We get a lot of snow drifts here and they tend to form in very inconvenient places, like our driveways. Thus, when my husband decided a few years ago to start installing snow fences on our property to keep that from happening, I had an idea in my brain about how those were going to look. I pictured more or less a temporary wall. I did not picture this:

How on earth does a plastic fence full of holes keep snow from drifting? I’m glad you asked. I went to our friend, Wikipedia, and learned this:

“Snow fences work by causing turbulence in the wind, such that it drops much of its snow load on the lee side of the fence. Thus, snow fences actually cause snow drifts, rather than preventing them. The fences are placed so as to cause a snow drift where it is beneficial, or not harmful so that the snow does not drift onto undesired areas such as roads or among buildings.”

I’m guessing most of you knew that already, but I didn’t. The thing that is supposed to prevent snow drifts actually causes them by creating turbulence. Snow drifts are going to happen either way – it’s just a matter of where they get planted.

I think I’m going to have to remember that the next time a stiff wind is blowing and there’s turbulence all around me. If there are going to be snow drifts, I’d rather they were put in the beneficial places. And only the God of the snow, wind and turbulence knows how to do that – good to know when that “hedge of protection” looks like it’s full of holes. The wind whistling through those holes is creating a symphony with all the crescendos and rests right where they should be.

Thursday Thoughts brought to you by Lynniebeemuseoday.

I’ll probably be slogging through snow drifts tomorrow to delete this thing.

I hinted heavily (i.e. sent a link) to my husband for a birthday gift this year: a watercolor instruction booklet that had caught my eye several times on Instagram.

Step-by-step advice from the masters! And isn’t it nice to know that this particular master, Andrej (yes, we can call him by his first name – he doesn’t mind), is ranked among the TOP20 watercolor artists of the world? (We don’t need to know who does this ranking – it’s not important.) With Andrej at the helm of my watercolor exploration ship, I felt assured that everything was possible. Simplicity itself!

The booklet is actually very well designed. Each lesson includes a photograph – taken, no doubt, in Italy, where even the grout between tiles looks beautiful and worthy of painting. You also get watercolor paper with light sketches of the photograph, two for each lesson. The paintings call for a limited palette of colors from which you will be able to get all the hues that you see. As promised, you get step-by-step instructions on how to do the painting. Lastly, you can see how the artist(s) version turned out.

I approached the first lesson with an insane amount of over-confidence. I liken it to watching figure skaters do their simplest elements on the ice, making it look so easy that those of us who can skate say to ourselves, “I could do that.” Naturally, we know that there will be no triple salchows or toe loop jumps in our repertoire, but surely we can eke out an elegant figure eight or a graceful move from skating backwards to going forward. We fail to recognize the sheer amount of work and practice that goes into all that graceful movement. We put our skates on and go fall on our butts. Many times.

It was a lot harder than I thought. I had a hard time getting the colors right, getting a smooth lay down of color, getting the right balance of water and color, keeping it from looking blotchy in places, preventing color bleed… The one on the left was Attempt #1. It was kind of Andrej to include two sketches on which to practice. If you don’t compare the second one with Andrej’s, it doesn’t look too bad, but it’s definitely not a triple salchow.

Still, I’m eager to go on to the next 15 lessons with the hope that by that time I finish #16, I’ll be out on the ice at least not falling on my butt. It’ll be fun, right?

P.S. I started lesson # 2 today. Ugh, the first attempt was AWFUL. My butt hurts now.

Signing off with Watercolor Wednesdays, this is Lynniebee.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

I’m going to call this feature the “Weekly Reading Roundup.” That way I get to use alliteration, even if I can’t use the word Tuesday with it (like Monday Musings, Watercolor Wednesdays and Friday Fiction). Now, I still need to come up with something for Thursdays… Thursday Thoughts?

Whatever.

January 12 Reading Roundup:

Dorothy Sayers, The Five Red Herrings, p. 13

(As Lord Peter Wimsey heads out to take a look at a dead body that turned up where he was vacationing) “…and with a sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and the prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter’s cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures.”

That just made me laugh.

Martin Luther, quoted by Elisabeth Elliot, Let Me Be a Woman

“…It is said that it takes a bold man to venture to take a wife. What you need above all else then, is to be encouraged, admonished, urged, incited and made bold. Why should you delay, my dear and reverend sir, and continue to weigh the matter in your mind? …Stop thinking about it and go to it right merrily. Your body demands it, God wills it, and drives you to it… It is best to comply with all our senses as soon as possible and give ourselves to God’s Word and work in whatever He wishes us to do.”

Know any young men that you’d like to have read that? I do!

