I’ve been thinking about dreams a lot lately.  Not the kind of dreams you have when you’ve drifted off into lalaland.  No, I’m talking about the kind of dreams that begin to formulate when you’ve been laid off three times from jobs that you weren’t sure why you were doing anyway.
All my life, I have played it safe.  Don’t take any risks or walk out on any limbs.  A person could get hurt doing that.  They could fail.  They could look foolish.  It might be more work than they bargained for.  They could go broke. It could be painful and who needs more of that? So I have played my cards pretty close to my vest.
I’ve never thought of myself as the kind of person that can have a dream. Not a dream that I want to turn into a reality anyway.   I’m more of a wisher.  More of a ‘someday’ kind of person. People like me don’t get to dream.  I’m not Martin Luther King.   I don’t get to do great things.  I am just an just average person that plays it safe and tries to keep my nose clean and stay out of trouble.  What’s with all this new fangled talk of dreams?
It finally occurs to me that people that are doing things that I want to do had to start somewhere.  They started from nothing. OK…some started from wealth and power but a lot started from nothing…just like me. There has to be that burning dream and desire deep in your soul that this is what you want to do and nothing is going to stop you.  I’m going to dream big and if I end up with only half of what I’m dreaming, it will still be a win.
I’ve always wished and dreamed that I could do something that I was good at, to make a living.  The facts are – I have to work for our family to thrive and survive.  Just the way it is for us.   Why can’t I be doing something I am good at and something I love?  Where is the crime in that?  Instead of always feeling like I sold out to something my heart just isn’t into because its ‘safe’?   True…one of these corporate admin jobs (just jobs to me, not a career) could be a means to an end.  I don’t discount that and I may find myself working admin again just to move closer to the dream. But the dream has to be there and after I have assessed all my talents and strengths and that of my family’s…because there is no way I am a one woman show…I think I know what I want to do.  People have been telling me for years to use my creativity, energy and work ethic to start a business.
And I’m NOT too old and its NOT too late.  I’m still breathing.  I’m not trying to parallel or exceed Walt Disney’s empire.  I just want a nice farm house with a wrap around veranda on an acreage with land to grow flowers and greenery for my daughters business and a lovely barn to glorify as a wedding venue (with all the accessories).   That’s not ridiculous.  Its totally doable.  No,  I don’t have any money.  WE don’t have any money.  But we can’t let a little thing like that stop us, can we?   I watched a documentary movie on Netflix recently called “The Biggest Little Farm”.  It was SO inspirational.   Those people started from nothing and faced and conquered all kinds of obstacles.  This also isn’t about getting rich – its about making a living doing what I love and am good at.  What my family is good at.  There is room for us all in this dream.
I must not forget that my heavenly Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills and He also knows how to give good gifts to his children – of which, I am one. The parable of the talents keeps running through my mind over and over and over again.  I don’t want to be that sorry little servant that buried his talents in the ground and left his Master much disappointed.
So I am dreaming now.  And I am dreaming big.  I’m off to make a vision board and figure out how to write up a business plan and pray.  Dream Big.  Pray Bigger.

Lemon ice cream. I could taste it already. Last time I made it we were fighting over it. Truth is, anytime I make homemade ice cream we are fighting over it. It’s kind of hard to hide because it has to be kept in a freezer and we only have so many freezers in our home. So it is right there. (I wonder if they make under the bed freezers? Or maybe a freezer that looks like one of your dresser drawers?)

I whipped up a lovely, light lemon cake with lemon icing out of one of my many cookbooks in the collection. Name of the book? Butter. What else do you need to know? I guess I didn’t really whip it up. The recipe involved many steps. I have long sworn off cake mixes for various reasons. I make every cake from scratch. Creaming the butter. Lemonizing the whole milk. Zesting the lemons and subsequently squeezing the juice out of them. Intoxicated by the aroma of fresh lemons. I guess that’s why they put lemon in household cleaning products. Who doesn’t want their home to smell like lemons? I was enjoying every finicky step. Anyway… I wanted some smooth, refreshing, lemon ice cream to go with it.

