dusting off those photoshop skills

So my friend C's blog Curious Pickles had made me envious of her hubby's photo skills in a good way. In the kind of way that jumpstarts you into learning, discovering, pushing yourself.

Of course, I've got a mid-range digital camera on my wish list this Christmas. But, I also took the opportunity to pull out those rusty Photoshop skills & start using it to give a damn (about my pics, that is).

Here's some of my beginning again efforts as I spent 4 hours or so playing yesterday.

before



after



before



after



As you might notice, all the pics have the same frame. That's because I automated it. Yep, that's right. With one click of a button, I can zoom the frame around any photo. Soon, I plan to automate collages into pre-set forms. It will be a lot of setup, but infinitely timesaving on the backend. Plus, I'm having a lot of fun. :-)

sweet madison

Who knew? Who knew that this town was a day trip? Who knew that such a Midwestern town still existed...and thrived? Who knew that our precious land would be a 30 minute country drive away from the town I've always wanted?



My biggest question now is, "Why was I stuck at a concrete college when other people got Hanover?" Who knew?

how I quit my bread machine

I've owned a bread machine for a long time. Not only have I owned it, but unlike most bread machine buyers, I've used it for a long time. In fact, I was so dependent on my bread machine that last year, when my first one broke, I replaced it within a week.

The problem with the bread machine is that, while it produces perfectly edible bread, it was about as tasty as the soft-crusted, bland, perfectly-sliced bread-aisle bread. And I'm a bread snob.

When we married, Jeff was working as an artisan baker. I had become accustomed to Kalamata Olive bread and Sourdough Cheddar, along with Challah and Farmer's White. I love the hard, crispy crust, the imperfect hunks of torn bread rather than slices. I love eating bread by itself, as its own entity, not as the envelope to hold sandwich fillings. But you can only achieve this bread by hand. It doesn't come from a bread machine. And if the experienced bread bakers talk about the process, they'll have you thinking it's a secret laboratory experiment that has to be performed with excruciating precision or you'll end up with a hard, lumpy half-baked ball of waste.

Hmmm.....turns out, not so true. I've suddenly fallen in love with making bread by hand because it's far more forgiving than "they" would have you believe and, here's the neat part, it's just as quick & easy as the bread machine. Who knew?

Here's my beginner's knowledge about making bread.

The salt to yeast ratio is very important. Follow the recipe for this. Everything else can be adjusted.

A great ball of dough is neither too dry nor too wet. If your dough feels like it's not pliant enough, it probably isn't the perfect dough. If it sticks to your hands, probably not the perfect dough. But, smaller loaves of imperfect dough will usually bake up just fine.

Rolls are way more forgiving than larger loaves.

Kneading doesn't take very long. Turn over 10 times or so before the first rise. Knead each roll 10 times before putting them on the baking sheet.

The oven has to be hot -- at least 400 degrees -- to get the "oven pop" that rises even a sluggish dough.

A little pat of butter or oil on top of the dough before baking is essential.

When using all wheat flour, you can put the dough in its bowl to rise, accidently forget about it & go to bed, get up the next morning, punch it down & bake your rolls and it will still be good. Some might even say better.

If any of your batches of dough just won't rise, try flatbread instead. Bake in a very hot oven (500 degrees) for a few minutes to make pita bread or fry on the stovetop for a fried flatbread similar to Indian breads.

I remember about this time last year, we made rolls in our preschool class. All those itty, bitty hands got to knead the dough & form their rolls & put them on the baking sheets. And when they came out, they were beautiful little breads, and they tasted as delicious as they smelled. If bread-making were that hard, how come a 3-year-old can do it?

The Proverbs 31 Wife

Hanging around on the Christian message board Gentle Christian Mothers had quickly introduced me to the concept of the Proverbs 31 wife as the ideal Christian wife. I had never actually taken the time to read it. (Well, in my defense, I had not even owned a Bible whose translation I cared for until a couple weeks ago.) I had lots of assumptions about what it said, though, having never read it.

I assumed that Proverbs 31 was probably talking about how women should stay at home & raise their children, keep the home nice & tidy, & not look for too much for themselves. They should be ever-sacrificing, and better seen, not heard.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when I found the actual verse to be a little lovesong about a strong, capable, supportive & talented wife:

A truly good wife is the most precious treasure a man can find!

Her husband depends on her, and she never lets him down.

She is good to him every day of her life,

and with her own hands she gladly makes clothes.

She is like a sailing ship that brings food from across the sea.

She gets up before daylight to prepare food for her family and for her servants.

She knows how to buy land and how to plant a vineyard,

and she always works hard.

She knows when to buy or sell, and she stays busy until late at night.

She spins her own cloth,

and she helps the poor and the needy.

Her family has warm clothing, and so she doesn't worry when it snows.

She does her own sewing, and everything she wears is beautiful.

Her husband is a well-known and respected leader in the city.

She makes clothes to sell to the shop owners.

She is strong and graceful, as well as cheerful about the future.

Her words are sensible, and her advice is thoughtful.

She takes good care of her family and is never lazy.

Her children praise her, and with great pride her husband says,

"There are many good women, but you are the best!"

Charm can be deceiving, and beauty fades away, but a woman who honors the Lord deserves to be praised.

Show her respect--praise her in public for what she has done.

I have become more and more interested through the past several years of learning about how women (and men) were designed to live. What choices are we to make that leave us calm, centered, & fulfilled? I look for these things in the Bible and as far as my home life is concerned, it seems a gameplan is laid out in Proverbs 31.

The reason I'm so glad that I finally read the verse is that it has allowed me to buck contemporary thinking once again. Just last week I received in my inbox an email forwarded by woman after woman that made a joke about the number of things a woman does after she announces, "I'm going to bed" (about 40 things on the path to the bedroom) versus how many a man does (one -- gets up & goes to bed). After I read the email, I lived with a little more resentment for the next several days. It's popular to grumble how many things we women have to do while our husband sits lazily in his chair doing "whatever he wants."

Why does he not do the dishes? Why does he not help me clean? Why does he never pick up the slack? Why can't I eat & then sit down & relax instead of cleaning up the kitchen?

You know why?

She knows when to buy or sell, and she stays busy until late at night.

Of course I stay busy until late at night. Honestly, if I didn't, I'd get bored. Quickly. Sitting in the living room chair for several hours before bed would have my legs jumping & my skin crawling. I am meant...designed, if I may....to stay busy until late at night. And with that little verse, I let it go. All of the resentment that contemporary society tells me I should have is gone.

What are your resentments? Are they truly valid?

be still....

I have three sprititual, Christian things on my mind today that have been brewing for a bit. The first is this verse from Psalm 46:10:

Be still and know that I am God.

It's a short little platitude on the outside, but eloquent in its simple message when you look deeper.

I've been sick with a stomach bug for the past week, which is my pleasant way of describing the freakin' parasite that has kept me no further than 10 feet from my toilet for 8 days & counting. At night, I've been too uncomfortable to lie on my side, so I've gone to bed on my back instead. Our 30-year-old TV finally broke around the same time I got sick, so I've laid meditating on my back to get to sleep each night instead. This simple change has transformed my daily attitude. I have always done my best thinking in this place between sleep and wake, this restful, alert, soaring, brainstorming, drifting place of clarity that I've never been able to call up on command.

I like noise. I like background TV, radio, voices, barking. It calms my fears. I have wished many times for a soundtrack to my life. Not only would I know of any impending danger just by the low, foreboding music, but I wouldn't have to ever be in quiet.

If I could vocalize the meaning I gleaned from Psalm 46:10 this week it was:

Only in the quiet will you know God.

It's not just the meditative quiet at the end of a busy night that has grown me this week, but the quiet of my lifestyle. I love it when we catch a glimpse of how we were designed to live. I haven't gone out save one hour this whole week. I've been homebound, locked down by the threat of parasitic contagion. And it has been one of the most calming weeks I've ever lived. For years, my soul has ached to rise in the morning, do a minimum of work on the computer, teach my child, cook, clean, sew & care for my family. Even when I finally had the opportunity to do so, when Sassy was born, I still filled the days with lots of unrelated activities probably pursued by me to make myself feel more important in the outside world. Nothing helps boost your self-esteem when you have no job, no school, little money, & a struggling marriage like having very important responsibilites that others are counting on you to do. This was not how God designed me to live.

