Odd bits

This past week I've spent more time at church than usual thanks mostly to Vacation Bible School. It has been fun even if I was one of the only people there who had never been a parent attending. In addition to the fun, I got to meet some people I didn't know yet, and I got out and involved in children's education. One thing I liked about it was that adults were learning right along side the kids. Ever since the first time I experienced it, I have always felt that having children see that their parents are learning at church too and some of the same sort of stories is both practical and effective intergenerational functioning in both church and education. Makes me wish that when a child in school has a parent that can't read or do math we could include that parent in our education system right along side of the child. It would make so much more of an impact that I think both generations would gain from it.

I also managed to watch two movies: "Night at the Museum" and "Hide and Seek". Both were pretty good. Although I don't remember the rating, I'm guessing that Night at the Museum is family fare. So that is probably something I can discuss with kids at school. Hide and Seek on the other hand seemed to make a study in psychological horror. The movie was pretty spooky. Enough so that when I watched the special features, such as alternative endings and deleted scenes, I turned on the commentary so that I'd have something to distract me from the spookiness of the scenes. The next movie from Netflix, which will arrive on Saturday, is "Without Borders." This is a love story about two doctors who help people in poor countries and during national disasters and keep meeting during these things and fall in love.

I've had the 4th of the 5 guitar lessons. They have gone pretty well. I pick up fairly quickly what Matt shows me but don't always get it smooth. This last lesson we got around to playing some songs. I had a small book in the guitar case and we wandered through it playing this and that. I promised that next lesson I would bring the score to Come Saturday Morning, which he had never heard before but thought it was pretty when he heard me sing a little of it. This in my, no longer very nice, voice so it must have really impressed him with its lyrics and melody. Now I need to look up what movie it came from because he asked and I couldn't remember.

Sometime in the past few days I found time to hit the local healthy foods market, Sun Harvest (a.k.a Wild Oats). They had meat on sale and I added a few items to my list just for that trip. When I got through the register I was stunned to find that the cost of the meat was considerably less than the other items I had purchased. This didn't use to be the case. I remember, when I was younger, being very careful to get less expensive cuts of meat to save money. Things sure have changed since then.

As if shopping for meat, thereby reducing my grocery budget, wasn't bad enough, I've also managed to actually cook a few things. One of them was a nice NY Strip steak. I was grateful to have remembered the spice combination an old friend from NY used when he dined at my house once (in the 70's so you might imagine how old a memory this was). It was a little salt and pepper, a sprinkling of garlic powder, and a dusting of ground celery seed. I substituted unsalted lemon pepper for the first two, added unseasoned tenderizer just in case I hadn't picked out a really tender cut of meat, and put it under the broiler for just long enough to get medium to medium rare meat. Despite the beef scares of recent years, it tasted fantastic! Today I remembered how to cook corn on the cob. And later this weekend, when the chicken breasts are defrosted, I'll bake them and then slice them into pieces for portion control dining later in the week.

Oh, and I've taken to keeping some limes cut into pieces in a small container in the fridge to add to the ice cold water I am starting to drink more and more of. Sounds like my diet is getting healthier. Hopefully I'll be back down to a size 14 when the spring semester comes around and I'm starting to interview. In the mean time the water with lime tastes really good.

One last and almost spiritual habit I've resurrected is involved in teeth cleaning. A couple of visits ago my dentist confessed to me that his favorite toothpaste was baking soda. I asked him if he meant the stuff that came in tubes and he said, No. The stuff that comes powdered from a box." It seems that when he was in dental school he had been looking at some plaque under a microscope and had put a drop of baking soda onto the slide to see what would happen. Poof! No more plaque. That impressed me! My grandmother used to brush her teeth with a mixture of baking soda and salt. I haven't pulled out the salt yet because the baking soda is a bit salty in it's own right. The nice thing is that when I'm done using this powder, picked up from my palm on my damp toothbrush, my mouth tastes sweet and the teeth are polished clean with the tiny granules. And it is so inexpensive that I could probably buy a nice skirt or blouse in what I'm saving on tooth paste at the end of the year. So I'll keep on using this remembered habit from my grandmother, from whom so many spiritual connections seem to come, and figure that in addition to saving money and taking better care of my teeth, I'm also taking better care of the temple my body became when I received God's spirit.

Peace, Hope & Joy!