Life on the Vine

I'm going to make this rather quick 'cause I've got to take our 'old man' Bear to the Vet this morning but I wanted to catch you up on a few things and also ask for some help. I just got back Tuesday from a 10 day vacation in Michigan.  It was a great trip.  I'll definitely be sharing some photos.  I got to spend some time with my sister-in-law Nancy and her mom Phyllis and then I linked up with my family.  I got to see my brother and his clan (wife, sister-in-law, nephew, and mother-in-law), my mom and her boyfriend, and my aunt and her husband.  Tom wasn't able to go with me because of work so I was flying solo the whole trip.  My mother's family is originally from Michigan but moved to Florida when my mom was a teenager.  This was only my second trip to Michigan and 20 years span between the two visits.  My maternal great grandfather was a lighthouse keeper in Michigan and we got to visit one of the lighthouses he worked in.  That was pr...

Today is officially the first day of Summer but it's been summer in southern Arizona for about four weeks.  Highs this week were around 106 and 108 degrees.  If I start complaining about the heat Tom reminds me that I have a car with a good A/C; I work in a comfortable office indoors, and I don't work outside.  So, honestly, the heat doesn't bother me too much, especially during the work week.  It is impacting my walks though that I usually like to take on my lunch break. It has really dried up here but this Spring I took more pictures of the flowering cactus and other interesting plants I came across.  I'm thinking ahead to the property and what I might want to plant so I find myself noticing plants and flowers more than usual.  I thought I'd finally take some time and download the photos from my iPhone and camera and share them on my blog. I hadn't seen or noticed a flowering prickly pear on any of my previous visits to Arizona.  The flowers re...

Whether Tom and I will be able to start construction on the house this year seems in doubt.  The last two months we've been investigating some different financing options.  Tom called banks and visited two.  I checked books out of the library - Idiot's Guide to Building Your Home, Building Your Own Home for Dummies, etc.  Reading up on the sections that discussed construction loans and financing.  We went and spoke to a mortgage broker, which helped me get a better handle on what we're endeavoring to do. Here's the truth.  We have many things that aren't in our favor.  First, we want to build in a rural area, on a piece of property that is off a dirt road, a portion of which is not county maintained.  Second, there aren't any comparable houses in our immediate vicinity, which can, and probably will, impact the appraisal.  Third, we're having to pay for a lot of things that probably wouldn't be a factor if we were in an urban area.  Lik...

Are you searching for something unique and special to do for Mom this Mother's Day?  Gospel for Asia has set a goal of getting 250 children sponsored through their Bridge of Hope centers before Mother's Day.   Maybe you'd like to help them reach that goal. This Mother's Day you could sponsor a child in your Mom's honor, giving her something she can treasure throughout the year but also helping a mother halfway around the world who is facing difficulties and challenges very different from our own.     Sponsoring a child through Gospel for Asia helps not only the child but also the family.  Meet Gayana, widowed at twenty, she was left to care for her young son, Vikranta.  She had no job and no way to provide for her family.  Her in-laws no longer welcomed her in their home and her own parents were too elderly to help.  She moved in with a sister and became so distressed that she stopped eating and sank into a deep depression. ...

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of my girlfriends, for her New Years Resolution, set a goal of cooking one recipe out of every cookbook she owns during 2013.  She apparently has quite the collection.  I thought it was a fun idea and contemplated taking on the resolution for my own.  I even took a photo of my cookbook shelf just in case I decided to take on the challenge and blog about it.  I figured I'd need to cook about six new things a month in order to get through my nearly 70 cookbooks.  I'm far from that goal but I have been trying some new stuff.  Just in the last few weeks I've cooked three new things out of two of my newly acquired Rachel Ray cookbooks from our local used bookstore.  You may be able to tell from the photo that I own several, about 10!  Without fail, Rachel Ray's recipes always take me more than the 30 minutes advertised, usually because of how long it takes me to prep everything; however, her recipes and her ...

Spring has arrived in the southern Arizona desert.  Spring arrived quickly in an unexpected burst of blossoms on the two trees in our front yard.  I think one is an ornamental cherry tree but I'm not sure about the other.  Tom thinks it might be a peach tree.  One of our three (!) rose bushes is blooming and there are more roses every day.  This is accompanied by poppies in my father-in-law's yard and a green quilt of leaves on the usually spiky, barren spines of the ocotillo, one of my favorite cacti. While Tom and I have visited Arizona almost every year since we've known each other, visiting during all four seasons.  These visits were a long weekend here and a couple weeks there.  Never have I experienced a full cycle of the seasons.  And, since this is also our first Spring in our temp house, I'm pleasantly surprised by trees that blossom and rose bushes too.  I wonder if I had mistaken resigned myself to no blossoming trees with this...

I'm a bit behind on my March Gospel for Asia blog.  Seeing as how the day after tomorrow is the first day of April I figured I'd better get busy. Recently the GFA staff has started sending out a couple different ideas for blog topics.  One of the options this month is to write a book review/blog about one of K.P. Yohannan's early books, The Road to Reality.  I love telling you about free resources and an electronic version of the book is available for free download by clicking here . Keeping things honest, I didn't read the book this month but I actually read it two years ago.  My copy is marked with several passages underlined and highlighted so it was easy for me to scan back through the book, re-reading the themes and passages that resonated with me.  I'll tell you that I found the book very blunt and striking in its discussion of modern Western Christianity.  Yohannan, who was born and raised in India, doesn't pull any punches and he is able to lo...