I had cooked and mixed and re-cooked the rich milk and egg mixture that makes up the ice cream and set it in the fridge to cool for eight hours. I guess thats when I should have started to look for my ice cream paddle. But I didn’t know it was lost at that point.

Finally when I needed it, I went directly to the last spot I saw it and it was not there. I tore apart the pantry and as result cleaned it. Tore apart the linen closet. The cupboards  and many other nooks and crannys where it may have wandered off to. Nothing. That ice cream paddle had vanished off the face of the earth. I told myself-be calm. Don’t lose your cool over this. Which would be my default reaction. It’s ok… just go to the store and buy ice cream. No, it won’t be the same but it’s not the end of the world. Me being me, I kept searching, but this time with a calm demeanour. Finally, I had to force myself to move on. My OCD tendencies insist I search until I find it but I had twelve people coming for dinner so I had to work on the rest of the meal.

I did move on to other tasks but as I did I asked myself ‘what’s the magic of the ice cream maker paddle anyway?’ I had the frozen ice cream bowl. So I tried my regular KitchenAid attachments. They did not work. I reasoned, all that plastic paddle does is move slowly around the freeze bowl for twenty minutes and you end up with ice cream. Why couldn’t I just stir the ice cream in the freeze bowl myself for twenty minutes? I guess the real beauty of having the attachments was I could turn it on and go do something else for twenty minutes. But this could work.

So I settled in for twenty minutes of slow stirring. I could not get anything else done during this time. As I watched the cooked milk and egg mixture start to freeze and thicken by the motion of my stirring (well actually the nature of the freeze bowl)  it occurred to me that many things in life require our undivided attention and there is no easy quick way to achieve the desired results. We have to do the work. We can do the work. Once we set our face as flint about a thing…. we get it done. We can’t always have easy. Sometimes we need to slow down and focus and just do the hard work.

As I watched the cream thicken, I could feel my stirring becoming more laboured. Ice cream was happening and it was going to be so worth it. Many things in life are totally worth the hard work but we seem to run from hard. Who doesn’t want easy?   I want the best results by doing nothing.  But this small incident reminded me that I set out to do the hard and holy things in 2020. I want to do the things that require resolve and discipine and  intention.  I am getting weak and lazy.  Always succumbing to the path of least resistance.  I need to build up my stamina. In every way.

But because I set my mind to stirring that cream for twenty minutes (which seems like eternity, by the way) I ended up with a rich, refreshing, creamy frozen product which would compliment my lemon cake perfectly. I was tempted to order new parts off Amazon right away but our Internet was down so that wasn’t happening.

Those parts have to be here somewhere but until I find them I guess I will make ice cream the old fashioned way. Churning it. And remind myself that the result is worth the work. Hopefully I will be able to apply this reasoning to the many things I want to achieve this year. I can’t just let something or someone else do the hard work while I fritter off doing something less onerous.

I do love the tactile side of cooking and baking. It brings such a sense of accomplishment and I hate to be defeated by a piece of plastic. And I wasn’t. I can do this thing. Life…. I can do it. I can stir the defeat out of it because I want to.  I want to do the hard and holy things*.

*Ann Voscamp

I dried the last plate ten minutes before my coach turned back into a pumpkin. The thing with hosting an authentic Italian meal, Tuscan style, are all the courses (and all the dishes).  Those Italians love to eat. And I’m sure it’s because the food is so amazing. Not that I’ve ever eaten an authentic Italian meal at one of those long, never ending tables with a million bottles of wine and candles in empty olive oil bottles with wax dripping down on all sides. Everything I know about Italian cuisine and culture I learned from the movie Under the Tuscan Sun. Sure, I’ve been to Rome, Florence and Venice. When my daughter and I arrived in Venice on an overnight train from Paris, we were so stunned by the heat that we ate gelato all day. A thin crust margarita pizza on the board walk at night. We ran around Rome like crazies trying to see everything in a day. Maybe it wasn’t built in a day but we proved you can see all the highlights in a day…. if you don’t stop to eat. When we hit Florence we decided not to remember it as a blur… so after a short morning sight seeing tour we were left in the square with naked David to have lunch at an outdoor cafe. Then we just wandered around the shops listening to street musicians in the afternoon. So really, Italy was not a food experience for us. It was not ‘Eat, Pray, Love ’.

