One-word answer meme

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Barbara Harper

I saw this at Alice’s and wanted to give it a try:

You’re feeling: Contented
To your left: Mail
On your mind: Responsibilities
Last meal included: Spaghetti
You sometimes find it hard to: Love
The weather: Pleasant
Something you have a collection of: Books
A smell that cheers you up: Chocolate
A smell that can ruin your mood: Sewage
How long since you last shaved: Hours
The current state of your hair: Longish
The largest item on your desk/workspace (not computer): CD-carousel
Your skill with chopsticks: Nonexistent
Which section you head for first in a bookstore: Fiction
Something you’re craving: Cookies
Your general thoughts on the presidential race: Frustrated
How many times have you been hospitalized this year: None
Favorite place to go for a quiet moment: Bedroom
You’ve always secretly thought you’d be a good: Cook
Something that freaks you out a little: Snakes
Something you’ve eaten too much of lately: Sugar
You have never: Skydived
You never want to: Skydive

This was harder than it looked!! Especially trying to form one word answers (I cheated on one with a hyphen). I was tempted to put little explanations or elaborations in parentheses behind some of them but I resisted.

Since I tagged people recently for another meme, I don’t want to over-do tagging, but just let me know of you do this and I’ll come read your answers.

Time Travel Tuesday: Fight Edition

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Barbara Harper

Annie created and hosts Time Travel Tuesday each week with a question about our past. It’s a lot of fun! Click on the button to join in.

The topic this week has to do with the stress of planning a wedding and whether we and our then-fiances had a big fight in regard to or in planning for the wedding.

Though we didn’t “fight” about it, our first serious disagreement in our relationship had to do with one aspect of our wedding. At the time I had only been to weddings at the church I had begun to attend while in high school, and though there was a little variation, they were pretty much done the same way. In one part of the ceremony, the couple knelt at a kneeling bench (that I think a man in the church made for the purpose) while the pastor prayed for them, and then usually someone sang at that point, either “The Lord’ Prayer” or some song that was basically a prayer for the couple (ours was “Nearer, Still Nearer” with the pronouns changed to plural and a few verses from “The Sands of Time Are Sinking” [the verses beginning “Oh, I am my beloved’s…” and “The bride eyes not her garments..” Both hymns can be sung to the same tune and coordinate quite well together.])

We got married while we were still in college and we were really tight on funds. In fact, looking back, I have no idea how we managed financially. My dear fiance objected to having to kneel before all those invited guests because the soles of his shoes were very worn and he couldn’t afford to get new ones for the wedding. But I was horrified at the thought of not having that part of the ceremony. It just wasn’t done!!

Looking back, that was so silly of me. I’ve attended multitudes of weddings since and learned there are dozens of ways to “do” weddings. We could have stood during that part of the ceremony or angled the kneeling bench so that our soles weren’t facing the people.

And you know what’s really funny? I can’t remember what we actually did do! I even looked back at our wedding pictures to see, but there is no picture of that part, and there were no videotapes back then. I think we did kneel as planned, my dear husband acquiescing to my desires. I wish I had been more sensitive to his.

If there is one piece of advice I would pass a long to brides about the ceremony itself, it would be to just relax. It’s a day that most brides have dreamed of for years, some since they were little girls, and some have actually had it all planned out for years even before having a fiance and without any consideration of what he might want. But the meaning and significance of the day can get somewhat lost in the details and stress and expense. I had a friend who was a wedding coordinator who finally gave it up because it was so stressful for her. I think the wedding that did her in was an outdoor wedding in August (that would be my second piece of advice — no outdoor weddings in August in the South!!) in which the bride got mad because some older people chose to stay in and watch from the lake house nearby because it was so hot and because the coordinator had the nerve to faint at the reception. This friend used to lament that most brides seem to spend much more time and thought on the wedding than on the marriage. A wedding is a beauitful rite, but keep the big picture in mind and don’t stress over details that no one will remember in the coming years.

Tags and awards

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Barbara Harper

Farrah at Light In the Sphere tagged me a while back for this meme. Thanks for thinking of me, Farrah!

1. The rules are posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

What I was doing 10 years ago:

We were getting ready to move from GA back “home” to SC. I was excited about the move, but ti was a busy time– packing up, getting ready to sell one home and buy another, being separated through the week while Jim had to start his new job but we couldn’t move yet til the housing situation worked out.

