"And he shall reign forever and ever…"

Eater Sunnay!

Today was beautiful. What is HILARIOUS (I swear, no really *gritted teeth* hi-lar-i-ous) is that all of Holy Week, no lie, all the way until yesterday was gorgeous. Sunny, no clouds in the sky, everyone was happy. And then today, when Christ freakin' rose from the dead, it rains. All. Day. Long. Depressed.

But today was beautiful. I made hot cross buns and they were delicious. I don't even have any pictures of them because they were all devoured. Which is better than tire-buns circa 2010. And Moozh made one hell of a spread fer sure. A big, cheesy frittata and sausage and hashbrowns. And I drank wine from 11 in the morning until I speak to you now. Am I done Lent or am I done Lent? (I sound like Jerry Seinfeld.)

And we fixed our biceys up so we are superstars. Mine looks like a steampunk champ. And his name is Archimedes. (More this one, less this one.) Moozh's is the coolest matte grey with blue bar tape. I will post pichers once they are all finished. They're single speeds. Call us doucheballoons if you want. We live in Bankybear so we're halfway there anyway. But they are good biceys…when you're not on a hill.

I thought I could post a picher of the dress I got for my zalovka's* wedding in Maui. Pockets! And it's a light fabric. And I don't have to wear a bra which is awesome.

*Sissy in law :)

I also have a very green windowsill in my kitchen now. Two bucks a pop and I have four fresh herbs that I am struggling with now. They smell delicious and I am determined to keep them alive. And eat them. It's a deal. I took four books (FOUR) out of the library on indoor gardening. But our lovely neighbour has the plots in the backyard of our building and she offered to share some of her spoils haul with us.

Let's think about summer and maybe we can bring it about :)

"The Beauty of the body that was broken for our forgiveness…"

Tomorrow is my favourite day and I preparation for it I wanted to post just a short meditation. My bestie Lacey receives these mediations every day that are magnificent and I want to post them here. You can subscribe to them through the Centre for Action and Contemplation.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming a human being

so I do not have to pretend or try to be God.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming finite and limited

so I do not have to pretend that I am infinite and limitless.

I thank you, crucified God, for becoming mortal

so I do not have to try to make myself immortal.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming inferior

so I do not have to pretend that I am superior to anyone.

I thank you for being crucified outside the walls,

for being expelled and excluded like the sinners and outcasts,

so you can meet me where I feel that I am,

always outside the walls of worthiness.

I thank you for becoming weak, Lord Jesus,

so I don’t have to be strong.

I thank you for being willing to be considered

imperfect and strange,

so I do not have to be perfect and normal.

I thank you, Jesus, for being willing to be disapproved of,

so I do not have to try so hard to be approved and liked.

I thank you for being considered a failure,

so I do not have to give my life trying to pretend I’m a success.

I thank you for being wrong

by the standards of religion and state,

so I do not have to be right anywhere, even in my own mind.

There is death in sin but we find life in Christ's sacrifice for us and we find joy in the Eurcharist of remembering that sacrifice. May tomorrow be a miracle. And may it be sunny. And you eat lots of hot cross buns. And booze.

"This is my prayer in the harvest. When favour and providence flow…"

What a beautiful Sunday! It is sunny, there are no clouds and I am wearing flip flops. Beaut. I am seven days away from what I am convinced is going to be a magical Easter Sunday.

I have officially experienced what moving should looked like. Yesterday morning moving friends of ours up two floors in their building was like a well oiled machine. We arrived, groggy and with coffee in hand, at 10 o'clock am and by quarter after one we were wandering around the place saying, "wanna open some chips?"

Then, as I mentioned, Moozh and I went to a Russian end of term dinner.

And it was awful.

The restaurant was a little overwhelmed, I'd say. Apparently their head chef was "away". So Moozh and I each ordered Borscht and it took -count it- an hour and fifteen minutes. The music was way too loud. There were some very obnoxious, and drunk, people there. Then, the transfer we had to take home never arrived and so we had to take a cab. But then we woke up this morning and it was all over. And I got 92% on my exam so this is an exercise in forgive and forget.

We checked out this beautiful church this morning that kind of has my heart. It's on the UBC campus in one of the libraries. We cleaned through the house today, the whole thing, and even though it's miniature sized, it took us eight hours. And we cleaned the weird spots, like the ledge where the cabinet door meets the rest of the cabinet and the inside of the radiator. Places no one will see. I will sleep and dream of dust. And weird rust drips.

And today was the two year anniversary of the day Moozh and I got engaged! And it's the beginning of Holy Week! And the sun was out AGAIN today! Altogether not bad.
This was us back then. Moozh lookin' smokin' and me wearing a turban. Typical.