Alastair Groves and Winston Smith, Untangling Emotions, from the Chapter called “Engaging Fear”

“Fear, whether mild uneasiness or abject terror, has a simple message: something you value is under threat. …Fear points directly to what we treasure.”

“Fear is a notorious exaggerator and false prophet of doom.”

“…every fear brought to the Lord, every anxiety or terror weathered under the shelter of his wings, reinforces our choice to trust. This means that even the smallest acts of faith, in God’s mercy, are self-perpetuating.”

I underlined a LOT more in that chapter, but didn’t want to bore you. This book has been really helpful to me, as sometimes I feel simply awash in emotions and often have trouble understanding where they come from and how to manage them in a godly way that neither abhors, ignores nor coddles them. Really good stuff.

Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart

“The world cannot fathom strength proceeding from weakness, gain proceeding from loss, or power from meekness.”

True that.

Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, excerpt from #279

Tie the Strings to my Life, Lord,
Then, I am ready to go!
Just a look at the Horses –
Rapid! That will do!

That made me think of Hebrews 12:1, which says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.”

Just for sake of quirkiness, I think I’ll end these posts with a something from my Paper app.

There you have it!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning, while underlining things for next week’s Reading Roundup.

I met Harry the year the first book was published. Our oldest son was in second grade and it looked like Harry was going to be a very popular fellow, so I decided to preview the book to make sure it got the parental seal of approval. Around the same time I read one of the ubiquitous Goosebumps books. It was awful: poorly written, parents were either non-existent or just plain stupid, sibling relationships were atrocious. We gave it a hard pass.

By contrast, I found Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone to be a really good yarn – clever and creative. But I was uncomfortable with some of the dark aspects of the story for someone as young as our son, and the author said future books would get even darker. It also got wildly divergent reviews in the Christian/homeschooling communities. Some people worried about young impressionable children getting lured into witchcraft, others felt that Harry was not a good role model, often getting away with lying and not always facing the consequences of his actions. It was thought that the line between good and evil was not clearly enough drawn. So, even though there were plenty of Christians who loved the series, we ended up giving it a “soft” pass, thinking maybe when our kids were older we would revisit it.

Fast forward to around 2013. While visiting one of the younger families at our church, we found out their dog’s name was Hagrid. “That’s an interesting name,” I said, “Where did it come from? Is it a family name?” The whole family eagerly pitched in to tell of their love for the Harry Potter stories (and if you haven’t read them, Hagrid is a dearly beloved character in the books). We were going to be taking two long road trips to Idaho and back that summer and decided to borrow the audiobooks from my sister. On your mark, get set…GO!

The excellent Jim Dale does a masterful job of reading these books and we were hooked right from the start. We plowed through 3-4 books that summer on the road and found time to listen to the rest of them over the next year. One time after 8-9 hours of driving we drove into our garage with only 15 minutes left of the book. We stayed in the car and finished it.

So how did we overcome all those objections and what made us love these stories so much? I’ll tell you in another blog post, since this one is already getting so long.

I started collecting the hardbound editions of the HP books right after we finished listening to them, but I set a silly goal of buying only nice used editions to save money. It was relatively easy to find books 2-7 at used book stores, but it turns out that NOBODY gets rid of the first book. NOBODY. So after all these years, I finally just bought a new copy of the first book – and it was less than $13.00, for Pete’s sake! Sometimes you can be too thrifty.

My collection is complete! That’s the whole reason I started this post.

Now if I were a normal person, I would have said something like: “I just bought the first Harry Potter book to complete my collection” and this blog post would have been a lot shorter. I’m not normal. And if you’ve read this far, you’re not normal either, for which I’m very thankful.

Next week’s Monday Musings will take up where this one left off.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning by saying “Evanesco!”

They say he lived in an abandoned old shack hidden in the woods, and he was content to let them believe it. But what need had he of walls and a ceiling? In one sense he had no corner to call his own; in another sense, everywhere was his dwelling place. Any sort of nook or cranny would serve just as well to give room for him to sit and think, to design and make his intricate plans. And to wait. And wait. One could say he was the most patient of God’s artisans, for the conditions had to be perfect for him to work his craft.

Many have lauded his work over the ages. Some insisted he should have a grand title, like “The Honorable Hoarfrost,” or “The Master of Rime,” but he eschewed all of this silliness (even though it did make him smile). His favorite moniker was the rough-hewn “Old Man Hoarfrost.”

He was endowed by his Creator do do one beautiful, glorious thing. He had only one job, one purpose, one “raison d’etre:” to reveal the glory of the Maker on the glittering cold days of winter. His cousin, Dew, could only ply his craft in the summer, so they never worked in the same hemisphere at the same time. They passed each other with a high-five and a “hey, nonny nonny,” as they roamed the earth in search of the tools of their trade: moisture and cooling temperatures.

