This and That | Ain't Complicated

Trouble and Tea Meet in Dorcas Smucker’s Teapot

I pour myself a cupload for the hilarity...and am not disappointed. Then I discover the life lessons...and am blessed.

Closing his devotional at a recent Hopewell business meeting, our former bishop remarked that he’d been reading a new book that afternoon and had a quote for us:

“The big decisions are the ones that transcend every place and relationship and job — integrity and kindness, mercy and generosity, love and joy and justice.”

When he concluded with “by Dorcas Smucker,” I knew which book he’d been reading. 🙂

A few days after that, I was chatting a bit with one of my high school Spanish students. She had just slipped back into school from her first round of chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Read it all

Email in Distraction-Free Environment

Using a big-free email service is a gateway-to-the-Web experience with all kinds of distractions and bloat. Enter God's Post for a distraction-free environment.

Using Gmail or Hotmail or YahooMail or AOL is a gateway-to-the-Web experience with all kinds of distractions.

And bloat. Wow! Talk about bloat! 😯 If you use Gmail, you know it isn’t merely about email. You know how you’ve blown so much time “checking my email”! 🙁 Sure, it can be fun and entertaining and helpful and efficient.

But often you want to do your email
in a distraction-free environment.

For over a decade I offered free, web-based email at God’s Post. Read it all

The Fine Art of the Double Cliché

Clichés enjoy overuse.

But if you gag on them, you can learn to enjoy their use again…by marrying some of them to each other.

Not only is the double cliché fun to use, it packs thrice the punch of either of its parts.

“Stick your neck out” and “Go out on a limb” both encourage risk-taking…and have grown weary of serving the language apart from each other. Solution? Pair ’em up!

Stick your neck out on a limb!

Read it all

Done

Done. I know it’s Rachel Witmer’s life here. It’s also this day where Dora is. And Election 2012 USA. And maybe this country. And maybe my active social media days. And maybe Anabaptist Bookstore. And maybe my book-writing days. But…

Not God!

Migrating Hummingbirds and We Feeders

“If we refill our hummer feeder, will we discombobulate their migration schedule?”

Our morning concern yesterday weighed heavily enough on us that I did some quick research. After all, we didn’t want our zooming little “pets” to stick around too long and then experience . . . ah . . . “weather issues” here in northwest Oregon.

We replenished the feeder with our usual homemade hummingbird juice, because… Read it all

Dead Mouse Died Mysterious Death

Yesterday morning, before anyone else was up, I stepped into our closed, attached garage and saw a puzzling scene.

A dead mouse lay on the floor. Weird.

I stepped over to where I could see the trap I’d set the night before. It was sprung and empty. Weird.

We have no critter poison available for public consumption in the garage. (Not for non-public consumption, either).

We have no interested-in-killing-mice-but-not-eating-them cat. (No cat at all, for that matter.)

I didn’t tinker with the scene at all, not in real life, not on my computer, not on any digital device.

So what’s the explanation for this?

See the upside down sprung trap in the “alley”?

I don’t know what happened.

What’s your theory?