However, I believe our Night in Tuscany dinner with our ‘first responder’ friends, was. First of all, first responder friends are those people in your life that respond first when you have a crisis or a joy. They are our safe people. And we have so much fun with them. Anyhoo, we had our valentine potluck last night and I offered to host since I could and I wanted to play a bit.

We eat with these folks. We pray with them. And we love them. So cleaning up the dishes and by dishes, I mean every dish in the house, was a joy for me. As I scrubbed those cheesy, tomatoey pots and pans I had a direct line view of our long Tuscan table with greenery hanging above. And I relived the laughter and the tastes and the smells and the music (which was supposed to be a romantic Italian restaurant playlist but bordered on circus music at times). Such a good memory made. There were talks of going on cooking class vacations to Italy or France. We reminisced about trips any of us had made to Italy. We ate too much food and drank too much wine and had an Italian good time. So this experience WAS Eat, Pray, Love.

Here’s the thing about food. We are very needy and vulnerable when it comes to food because we can’t live without it. We have to eat. People do die from starvation. It’s a basic human need. So when we gather around the table to eat, we make ourselves vulnerable once more. So if we eat in a safe, loving environment our physical needs are met under the guise of our social and emotional needs. It’s a sweet harmony. I adore this harmony and am committed to making it happen as often as I can.
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We are having a crisis of epic proportions over here. We’ve had no internet for almost a week. I know right? And you thought you had problems. Our peaceful, blissful existence has been upturned by this catostrophic turn of events. No blogging. No instagram. No Facebook. NO NETFLIX.

This is pretty much all we’ve talked about all week. We’ve had to turn the wifi off on our phones and resort to using our carefully rationed data plans. We‘ve had to watch regularly scheduled TV with commercials. Some of us have even had to resort to reading books. Of course there is always Starbucks with its free wifi. They’ve seen a bit more of us this week than usual and that’s hard to imagine.

It’s absolutely mind boggling how dependent we have become on this trendy technological discovery. Remember back in the olden days when we sat around the dinner table and all we did was eat and talk and share ‘worst part of day and best part of day’? Or fight over who was doing the dishes? Or when we looked facts up in the World Book encyclopedia  or had to go to the library? When we went to the store to buys things? We went to Blockbuster to rent movies. We listened to music on our walkmans? We took care of Tamogochi’s for entertainment. We met people for coffee face to face. We got our affirmation from people we knew for real life things we did.

But a distant memory. Hazy at best. Those were the days my friend…

Why would an old, lumpy deny-er like myself foolishly sign up for a gym membership? It seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I needed a new hangout. When you walk through the door of your local Starbucks/Chapters and all the staff yell out ‘Hi Geri’, you know you’ve been there too often. Don’t get me wrong… I love it there. But when the Chapters staff have your Plum card number memorized… it’s time for new stomping grounds. So Lexie sold the idea to me using perfect logic. ‘You need a new place to hangout-it will cost one Starbucks a week and if your going to curtail your time there then you just reappropriate the funds.’ Still making total sense. ‘You wanted to get more exercise for the health of your aging brain and this is an excuse to order those wireless earphones from Amazon’. Price of gym just went up. AND Lexie trains there so we could car pool when it works out. Plus there’s a sauna and tanning facilities and a hydro massage bed. So I bit the bullet and joined. One year commitment. As I was sitting in the sauna after my workout the first day, I was having buyers remorse. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea. Well, it was definitely hot in the sauna but … maybe I should have come as Lexie’s guest a couple of times first.

