Wasn’t Tim wonderful to take all those gorgeous pictures and post a blog while I was gone! Thank you, love!

One of my friends asked me if I was going through blog withdrawal during the retreat.

“Are you okay?” she asked? “Do you need to find some wireless connectivity somewhere and get your bloggy fix?”

People are so kind, looking out for my addictions. Thankfully blogging is still a legal. Although my fingers twitched several times and I may have said something like “this would be a great blog” oh three or four times, I actually was fine not blogging. I knew Tim was home keeping the blogging fires burning.

The retreat was wonderful. It was nearly perfect in every way. I was incredibly blessed by the entire experience - the speaker, the lovely accommodations, the godly women and great fellowship, the little details that made the retreat special and so much more.

I hardly took a single picture - see how I have fallen - but the retreat photographer is in my small group and I plan to steal her camera data card as soon as possible. Our theme was the Amazing Race and we used the map of the world to “point” us to the giveaway table. It was so invigorating to work with such creative women.

Coming Soon:

Planning a Women’s Retreat

My dear friend, Nancy, has written a detailed post on how to plan a women’s retreat. Look for it some time this week.

I hope you had a good weekend. The weather here in western WA was incredible on Saturday and it’s stirred up in me a serious hunger for summer weather.

Kathy

Two days of gorgeous weather here, sunshine and warm temperatures abound. Rachel claims that it was 80 degrees today at one of the parades in which she performed.

It was a beautiful day. We worked outside on our ‘castle’, and had time to play with the hose and a make-shift slip ‘n slide. We ate leftover pizza for lunch and stew for supper, thanks to Kathy who prepared meals for us before she gleefully ran off to attend the annual women’s retreat with ladies from our church. The kids played several elaborate games; their latest is a game called ‘Mousetrap’ involving a large rope tied on one end and twirled like a jump-rope (presumably by the ‘cat’).

Daniel amazed us all with his mouse-like agility.

Joshua kicked the weekend off in his own unique style by mowing the lawn with our new mower. He was deep in The Count of Monte Cristo and decided to mow both front and back lawns on Friday so he could devote his Saturday to more single-minded reading. I recently assigned him six books to read before he is allowed to re-read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, so he is burning through them as quickly as he can.

Kathy and I agreed to use part of our tax refund to buy a new mower. Joshua put it through its paces.

We had a good day. I bought the wrong length 2′x4′ studs on Friday, so we had to go back to Lowe’s for more wood — then I had the wrong size nuts for my bolts, so back to Ace Hardware I went again. Still, we managed to get a couple of walls up on the ‘castle’, much to David’s excitement.

How does that saying go: “Measure once, cut three or four times … ?”

“You’re almost done with it,” he exclaimed. Seven-year-olds aren’t very hard to please, when it comes to construction.

David had no shame when it came to avoiding Joshua and the hose …

The ‘castle’ is quite a bit taller than we expected — almost gangly, if you can use that word to describe a small building. I plan to put in a floor at about 6′ and use the top part for battlements, at least until we can put a roof over it. Let’s hope we don’t get any serious wind before it is more stable, or we’ll end up with a lot of scrap lumber and not much else. We haven’t yet decided how to decorate the outside — maybe we could paint boards to look like stone?

Daniel and I are very proud of our tomato seedlings.

We even brought our tomato plants out for the afternoon, so they could become ‘hardened’ to the wind and sun. They seemed to like it, although several of our little seedlings drooped a bit until we perked them up with a good watering.

David and Sarah can’t wait for their seedling tray to sprout (it’s still under my bed, germinating).

Toward the middle of the afternoon, I began feeling my allergies in earnest. This has been a pretty gentle season for me so far — I’ve been able to stay on top of it ever since allergy season started (for me, in late February). Tonight, though, I’m runny-nosed and bleary-eyed and I’ve already taken my whole day’s allotment of Allegra (and then some). It may be a long night.

You’d think it was Summer, the way these kids carried on in their bathing suits!

Rachel spent the day performing in four Daffodil Parades in the area with the Drill Team from our HOPE homeschooling co-op. Their costume involved jackets and black clothing, so she was pretty hot. They went out for pizza afterward, so we weren’t able to retrieve our sweet Rachel until 9 pm, which is why she is conspicuously missing from these photos.

“Pose heroically,” I told ‘em, so they did.

Tim
Project 366, Day 103

I hear American Idol opened with a song about Jesus this week. Is that true? Wow.

I have never seen American Idol. Ever. Isn’t that strange. Is it a favorite at your home? I have lots of friends who love it and gather with their family to watch each week.

Come to think of it, we’ve never seen Lost, Survivor (any variety), Amazing Race, 24 or CSI either.

Of course, that’s not really surprising since we don’t have a tv (other than one for movie viewing), but it does make me think about main stream culture and how much conversation revolves around the current tv shows.

Interesting.

