and you ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

Hoity canoity! I went to bed a perfectly normal homeschooler, pro-education in the very educated sense of the word, and woke up an unschooler. How did that happen?! And when, exactly? I wonder....

Anyway, here's a quotable from Mr. Holt.

"It can't be said too often: We get better at using words, whether
hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only
one -- when we use those words to say something we want to say,
to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own."

~ John Holt

Sometimes I'm giddy with nervous excitement, imagining Sassy having freedoms I never had, living a life I only dreamt of, being herself mutliplied by infinity. I feel like I have a fear-grin permanently plastered across my face right now, even if it doesn't show on my lips. I want to jump out of my skin right onto our farm, even though I'm terrified of my own lack of experience here.

Ah, well, with me, the call of adventure always wins over fear.

this is my commandment

I used to sing a song in Sunday School when I was little.

This is my commandment
That you love one another
That your joy may be strong.

Here's the actual verse.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question.

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Matthew 34-40 NIV

I've been thinking quite a bit about this verse all month. This Sunday, we had the sermon about homosexuality that often pops up in "seeker churches," like the one I attend. I was glad to hear that our pastor was preaching love instead of judgement (particularly since this is a make or break issue for me in a church), but it really got me thinking about this aspect of "love" that Jesus talks about it this verse.

Love is presented in this passage in the form of a commandment. I've known this for years -- ever since those kindergarten years singing Sunday School songs. But it holds a new meaning when I concentrate on the commandment part.

It is only possible to follow a command if you're being commanded to do something. You can't be commanded to feel something. Really, this idea of love that we are commanded to practice must carry with it a different meaning than the one that we Americans typically attach to "love."

It must be possible to actively love other people, regardless of your feelings for them. Like most Americans, I typically see love in the context of my marriage, my family & my friends, plus all those other things I enjoy. I LOVE my husband. I LOVE my daughter. I LOVE retrievers. I LOVE summer. I LOVE coffee. I LOVE sunshine. I LOVE my new camera.

When we keep using the word love in this way, I think it keeps us from realizing that the love Jesus spoke of is a little different, less opinion-based and way more active.

I can't change my usage of the word love, nor would it be all that productive since it's part of our country's vernacular and I don't want to be misunderstood by everyone around me. Instead, I'd like to add one little word to Jesus' commandment to make it more accurate in the context of current American English.

This is my commandment
That we LOVE ON one another
That our joy may be strong.

There will always be neighbors that I find it hard to love as myself, those about whom I'm prone to gossip, that most pervasive of transgressions among women. But I have to love on them anyway. If the focus is off changing my feelings and on practicing the action of love, the commandment should be easier to follow.

blooming flower

Sassy chose the blooming flower as her prize at the Art Museum



For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about my various time suckers recently. I feel like one of those analysts that companies hire to find out where they can save money, especially in human labor. I've been jokingly referring to myself as a "systems analyst" in my own head. (OK, and to Jeff, too. I'm sure he was rolling his eyes, even if he was kind enough not to do so during our "face time.")

It is true, however, that our house is bleeding money through as yet unidentified avenues and weeks will go by with me not seeming to do much besides repeating long cleaning or organizing processes over and over and over again. Couldn't there be a better way? A way that enables me to spend more time doing something that would make us some money or feed into my daughter and other family/friend relationships? Finding and reducing these time suckers often has some lovely little surprise benefits, like saving money or saving resources to help lessen our environmental impact.

So can I write "systems analyst" on a resume one day? :-) Here are a couple I've identified.

Dishes
Our dishwasher broke again (never, ever, EVER buy Frigidaire anything), leaving me with lots of time spent not doing dishes, but thinking about the dishes. I have implemented a new plan for our family. Each of us has chosen one mug, one glass, one bowl, one plate, one fork, knife & spoon. These are only to be used for the individual that chose them, and no one was allowed to choose the same style. That habit I've cultivated of buying mismatched dishes, to the dismay of my more OCD friends, is paying off!