It’s not that I don’t like working out. I totally do. It feels good to do something good for yourself. Get the heart rate up and the adrenalin flowing. Get the bad cholesterol and blood pressure down. But what Lexie failed to mention was that the place was lined with mirrors. Well, I just don’t really want to see myself everywhere.  I tried not looking but I just ran into more mirrors with my eyes averted to the floor. At home, I could pretend I was pretty ok. Not here. At home I don’t wear racer back sports bras and tanks. I try really hard not to be in front of a mirror until I know I’m not going to scare the crap out of myself and others.

I noticed there are no sharp objects at the gym. Probably a good idea with all those people and mirrors. In fact, they should probably provide counselling after each visit. The sauna rules suggest we get naked. I don’t even want to see that.  That’s not happening. I’ll just wring out my sweatshirt when I’m done.

I noticed that my workout wear was also not up to speed at the gym. I’ve only been twice in three days but, so far, I have not seen anyone of my particular species, so looking at all the trainers and svelte bodies has been a bit daunting. I went to Winners to find some different workout gear. Turns out the plus size section doesn’t have workout wear. Why not? We’re the ones that need it. So I wrestled myself into the largest sports bra I could find in the hip young adult women’s section.  Who needs to go to the gym? That was the best workout I’ve had in years. Then I had to take it off. I didn’t bother going to the gym yesterday. I was exhausted. Anyway, no sports bras for me. They just flatten and spread and make your stomach look like it starts right under your two chins. Not flattering. Not only that, I have to put my hair in a ponytail if I don’t want to faint from heat exhaustion and I did not want to know what that was covering up. When did I start looking like someone’s pet Boxer?

And to add to the joy of the experience, I set out on the elliptical with my brand new wireless bluetooth earphones, and was feeling quite trendy for an old gal, I listened to three songs and a voice came on that said my battery was dead.  Are you kidding?  I’m 8 minutes into a 60 minutes cardio routine.  Problem was the instructions that came with the earphones were printed on a two inch by two inch paper.  That’s pretty tiny printing.  It can’t be read with the natural eye, so I just guessed at what they were saying about the red and blue lights.  I was wrong.

Joining the gym has turned out to be the perfect way to humble myself. Who knew? Who cares what anyone else thinks? Although I am fairly certain no one else is thinking about me or watching me, it feels like I am the gym entertainment. But I have every right to be there. I paid my dues and will continue to do so. And eventually it will get better. I’ll either start to accept that I don’t look 35 anymore or I’ll actually start to look better.

PS… I have a really nice personality and I can sing.

Our names are the most essential thing about us. Its often the first thing people know about us, and yet this one word holds far more significance and sacred history than any other first impression could ever capture. – Esther Fleece Allen

I’ve often labelled myself. A failure. Not good enough. The family idiot. Unmotivated. A loser. Even convinced myself that I’m unforgiven many times. I’ll never get it right.

Because of my diverse creative talents, given me by the Lord, people have often asked me ‘is there anything you can’t do well?’ Inside I’m thinking, how did I pull that off? People think I can do everything. How can they not see what a true failure I am? How did I fool that many people? And then I feel like an imposter too. There are so many things I just can’t get right or get victory over.

I’ve often labelled other people. Jokingly I call all the other regulars at Starbucks/chapters ‘losers’. Why? Because they are in there every single time I am…..wait…. I’m one of them, am I not? So I’ve been thinking of coming up with a gentler label for them. Lol. But I write some people off as this or that without really knowing them or their story. That’s not fair or kind.

I looked up the meaning of my own name. I’ve looked this up before but forgotten about it. Geraldine means mighty warrior with a spear. Or ruler with a spear. Or mighty with a spear. Apparently, people with this name have a deep inner desire for love and companionship and want to work to achieve peace and harmony. They also tend to be creative and excellent at expressing themselves. They are drawn to the arts and often enjoy life immensely. They tend to become involved in many different activities and are sometime reckless with their energies and with money.

There were many other descriptions that surprisingly described me extremely accurately. But it was really the meaning of the name that caught my attention. Mighty. Warrior. With a spear. Spiritually speaking, I want to be a warrior. I want to be a mighty warrior. And that spear? Is that the sword of the Spirit?

