What's in a name? Meme

1. YOUR ROCK STAR NAME (first pet, current car): Trixie Focus

2. YOUR GANGSTA NAME (fave ice cream flavor, favorite type of shoe): Almond Fudge Balance

3. YOUR NATIVE AMERICAN NAME (favorite color, favorite animal): Blue Deer

4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME (middle name, city where you were born): Jennie Milwaukee

5. YOUR STAR WARS NAME (the first three letters of your last name, first two of your first name): Gar-Lo.

6. SUPERHERO NAME (2nd favorite color, favorite drink): Teal Orange Juice (Um...not so much. How about "The" followed by your 2nd favorite color, followed by your favorite pastime? The Teal Blogger."

7. NASCAR NAME (the first names of your grandfathers): Axel Erwin, yeah, that’s kind of NASCAR.

8. STRIPPER NAME ( the name of your favorite perfume/cologne/scent, favorite candy): Xia Xiang Snickers Cute, wouldn’t you say?

9. TV WEATHER ANCHOR NAME (your fifth grade teacher’s last name, a major city that starts with the same letter): Passon Pensacola . I couldn’t remember the 5^th grade teacher, so I used the 4^th grade teacher whom I hated.

10. SPY NAME (your favorite season/holiday, flower): Thanksgiving Iris

11. CARTOON NAME (favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now): Grape Sweats

12. HIPPIE NAME (What you ate for breakfast, your favorite tree): Toast Aspen

Six non-important things/habits/quirks meme

I have been tagged by Eric over at The Heart of a Pastor for this meme...so here it goes...

The rules for the meme are:
--Link to the person who tagged you.
--Post the rules on your blog.
--Share six non important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
--Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
--Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

So here are the six non important things/habits/quirks about me:

1) I love, love, love blue, blue green, teal, and anything BLUE. Did I tell you that I'm passionate about blue? I even have a fiber art piece posted on-line about my feelings for the color blue.

2) I am a board member of a secondary school in Uganda, East Africa. I hope I get to return there sometime.

3) According to a quiz I took at church this week (Lenten Service) I don't have Affluenza. I kind of doubt it. Put Affluenza in an amazon.com search and you'll be able to see just what you can "buy together."

4) I've used a pit latrine on three continents. Believe me, this is a big deal to me because I have knee arthritis.

5) I tell myself that if I didn't read so many blogs, I'd do more creative sewing. But I did finish the stole for my daughter's ordination and she doesn't even have a church yet.

6) I always have good intentions to do any number of things. One of these is to read the Bible more. Well, I know myself well enough to know it isn't going to happen much without some kind of outside structure in my life. For that reason, I've been attending Tuesday Bible study since 1977. This is a small discussion group of lay people, but at times our pastors (through the years) have attended. When the kids were little and we considered ourselves to be "young mothers", we hired a baby sitter for our hour each week.

Tagged: well, I'll think about this later.

Where there's a will, there's a loophole... Didn't you always want to be on the stage?

The Freedom to Breath act was meant to give all citizens clean indoor air, but there was a loophole that is now being used to bring smoking back to bars. Links here and here.

Addictions aren't funny, so I'll just call this sad-funny.

Days of your life

Never regret a day in your life.
Good days give you Happiness.
Bad days give you Experiences.
Both are essential to life.

90 years Old!

My mom turned 90 today. The family party is tomorrow. She resides in an assisted living facility in a small city near the small Midwestern town where she was born, grew up, and later retired. During her married years, when raising her family, she lived in the big city. My family roots go back into the 1800's in this little town and several family members retired back to this town. They are now old and in poor health or just declining from age. We have lots of rich memories and love here.

When we are here, we stay at the home that my grandma lived in for about 60 years and my mother lived in during her retirement for about 30 years. It has lots of old house problems, which do become more apparent when the temperature is below zero. There are nine of us here tonight, including 2 babies and two toddlers. It is mostly fun, but the kids get stressed with all the changes and sleep disruption.

I just made two cakes for the party tomorrow. Apparently the oven thermometer isn't right. They got done about 25 minutes early. Ooops. I'm just glad I peaked in the oven. Maybe the middles will be fine. I hope that is the only problem with the party.