Nowadays you can rent or buy an entire season of your favorite tv show. I’m so far behind with some of these long running series that I don’t know that I can catch up. By the time I finally watch Lost or 24 there won’t be anyone left to talk with. Everyone will be on to the new latest and greatest and I’ll be forced to hit old blogs and tv forums to discuss the plot intrigues.

What about you? Are you a tv watching family? Do you have favorite shows you can’t wait to see every week (when there isn’t a writer’s strike, of course)?

Do you catch them “live,” use TiVo or buy them on DVD?

If you buy, what tv shows do you own?

We have lots of old ones - Gilligan’s Island, The Andy Griffith Show, Bonanza. As well as some newer ones - Monk and Alias.

Why do you think tv is such a major source of conversation? Are we connected, as a society, through our common tv viewing?

I’d love to hear from you. Tim and I have absolutely no resistance to the television. The only way we are able to maintain any balance regarding tv is to just forgo it all together. We pretty much made the decision, as newlyweds, not to have tv in the home. We fight over the remote at hotels, however. It’s not pretty.

Kathy
I took pictures today (okay, Rachel took them) but I only got 4 hours of sleep last night and I MUST get some more tonight. Loading pictures takes time!

When Kathy organized the 5 for $5 contest earlier this year, I decided to sign up (even though I was the only person of male persuasion to do so). I knew there wasn’t a chance I would win, but I wanted to motivate myself, and I figured it would placate Kathy. Now that she has kept her weight off for more than two years, she casts an appraising eye on me, with a physical makeover in mind.

“How’re those push-ups and sit-ups coming along,” she’ll ask, pretending to be subtle. “What are you going to do to get some kind of cardio workout?”

Not my actual power nap strategy.

I bite back a sarcastic retort and smile ambiguously, avoiding eye contact. “I’ll figure something out,” I mumble vaguely. Whenever Kathy begins to be satisfied with her weight, she pays more attention to mine. “Maybe we need more magazines around here with unattainable, waif-like female bodies on the cover,” I muse to myself. (Sometimes when I’m musing, I’m not very kind.)

Anyway, the point of the 5 for $5 contest was to come up with five health-related goals that you could measure and track over a five-week period, with a maximum of 100 points each week. I came up with four pretty easily, but I couldn’t seem to think of the fifth. Then I remembered a recent study I heard about where they tracked sleep patterns of two groups, and found that those who slept at least 7 hours a night were more likely to lose weight than those who slept less than that. So I set my fifth goal such that I would try to get 7 hours of sleep at least four days a week.

Have you ever seen a giraffe asleep? I haven’t. Maybe this giraffe is dead?

It is surprisingly difficult to get that much sleep in this season of my life. I have to get up pretty early most days, either because of my commute or in order to meet with ‘my boys’ for prayer before work. I’m a night-owl by nature, and there always seems to be one more thing I want to do before I sleep. Because of my involvement at church, evening meetings are not uncommon. From time to time I do some side-work, much of it volunteer labor for non-profit organizations. I try to spend time with my wife and my five children each day, and I do like to play a half-hour chip’s worth of computer gaming whenever I can fit it in. And then there’s writing blog entries whenever Kathy comes up empty. There just don’t seem to be quite enough hours in the day, and so I cut it out of sleep time, more often than not. To compound the problem further, during allergy season (late February to early May, for me) I don’t sleep very well and often wake up in the middle of the night, sneezing and congested.

This could have been me on the train this morning.

Some people get by on less than six hours of sleep a night, while others need at least eight. One friend of mine routinely sleeps less than four hours a night, and I know several who view sleep as an enemy to be vanquished or avoided. People vary, but nearly everyone I know complains of being tired, especially on Mondays. I find that when I’m tired, my view of life darkens and narrows considerably, yet I’m unwilling to give up many of the things that vie for my time.

I thought about posting pictures of myself asleep, but the logistics were kinda tricky, so I settled on sleepy animals.

Scripture seems a bit divided on this topic. On the one hand, sleep is portrayed as an enemy to financial security:

”How long will you lie there, you sluggard?
When will you get up from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest-
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.” – Proverbs 6:9-11

Yet on the other hand, even God rested when He had completed His work, creating the world. And Christians are encouraged to look forward to their eternal “Sabbath rest”. As I get older, the idea of eternity as ‘rest’ begins to seem a lot more attractive to me.

”There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience.” — Hebrews 4:9-11

We have a bear like this at our local zoo …

So I’ll take an informal comment-poll: What is your philosophical view of sleep? Is it important for your health, or is it a necessary evil? How much sleep do you get, and what steps do you take to improve your chances of getting enough sleep?

Tim

A little more than a week ago, I posted a blog which I whimsically entitled Daylight Savings Time. A rather feeble play on words, I attempted to explore an innovative new idea I discovered: saving money and getting out of debt. I was astounded by the number and quality of responses we received in the form of comments and personal e-mails. It turns out that a large number of people are rather passionate about this subject.