I AM a warrior and I have the sword of the spirit. That name that my parents probably unwittingly gave me means something. My dads name was Gerald and my parents were following some tradition that  says the 2nd child has to be named after the father.  That was me. Gerald means the same thing. I want to own that name. Geraldine isn’t a name for wimps or losers. It’s a name for fighters and defenders. Of others and of the faith. I have a calling to be a mighty warrior. Putting on the full armour of God comes to mind.

I have often felt fearful and shy. Scared and lonely. Challenged to prove myself worthy. But the names that God gives me are: Worthy. Forgiven. Daughter. Adopted. Beloved. Bride. Righteous.

My word for 2020 is ‘Courageous’. Obviously, I have it in me to be courageous. Because I am a mighty warrior with a spear. In Proverbs, it says that that the righteous shall fall down seven times and get up eight. As I told a friend, my plan this year, and always, is to pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again. Just keep going.

I challenge you to look up the spiritual meaning of your name and see if it doesn’t empower you to live up to that name you’ve been given.

I’m sure many of you will think I am daft, but I just figured out what is wrong with me. Well, I am sure that many of those that know me will have various opinions on this topic.
Whenever you lose something you cherish and value or have it taken away there is always a grieving period afterwards.  We need that grieving period.  Its not exactly  on the same level as losing a loved one, but its the same process.  And you can’t say well buck up, at least you didn’t lose a loved one. Brene Brown says there is no comparison suffering.  This is your reality and you need to go through the process.  And you are entitled to grieve that loss.  In fact, you need to grieve that loss.
I did not have time to grieve the loss of a job at the end of October because I was immersed in full-time preparation for a family Christmas reunion.  I had no time to think about what I had lost.  In fact, most of the time I thought to myself, thank goodness I’m not trying to squeeze all this planning in around a full time job. I had no premonition that this was going to happen either.  It was a total and utter shock to find myself driving home at noon on October 30 with a car full of my personal effects from my office.
I mean, I was hesitant to apply for this full time position last January but I didn’t give myself time to really think about it and hit send on my resume. I knew the job was mine if I’d only apply for it. I reasoned, this job could see me through until retirement and I was grateful for the regular paycheque and totally making use of the benefits.  It was a God send and a life saver.  It was a difficult adjustment – getting used to working full time after not for so many years (I had jobs but they were not five days a week) and to have to commute so far but I finally got into a rhythm and was really enjoying my position.  The drive. Loved the people.  Was totally capable of performing my tasks.  I had the best work space in the office.  And I thought I finally had it all wrapped up…my daily purpose and contribution to the family coffers.  I made good use of my spare time since I had so little of it.  It was great.  I was thanking God for these circumstances every single day.  And then, whamo….its all gone.

It’s only now…now that all the guests have gone home and the Christmas tree has come down and I have no where to go every morning and there is no money in my bank account that the reality of the situation has finally hit me.
Its not that I haven’t been laid off before….this will be the fourth time.  You think I would be getting used to it by now.  If this was a boyfriend or husband that kept dumping me, I’d probably decide to drop men for good.  And that is how I feel about the whole job thing.  Why would I keep wanting to set myself up for getting dumped again?  Well…I wouldn’t and I don’t.  But I do need to be bringing in an income in some way – for a few more years – so I’ll have to figure out something.  But for now, I am going to let myself grieve.  I am giving myself a time limit for this grief and then I will move on (because its not the loss of a loved one)…its the loss security and contentment and purpose and I will find my way again.  I am just a little wobbly right now.
And if I want to buy a family size bag of munchies and pick out all the crunch-its and give the rest to my family?  That’s my prerogative.  I don’t want to hear any complaining that the crunch-its are all gone.  I could just throw the rest in the garbage but I didn’t.  For some reason its more satisfying to pick them out from around all the rest of the chips than to just go out and buy a bag of just crunch-its.  That’s my story.