One couple won't be attending: my older sister just found out yesterday that she has liver cancer. Please pray for her and for all of us. One of the challenges tomorrow will be getting some of the old people out because there is ice everywhere on the sidewalks.

No, its not yet time to plant the garden.

We correspond by email with some people we met in Uganda, especially with one man we've been emailing for over 4 years. (Somehow by the Grace of God, the first snail mail letters got through and we found out that email is possible.)

In an email I received yesterday, he said that the thought we should be getting warm weather now and he wanted to send us some seeds for our garden. My response is to send him these three pictures.

Lead a Horse to Water / Music / Labels

Funny Quote of the Day
You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.
Milton Berle

We went to a wonderful concert last evening to see the Claremont Trio. The world class musicians braved the cold and wore strapless gowns, with leggings underneath.

I changed my labels yesterday and now I'm searching for the right one more than before. Too many labels?

This is deep. (?!?)

MILWAUKEE - Barack Obama says the country must do "whatever it takes" to eradicate gun violence but believes in the right to bear arms.

Church pictures added/changed

I changed/edited the church pictures somewhat. These photos were taken by my husband or me.

Passionate

No, not passionate as related to Valentines Day. I actually slept too late to kiss my husband good bye this morning. No, the passion was in our presentation last evening at the Lenten Service at our church, on the topics of Welcome the Stranger and Clothe the Naked.

We did a slide show (Power Point) on this topic, weaving in our pictures from our Habitat for Humanity Global Village trip to Uganda last November, as well as pictures from the God's Child project in Guatemala. Mercifully for the viewers, I left out pictures from Madagascar and Bolivia.

Apparently the presentation was well received, assuming stunned silence during the program even from teenagers is a good reception. Quite frankly, unless you can see it with your own eyes, the reality of intense poverty is impossible to understand. We tried to show, with the pictures, the everyday life of the people in poverty. "The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time,"said Willem de Kooning There is just no way around it: when you are that poor, you work all the time. Its like walking up hill on an endless sand dune without sandals.

My husband had some readings, from books and from his own essays. He could hardly get through them without choking up. He was out of his comfort zone, but he is passionate about this topic. He feels strongly that the economic inequities in the world currently are, ARE, sin on the part of the richer countries. He sees God's mandate throughout the Bible to care for people. He believes that God has used clothing as a metaphor for caring for people, citing Matthew 5:40, Matthew 6 25 - 31, Matthew 25: 34 - 36, Luke 3: 11, and an obscure verse, Amos 2: 6 - 7.

This begs two questions: 1) What do we do, NOW that we are informed? 2) Are we sinning when we are ignorant of these situations?

What do you think?

Finished! Power Point; and Prayer Requests

Finished, and NOT at the last minute, like usual:

1) One stole for an ordination that isn't even scheduled yet.

2) One Power Point presentation by my husband. I didn't help, except to help find a few things on the computer, but when he was using the computer, I couldn't use it.

3) One Power Point presentation made by me, my first, to be given by both of us on 2/13 on the Lenten theme:
Living Simply with God (Matthew 25: 34 - 40)

n

n

nOur Small World and the Global Church
Welcome the stranger; Clothe the naked.

We are using the God's Child Project and Habitat for Humanity (both linked in the sidebar beneath the church pictures) as our examples and our photos from Guatemala and Uganda to illustrate the theme.

The biggest problem, after learning to use Power Point, was to try to limit the number of slides I will use. I decided to leave off the pictures of Global Village projects in Madagascar and Bolivia that I wanted to use. I will put the conclusion after the section about the incredible hospitality of the Ugandan people.

It is good to be reminded that having more goods and money don't make us better people. We were very blessed to be among Ugandan people who lived their faith and were comfortable expressing it in an every day manner.

Please join me in praying for Robert B, in Uganda, who has been very sick. He is the director of the Royal College of Kamuli, and the Prince of Peace primary school So many people depend on him. Please pray for peace and reconciliation in Kenya because the situation affects not only the political parties involved in the dispute, but also the thousands who have been made homeless and refugees. This dispute is having dire affects on the neighboring country of Uganda.
LINKS for listed charities are in the side bar.

Sidebar

What do you think of my sidebar changes?