And this is us now: 

What a goomba, hey? This was rather disjointed. But I'm icing my back and that makes typing, and…thinking, difficult. I'm also watching "The Kennedys" and Rosie Kennedy is melting my brain. 

Happy SPRING!

P.S ~ I am on a mission of discovery this week. We found a diamond in the rough for produce a couple weeks back. Gorgeous fruit and veg for less than what I would have to take out a student loan. And then I found a twin for bulk! Bankybear has been withholding from me. There is more out there to discover. Tally ho! 

"I don't need to get steady. I know just how it feels. Tellin' you to get ready…"

My sister in law is officially a big kid and graduates from her program in 18 days. Which blows my head right off my body (And as my Dad used to say when I would flip out as a kid, "little tiny pieces of Brianne all over the ceiling.") It makes me think of when I graduate and how freaky and monumental and somehow simultaneously anticlimactic. Which also makes me think of WHAT WILL I DO THEN? I'm going to graduate with a BFA which is the most useless degree ever. It's a fun degree that does not necessarily get you a fun job. I may end up typing up abnormal medical results in a yellow lit office the size of Harry Potter's bedroom somewhere , "gat-ah-gat-ah-gah-ah", all day long. Or there is always a clicky pen tester.

Basically, I am prematurely stressing out. Which is so unlike me...

And so I've been surfing, because that is simply what happens to my brain when I have a lot to do. It gets up from it's proverbial desk and puts on a sombrero. And when that happens, I am subject to it's whims. It makes me read blogs and watch the Food Network. It MAKES ME DO IT! I came across a food blog (NO WAY!) and this beautiful vegan lady, Oh She Glows, posted something about "graduation fears". It's a beautiful way of articulating that if you get to the end of your education and realize, "Oh crap", that it is not the end of your life. It is something we all inherently know, deep down in the part of us that still dreams even though we step on it and throw garbage at it, that our education is not who we are and that we can always course correct, we can always choose a new way.
*She also makes kick ass blondies.

Easter is coming. And I wish you could see my face right now because I am so serious. (And I am having a weird hair day.) I am so gleefully excited for hot cross buns and sunshine (Bankybear better not cheap out on that this year. IT HAS TO BE SUNNY). Matt and I might go away to Whistler that day and just spend a day. At first I wanted to plan a big thing where people come to our house and I cook and it would be all brunchy and fun. And then I stopped being excited about Easter. So I nixed that idea and now I am back to being excited. My Gram was with us last year and it was so nice and low key. My hot cross buns were less than stellar. Even in the picture they look kind of like tires. Smother them with enough butter and jam and they taste fine, but this year, THIS YEAR, they will be different. I have come a long way in my breadmaking since then.
All I can tell you for sure about Easter Sunday is I'm having a beer. Longest 40 days of my life. I'm kidding of course. It hasn't actually been that hard (SERIOUS!) but I will definitely enjoy the first imbibing.

Beautiful
LemkaB at Etsy

Look at the cute buttons! klardar from Etsy

These are the colours of my kitchen
LynnCardwellPottery at Etsy

Do these earrings come with her face? If so, I will take them.
TribalStyle at Etsy

Happy Wednesday! Friday's not that far away.

P.S ~ Sister-in-law in Russky is za-lov-ka, which I think sounds nice for my 'love sisters'.
P.P.S ~ I just found out that my favourite restaurant in Cowtown, The Coup, has a cookbook. Which means I need it. Basically. I love it when restaurants put out cookbooks because then I feel like I could tip myself after I feed myself.

"See mother, I make all things new."

Happy Easter! I hope everyone's Easter was preferable :)

My first Easter as a married, creating and loving every minute of the traditions my hubby and I make together. And how cute it our little Easter Bunny!

It was quite the nutty weekend in Victoria. A huge storm blew in on Friday morning. Many of

the ferries were delayed or even cancelled. Sleety, cold rain. Trees blew apart. And the Easter Bunny rose anyway.

Despite the gross weather, we celebrated the Easter I love so much. Mom and Cami called WAY too early but I was nice to hear their message. They called after bawling through the Hallelujah Chorus just before we did. We sat in peace with our respective mugs of coffee while the hot cross buns baked. I missed the 'add-ingredient beep' on my dough setting so they are essentially hot cross swirls with the fruit swirled in like Cinnamon Buns. No cross only because I find Venetian Cream totally gross and I only had so much improvisational genius in me at eight o'clock in the morning.

I've had so many wonderful people lately to have beautiful conversations about Jesus! I like this! I think Van will be such a great move for us because we already have a church community that we're so excited to become a part of.

We went for a spirited (aka blustery) walk downtown to Silk Road for some tea but we really only ended up smelling their bath salts a little too deeply and I wandered around, elbows tucked, at the prospect of knocking precious tea paraphernalia onto the floor. But oh the teapots. They speakah my language! And while we were doing this my man got his ears pierced! He wants to stretch them and put in plugs but until then he's soakin' them in salt water for the next eight weeks.

G'ma reminded us of the story where G'pa showed up at Church with a beard and after someone asked him

about it he said that his wife was growing a beard on his face. I think there's a bit of this in Matt's posts but I think think they look muy sexy. It also temporarily satisfies my desire to have a new piercing when I don't know what I want.

The three of us on Easter Sunday night, took communion together, Matt made a wonderful Thai rice wrapper meal and then we watched the Passion of the Christ. Oh my. Oh my, is all. While there are aspects to the movie that aren't maybe my thing, I think it is a breathtaking portrayal of truly what Christ did for us. Every time one of the Roman guards would spit in Christ' face, I couldn't help but realize that he had them in mind when he died for the sins of man. I was reading a bit about the movie and it is said to be very pro-Catholic, ala Mr. Gibson, which is partly because of the films emphasis on Mary. That, I think, is one of the coolest parts for me. When Christ is carrying his cross to Golgotha, and Mary is trying to get to a place where she get to him and there are the two scenes of her seeing Jesus fall as a boy and then seeing him there, falling under his cross, beaten and broken. I think when we talk about Mary in regards to Christ as a man during his ministry, we tend to forget that Jesus was Mary's son, in the sense that she gave birth to him and raised him. My G'ma told me about a speaker she heard who said that as any parent would understand the 'mother bear' kind of reflex that flares up when one of your children are hurt. Don't you think Mary would have done something to stop his pain if she could have. But Mary understood the plan. She understood what needed to happen. Ever since the Red Tent, I've loved the beauty of finding strength in the strong women of the Bible and to seek out and understand their stories.

*We also watched this video when G'ma was here. Love this movie. And Rob Bell is a very long person.

The birds and bees are our disease contracted collectively...

I addicted to crazy information. Documentaries have to be my favorite movies right now. And the trend seems to prove, not uplifting documentaries. BUT because I know this entry will kind of get off the rails pretty quick, this look holy smokes adorable. And so wonderful!

My fiction teacher was saying today that in the past twenty or so years, fiction and fiction reading has declined. It's not only the onset of 'screens', like televisions and computer screens. Many studies have looked into this and one of the theories is that is has been since 9/11. It comes out of fixation, like a car accident. It's the thought that there are so many horrific, real and far more tangible things happening in the 'real world', why would I need a

book, a piece of fiction to take me to a place of fixation, to capture my attention. Non fiction has risen in popularity as fiction has declined. It's interesting because a lot of the people I know, when things get cruddy, they want to escape. They find the most entrancing kind of fiction, that will temporarily relieve them of their preoccupation with something they can't ignore. And I am part of that trend. Film, books, magazines, blogs. I am interested in the people interacting with this world as I am. It's the feeling that we are not alone in the big, magnanimous cruddiness. We are not alone in witnessing suffering, in desiring change and in seeking fulfillment.

Umm...Blab.

Anyhoo, the most recent residents of my dvd player were Captalism: A Love Story and Addicted to Plastic. I remember seeing Addicted to Plastic on the shelf in Blockbuster and feeling depressed already. And so my husband, feeling the same voyeuristic masochism as me, brought it home. After I had spent six straight hours immersed in a renaissance literature essay. It's the end of semester, aka Boob Tube Rescue.

Ever since the huge BPA-scare when I was in high school, I have forever eyed plastic of any recyclable and otherwise distinguishable variety with a severe sense of paranoia. I silently consign myself to a slow death every time I heat anything in plastic and I can't use our microwave anymore. I should also add a disclaimer to this diatribe that I am a self-identified obsessive personality. (Which is kind of like saying I am a self-identified hypochondriac but at least it's self-identified). So needless to say this Addicted to Plastic movie made me feel nervous. I found this movie to be slightly more feel-good than a lot of other movies, like say The World According to Monsanto which was like a dash through court cases and autopsy reports with tin-foil hats. AtP made an effort to identify the truly pervasive problem that plastic poses to the environment, wildlife, food sources and humans but it spent equally as much time on what was being done about it. Did you know that Denmark has a recycling turnout of over 90%? Did you know that Canada and the US combined only recycle on 5% of their recyclable waste? That's really stupid. And did you know that we ship/sell our recyclable waste overseas so that impoverished and overpopulated countries like India can deal with it? Excuuuuse me?

Despite my tirade, this is a great movie and I found it largely unbiased.

UNLIIIIKE...Michael Moore! Capitalism: A Love Story was classic Moore. Matt actually wrote a hilarious post on his blog about the movie. The movie is not really about Capitalism at all. It's about corruption, the corruption of banks, wall street and government. But it is not about Capitalism. Moore is an obvious proponent of Socialism but using the film as proof, he doesn't seem to acknowledge Socialism as equally susceptible to corruption. Matt is on this Milton Friedman kick lately. He has a tab on his computer that links to clip after clip of Friedman debating other people in defense of the American Capitalist system. Now I am not a capitalism-can-do-no-wrong kind of person. I think it's a flawed system just like everything else because it relies on humans, who are inherently flawed. But Friedman makes a good point. Moore goes so far in his movie as to interview bishops and priests as to their opinions of capitalism and for them to denounce it as sinful. It's a wonder most people look at Christians as fanatical kooks.

What I think both of these films bring up, however, is that as residents of this earth, we have this expectation that our systems and our world should be able to function and continue regardless of what we do to them, and they should do it flawless and without consequence. We want to be able to check out so that we can 'fulfill all of our desires for our life'. Which makes me think of that part in Wall-E when we see all of the humans on the ship hundreds of years in the future. I don't want to be like that. Doesn't seem fun at all actually.

On a fun note! *Because blogs like this always need fun notes. Tomorrow is Good Friday!

She's almost here... :)

Babies

I have had two different babies on my heart lately. Their birthdays are almost a week apart and they are very very special to me.

Music has such a strong memory recall for me, everything from singing along to "Christmas Don't Be Late" by Alvin and the Chipmunks for the thirteenth time on the way to Grandma's house to watching my dad bliss out to 'Hey Jude' in high school. Music is how my family communicates with each other.

At work tonight, in my flu-y, allergy clotted stupor, The Scientist by Coldplay came on. I had to stop and marinate in the memory for a bit. It made me think of my sister's wee little, wonderful son who's watching over her. I wrote about my sister's pregnancy for my Creative NonFiction class and immersing myself in the breathtaking memory and heartbreaking story made his third birthday this year just a little more melancholy than usual.

And then today, literally the cutest, funniest toddler I know turned one today! Little Ansel Luke is Matt's godson and every time I see a picture of him or hear his mom tell a story about him, I burst out laughing. He has such personality, and so much of his parents in him. He has the cutest little expression, little curls in his brow when he's skeptical or a huge triangular mouth that smiles with glee as he pushes other kids at daycare out of the way for the water

table.

And then Matt and I went to Van over the weekend and went to a wicked, wonderful church that we love a lot. I am very moved by that church and I cry every time we go there. Obviously, the Lord reaches me there. They did a baby dedication on Sunday and I cried through the baby dedication! I have never cried through a baby dedication before...but I did this time. The pastor talked about how married couples are given a unique and intimate privilege to imitate God in the act of creation. That's what got me. I thought of Beau; I thought of Luke; I thought of the little one in my heart that will have my husband's long eyelashes and hopefully his gorgeous, fierce spirit. I thought about how breathtaking and simultaneously terrifying it will be to create life.

Easter is in two

and a half weeks! I LOVE Easter. Have I said this? More than Christmas. It is beautiful. I love this picture. I saw it on Flickr and I thought it was soo cool. I've only dyed eggs once for Easter and I thought it was no big whoop. But my cousin did drop his eggs in from standing height and after that there wasn't any dye left. Maybe that's why.

On another note: my wonderful, gorgeous best friend gets here in four days!!!! OmmmmmmmG! That is four sleeps.

Lentil

So I realized that I totally missed Ash Wednesday. That's what happens when you're not going to church and you also never look at a calendar. Hmm.

I'm not one of those people who feels that when Lent comes around YOU HAVE TO GIVE SOMETHING UP. IT'S WHAT YOU DO. But last night, Matt and I went to church and the pastor was preaching about how to we, in our actions, say yes and no to what the Lord calls us to. And I think that Lent is one of the ways that I can say 'no' to what I feel keeps me from him and keeps me selfish and feeling bad about myself.

I want to give up negativity for Lent. It sounds totally hokey whenever I say it but that's what I want to make a point between the Lord and I that I want to give up those thoughts. I don't want those thoughts towards myself, towards other people, or towards the opportunities that the Lord puts in my life.

In my WS class we're talking about consumer culture. There is a site called about-face.org and they organize ads and music videos into 'offenders' and 'winners' in the battle of women's body issues. I love this one. People magazine, who knew?

Who gets to decide who's beautiful? Who decides what is of value? I tear up every time I think about my best friend and how friggin' inspirational she is.
"I love the way I look. I honest to God, LOVE the way I look".
I want to raise my daughters with that. I want to embody that for them. I want to honor the body that God gave that works flawlessly and who gave me a husband who loves every inch of me even on my gross days.

5 weeks until Easter!