Misconceptions from my childhood...

So as I was blow drying my hair the other day I looked at the tag on my hair-dryer and remembered how confused I was when I was little by those tags.

The tag says DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG. WARN CHILDREN OF THE RISK OF DEATH BY ELECTRICAL SHOCK. So when I was a kid and read that tag, I somehow thought that if you removed that tag, you would receive a fatal electrical shock. Why would they word it that way? I'm 33, closing in on 34, and I've still never removed a hair-dryer tag, just in case.

Remembering that made me think of some of the other things that used to confuse me, or that I didn't figure out until I was much older than I should have been.

Did anyone else ever wonder about the tags on mattresses and pillows too? Why is it that removing a tag from a mattress is an offense punishable by the threat of jail time, but you get arrested for driving drunk, and you most likely won't ever see the inside of a jail cell? Really? I wonder what that conversation is like on Cell Block D in Leavenworth... "What are you in for man?" "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, you?" "I went into a store and tore the tags off of 3 mattresses and a dozen pillows." "That's hard core, man."

Who polices that? I know for a fact that the abundance of drugs, gangs, and domestic violence in combination with your run of the mill barking dog complaints, speeders and the aforementioned drunk drivers keep my husband so busy that he rarely has time to do unannounced mattress and pillow checks on the unsuspecting residents of Everson and Nooksack. So who enforces that? Do they have to obtain a warrant to check for mattress tags? I remember one time, I got a wild hair and decided that I was going to tear a tag off, and it was so firmly attached on there that I couldn't tear it off. I gave up after a few fruitless tugs. I guess I wasn't that committed to it, or fate was stepping in and preventing me from recklessly breaking the law like that, and sparing me from further uncomfortable questions during my pre-employment polygraph for the Blaine Police Department. I wonder if that would be a deal breaker...

Anyone else ever have their mother tell them, "Always wear clean underwear in case you have an accident?" If my mother had worded it, "In case you're in an accident," I probably would have figured that out before I was 16 years old. I always thought, "How stupid is that?" Because an accident is wetting your pants, right? So what does it matter if they are clean or not to begin with? Sadly, I really was probably somewhere around the age of 16 before that clicked in my head. I heard it said again, and it finally made sense.

Another one, and this is probably a Christianson Family exclusive, is the word "Bink." Even my computer's spell-checker is underlining that word in red telling me that it isn't a word. When my sister and I were little, we always got our fingernails "binked" by my father. Apparently that came from the sound that the fingernail clippers make when you clip a nail. My father would say "bink, bink" with each nail, and it became a word in our family. We'd always ask, "Papa, will you bink my nails?"

This one is even sadder because I think I was 19 before I realized that it wasn't a real word and that not everyone knew what binking meant. I took my cat, Tiger, to the vet and he was going to have to stay for a few hours and have some stuff done, and I think he was being sedated. So I asked, "Would you bink his nails while he's here?" And even though the receptionist looked a little confused, I guess she got the gist of what I meant, and sure enough, when I picked Tiger up his nails were very nicely binked.

It finally dawned on me that "bink" was not actually a verb and that most people didn't know what it was. That was definitely not my proudest day.

However, even armed with the knowledge that bink is not a real verb, I have continued to use it as such, and have decided that instead of modifying my behavior and using the actual term for clipping one's nails, I have made it my mission to enlighten the greater world around me to the wonderful word that I grew up with.

Garden Wars Episode I... Green Thumb vs. Couch Potato

Last year I decided to try gardening. I had tinkered with a few spices in pots and flower beds the year before, but without much success because they didn't have any afternoon sun. Last year I thought, "What the heck?" So I brought home the sod cutter and a roto-tiller from work, and Matt and I took up a section of lawn that got lots of afternoon sun, and we went to work. I brought home bags of steer manure and having already returned the tiller to the store, I mixed it in with a shovel and a rake.

Having completed that, I was ready to start planting. I was ambitious... I planted garlic, cucumbers, broccoli, delicata squash, snap peas, spinach, tomatoes, strawberries, basil, cilantro, rosemary, and lavendar (not to eat, just 'cause I like it.) I started everything from starts, I didn't think I was ready for the responsibility of seeds. I found that I really enjoyed working in my garden, but it was SO hot last summer that most of my peas died, and I didn't like pulling weeds in that heat. And I wasn't super stellar at that whole watering thing.

I was amazed at my level of gardening success given my usual propensity for murdering helpless plants. I grew well over 40 pounds of tomatoes last summer and made over a dozen quarts of salsa. Pretty good for someone who doesn't even like tomatoes...

I harvested a number of delicata squash from my plants, much to my delight. I made cream of broccoli soup with fresh broccoli from MY garden... it was a very proud moment for me.

I was surprised to discover that I was fairly good at this gardening thing, and felt very rewarded by it.

Then fall came. I harvested the rest of my squash, and then never looked back at my garden. And then came the attack of the weeds. They were stealthy, they crept in a few at a time, and even though I knew they were there, I didn't realize how strong their presence had become.

My strawberry plants were (I thought) the only plants that survived the winter. I thought, "I'll go pull the weeds around them, and then get ready to start over." That was 2 months ago, when it wasn't such a jungle out there. I went out today ready to do battle. I had my gloves, and my scuffle hoe (also known as a Dutch Hoe, which leads to MANY MANY jokes, but I digress...) and I thought, "Ok, I'll spend an hour or so pulling these weeds."

