The Intentional Life

As I alluded to last week, this week I am talking groceries - specifically the list that I follow to get said groceries. Last week I told the short tale of living at a Residential Treatment facility, where part of our salary was paid in food.  For 5.5 years we had a pantry right on campus where we could get all the food necessities that we needed.  This was grand...while it lasted. When we transitioned out of our Houseparenting role in 2014, and made the move into the real world of grocery shopping - it felt a bit daunting. I had been out of practice for so long, and the Recession, and increasing food prices, had happened in that time. My husband and I have a long-term dream of one day living on only half of our income, and giving the other half away (another post for another day). And one way to help make that happen was to be wise and prudent in our grocery purchases. Hence the main reason for our pared down grocery list. That, and I just tend to crave the minimal. Several

  photo credit One would have to be pretty much off the grid to not know what is happening today. 1 minute of scrolling Facebook, or hearing the radio or newscast could tell you as well. I am not here to voice my political views. I don't want this to be the platform for that. But what I will say is that today does not make me cheer, nor does it make me despair. Because, in reality, a new man may now be holding office, but this was already known, planned, and ordained long before either of those men were even born. No, today I do not throw out cheers or jeers on my Facebook wall. I do not stand here on my soapbox and rant. Today I offer Hope. Hope that does not depend on who is leading a country, any country. I do not desire for our President to fail, just like I didn't want the last one to fail either. Because we would all go down with the ship.  Do not place your hope in something that is fleeting, something that grows old, fades, passes on. But plac

  Thankfully there are doors to hide the mess... Unfortunately there are doors to hide the mess. Seems if there is a door to cover it up, it's more likely to get out of control  (my laundry room is another case study of this point!)  This weeks purging/organizing, surprisingly, didn't take me long to tackle. The pantry was a bit ridiculous, but it still cleaned up without too much of a hassle. This post kind of flows into next week's (grocery list) with it's explanation... While we lived at Gateway Woods from 2009-2014 we were fed by the communal food room. There we had a share of the food with the rest of campus. Sometimes we ran out of fresh fruit and milk by the time it came to grocery-run day, but otherwise there was always plenty of food to choose from. This was one concern I had as we were leaving Gateway, and the benefit of the food room. I hadn't bought groceries for real in 5.5 years.  I knew prices had gone up and prior to Gateway our fo

When I got married 14 years ago, and moved into our first apartment together, it was novel, the idea of having my own kitchen, with my own kitchen utensils and pans and pots, etc. the only shot I could find of our galley kitchen....that really was all of it... As I was looking to put things away in our tiny galley kitchen I put things where I thought they made the most sense at the time (in my 20-year-old, never had my own kitchen head). Over the months things felt herky-jerky and didn't really have a flow as I tried to get accustomed to my own kitchen. And I realized with a bit of shock: I was acting like my mom. Ha! I had laid out my kitchen, and where I put things in the cupboards, in places that I was familiar with: like my mom's kitchen. But what made sense in my mom's kitchen, did not necessarily make sense in mine. So, I set about rearranging and putting things in places that made more sense.  And then Paul spent the next month trying to figure out whe

A few years back I got Rend Collective's Christmas CD. During the Christmas season it is just about the only thing that plays in the van. My personal favorite, and what has become our family theme, is their song: For All That You Have Done.  It's sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.  The lyrics are below: Your grace will never be forgot Your mercy all my life Will be my soul's forever song My story and my light    January: celebrating 34 years of Paul From mountaintop to valley low Through laughter and through tears Surely the goodness of my God