I thought I would be lonely. I thought we'd never really be able to move to the farm. I thought I'd miss the running, the park play, the Saturday bars, the 24-hour Kroger. I won't. If I die never having owned a horse or milked a goat or brought eggs in fresh on Sunday morning, I'll miss that. I won't miss Target or the restaurants or even the coffee houses. I definitely won't miss being in the stupid car all day.

Only in the stillness will you know God.

It's amazing how the mind wanders, explores & always comes to focus on what is right when given the space -- the stillness -- to do so.

movies!

Who doesn't like good movie recommendations? Here's mine from the ones we watched this year. (Note that we rarely go to the theater, so most of these movies probably weren't released this year, we just watched them this year.)

The Painted Veil - perhaps my favorite movie love story ever

Blood Diamond - difficult to watch, infuriating & enlightening

Off the Map - a calming suggestion from a good friend about identity crisis in off-the-grid desert living

28 Days Later - a surprisingly well-written "zombie" flick that has nothing to do with zombies

An Inconvenient Truth - there is no excuse for not having watched this yet

The Break-Up - though big-name actor romantic comedies might be movie twaddle, this one has unanticipated depth

Stranger than Fiction - an opinionated baker living a life I envy, a lovely scene featuring "Whole Wide World," and another great performance by Will Farrell

Fast Food Nation - also difficult to watch, but is immediately transforming and sticks with you for months afterward

Hotel Rwanda - a glimpse of this highly volatile period in Rwanda's history through one man's eyes

More to come!

how to ruin your children's lives

I hopped over to Mothering.com to post a quick question about low VOC sheds when this article headline from Science Daily caught my eye:

Mom's depression linked to infant stress

As always, I will post the whole article since links to news sites change so rapidly.

TORONTO, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- A Canadian study suggested an association between a history of depression in the mothers and increased stress reactivity of their infants.

The study, published in Biological Psychiatry, also linked increased stress reactivity to a particular style of mothering known as "maternal overcontrol."

Researchers found an increase in the stress hormone -- cortisol -- following a mild stressor in infants whose mothers have a history of depression and a pattern of intrusive and overstimulating behavior toward their infant known as "maternal overcontrol." These infants also had lower pre-stress cortisol levels. In addition, there was a correlation in the cortisol levels between mothers and their infants.

These findings add "to our small but growing body of knowledge on neurobiological differences in stress responses between infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers," study leader Dr. Rima Azar, of Toronto General Hospital, said in a statement. Since the adrenocortical system is easily influenced in both positive and negative ways, Azar said she believes that it is very important to eventually identify which babies are more vulnerable to stress.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

Now, if I may rewrite the article to reflect more truth, please:

A Canadian study suggested an association between a history of depression in the mothers and reading too many stupid "scientific articles" about all the ways they could ruin the lives of their children.

The study, published in Biological Psychiatry, also linked increased stress reactivity to a particular style of mothering that is induced by these same stupid articles and has been given a judgmental, demeaning name by the researchers in order to establish a new syndrome and possibly help secure funding for their future studies.

Researchers found an increase in the stress hormone -- cortisol -- following a mild stressor in infants whose mothers have a history of depression and a pattern of what the researchers consider intrusive and overstimulating behavior toward their infans that they have decided should have the name "maternal overcontrol." The researchers also outlined in specific medical jargon how the depressed mothers were ruining the lives of their children, using quantifiable values of various hormones so as to make their research sound important & undeniable.

These findings add "to our small but growing body of knowledge on neurobiological differences in stress responses between infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers," study leader Dr. Rima Azar, of Toronto General Hospital, said in a statement. Since the adrenocortical system is easily influenced in both positive and negative ways, Azar said she believes that it is very important to eventually identify which babies are more vulnerable to stress and treat the mothers quickly with mandatory drugs lest they risk losing their children to foster care until they can develop a better attitude and display cortisol numbers in the appropriate range on a court-ordered blood test. Then we can all finally be happy.

Related Headlines, just in case you're not yet sure if you are indeed ruining the lives of your children:

Low-birth weight linked to later disease (September 28, 2007) -- Low-birth weight infants may be at a greater risk of stress-related health problems such as coronary heart disease and diabetes, a Finnish study ... > full story

Breastmilk nicotine disrupts infant sleep (September 5, 2007) -- A nonprofit research center in the United States found infant sleep patterns disrupted by the nicotine in their mothers' breast milk. ... > full story