

So, I was thinking that maybe I should go grocery shopping today. Not sure. We could always heat up that frozen spinach, sprinkle some lemon juice on it and wrap it in an old whole wheat tortilla. I'm sure that would be fine for dinner.

Suburbia: A Drought of Conscience

Our water restrictions are now pretty severe. Back in August, we could only water every other day - then it went to 2 days a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays) - then it went to Saturdays only (between 5 and 8). As of last Tuesday, we can no longer water our lawns AT ALL. People can water vegetable gardens with a hand held container on Saturdays between 5 and 8. That's it. No washing cars, no hosing down walkways, no serving water in restaurants except upon request (those luxuries were prohibited long ago). Unfortunately, even with all these restrictions, Durham's water usage has only gone down 16%. 16% !! We are entering a crisis. On the city website I found a current lake/river level graph that compared our current state to the drought in 1933-34 (Dust Bowl years). We see people continue to water because they want their grass to grow.

We would like our grass to grow too especially because we just seeded our backyard and we live on a hill. Without roots, our land will erode and void the structural warranty on our new home (and because when it rains here it pours, part of our backyard slides into the neighbor's backyard every time it rains.) So, we are not watering. But we do continue to take regular and long showers, prepare a lot of tea and coffee, use our dishwasher, etc. What we have really started realizing is how strongly we are gripped by a consumer mentality. Several people around us continue to water their lawns (by far the biggest source of water-waste in the present climate), just ignoring the restrictions altogether.......All of us to varying degrees are just thinking "I can have whatever I want and there will always be enough" - it is sickening. Meanwhile every day people are dying in Africa because they don't have clean water to DRINK. And we are concerned about our yards here. Ridiculous.

As Westerners - and especially Americans - most of us see our basic necessities this way - like a grocery store full of unending resources without any consideration for the way that NATURE and the ENTIRE HUMAN COMMUNITY should put limits on what we consume and how often and in what ways. From that perspective, we have surely succumbed to the social conditioning that continually urges us to equate luxury with necessity, and so in our self-deception we GRIEVE when we can't water our lawns, buy our next appliance that makes our lives easier, or improve our "standard of living" etc. We experience the obstacles to reckless consumption as the loss of a BASIC NECESSITY - as a plight that forces us to act to attain e.g., a car with air conditioning with similar relentlessness as we would expect someone from Somalia to pursue the next meal.

Surely a sense of guilt isn't the answer - guilt *alone* seems to just absolve us of responsibility by giving us a cathartic sense of "see - I get it! I care!" and then, once our smitten consciences are pacified, we just turn back to our normal lives of selfish uber-consumption. So yeah, guilt isn't enough, but it sure as hell is a good start.

"For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content. But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge humanity into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil deeds, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. Flee from these things!!!" (1 Tim. 6:6-11a).

Capitalistic consumption? Environmental stewardship? It's not a conservative or liberal thing. It's a Christian thing.

Three Years!!!

Happy anniversary to us (yesterday). We went out and enjoyed a delicious dinner at Rue Cler in the strangely desolate downtown Durham. The weird thing was that while there was nary a soul walking about on the streets, looking into the windows revealed that the patronage inside the shops and restaurants was quite lively! How did all those people get in there, if they're so afraid of the streets? They may have been holograms, but we resisted the urge to poke at them with our cutlery.

But before dinner we were people on a mission. It came in the form of an electronic communique, but instead of IT self-destructing in ten seconds, *I* (Sameer) self-destructed in ten seconds. For, it was a note from DHL saying that the present I had arranged to have delivered to Whitney at work - at 2 CHAPEL Drive - had instead gone to 2 CHIPLEY Court. Chipley? What the $#@!?

DHL guy 1: "Hey Earl, this here package says, it supposed-ta goto Duke Divinity School on 2 Chapel Drive... Where in tarnation is that? What the sam hill is a s-c-h-o-ol?"

DHL guy 2: "Heck if I know, Clive - let's just drop it off at this here place - it's in a different zipcode at a house steaduva school, but Chapel sounds kinda like Chipley, don't it? *Guffaw*"

Anyway, after unclenching my fist and looking around to check if anyone at divinity school could see the blackness of my heart at that particular moment, I broke the news to Whitney that I sent her something that she wasn't going to get. But oh yes she was. We decided to drive to the residence, which was in a rough part of town in a low income neighborhood in East Durham. We drove twenty minutes out of the way to the other end of town.

We drove through the neighborhood really slowly - I slid the seat back, flossed the wheel and tried to play it cool, bobbing my head in a hip-hop sort of way and looking tough, even though there wasn't any music playing in the car. As we rolled up on the house, we saw our package neatly laying against the front door of 2 CHIPLEY court. We got out of the car, and walked up to the door like we was just chillin' - but then we grabbed it from the doorstep and hustled back toward the car as some high school boys came up the street looking at us like, "Uh-uh, No you DID-NT!" But yes we did. We drove it home and got out the scissors and opened the box. And this is what was inside. Isn't it lovely?

Citrus

Sometimes Sameer likes to make fresh squeezed juice. I like it when he does this - especially when he shares.