Five things on my to-do list today:

1. Package up a couple of things I need to mail.
2. Wrap a belated birthday present for a friend.
3. Begin working on decorations for the upcoming ladies’ luncheon.
4. Write a letter to my mother-in-law.
5. Take a nap. 🙂

Snacks that I enjoy:

Chocolate chip cookies
M&Ms
Popcorn
Chocolate chip chocolate covered granola bars
Chips

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Give portions to church and people I knew with various needs.
2. Pay off our debts.
3. Put aside some for youngest’s college education.
4. Buy a more adequate home (not necessarily bigger — just better arranged).
5. Buy new living room furniture.

Three of my bad habits:

1. Staying up too late
2. Procrastinating
3. Snacking on the wrong things (see above) 🙂

Glad that one was limited to three!!

Five places I have lived:

1. Corpus Christi, TX
2. Houston, TX
3. Taylors, SC
4. Greenville, SC
5. Douglasville, GA

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Baby-sitter
2. Library worker
3. Church Secretary
4. Sales Clerk
5. Inventory counter

Five people I want to know more about (A nice way to say TAG!)….

1. Alice Teh
2. Jen
3. Bet
4. Grams
5. KC

I have also been woefully delinquent in acknowledging a couple of awards folks have graciously passed on to me.

Alice gave me the Perfect Gift of Friendship Award:

Thanks so much, Alice! I’d like to pass this along to: Jen, Susan, Susanne, Grams, Janeen, and Jewel.

Then KC passed along to me the Blogging With a Purpose award:

Thanks, KC — I am honored. I’d like to give this to Elle, Susan, Lizzie, and Rita.

Works-For-Me Wednesday: Claiming donated items on tax returns

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Barbara Harper

Did you know that if you itemize your tax deductions, you can claim donations to charities?

To do so, you need to make a specific list of what you are donating and get a receipt when you donate the items. When we have done it, we have simply listed “5 boys’ shirts; 6 men’s slacks,” etc. The recipient does not assign a value to what you have donated: you must do that. There are guides for how much you can claim for donated items at the Goodwill site and the Salvation Army site. I imagine you can use the same guidelines if you donate to a local rescue shelter or children’s home.

For example, you can claim $2-12 for a shirt, $2-10 for pants, $3-20 for a dress, depending on the condition. That’s more than you could make at a yard sale on those items. Household items seem to have about the same value that you might get at a yard sale, maybe a little more (lamp: $4-12; books: $.75-1.50; chair: $5-15).

There is a much more detailed document titled “Determining the Value of Donated Property” on the IRS web site at which covers multitudes of types of donated items. It also warns that there can be a 20-40% penalty if it is discovered that you overstated the value of a donated item. The IRS document on Charitable Contributions details what types of organizations and donations qualify for deductions.

The advantage to a yard sale is that you can get the cash immediately for your items. But if you don’t need the money immediately, you might make out better donating the items and claiming the deductions. Both efforts take time: the yard sale takes time to price things, advertise, and spend a morning actually selling and then packing up what’s left over. Donating to charitable organizations takes time to make lists and assign values and haul your stuff to the donation site (although some charities will pick up items) and then keep up with the paperwork until tax time. It just depends on which method you find less frustrating and confusing.

Of course, if you have things you need to get rid of and you don’t itemize your deductions and don’t want to have a yard sale, you can just take them to a donation site and drop them off without dealing with itemizing or receipts. Or you can donate them to a charity that is holding a yard sale. Some things might do well on eBay, but to list things item by item would be a bit tedious if you have a lot, and I don’t know that common everyday household items would do well. Some items, particularly children’s clothes and women’s clothes, might do well at a consignment store. Mrs. Wilt had a great post about that this week.

See Rocks In My Dryer to find more great tips or share your own with us.

Time Travel Tuesday: To Grandmother’s house we go…

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Barbara Harper

My Life as Annie’s weekly Time Travel Tuesday asks this week:

Travel back to grandmother’s (or aunt… or ?) house.

What are the smells you remember walking in when you were young?

What are things you remember seeing every time you were there?

Any special things you always did with or at grandmother’s house?

We spent some time living with my mother’s father when I was a child. He loved to tease and had a very distinctive laugh. That laugh is what always comes to mind when I think of him. Later on when we moved to another town and he remarried, whenever he came to visit he always brought Dunkin’ Donuts, and when I woke up in the mornings he and my mom were always visiting at the kitchen table.