You’d think winter was Hoarfrost’s favorite season, and it certainly was the culmination of all his imaginings, the time to display his masterpieces. But Autumn was his happy place. Each dried up plant with its sharp and brittle points and its spare and stripped-down lines – these were his canvases! Each time he saw them, he’d rub his hands together with the glee of anticipation. Oh, what a wonderful world he’d been given in which to do his work. Let it begin.

Welcome to Fiction Friday! It might be more accurate to call this piece “Fanciful Fiction,” and I don’t expect every Friday to be like this. But I took a walk this morning and the story began to tell itself – I couldn’t hold it back.

In the future, I will sometimes return to the adventures of Fig Newton and his friends – I was quite taken with him. Also, I had a fun idea about using the descriptions on wine labels as a launching off point for stories.

Thanks for joining me, friends! May these stories lighten your days and brighten your minds when the times are heavy and burdensome. Sometimes it’s good to set down something heavy you’ve been carrying so that you can pick up a light-hearted piece of whimsy.

To God be the glory.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning while searching for Old Man Hoarfrost – I really think I saw him lurking in that shack.

When I was a young adult, coming home for Christmas meant my parents’ house. That’s where Christmas was. That’s where it had to be, where it always had been. I got married and shortly after that we moved to Indiana. Those first couple of years, we came back home for Christmas…and it was still my parents’ house.

But a shift was coming. A new wind was blowing and I wasn’t ready for it. When I was pregnant with our second child, I had experienced a miscarriage and then a tubal pregnancy (requiring emergency surgery) between the two children. My doctor thought that it might not be a good idea to travel all day in a car in the middle of winter to get home for Christmas, especially since I was in the first trimester of the pregnancy.

Suddenly the song “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” was where I was living.

“I’ll be home for Christmas – you can plan on me.
Please bring snow and mistletoe, and presents by the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me where the love light gleams…
I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”

What had always been an unbearably sappy song became my theme song and I would sing it along with Amy Grant with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Did I mention that I was pregnant? That’s right – emotions on steroids. I couldn’t imagine a Christmas so far away from home.

It turned out that we didn’t go back to Minnesota for Christmas until we moved back here nearly 10 years later. I cried that first year, missing my parents, missing my siblings, missing our traditions, missing the cookies, missing the singing of Christmas carols, missing…everything. But God had set me in a new place, with a wonderful husband, a sweet little boy and another one on the way. We had to learn how to make our home the place where Christmas was.

And we did. We borrowed a lot of traditions from my growing up years and added our own. At some point I realized what a blessing it was to be able to stay home on Christmas Day, to enjoy the sweetness of celebrating our Lord’s birth with our growing family at home – our home. Out of death came life. Out of sorrow came joy. The uncomfortable thing became comfortable; what seemed out of place fell into place.

And now, we are the parents of adult children, some of whom are married and starting families. Our home can no longer be the center for them – they have started a new thing. It’s the way it should be. As long as they can come to our house for Christmas, I will rejoice and be thankful. But I don’t want to forget that God has put them in a new place with new beginnings, to start their own traditions, and to make their homes the place where Christmas is for their children.

To paraphrase what John the Baptist said, “They must increase and we must decrease.”

But I’ve also learned something else. Seeing them increase is a glorious thing, just as it was for John to see Jesus increase while he decreased. That’s what he was there for – to point the way to Jesus. And as parents, this is part of what we’re here for – to point the way for our children to live independent lives for His glory. And Lord willing, our children will be raising new little ones to follow Jesus. Hallelujah!

And decreasing – well, that’s not all a bad thing either. I love the full house at Christmas time, but boy is it nice to return to our regular quiet routine after all the celebrating is over and the guests are gone.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Amen and amen.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning. He must increase and my blog must decrease.

Watercolor Wednesday has a nice ring to it, but I think this will also include any other artsy/crafty things I’ve got going on. It’s kind of weird sharing these things because it seems like an invitation for admiration, but I don’t know why sharing artwork should be that much different from sharing any other kind of produced work. I love looking at other people’s art, so maybe some of you feel the same way.

Okay, with all that navel gazing out of the way, here’s the “rest of the story” about my experience with the Jump-Start with Jenny lessons on YouTube that I did. The 30 days of lessons ended up taking 4 months, but my goal was to finish it. The last 6 lessons were way more detailed and required a fair amount of sketching ahead of time. The last project was “artist’s choice,” so I take full blame and/or credit for it. 🙂

I think my least favorite to work on and to look at is the Urban Sketch – it was from a photograph I took in Mantorville. All in all, I learned a LOT and recommend the lessons.

