My feet hurt. My feet have always hurt, they have never been very cooperative feet, but lately they hurt all day, every day and worse. No matter what shoes I wear, (Or don't wear) or whatever else, my feet hurt all the time and it makes the simplest things in the day a chore. But I am trying to look at the occurrences in my life differently, rather than circumstances to fuss against, or as a punishment from God for one thing or another, I'm trying to see them as something that comes directly from Him and I'm trying to ask and understand from Him what I am to do with it all. And I pray and I think and I look around and all I can come up with is that I am done with housework. Is that a horrible thing to say? I've done it for 20 years now, I've got big kids all around me and I just can't keep up with it anymore. Even putting all the laundry away seems like this big mountain and it is simply because every step I take... HURTS.

I don't know what else to do. I have always been a walker and I've never minded caring for the family. Housework has never been something I would complain about, I don't mind cleaning the kitchen or sweeping. Rand has always tried to get me to give more over to the kids and I have just had a hard time doing it. I just like feeling like this is my house, you know? But I just can't deny it, Shayleen is going to have to take over and get the others working and I am just not going to be the one that can be the main player... Argh.

So what am I going to do? Well, schoolwork, obviously. That is a good portion of the day. But also, I think I am going to draw. I don't have any real talent, I can't organize, I can't garden, I can't do anything really very useful. It seems like the only natural skill God had placed in me is to be able to draw pretty pictures. Not very useful, but I guess that's what I will do. Read the Hobbit to my boys (and drag them through their math) and draw pretty pictures. Hows that for retirement plans?

A couple weeks ago a guest speaker at our church made the statement that he thinks we Christians are really good at separating ourselves from pagan culture but we really don't find a way to create Christian culture. Like when you have a person that when you talk with that you always gossip. Then you realize you shouldn't gossip, but then the conversation dies and you don't know what to say. When he said that I thought "Oh! That's so true!"  I think that it's true in a lot of areas. It seems like in times past maybe we knew some of it and had culture in those areas (like child raising was much more Christian in times past and has largely been replaced with secular culture... I think anyway.) and some areas I don't think the church has really reached maturity, or frankly even tried to. Have you ever heard anyone talk about Christianly city planning? Shouldn't we? Is there city planning that would be distinctly Christian? I think that we should be sending missionaries into the field of city planning.

When we lived in Portland there was a move to ban snout houses. (Snout houses are the ones where the garage juts way out toward the streets and the front door in hidden way back.)  They said they are architecturally ugly and that they hinder community because people drive into them and go from the garage to the house-neighbors never see each other. Oooo the conservatives were all up in arms. How dare they tell us we can't have our snout houses!

Well, I kind of felt like they had a point...

But how should a Christian city look? I love to read Dwell

.Personally I think it absolutely the very coolest magazine out there. Well, top 5 anyway.
I love to see the creative ways people came up with to make good use of a dinky little space. How they position their windows in a crowded city to make it feel private and secluded. How groups of people get together and make a community house together that still affords everyone privacy yet encourages interaction between them. Houses as culture. Houses as good neighbors. Houses as community. Houses as art. Very. Cool.

I wish more Christians would take this up as a serious point to study-a Christian point to study. We shouldn't be the ones in the back of the room griping about the ideas brought to the table for solutions. But too often we are.

I miss Portland.

Can I just say?

Lately I've just been going around feeling mopey like I'm just kind of homesick. I really miss Portland!

I miss Pizzacato. I know there are others but the ones in Portland taste different. The ones in the suburbs smell like the suburbs. They taste like the suburbs. The ones in Portland taste like Portland.

I miss the crazy lady who used to walk past our house in an evening dress and a long cigarette and scream obscenities at men. Poor wretched soul.

I miss walking out the front door and smelling coffee in the air.

I miss all the groovy gardens.

I miss the way all the kids on the street shared their outside toys. In our neighborhood, the rule was you could ride anything left on the sidewalk as long as you didn't take it around the corner. Here if my kids leave anything on the sidewalk the neighbors drag it back and glaaaaare at us. *sniff*

I miss popping out the door and running to Saturday Market at the drop of a hat.

I miss jumping on Max to run to Loyd Center.

I miss the waterfront.

I miss street musicians.

I miss street kids with mo-hawks with heights that defy gravity. Walking their tiny kittens on leashes.

I miss yuppie moms in jogging clothes and running strollers trotting all over town with coffee cup in hand.

I miss the big free sample Saturdays at New Seasons.

I miss our neighbors who used to start their family reunion with bagpipes.

I miss smelling Bento on the streets.

I miss funky little import shops and boutiques....

I miss waking up at night to the sound of street guys pilfing the bottles and cans in our backyard..

I miss sitting outside coffee shops watching the kids draw with with sidewalk chalk.

Portland was hard to live in sometimes. But golly. It was never boring.....

"Don't it all seem to go, you don't know what you've got till its gone."

I miss Portland. *sniff*

(The above photos are credited to Portland Ground Providing homesick Portlanders with a place to go and sniff..)

I love this video. Absolutely love it. I love Coldplay.

I do want to clarify that I do indeed know that not every guy who comes in our back door (at our house friends usually use the back door.) is here on some covert operation to "check us out." Now everyone is probably paranoid to visit us. heheh. Actually that thought comes from countless courtship articles that I've read (how amazingly pathetic that I could read so many books/articles and be so lost, huh?) Actually, I don't think anyone has. How sad. We aren't as in demand as I might like to believe.

Anyway, I think a lot of my antagonism comes from just a general feeling that I am moving in a lot of areas and I want to know really what I think and why. I think for a good while my spiritual life was kind of stymied because I kind of came at things from a conservative-good, liberal-bad sort of view point.  When I went into the homeschooling culture I went in whole hog and the only other family we knew who were doing it made Mennonites look wild. That isn't hyperbole. I consumed a lot of homeschooling magazines and books and analyzing every little thing, threw away the TV,  wore jumpers, and really, really tried to fit in with the whole uber-conservative homeschool crowd. We even visited a Mennonite church once. But I could never really feel like it was me, or that it all belonged to me. Some of it did, and still does. I still love reading to my kids, I still homeschool, all that... But I also have to admit things that some of those people I knew then would find shocking. Like that when the Talking Heads come on, I turn it up really loud. I ALWAYS hated how I felt in the dresses. They always made me feel fat..I wore them completely out of trying to do what God wanted... (well, and it was my little protest sign for myself in Portland that I wasn't going along with the whole "question gender" type thing... and in Portland if you have more than 3 kids you either belong to one of two groups-welfare addict or religious freak. Neither is very well looked upon in Portland, but if I was going to have to be one or the other....)

Anyway I think I felt a lot of guilt over things that I didn't need to feel guilty about. Some of the things I took on I did because I was convinced and some things I did because it seemed like that was the thing to do... And I think in a lot of areas I'm just questioning things. I don't want to knee jerk in the other direction and just be liberal for liberal's sake either. I want to be "convinced in my own mind"..

Maybe *I'm* the one looking for an iron clad guarantee that I'm doing everything right and that all the out comes rest with me. Because if I didn't admit that the whole idea of making a mistake terrifies me, I would be a liar. But I suppose all the risks involved are meant to drive us to prayer, and believe me, I do.