Not one of our actual readers.

“Whoa, there,” I thought. “Most of these people are serious about paying off debt. Some of them think we should actually get rid of our credit cards!” I pulled up a browser window and shopped a while at NewEgg.com until I regained my composure.

Let’s face it: I like having credit cards. I like the feeling of power they engender, and the illusion of value and wealth. I enjoy the convenience and the ease with which I am separated from my money. I value the increasingly-worthless airline miles I earn when I engage in serious borrowing. I even like the mail they send me:

“Dear Tim,” they write. “We’ve noticed that you haven’t reached full indentured-servanthood yet, in terms of the amount you owe us, which is slightly less than Argentina owed to the World Bank in the late 90’s. To tempt you to be even more irresponsible, we’re raising your credit limit to ridiculous levels. You should rush out and buy a computer for every room in your house!”

As we read comment after comment, extolling the virtues of Dave Ramsey’s books and Crown Financial Ministries, we began to feel a bit convicted. “Maybe the time has come for us to actually make a change in how we handle our money,” I mentioned to Kathy, rather hesitantly.

One of the Small Groups at our Church is doing a study using Crown Financial’s book …

“Sounds great! When shall we start? I’ve got our old budget (the one we started last year) right here! I’ve read three chapters of Ramsey’s book, and I have a list of things we need to talk about!” My wife is nothing if not enthusiastic.

I dragged my feet for a week or so, ’cause I like to play hard-to-get, but eventually she wore me down, and I agreed to spend a couple of hours talking about our financial future.

“I’m so excited,” Kathy bubbled. “My friend M. and her husband sat down the other night to talk finances, and they got into a big fight. I’ll bet we can do even better!”

Sure enough, we had a big fight about parenting before we even started talking about money, which demonstrated our superiority and, I felt, put things into their proper perspective. We came to a few tentative conclusions:

• We need to stop using credit cards
• We must build a workable budget that allows us to live within our means, and stick to it.
• We should aggressively seek to set aside $1000 as an emergency fund, so unexpected expenses don’t ‘break’ our budget, or lure us back into deficit spending.
• Once we’ve got the $1000 put aside, we can attack our smallest debt and work to pay it off as quickly as possible.

Dave seems to have an answer for everything.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is not going to be a quick or easy path for us. To follow these simple steps, Kathy and I will have to change quite radically. We’ll have to learn to defer gratification, and to find joy in paying off debt, rather than in the acquisition of ’stuff’. We’ll have to temper our generosity, and live under actual constraints. We’ll have to learn new vocabulary, as in “We can’t afford that right now,” or “We’ll buy that just as soon as we save up for it.”

“Afford? Saved? What do those words mean, Dad?”

It will probably come as no surprise to those who have been down this road, that even now, as we stand on the brink of making a decision to change our way of life, we are facing some considerable expenses:

Not my actual tooth.

1. I’m in the middle of an implant process for one of my teeth that will probably cost me another $1800, after insurance
2. Kathy faces a potentially costly dental process in the near future (cost unknown)
3. Our van badly needs new brakes and other maintenance (ballpark $600)
4. We urgently need to replace the roof on our house (probably around $14,000)
5. We are in need of some homeschooling materials by the end of the summer ($600)

Not my actual roof.

So, what would you advise?

(1) Shall we abandon our well-intentioned, but naive attempt to shake off our dependence on debt?
(2) Shall we satisfy these immediate costs, and only then embark on a course of correction (admittedly, with a much higher debt load)?
(3) Shall we stick to our guns and refuse to go further into debt, even if our safety, our health and the value of our home may suffer as a result of deferring these expenses?
(4) Shall we take some drastic step (sell our house & move back to the country, change jobs, get a second job) rather than accept additional debt?
(5) If we do borrow money to get through these expenses, can I sneak in the purchase of a new computer, since it would be such a small proportion of the money borrowed? (Well, OK, I think I know the answer to that last question.)

Examining my heart, I really don’t know if these are smoke screens or not. Each of the expenses seems ‘necessary’, and my spirit quails at the prospect of abandoning the alternative of credit (I’m afraid I’ve leaned on credit too long). Do I just need to trust in God to provide for each in turn, or is this a case where I can’t reasonably expect God to bail me out from a series of bad decisions? After all, it isn’t God who borrowed money to acquire ’stuff’, and who failed to save for these kind of expenses. The roof, for example, is certainly not unexpected — we’ve known since we bought this house that we needed to replace it. Is it reasonable to live for years beyond my means, and then, suddenly, when I finally get the courage to change, to expect God to save me from the consequences of my misconduct?

She makes climbing look so easy …

These are serious questions. I value the wisdom and encouragement of the many responses we received from the first blog, and I’m hoping that some of you will take a few more minutes to offer your insight.

Tim