Sometimes I get caught up in the existential crisis of “what’s the point of all of this,” but there’s a joy that comes with being creative and in learning a skill and that seems to be enough “point” for now.

Bah – more naval gazing.

Let me know if you have a favorite of the above – maybe I’ll just send it to you! I don’t really have other plans for these.

Reporting live from the Lynniebee Cluttered Craft Room…

I’ll probably delete this in the morning, if I can find it.

I’ve been thinking about how I want to use this blog this year, with the idea of being a little bit more focussed on certain types of writing. I’m thinking of setting aside each day of the week like so:

Monday: Random thoughts
Tuesday: Gleanings from what I’m reading
Wednesday: Watercolor/Art
Thursday: Poetry or photo-oriented writing (like most of my posts last year)
Friday: Fiction (short)

It’s not set in stone yet – just thought I’d give it a try and see how it goes. I’d certainly be open to any feedback you have, my illustrious readers. It would be really fun to have an alliteration for each day (already have Watercolor Wednesday and Fiction Friday).

Elisabeth Elliot, Keep A Quiet Heart
“So many lives seem honeycombed with small failures, neglectful of the little things that make the difference between order and chaos. Perhaps it is because they are so seldom taught that visible things are a sign of an invisible reality; that common duties may be ‘an immeasurable ministry of love.‘” P. 84

I used to tell my kids that if they did nothing else before they left their room in the morning, they should at least have a discipline of making their beds every day. It’s surprising what can flow from the discipline of doing small things. A funny story about that, though. One day I came downstairs and told my son Josh (about 10 at the time) that I’d noticed he hadn’t made his bed and it had grieved me deeply. This was said tongue-in-cheek, of course. He ran upstairs to make his bed and then came down with a triumphant look on his face. “Mom,” he said with glee, “I noticed you didn’t make your bed this morning and it grieved me deeply.” It’s so rare that I don’t make my bed in the morning that I still can’t fathom how I overlooked it that day; God has a good sense of humor.

J. Alastair Groves & Winston T. Smith, Untangling Emotions
“…Paul Miller once quipped that anxiety is wasted prayer. …doing anything with our fears, especially chasing your thoughts on the hamster wheel of anxiety, short-circuits the very purpose for which God gave us the capacity to feel anxious. Our anxieties are meant to lead us straight to him. Every time.” p. 109

As I told a friend recently, I live in the land of “Worst-Case Scenario,” and it’s not a fun place to be. I love the idea that anxiety is meant to lead us to God. As I’ve gotten older, I have been learning to take these things straight to Him, but I still get on that hamster wheel now and again.

Emily Dickinson, excerpt from Poem #257, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“The Rainbow’s way–
A Skein
Flung colored, after Rain”

Nice bit of imagery, that.

Addison Leitch (second husband of Elisabeth Elliot – heard this in one of her speeches on the podcast)
“When the cross of Christ cuts across the will of man, somebody has to die.”

Think about that last one for awhile.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these gleanings, if you have any. Also, feel free to share your gleanings with me!

I’ll probably delete this while writing more quotes down in the morning.

Happy New Year! It’s deeply ingrained in my psyche to think about new beginnings, goals and resolutions at this time of year. As a family, we used to have a form that we each filled out on December 31 (or thereabouts) with space for resolutions in five areas:

Spiritual
Physical/Heath
Personal
Hobbies to Pursue/Skills to Learn
Miscellaneous

Like most people, I start out well, but some things peter out over time. It’s dangerous territory to resolve to do something daily; if you skip one day: BOOM – game over. However, I still love to take time to think strategically about the year ahead in each of those areas and to make plans, holding them all in subjection to Christ. As I always used to tell my kids, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!” Ha ha – just the kind of thing that parents love to say and that kids hate to hear.

With that in mind, here are some of the things I’m thinking about for 2021:

Take some online courses: art, literature, maybe history
Goodreads Book Reading Challenge: 100 books
Blogging: what to do? M-F again? More specific writing goals? Keep it random?
Bible: continue with Bible Reading Challenge (in my fourth year of this)
Exercise: 3-4 times per week
Continue with Hiking Club: 40 miles more this year?
Knitting: gotta start using up my stash. One project a month?
House: get rid of stuff. One room per month?

My daughter helped me go through stuff in the craft room while she was here, which gave me a good start on that last item. We’d like to downsize at some point and definitely don’t want to bring all the accumulation of the last 15 years with us. Here’s the first bin of give-away for 2021:

Lord willing, it will be followed by many more.

What are your plans for 2021? Let me know if you have thoughts about this blog, too.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning…