Yum?

I noticed Opossum in the index while finding the Stollen recipe this afternoon, so I looked it up and found this recipe.

While it is comforting to know that I have a resource if I ever need to cook opossum, or, for that matter, bear, racoon, muskrat, woodchuck, beaver, beaver tail, peccary, or wild boar, which were in the same section, it is a little odd to me to think of eating a 'possum. Usually, when I see a 'possum, it's on the side of the road, either road-kill or about to become road-kill. (This recipe doesn't seem like you could use 'possums that met their untimely end on the road, however.)

While I don't plan on cooking up any opossum, I was curious. Have any of you ever cooked or eaten a 'possum?

*Groan*

Helpful sibling: "Is there anything else you need?"
Me: "Yes, cinnamon."
Helpful sibling: "Here it is."
(I quickly unscrew the cap and with a flick of my wrist put the first of three or four planned shakes of "cinnamon" into the breakfast bars, before he stops me in alarm.)

Initial response indicates that the one shake of red pepper did not ruin breakfast.

Life with siblings is never boring!

(Yes, he knew he brought me pepper. He figured I'd read it to make sure it was cinnamon. The look of alarm on his face was pretty funny, looking back at it now.)

Merry Christmas

"And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins." ~Matthew 1:21

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." ~John 3:16

Merry Christmas!

Well, the other Natalie tagged me for this, so here goes. :-)

Seven things I hope to do before I die:
1. Truly know the Bible.
2. Get a good grip on why I believe what I believe, one issue at a time.
3. Marry a Christian man.
4.If God blesses my future husband and I, I’d love to have many, many children.
5. I would also love to watch them grow up as faithful Christians, marry believers, and have many children themselves.
6.Learn to sew well.
7. Disabuse everyone I know of the falsehood that I am passionately fond of canned spinach.

Seven things I cannot do well:
1. Sew.
2. Knit without getting distracted and losing track of stitches.
3. Count the stitches when I’m crocheting.
4. Fly a kite
5. Finish stories I’m writing.
6. Go to bed at a reasonable hour.
7. Get up on my own without two alarm clocks unless I know I have something important to do.

Seven things that would attract me to my future husband:
I liked Natalie’s answer to this, and I’m passing on this section too.

Seven things I say often:
1. Okay...
2. Stop running in the house! (To brothers at intervals during the day.)
3. Would you pleeease make me green tea/coffee? (")
4. Did you ask mom if you could do that? (")
5. Did you call me, Mom?
6.What?
7. Time to eat!

Seven authors, books or series I love:
1. The Bible
2. My Life for Yours, Praise Her in the Gates, Her Hand in Marriage
3. Pride and Prejudice
4.Chronicles of Narnia
5. Anna Karenina
6. P.G. Wodehouse
7. Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries
(Ack! Only seven? But I couldn’t fit The Scarlet Pimpernel, or A Tale of Two Cities, or The Hobbit, or...)

Seven movies I watch over and over again:
I’m modifying this to a list of seven movies I like enough to watch once a year or so.
1. Signs ("What if there are no coincidences?")
2. Raising Arizona ("Well, alright then.")
3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Beautiful music and big ships.)
4. My Big Fat Greek Wedding ("So, there you go.")
5. Gladiator (great agrarian themes)
6. Pride and Prejudice (either the new one or the old one)
7. A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (fun, friends, rockets, and cheese, cheese, Gromit!)

Seven people I want to do this:If you want tagged, leave a comment saying so and I’ll consider you tagged and update the post to reflect your tagged-ness. :-)

I'm Loved

You know you're loved when your younger brother spontaneously gives you a handful of rubber bands out of his stash.

One of the things I've been intrigued with in my photography is perspective. With my new camera, I can put it in Macro mode (to help it focus on objects close to the lense), and I can also choose to put it in portrait mode which makes the background less clear. This helps when I am interested in different ways of looking at the same object, in this case, a blade of grass. In the picture above, I'm looking down on the grass, with a background lacking contrast (you can also tell that the background is blurry because I had it on portrait). In the picture below, however, the blue sky makes the grass really stand out. I don't know that I like the angle on the blade of grass in the bottom picture, but I was holding the camera through a barbed wire fence to take it, and I was having trouble getting things just right without getting the fence in the picture.

Thank You

This beautiful can of spinach was one of my birthday gifts this year. I appreciate all the thought that went into this gift! I was amazed to see that it did, indeed, have Popeye on the can. I had never before seen a can of spinach with Popeye on it. Truly special!

Thank you, Mr. JFC!


(Note: if you find yourself bewildered as you read this, I suggest you read the comments on the previous post.)

Quote

"But conversion and spiritual growth are not only through the mind. There is a correlation between being willing to accept and practice God's revealed truth and being able to understand it. People who are unwilling to change either their thinking or habits to accord with what the Bible says, cannot advance spiritually. This is true both in becoming a Christian and in growing as a Christian...Understanding is limited by the degree of willingness to be humble."

-Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience, by Ranald Macaulay & Jerram Barrs

The Christian Origins of Christmas

"We are not here today, marking the approach of Christmas, because the early Christians compromised with paganism. It is not the case that our fathers tried to sanitize some pagan celebration of the winter solstice. As it turns out, the Romans did not celebrate the solstice, and their Saturnalia was on a different day entirely. There was one brief abortive attempt by a pagan emperor to start celebrating the solstice (with a feast to the Unconquerable Sun), which was almost certainly a response to the Christian celebration of this day. This day is ours, so unbelievers may be cordially invited to keep their hands off it."

-Pastor Doug Wilson, here.
(he also wrote an excellent post titled "Merry Christmas" As Insurrection)

"Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.
Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance."

- Quote from the December 2003 issue of Touchstone Magazine, hat tip to Cognizant Discourse, who blogged it here.

Merry Christmas!

Fall Plowing

Grant Wood

Yesterday...

The sunset and the cows.

Snow on grass.

Yesterday my brothers and I went down the hill to the creek. I took the first picture while Hank and I were waiting at the gate for the boys.

It was the first real snow of the year, and we were eager to see the ice in the creek. It turned out that the ice was fairly thick, although there is still running water, so the cows can drink there as well as the stock tank. I tried to get pictures of the ice but they didn't turn out too well, so I'll have to try again. No worries- I don't think the ice is going anywhere for a while!

Narnia

...Lucy thought the Beavers had a very snug little home...there were hams and strings of onions hanging from the roof, and against the walls were gum boots and oilskins and hatchets...and fishing rods and fishing-nets and sacks. And the cloth on the table, though very clean, was very rough...

_________________________________________

"a pair of tiresome beavers with Cockney accents who engage in sitcom-style banter."
(TIME magazine describing the Beavers in the movie version)
_________________________________________

I love Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia are the first series of books I remember digging into again and again throughout my childhood. My copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has water stains from being forgotten in my "fort" overnight once. I regularly imagined going to Narnia myself. Once, when about nine or ten, I saw a tree which had rotted almost completely away. All that was left was a spire about nine feet high, with an oval rotted out in the middle. I went through it, hoping it was a door into Narnia. Sadly, it wasn't. Even at the age of fourteen or so, visiting my aunt's huge old home, I tried to open the door of a big antique wardrobe in the dining room. It’s probably best that it was locked. It would have been very difficult to convince my aunt I wasn't insane if she had found me inside the wardrobe, tapping at the back. Imagination is a wonderful thing. It works within the framework of the story to fill in the gaps. What was she wearing? What color are her eyes? (I have always imagined Lucy’s eyes as green.) What do Mr. and Mrs. Beaver look like?

That's something movies lack. The only imagination you'll need is regarding the plausibility of the plot or the believability of the characters. During a movie you don't stare into space, reveling in trying to see Lucy's face, enjoying imagining Trumpkin. As I told friends when the movie version of LotR came out, my imagination may never be strong enough to clearly see the faces of those characters. And my imagination may never be clear on the faces of Lucy, Polly, Eustace, Aravis, Reepicheep or Puddleglum. But do I want to endure Andrew Adamson (the director) barging in over my imagination and slapping actors' and actresses' faces, voices, and costumes on the characters? Do I want "a pair of tiresome beavers with Cockney accents who engage in sitcom-style banter" in my Narnia? No, thanks. I prefer the Mr. and Mrs. Beaver of my imagination to remain the wise, wonderful, hospitable, kindly couple they really are. It’s a good thing the books will be unaffected by the movie. But won’t the movie impact the imaginations of the readers? Won’t they, henceforth, read through the imaginary filter of the movie version?

Wonderful, well told, well conceived, thoroughly Christian books, with the capacity to captivate readers through the beauty of the story and the nobility, courage, and humor of their characters, do not come often. Should they be trivialized into popcorn-n-soda fast food moving pictures? Why waste such treasure? This strikes me like someone transforming the works of Leo Tolstoy or Jane Austen into comic strip format. The medium blunting the message.

As with Middle Earth, Narnia is, if you haven't guessed, dear to me, so I don’t plan to tamper with my imagination of it by seeing the movie.

(the upper pasture this afternoon as I walked)

The Mighty One, God the LORD, Has spoken and called the earth

From the rising of the sun to its going down.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God will shine forth.
Our God shall come, and shall not keep silent;

A fire shall devour before Him,

And it shall be very tempestuous all around Him.

He shall call to the heavens from above,

And to the earth, that He may judge His people:
"Gather My saints together to Me,

Those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice."
Let the heavens declare His righteousness,

For God Himself is Judge. Selah

~Psalm 50:1-6

Reflections

Frost covered leaves this morning.

"Then the dove came to him in the evening, and behold, a freshly plucked olive leaf was in her mouth; and Noah knew that the waters had receded from the earth." ~Genesis 8:11

"But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away." ~Isaiah 64:6

"The people of God, in affliction, confess and bewail their sins, owning themselves unworthy of his mercy. Sin is that abominable thing which the Lord hates. Our deeds, whatever they may seem to be, if we think to merit by them at God's hand, are as rags, and will not cover us; filthy rags, and will but defile us. Even our few good works in which there is real excellence, as fruits of the Spirit, are so defective and defiled as done by us, that they need to be washed in the fountain open for sin and uncleanness. It bodes ill when prayer is kept back. To pray, is by faith to take hold of the promises the Lord has made of his good-will to us, and to plead them; to take hold of him, earnestly begging him not to leave us; or soliciting his return... God may delay for a time to answer our prayers, but he will, in the end, answer those who call on his name and hope in his mercy." ~Matthew Henry, on Isaiah 64 verses 6-12.

"Blessed is the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night.
He shall be like a tree Planted by the rivers of water, That brings forth its fruit in its season, Whose leaf also shall not wither; And whatever he does shall prosper." ~Psalm 1:1-3

"To meditate in God's word, is to discourse with ourselves concerning the great things contained in it, with close application of mind and fixedness of thought. We must have constant regard to the word of God, as the rule of our actions, and the spring of our comforts; and have it in our thoughts night and day. For this purpose no time is amiss."
~Matthew Henry on Psalm 1:1: Verses 1-3.

Twister

FedEx delivered my camera this morning, and it is working great. This is a picture of our barn kitten, Twister. I took it while walking this morning.