Book Meme

Singing Owl tagged me for a book meme. Here are the rules.

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)

Find Page 123.

Find the first 5 sentences.

Post the next 3 sentences.

Tag 5 people.

Ok, I am sitting next to a large book shelf, but my tote bag is between me and the shelves, so I took a travel book out of the bag. First let me explain that on 2/13 my husband and I are giving the lenten sermon/reflection/program at our church. The Lenten theme is Living Simply with God, and each week the theme will be based on Matthew 25: 35 - 40. This is the ELCA church wide topic for lent.

We were asked to do a program about our trip to Uganda, reflecting on the theme "Welcome the Stranger and Clothe the Naked." I'm working on my first computer presentation ever, so my resources are close at hand.

The book is Uganda Handbook by Michael Hodd and Angele Roche. Here are the three sentences:
"Houses were looted and then burnt to the ground, along with the surrounding shambas. It did not take long for the vegetation to grow up again so there is now not much evidence apart from a couple of burnt-out tanks left to rust on the roadside. As a result of the events in the area Luwero has received considerable attention from aid workers and foreign governments."

Tagging: (I'll come back and do this later.)

Now that is Worship!

We did setting six, for the first time, in the new ELW last Sunday. That was a very worshipful experience. It is not like going to a funeral. It made me think of the joy of salvation, the release from sin that we all receive. Although I realize that worship should not be taken lightly, I do wonder why my strong impression of worship from my childhood was that there was no joy, no smiling, only seriousness.
Was that just the trend of the time or did it reflect a different theology?

Endless political season summed up!

"The endless political season has only reinforced the "Christian" label,and we are told that some Christians are better than others, apparently, because they say so. And it seems that if you have a personal relationship with Jesus (whatever that means), you can do pretty much anything, like wreck the country and bomb evil-doers and point fingers at those who aren't Christian enough. I can't imagine that Jesus had this sort of thing in mind as he went about teaching people to try their best to be good people no matter what they called themselves. Same with the Buddha and Mo hammed." quote from this blog.

Reflection on War (nothing new, is there?)

Kent Kapers II reflects on war, ancient and modern.

Super Bowl/Africa MONEY!

I watched the last half of the fourth quarter yesterday. Apparently I spent my time wisely.

Addition: I've been reading the news of Kenya/Uganda/Chad etc. on the 'net. These people are suffering! The political situation in Kenya has led the members of different groups to kill each other, but this has spilled over to killing, looting and burning of people/buildings/vehicles that have nothing to do with the groups in Kenya. For example, a LCMS church/parsonage/clinic was burned to the ground. Ugandan trucks crossing into Kenya for trade have been looted and burned.

The Ugandan people are greatly affected by the situation because their fuel (petrol and diesel) come from Kenya and normally, they export through Kenya. The price of gasoline is up to almost $20/gallon in Uganda. Tourism is down in both countries.

Why am I linking these situations with the Super Bowl? Because I've read about the millions spent on advertising for the game (not to mention the millions spent by the viewers and attendees) and I've thought, "That could help a LOT of people in Sub-Saharan Africa."

Did the "old" Lutheran Church lack grace?

This essay writer claims that the mid-2oth Century Lutheran Church in the USA lacked grace. The writer must be about my age. I don't remember the church lacking grace, but I do think it lacked a sense of joy in being forgiven. Is that a different way of saying the same thing?

I remember the services being the same (really, really!) every Sunday, not relating to the world outside the stained glass windows, and pretty much about what "I believed" (head knowledge, which could be described as a form of works) since I was a Lutheran, i.e. memorization of the catechism. But that could just be the particular church I experienced because that pastor was kind of cold and boring. Yet, the church had two services each Sunday, fairly well attended. I was a child then so I lack perspective. Maybe we expected less of our churched back in the last century.

Why hasn't somebody told me about this stock???

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Exxon Mobil made history on Friday by reporting the highest quarterly and annual profits ever for a U.S. company.

Exxon (XOM, Fortune 500) shares gained nearly 2% in pre-market trading on the results, which were underpinned by soaring crude prices.

Exxon, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, said fourth-quarter net income rose 14% to $11.66 billion, or $2.13 per share. That's up from $10.25 billion, or $1.76 per share, in the year-ago period"