Welcome Home!

We went to VA. to visit our good friends Julie and Greg. They recently adopted a new born baby. Her name is Annalise. She is so beautiful and has a wonderful family to grow up in. Just look how sweet she is...

More pictures can be found here

Below is a cute video, if you listen real close when we are singing the "ABC's"



Here is Chloe on the way home recounting the tail. She is funny...

Gardening for anal retentive personalities

I hate yard work! I really hated gardens. We had one for a few years and though it was nice to grow our own produce, the work was always a pain. I never had the right tools, enough time, or knowledge to do it right. Thank God Kathi is smarter then me and did the thinking. I was the mule. Digging, digging, and more digging. Our soil is all clay so it is very hard to grow anything in it. We had to haul in top soil and compost all the time. By the time we got the garden ready, I did not want to look at it anymore.

Well, lately Kathi and I have discussed options to live more basic and appreciate the simple things in life. Some of this comes from the water shortage/cost of gas and realizing how much we waste. It may also come from discussions at church. Whatever the reason, it has made us realize we should make an effort to be aware of the impact on the earth and community.

We decided to get a rain barrel and use it for all outside watering, so far it seems to work o.k. I miss the water pressure from the house, but in Durham water restrictions do not allow any out door water use.

Kathi also found a book at the library call "All New Square Foot Gardening".
She mentioned it to me and at the time I smiled and thought, how nice, but I aint gonna do all this work. Then I picked it up one night and could not put it down. It open a new world to me and had simple steps to follow. As I read the book, the lights went out. I found a flashlight and finished the book. I was hooked. This concept could enable communities and congragations an EASY way to work together and harvest food. The author has even taken the concept overseaes and trained communities how to do Square Foot Gardens in order for them to make a living.

The whole concept comes down to 4 by 4 foot squares and a special mix of peat moss, compost, and vermiculite. This soil is so rich and light, it is amazing. Since the soil goes into a box there is no weeding, ever..... Here is the magic mix and boxes we made. We also have a standard garden next to these boxes and plan to compare the success. So far Square Foot was easier to prepare and the amazing part, is how much you can grow in these small spaces. As we go through the season, I will keep you posted and place all pictures in the 2008 Garden album in our Kodak Photo Gallery.

Go shop and save our economy

The bells are ringing again. First, after 911 the government asked us to show our patriotism by shopping to stimulate the economy.

Now the economy is in trouble again. The government plans to borrow money from China, to send it to all its citizens, in hopes they will go out and shop.... If it even works, it is such a short term gain. It does not fix the situation, but adds more debt for us to worry about.

I struggle with this, because I am not gonna send the money back. We have plans to pay down our own debt on loans or the dreadful credit cards. We have a personal deficit because we decided to be a single family income in order for the kids to have a parent at home and like a lot of people we also have many unexpected medical bills.

Few thoughts:

• We are very luck to be able to have a parent home and stay afloat
• I hate to see so many people with the mortgage crisis, but wonder how many were trying to keep up with the Jones, and buy a house they really could not afford using an adjustable or interest only to pay for it. On the other hand I see how expensive houses are getting and maybe this is a result of the overall inflated housing market, things are never as black and white as they seem.
  
• This stimulus package, does not fix the issues with economy - loss of jobs, gas prices, investments being low, and at the same time corporate profits at all time high. Something else has to change.
• It makes me sad to see so many people struggling and how easy it is for them to become faceless or a statistic
• I was emailed this letter about the tax rebate and found it compelling, thought I would share it:

Open letter to: President George W. Bush

First of all, we want to thank you for your hard work and efficient cooperation in responding to the growing crisis in the U.S. economy. This is a model of bipartisanship that many citizens, of every persuasion, long to see and rightfully expect.

Nevertheless, we also want to voice some deep and abiding questions about the economic stimulus legislation approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on February 13.

Individuals in our congregation have varied opinions about the relative effectiveness of this legislation—not unlike many other citizens. What we are in agreement on, however, is the deliberation leading to this federal action appears to have neglected more fundamental questions: Whose economy is in fact being stimulated? What vision is being served? Which arrangements are being strengthened and which are being breached?

Your own statistical research offices continue to document a frightening, and escalating, pattern of economic disparity both in the U.S. and between the U.S. and the larger family of nations. In our judgment, it is politically dangerous, economically unstable and environmentally ruinous.

In the language of our faith, this massive disparity is a sin, the evidence of spiritual distress. Our Scripture, tradition and conscience are insistent at this point: being faithful to God and constructing just relations within the human community (and with the earth itself) are parallel commitments.

We assure you that we are committed to fruitful economic activity. We are thankful for those individuals and groups who labor creatively and intelligently to create wealth. But, again, the questions arise: Wealth for whom? Under what terms? In whose favor?

We claim no privileged expertise in formulating economic policies that would foster more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources. Neither do we believe that our Scripture, tradition and conscience have ready-made answers. That task rightly belongs to a much wider mix of people willing to work hard and negotiate long, with intelligence and passion, for the sake of the common good.

We do believe, though, that there must be more commonness in the good we pursue.

We expressly do not believe that shopping is an appropriate response to our collective trauma—whether it be that of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, or the crumbling lives now caught in our tumbling economic outlook. There is something fundamentally awry in this assumption. Our gluttony, literally and figuratively, is laying waste to our commonweal.

We are not ascetics, at least in the way most people understand that term. Our congregation shares wonderful potluck feasts after our weekly worship service. A frequent invitation at our communion table is “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). We say amen to the teaching from the Jewish Talmud Yerushalmi: “On Judgment Day God will hold us accountable for the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy.” We celebrate God’s promise of “the fatness of the earth” (Genesis 27:28) and echo the psalmist’s confidence: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of God in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13).

But the Bible also speaks of “fatness” in a profoundly different and troubling way: The wicked “have no pangs. . . pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression” (Psalms 73:4-8).

We fear that our nation has become infatuated with security, with eyes swollen shut to the reality that the only lasting security is mutual security; that terror cannot be overcome with more terror; that clenched fists cannot unravel the legacies of discord and enmity that inflict neighborhoods and nations alike.

Given our convictions about what it means to follow Jesus, and given our dismay over the skewed perceptions and scandalous policies governing current economic arrangements, we pledge that members of our congregation will donate all or part (at minimum, a 10% tithe) of the expected tax rebate to organizations that foster the well-being of people on the economic margins. We also pledge to encourage other communities of faith and conscience to make similar commitments.

To be sure, this is a modest step and—if the harvest of peace is to be sown in justice—must be accompanied by many other personal and public commitments. Our hope is that enough others will make similar pledges and create the political will needed to nudge our nation away from current arrangements and toward new solutions rooted in restored imagination and renewed moral clarity.

All such commitments will come at a cost. We believe the consequence is worth the cost. Which is why we ask you, our nation’s leaders, to go back to your chambers to ponder a different set of questions and formulate a different set of policies.

Respectfully, and with appreciation for the burdens of your duty,


The Circle of Mercy Congregation
Asheville, N.C.

Put the kids in the fridge.

Below is an email trail of a conversation I had today. While Kathi is in Florida for a funeral, I have been in a hurry working and trying to give Chloe attention, . This email clearly shows I am not sane..

>>>Friend>>>
I left eggs on your desk. if you're not here I'll put them in the frig down on your end of the hall...let me know.

>>>James>>>
I am at home, Kathi's grandmother died and I am trying to figure out what to do with the kids for the next 3 days, can you put them in the fridge? THANKS

>>>Friend>>>
Who, the kids? Read your message over, that sentence is too funny.
I'm sorry about Kathi's grandmother.