My grandmother tended to move to be near different ones of her children at different times, so I don’t remember a particular house associated with her. But for some years when she lived near us, I very often went to spend the night with her. We shared a love of reading, and one of my delights was staying up late to read when I spent the night with her. She must have had an additional bed in her room, because I can remember us both being in our respective beds with a book and a lamp on until late at night. Her children were scattered from Texas and Louisiana to Alabama, and she would spend some part of the summers driving around to visit them. Two or three of those summers she took me with her, and though I don’t remember a lot of specifics, I remember that as a special time with her. She also loved to crochet and was almost always working on some project or another if she was sitting still. Sadly I don’t have much of anything that she crocheted except a few coasters and a doily and one baby blanket. But I remember the industriousness and always associate crocheting with her.

Know and Tell Friday

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Barbara Harper

To Know Him hosts Know and Tell Friday, and we’d love to have you join us. The questions this week are:

Question 1
Do you color your hair (give me some background info on this one)?

No. Not yet anyway. 🙂 I never had a desire to as I was growing up and in my 20s. My hair was kind of a honey blonde and then started darkening a lot as I got older. I don’t mind that it got darker per se but it became kind of a blah color. I thought about coloring it, but I really, really hate to see people’s roots showing and felt it would drive me crazy trying to keep ahead of that with coloring. Now I do have some gray — a streak on one side and more and more sprinkled throughout. Twice in the last month or so I have been offered a senior citizen discount at restaurants (and I don’t qualify yet!!!) and twice in the last couple of years I’ve been thought to be my youngest’s grandmother. 😕 So I have been thinking about it. A friend recently told me about a type that washes out after 30 days, so that might be a good one to start with.

Question 2
What is one thing that you do with your family (or by yourself) to celebrate Easter?

I wrote about our Easter traditions here, but highlights of the day are the special church services.

Question 3
How old was your oldest living relative (still living or in the past)?

I am not really sure, but I think one grandparent on each side lived into their 80s.

Question 4
What is one thing that can be a “time waster” to you?

The computer.

Question 5
Most annoying bug?

Is there such a thing as a non-annoying bug? I know they have their purpose and I don’t mind them as long as they stay outside and away from me. Even ladybugs lost their appeal a while back when we had an invasion of them. But I guess the top of the list would be roaches, mosquitoes and what my husband calls “no-see-ums” — little things that fly around your eye and head outside in the summer.

Question 6
What does Easter mean to you?

It means to me a confirmation of all that Christ taught about Himself; it proves that there is life after death; it shows that Christ is victorious over death.
Question 7
(Feel free to pass on this question) Is there currently a sin that you are holding onto, and you know you should let go of?

There are some that I struggle with regularly, yes, but I don’t want to go into them here and now. Sometimes in church or after devotions I get to a point of yielding — or at least I think I have — and may have victory a time or two, but then fall right back into old patterns.

(By the way — I am celebrating my 1,000th post with a giveaway here. Hope you’ll check it out!)

Time Travel Tuesday: Smells

Posted on March 18, 2008 by Barbara Harper

My Life as Annie’s weekly Time Travel Tuesday asks this week if there are any smells that take us back in memory. I don’t really remember too many.

My dad wore Old Spice cologne, so a whiff of that always makes me think of him. I don’t remember my mom wearing perfume, though I think she did. I don’t think she had one particular scent that she wore all the time.

I grew up near the Gulf of Mexico with frequent excursions to Padre Island, and the smell of sea water takes me back to my childhood there. So many birthday parties, overnight camp-outs, family get-togethers, and fish fries held there! And this was no wimpy strip of beach alongside a highway and hotels: this was sand dunes and sea grass as far as the eye could see in one direction, and endless waves in the other. I forget how much I miss the sea until I am around it again. We’re a few hours away from the water now, and, really, with the lack of public modesty we wouldn’t go much any more anyway, especially with three boys in tow. But a few years ago our kids’ spring break was an off week from the public schools’ and we spent a few days in Charleston at a hotel right on the beach. Hardly anyone else was around. It was wonderful!

Know and Tell Friday

Posted on March 14, 2008 by Barbara Harper

(My Friday Show and Tell post is just below this one and my Ultimate Blog Party post is here.)

To Know Him hosts Know and Tell Friday, and we’d love to have you join us. The questions this week are:

Question 1
What can you draw well?

No, not at all. My drawings look rather pre-schoolish.

Question 2
Name a TV show (at any period in your life) that you watched that you were probably a little too old to watch.

Besides the shows my kids watched? 🙂 I really can’t think of anything, though I am sure I probably did. We still love the Disney and Pixar animated films but I think those are geared to the whole family rather than just to kids. I’m not much for TV cartoons any more but I still love the one with Tom and Jerry’s antics to classical music — I think Tom is trying to conduct or play an instrument, I can’t remember, but Jerry comes along and havoc ensues. Maybe Tom plays the piano — I seem to remember Jerry hiding in one and running along the keys.