We have a special drying place for these dishes. Each time you use your dishes, you rinse them & put them on the drying place. Every time I do a load of dishes, I wash those too & we start over. In my estimation, this will eliminate about 50% of the overall dishes. No longer will we have a steady stream of plates, mugs, glasses & silverware. The full loads will be made up of our cooking & storing dishes. It should save the same amount of money spent and water wasted.

Pictures
I've realized that my camera is a big time sucker for me. It involves a loooooonnnnnnggggg process to get pictures from the camera to, say, a website like this one. Unfortunately, I don't have such an easy fix on this one, though I'm trying. Here's the steps:

Transfer pics via camera cord to my laptop
iPhoto auto starts and imports the pics
View pics in iPhoto and decide which ones to keep (this is by far the longest step, since the camera's resolution overwhelms my very slow computer)
Delete unwanted pics from computer, first to iPhoto trash, then empty iPhoto trash, then empty desktop trash
Name those pics destined for other places (email, websites, photoshop)
Export those pics to the appropriate places by apple-clicking on each one from the organize view, choosing export & typing in my specs (this too is very time-consuming & annoying since I can't always remember which pic I've chosen for which app when in organize view)
For a Blogger upload, open the image dialog box in Blogger & configure specs
Upload
Copy & paste to the right spot in the post since it always annoyingly puts it at the top of the post

Using this system, one picture -- just one -- could easily take 20 minutes or longer since a lot of time is waiting for iPhoto to stop spinning its little rainbow ball and recoup enough to perform the command I just gave it without crashing my system. Then, of course, there's the waiting for the Blogger site to respond. It can be very frustrating. If I want to use a grown-up camera, I think I need to find a grown-up system to deal with the pics. Maybe this involves different software or maybe different hardware for my computer. If you all have any ideas that have worked for you, I'd love to hear them!

So if I can eliminate these time-suckers, what will I do with myself? That's easy. I'm looking at my bedroom around me right now. It's dusty. So, so dusty. It needs to be vacuumed. Thoroughly. Even under the bed. I have 3 baskets of clean clothes to put away. Dishes to take downstairs. Empty cans & bottles to be recycled. And that's just one room. My usual tactic is to just jump in to get it done. You know, because thinking about the problem would be wasting time that could be spent doing. Maybe that's not so. Maybe thinking about the problems is exactly what would turn my life at home from a "when am I going to ever catch up?" atmostphere to an "I'm on top of it" atmostphere.

I would love for my house to be a safe haven for our whole family. A place to unwind, drop our stress & actually relax. Instead, I actually dread walking up to my front door whenever I come home. While I'm out, I can relax and just be. At home, from the minute I step in the door, I see work. I feel work. I am crushed by work and the everpresent feeling that I am way behind and there's so much more work to do. If I'm the hamster, my house has become the wheel.

I've even thought I will probably have to leave my house to school Sassy when she reaches that hands-on teaching age. I'll have to go to the library to homeschool my child, because my house has become a crushing weight of neverending responsibility and failure. That's just wrong!

So this week, I'm doing a little more thinking and a little less doing. Just for this week. I'm already hopelessly behind, so what's there to lose?

freedom la la la la la

Well, on the exact 4th day of my new coffee job, today, I awoke early early in the morning. About 3:00 a.m. to be exact. I tossed & turned and told myself I had to get to sleep that I had a big long hurried weekend ahead of me and I was already fighting sickness and I had to sleep. Sleep, dammit, sleep. And then I consulted my little voice on this whole job thing. Why was I already so stressed on only Day 4?

I told a few friends right after my 3rd day (last Saturday) how the assistant manager implied that I was stealing a drink on the way out the door and how they tried to keep me almost an hour after work to teach me the books although no one informed me that this was planned. So, I had Jeff waiting outside for me and both of us getting frustrated for a good 15 minutes. I don't know if I mentioned how frustrating it was that they had no employee manual at all. No policies written down. No training information compiled with instructions on the different procedures, phone numbers of people who could help, etc. Instead, they relied on 3-4 training shifts to teach you all you needed to know & then you were to work by yourself from that point forward.

