tonyandkirsten.org

It’s the end of July in Ames and you know what that means — curb shopping! This time-honored practice has furnished many a dorm room and rental house. From about July 25th through August 2nd, one need only drive around a few streets with rental properties to find dozens of chairs and couches as well as a few dressers, end tables, bookcases and other miscellany. But couches always seem to be the hot item.

Now that we are home owners and can paint our walls fun colors, we wanted to move up from curb and free furniture to the next step up on the furniture food chain to thrift store furniture. We made a trip down to the Salvation Army in Des Moines and picked up a sweet couch and chair (as well as an office chair) for only $52 — it normally would have been twice as much, but we discovered that every Wednesday is 50% off day!

As most college students and young adults know, curb furniture is the bottom of the couch food chain. Couches start off their lives being bought from an expensive furniture store. Only “real adults” buy furniture there, and I am sure you have to be at least 30 to qualify. After a couch has outlived its usefulness in the living room of a home, it might move to a basement or less-used room of the house. This is the second step in the couch food chain. After another new couch enters the home, a new owner will be found for that basement couch. If it is still nice, it joins the third level of the food chain — a used furniture store or the classified ad section of the local newspaper. If it is not in good condition (or it is a couch originally purchased at the third level) it will go straight to level four — the thrift store or garage sale. After a level four couch has out-lived it’s usefulness, it decends to level five — the curb furniture. At level five there are also couches that are so poor that one can’t sell them and you give them away to someone directly, instead of anonymously at the curb. At level five, couches continuily recycle, going out to the curb and into dorm rooms, apartments, and rental houses, and then back out on the curb as students and young people chose not to move them when leases are up or the school year is over.

After a couch is finally no longer useful at level five, it is out of the food chain, and destinied for the dump…or in the case of Ames, the trash-burning facility at the power plant.

When we brought home the “new” level-four couch from the Des Moines Salvation Army, Tony asked what we would do with the old one it was replacing. It was ugly enough (and heavy enough) that we didn’t want to put it in the basement. I said, “Put it out on the curb of course!”

It was gone within less than 12 hours.

Though we now own a level-four couch, we may still be on the hunt for some level five finds. So be sure to tell us if you see anything that fits our color scheme!

So, we moved into our new house on Friday night. (Thanks so much to the dozen or so people who helped!). Unfortunately, due to some quirk of the way DSL service works, we had to agree to a multiple-day dry spell in our internet service in order to keep the same phone number. Yes, in a high tech world where most internet-related things seem to only take an instant, DSL service takes five days to hook up or transfer.

I feel really out of touch not having read any email or blogs from late Thursday night until today. After receiving a third phone call asking “did you get my email?”, I figured it was time to take the laptop to somewhere with a wireless internet connection and get caught up. Amazingly, Madeline has been happily sleeping in her car seat for nearly 45 mintues now as I have enjoyed an Iced Caramel Latte and some internet useage at Stomping Groungs. It’s a nice break from unpacking in our new place and cleaning in our old place.

Best case scenario, our internet MIGHT be working tonight (five days, including Friday and today, but that is counting the weekend) or at worst next Monday (not counting Friday, since I called after five, and assuming it takes a full five business days, and doesn’t start working until the next business day after the five days. )

At least I have fewer distractions to my unpacking and cleaning. But if you don’t see too many blog entries or emails from me the next several days, at least you’ll know where I am…the DSL desert.

We’ve made the discovery that Madeline is starting to show some enjoyment for music. For the first few weeks of her life, she showed little or no reaction to music being played, but lately during fussy times she will quiet down (at least for a few minutes) if we turn some music on. It can be the music on the mobile, classical or jazz on the radio, or even my somewhat-off-key singing.

A couple of nights ago Madeline was again fussy for no aparent reason…she was tired, but wouldn’t fall asleep. I started singing to her, and quickly realized that if I was going to sing to her for any length of time I would need to come up with more to sing than just “You are My Sunshine” and the “Go to Sleep” song. While I probably know the words to dozens if not well over a hundred songs we sing at church or that I have on CDs, when pressed to sing one with no musical or lyrical prompting at all, either my mind goes blank thinking of anything to sing, or I can’t remember the words of songs that I really should know.

I then remembered I had a small song book we used to use for student group worship times…circa 1996 or 1997 or so. Luckily, it was still somewhere I could get to it among the sea of boxes. The booklet only contains words to songs, so you’re out of luck if you can’t remember the melody…but out of the nearly 150 songs the book contains, I probably remember the tune to at least half of them. Some of the songs are Christian “praise chorus” classics like “Lord I Lift Your Name on High” and “All in All,” while many more of them are old-school Great Commission scripture songs and other numbers that I think are unique to our movement (or maybe they just haven’t been popular in general since the 70s?).

I will admit that I really like the scripture songs from back in the day. As I sung many of these to Madeline — personal favorites of mine like “Jeremiah 32″ and “Psalm 67,” and many others — It not only made the time pass more quickly as she contininued wailing (she was quited down for the first 5-10 minutes of my singing, then resumed her crying), but it was also an encouragement to me. It brought back happy memories of getting together in the basement at the Hunt St. house on Sunday nights my freshman or sophomore year (back when the Bovenmyers still lived there) for dinner and singing. It reminded me of early fellowship team meetings back when I was still a student leading a team with Ben Lennander, as we were trying our best to figure out how to reach out in the towers. And it reminded me of my early years at Stonebrook when we still met at the high school, and the church was a whole lot smaller than it is now.