Then I made it across the lawn to the wild weed patch where my garden used to be. My prized garden, the object of my affection last summer, was now completely grown over with grass, and weeds and my strawberry plants mixed in for good measure. I started yanking out handfuls of grass and weeds and chucking them into the wheelbarrow. After 5-10 minutes of this I had cleared approximately a 1' x 2' area. I was also feeling shaky and all-around yucky. So I came back inside to lie down for a few minutes. Then after some cheerios and a nice chat with the lady from the Census bureau I decided to go back out there and try again. This time I was armed with ear plugs and my weed-eater. I decided to knock down most of the tall grass and weeds and leave the area where most of my strawberries are alone. I loaded up the wheelbarrow again with cut grass and weeds. I raked, and pulled handfuls of weeds and grass, and started thinking, "Maybe my strawberry plants just aren't worth it..."

So, it's now been almost a week since I started this post, and I haven't been back out to the garden, but as I was writing this last weekend, I was starting to remember how much I loved the results of my garden last year and that maybe, just maybe, the strawberry plants were worth the effort. I loved going out and clipping some fresh basil when I needed it, or having my all day salsa making fest with Robbie using 25 pounds of tomatoes that I grew all by myself. And as I thought more and more about it, I decided that I did want to reclaim my garden and grow more stuff this year.

It remains to be seen if I'm going to get out there and continue the war against my weeds tomorrow afternoon, but I have the best of intentions. My best intentions never seem to be a match for my couch potato tendency though...

So many thoughts... so little sleep

Trying to clear my head of some of the things I've been wrestling with for the last week... This one is definitely a downer...

One week ago I went to a memorial service for a young girl I had never met. I know her mother and I went to show support for her. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there and so I was seated in the over-flow. The speaker system had a short in it and so the sound wasn't working in there. I finally ended up in the balcony, but not seated in the balcony, sitting on the floor in a room behind the balcony, but at least I could hear. I couldn't see the pictures that were shown, but I got to hear such a beautiful and amazing testimonial of her short life.

Her uncle is one of the pastors at the church that she grew up attending and apparently he'd been her youth pastor. He told a story about a camp their youth group went on, and even though I couldn't see anything, I could picture it perfectly in my head. Their group went to a ropes course, and every year he found a way to avoid jumping off the pole.

Let me explain, because I have actually done this task before. You climb a pole, like a telephone pole, and you stand on the top of it and leap off reaching for a bar that is about 10' away. You are wearing a harness and there is another person on the ground that is holding on to the other end of your rope. They will belay you down safely. So, as I remember from my own experience, even if you love heights you are scared out of your mind as you stand on top of that post trying to gather the courage to actually jump off. I jumped, and of course I didn't make it, but my partner on the ground had a firm hold on my rope and they got me safely down to the ground.

Back to the service, the pastor was saying how every year he had avoided having to do this. The year that his niece came to the camp, however, he found that he couldn't avoid it anymore. She gave him a compelling argument about them doing it together and how it would be a family thing. So he found himself at the top of the pole, feeling the same terror I felt, and how he looked down and saw at the other end of his rope a teenage girl who weighed about 100 pounds and he wasn't sure if she would be able to get him down safely. He had to trust that she had a hold on him and wouldn't let anything bad happen to him. He gathered his courage and jumped, and I don't think that he made it to the bar, but he made it safely to the ground.

He used that as a really powerful metaphor for life. He asked the congregation at large, "What's on the other end of your rope?" He went on to say that the only answer to that question that won't let you down is "God." Too many people have the things of this world at the other end of their rope and when they jump off that pole, there is no one there to get them safely to the ground.

Since this memorial service, I keep thinking about his words. I also keep thinking about God's will, and His plans for our lives, and I am once again so overwhelmed by trying to make sense of it all. I am so incredibly thankful that I don't have His job. I can't even begin to fathom all that He has to do, and all the pain that He has to witness every second of every minute of every day.

I live such an incredibly sheltered life, safe in my cozy home and going about my daily life and only catching small glimpses of that pain. And then a tragedy strikes like the murders of the police officers in King and Pierce Counties last year, and I am forced to look at the larger world around me. And even then, it's such a small part of the world, and even though it's the worst tragedy imaginable for that family, it is still a small but horrific incident in the grand scheme of things.

Last night I watched an "Invisible Children" video and even though I have heard some of the stories of these children, watching the video made it so much more real. It was the story of a girl named Grace. Grace had been abducted from her family and forced to be a child soldier in "The Lord's Resistance Army." She was just a little girl, and she was repeatedly raped by a man 40 years older than her. Then, when she was escaping from that army, she was shot. The baby she was carrying strapped on her back was killed. She was shot in the leg, and also her back was grazed by bullets. She needed surgeries on her leg and has braces on it that are screwed into her leg. She lives with pain all the time. At the age of 13 she gave birth to a daughter. She decided to keep her baby and raise her, but even if she returns home to her village, she won't be accepted by her family anymore because of the use she'd been put to. And Grace was one of the lucky ones. It was absolutely gut-wrenching for me to watch this video and to have to really open my eyes and what goes on in the world, the things that I don't want to have to think about, the things that I had lived for so many years being unaware of.

And I don't know which is better, to know of these things and be so thankful for my life, and my family, or to be blissfully unaware of these horrors.