I'm very comfortable working by myself. With instructions. I like written instructions. At my old coffee shop job, I referred to the training and procedure manual often....after I rewrote it and indexed it for a class project in my tech writing class. I enjoy writing training manuals because I know what a valuable resource a well-organized manual can be.

So I tossed and I turned and I consulted my little voice. I've been missing my little voice. He hasn't come around for awhile. I've been pretty scattered and stressed lately, bordering on the overwhelmed again. My little voice flees like a dove when I feel this way.

My old pastor at my old church, the one that I truly love, the one that has my heart, recently did a sermon on the Holy Ghost. He described the Holy Ghost as a Counselor and brought up how Jesus compared him to a dove. The Holy Ghost does not like to be around certain mindsets. I believe that for me, my little voice skitters away when my mind is all-over-the-place. But apparently, 3:00 a.m. is a good time to be asking for counsel.

My little voice speaks in ideas more than complete sentences, and what I discerned was this: quit. Quit the job. Quit being all-over-the-place. (Why do I keep forgetting these things?) When you do this working outside the home, you are not living your natural life.

There's more. And this is where my little voice deviated from my usual thoughts.

Me: What do I do at home? More gardening? More slashing of bills? Work from home?
Little voice: Serve your husband more.

I've shared my "I'm not a feminist," line with most of my friends, but I never use the word "serve" in relation to my husband. I imagine women that "serve" their husband to always wear long skirts & tennis shoes with white socks sticking out. And never cut their hair -- just pull it up into the bun.

But upon further thought, the little voice is probably right -- again. See, when I work, I start to get stressed & overwhelmed and then I get resentful. I get resentful that Jeff never does housework or laundry or errands or bills. I think, "Well, I work too!" to which he replies, "Yes, but you don't work at a job that supports the family." Many of my feminist friends would likely smart at that one, but I think it's true. I don't carry the burden of supporting the family, nor could I. I am not built that way. I would not be living my natural life.

Jeff, on the other hand, is built that way. That is a very important character trait to him. He may not choose to go to his job on any given day, and it may not be his dream job, but he still goes. That is HUGE to me, because if it were me, I would choose not to go. I would be depressed constantly. I would hate my life, all joie de vivre gone.

The problem is, a $10/hour job demands just as much from you as his family-supporting one does. They carry the same expectations that you arrive on time, that you show up for your shift, that you make them the priority in your life. In fact, the $10/hour job is often more demanding and has higher expectations since the nature of the jobs usually entail some service aspect that can't be achieved without a human being present.

When I work, I feel the same mental strain for that piddly job as he does for his important one. So it's natural that I would get resentful. Of course, resentment never builds a healthy marriage.

What else did my little voice tell me that I wasn't expecting?

Me: Well then, where should the money come from? What kind of job can I get that-
Little voice: A loan.

My whole idea was to pay for this temporary home with cash. But now I feel that perhaps I should explore the loan option a little more. Perhaps it would make this move -- this summer -- less stressful with very little pinch. Aren't I supposed to live, too? I mean short-term pain for the gain is all good and everything, but putting myself into a depressed, resentful state to achieve it doesn't seem like a viable option anymore.

My little voice thinks that my new church is not as good for me as my old church. I know this. The drive is prohibitive for me, but deep down, I know this. I am committed to the new church for now. I have obligations that I'm not willing to break. But I think I need to set aside a certain time & place to download and listen to each week's message from my old church.

So....what did I do after consulting my little voice? I told him how much I'd missed him and asked him not to flee so far and to stick around. Then I went to sleep. Ahhh.....sleep.

And this morning, I woke up, lazed around for a few minutes in bed with Sassy, and then came downstairs and quit my job. And the best part is that I haven't felt guilty about it. I usually feel terribly guilty after I quit a job, but this time I didn't, because I knew I had the support of my little voice.

Freedom la la la la la