Question 3
What color is the dominant color of your wardrobe?

It depends on the season. In the winter there are a lot of blues, blacks and grays as backgrounds with florals mixed in. In the spring and summer I would say it’s predominately pink. And I wear my denim jumper year round.

Question 4
Favorite donut?

Krispy Kreme’s glazed when they’re hot and ready. 😛 One local grocery store also sells “Tiger Tails” in their bakery — chocolate and regular glazed, twisted. Luscious!

Question 5
Wear painful shoes just because they are cute?

No!!! I am about as unfashionista as you can get and have foot and balance issues anyway. They have to be comfortable.

Bonus Questions
Question 6
Is there anything that you believe you do not believe God about?

I had to read that one over several times to make sure I understood it. There is a level in which I believe everything God says in His Word, but of course that is tested all the time. Probably the area where I struggle with it most is when something awful happens, particularly to little children. As much as I have read and studied and concluded about suffering and God’s purposes for it, I still struggle with His sovereignty and love and care when it happens. But we walk by faith, not by site or by feelings, and I have to go over and over those verses that assure that He has a purpose in everything and that all things will work together for good to those who love Him.

Question 7
In general, do you think it is ok to be frustrated with people?

Well — I think it is inevitable. We are all sinners, and our rough edges are going to jab into each other some times. I think it is what we do with it that’s key. Being frustrated with someone isn’t an excuse to blow up at them, act unkindly toward them, or carry a grudge against them. “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye” (Colossians 3: 12-13). We need to remember that we likely frustrate other people often, too, and we need to treat them the way we would want to be treated if the tables were turned. I think we need to examine our reaction, too. Was it just “one of those things,” or was it, as it is all too often, a selfish reaction because someone impinged on something I wanted — my time or space or the way I wanted something done.

I had a roommate in college who would continually use my little hot pot that I used for heating water for instant coffee for her herbal tea — which she made with loose leaves and left as is when she was done, so that when I went to use it I had to clean all that gunk out. That was frustrating! And I don’t think it was wrong to feel frustrated. But the right way to handle it would have been to confront her (kindly) and ask her to clean it out when she was done instead of seething under the surface, which is what I tended to do instead because I hated confrontation. A few uncomfortable moments of confrontation would have saved all that frustration. On the other hand, if I get frustrated because someone is sitting in “my” favorite spot on the couch, and they know that’s where I like to sit when we’re in the family room, well, then, I just need to get over myself. 🙂 I do sometimes ask if I can sit there, though.

Know and Tell Friday

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Barbara Harper

(My Friday Show and Tell post is just below this one and my Ultimate Blog Party post is here.)

To Know Him hosts Know and Tell Friday and asks this week:

Question 1
I have been blogging for a year this month, so my question is what made you start your blog?

I don’t remember how I started reading blogs — I think from links to peoples’ blogs on a couple of forums I was on. Reading one person’s blog leads to reading their links and blogroll. I enjoyed the ones I read and began thinking about doing my own. I wanted it first of all to be a blessing and an encouragement to other ladies but I also wanted it to be fun.

Question 2
Do you speak another language? If so, why or how did you learn it?

No. I had two years of Spanish in high school but only remember a few words.

Question 3
Morning person, or night owl (or somewhere in between)?

Naturally, if there are no time constraints, I tend to be a night owl. But with a family and school, etc., I have to get up pretty early. I still tend to stay up too late.

Question 4
Do you exercise on a regular basis?

No. I should.

Bonus Questions
Question 5
If money were not an object what is one thing you would like to do for another person?

I know a couple of students in Christian colleges struggling financially whom I would love to help with their school bills.

Question 6
What is one of your favorite attributes of our Lord God?

It would be hard to single out one. I love that He is perfectly righteous and can always be depended on to do the right thing. I love that He is truth and love. But if I had to choose, I am grateful for His longsuffering and lovingkindess.

Question 7
Have you ever thought about adoption or foster care?

No, not really. I don’t think I have it in me. I have my hands full with my own three.

Classical Music Meme turned into a Thursday Thirteen

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Barbara Harper

Semicolon answered the question recently, “What are seven classical music works you love?” I started out answering the same question…but I couldn’t keep it to seven. So I decided to make a Thursday Thirteen entry of it.

These aren’t necessarily in order of preference — except the first one. 🙂

1. Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major”

2. Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”

3. Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet Overture”

4. Bach’s “Air on a G String”

5. Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G Major, the “Surprise Symphony”

6. Bach’s Suite for solo cello No. 1 in G major prelude