Sure, some of these songs contain what could be considered modern musical faux-pas like enlongating unimportant words (see the word “produce” in the Psalm 67 song) and many are in a musical style that has been uncool since the early 80s. But they are still an encouraging way to worship the Lord and meditate on God’s word!

Tony and I got together with some of the leaders from our fellowship team this past weekend to discuss vision and planning for the fall. It was encouraging to be in fellowship with these leaders and to start turning my mind and heart toward what God has for our team and for the Rock as a whole in the fall.

Since Madeline was born, I’ve been on leave of absence from my ministry job duties, and it has been a mental leave of absence in many ways as well as a physical “not doing the work” type of absence. While I would think about things if asked a direct question, I definitely wasn’t thinking, dreaming and praying about what God has for the fall. I had been thinking and dreaming about packing, decorating our new house and finding bargains on cute clothes for Madeline.
I’m excited to see what God has for our team in the fall. I feel like I am often on a team that is having a make-or-break year or semester, and this is no exception. My ministry team doesn’t have a lot of people in the dorms, and we’ll need to see some new faces if we want to have a signifiant dorm presence when the next year rolls around. And yet I am personally in a different position than ever. Having a baby to bring to the dorms should be girl-magnet for the first-three-weeks crazy outreach time, but I know that it won’t be practical to bring her there every night all year…she could be a distraction to things like Bible studies and prayer meetings if she starts screaming (and one of these days we might actually get her on a regular schedule that involves a bed time earlier than 11pm).

Even though it will look different than in the past, Tony and I are still convinced that God wants us doing campus ministry, just with a baby to make things more interesting. We don’t have it all figured out yet as far as what our schedule should look like in the fall or how my time can be most effective for the kingdom (like when I should be focused on Madeline, and when I should be focused on discipling/coaching women leaders or doing administrative stuff for the Rock)…but I am now in the mindset of starting to think, dream and pray more seriously as to what it should look like. One thing I am definitely thinking is that God can use our new house as a ministry tool to make doing college ministry with a baby more feasable. I am really hoping that we can continue using our home as we have this past year for meetings, dinners and people coming over to do laundry, but maybe even more so.

But for the moment, it’s back to packing…this move has to get done first before fall can come!

So, 5th try’s a charm??? Not counting the short post about our moving plans, I think I have started to write a blog entry about four or five times in the past week. I am stilll really slow at typing with one hand, so even a whole session of feeding Madeline is not enough to write a blog entry of any decent length. (Or at least I get frustrated with the slow pace before I get very far into it). So in the past 8 or 9 days I have been interrupted by my daughter’s hunger or general fussiness several times. I’ve also been interrupted by computer problems (the laptop’s hard drive died) and my guilty concisence telling me to go and work on packing more boxes instead of wasting time writing on my blog.
Today, I have successfully managed to not get any packing done all day, so what’s a little more time wasted? I spent over half and hour in Target today looking at cute baby stuff. I did go to that section with a purpose — looking for disposable bottle liners for feeding Maddie while traveling…but I got distracted by the many items on clearance. Then I was absolutely sucked in by the cute Duckie items on clearance. I am obsessed with cute duckies, and I can admit it! Since I had a gift card to use, I gave in and bought a two-pack of knit pants that included a yellow pair with blue duckies. They’ll debut on Madeline when she reaches the 6/9 month size.

We’re even decorating Madeline’s room with a duckie theme…so if she hates duckies by the time she reaches three years of age, at least you’ll know why. Meanwhile, if you are doing your early Christmas shopping and Madeline is on your list…feel free to buy the cute duckie stuff before she gets old enough to care.

We’re finally ready to make moving plans! We are going to make the move from Friley Rd to West St on July 16th starting at 5:30pm…We’ll take all hands to help, so meet us at our Friley Rd house if you can help. It should just take a couple hours. We’ll break for pizza at 7pm, so that’s some incentive for you to show up and help…We’ll feed you pizza.

We’re also tentatively hoping to paint this weekend, but there is a lot of other stuff going on as well. If you think you might want to help paint, let us know and we will keep you informed…the painting might not happen until some night during next week.

Finally, I could use help during the day especially to pack…or to hold Madeline while I am packing. Just give me a call or stop by. I’ll be packing just about every day between now and the 16th!

While taking a break from Daylights yesterday (I just finished my editing for the fall 2004 issue, by the way!) I discoverd links to a couple of interesting magazines in a comment on Slashdot.

Found Magazine’s website is full of things lost by one person and found by another. But not just anything — these are items most of us would ignore if we saw them, and have probably lost and not missed many times ourselves — mostly notes and old photographs.

Most of the dozens of photos and notes on their website come with a few comments from the finder. Some comments offer the circumstances of the items finding, while others give commentary and speculations as to the story behind the item. The drama in everyday life intrigues me, so these small, anonymous tidbits fit my style.

Ready Made appears to be a quirky design magazine with other funky “how-to”s thrown in as well. The magazine’s tag line is “A bimonthly print magazine for people who like to make stuff.” Well, I don’t do a lot of “making stuff” other than food, but the features you can see on this magazine’s website make me want to start. Lampshade made from old slides? Turning soda cans into a camping stove? That’s cool. A humorous article well worth the read: “How to seem like you read several newspapers.”

I’m looking forward to tracking down the print versions of these magazines sometime soon.