I am listening, for the third time, to an interview Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, and John C. Reilly about their new movie. (I have a 2 year old–I think I missed bits and pieces the first few times.) Hysterical. I can barely type straight because I’m laughing so hard. (For example, the word “sass-mouth” is just too too funny coming out of John C. Reilly’s mouth.)
In the reading world,  I’ve been working on Morte D’Urban, by JF Powers. It’s about a worldly, snarky priest from the fictitious order of St. Clement in the 1950s midwest. And, I cannot believe how many little details of ministry feel similar.

I am tired.

But there’s hope: I’m still on vacation for two days and tomorrow Zora goes to Grandma for a few. I’m thinking in: naps, a pedicure, a little unpacking.

Update:

Well, it turns out I wasn’t just tired. Monday morning I woke up with a raging headache, incredible muscle pain, lightheadedness, and no desire to eat or drink. Bleach…After a day in bed, I’m feeling much better.

1. Zora just took her first bath in a week (not counting dips in Lake Michigan) Honestly, I was suprised by how not-completely-foul she was.
2. Amazing camping accomplishments: making pizzas (from scratch) over a wood fire; keeping Zora out of profuse poison ivy; packing 5 days of equipment, 2 teenagers, a toddler, 3 bikes, a bike trailer, clothes, beach gear, etc in a Scion x; figuring out how to use vaseline to make my MI state park’s year pass movable from one car to another; being the person on the trip who was not afraid to deal with spiders.
3. Not so amazing camping accomplishments: 3 hours average each day spent in the tent getting Zora to sleep (I am not exaggerating); forgetting to pick up a gas cannister for my stove AGAIN (I did this last summer, too); seriously straining a muscle in my arm from lugging too-heavy things; bending half of my tent stakes.
4. I do not understand why people fly to the Caribbean. (OK, also, I can’t afford to do this.) We had a beach-front camping spot, with our hammock slung between two trees, and the lake just a few steps from our tents. White sand, blue water, the works. If you bring along your tropical drink of choice, you’re set.
5. I could not have managed this trip without the incredibly fabulous duo of Elena and Grace. (My 9th grade cousin and her best friend.) They are the best. Ever. Period. So, in Zora’s word’s “Teek oo, lnena; Teek oo, Geese.”
6. Dutch people are inbred. I spent 5 minutes at a hot dog stand trying to convince someone that I was not the blond Erica who looks exactly like me that she knew because I do not have an older sister.  But, in West Michigan, I think this is a normal conversation. We all look like cousins.
7. Speaking of tropical drinks, it’s not tropical, but seems appropriate for the upper midwest…my drink of choice for this trip was the Leinekugel’s Summer Shandy. Perfect.
8. Books read so far on vacation: Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen); Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (Boris Akunin); and I’m part way into River Angel (A. Manette Ansay).
9. We are offically moved in to the new place and out of the old place. We are not officially unpacked. In the interest of setting acheivable goals, my goal is to be unpacked and organized in time for the first snow, so that we can park our car in the little attatched garage instead of our boxes.
10. I’ve hit my goal weight, and stayed there for a few weeks. But, I just ate too much chocolate in celebration of the first nap Zora’s taken in over a week that has not involved extreme parental soothing.
11. Erik’s birthday/anniversary/Father’s Day sweater is coming along nicely. But I also started a sleeveless silk/wool sweater for myself because I needed something a little different. Grace and Elena learned to knit on this trip, too. They are pros already. We stopped at a knitting store in Travese City to get them a new project, and the store-owner’s yes bugged out of her head when we told them how many techniques they’d learned in a few days.
12. Local meal this week: lots and lots of cherries.
13. We were relieved at the end of our trip to stay at my aunt and uncle’s really wonderful cottage on the way home. Mostly because we like them, but also because we like the cottage
14. I bought myself a berry bowl from this place. It’s near the aforementioned cottage, and I think the berry bowl is so cool: it comes with a little plate underneath, you wash your berries, and then you just leave them out for attractive snacking.
15. Another car ride tonight: Zora and I pick Erik up from the train after work, and then head for Wisconsin for a weekend with his family. I will not be driving, lifting heavy objects, or putting Zora to sleep.
16. I need to listen to the news on the radio less. It makes me a crazy person. Lack of eletricity is a good thing for my soul.
17. Did you know that Germans eat really spicy radishes with their dark beer? I just learned this at the farmer’s market this morning. Then I bought some spicy radishes. But all I have is the Leinie’s Shandies in the fridge. So I’ll have wait to try this.
18. And, look for a few more posts with video next week. Possible attractions include: Zora eating ice cream; Zora using cherries as body paint; the hammock; and other things involving, of course, Zora.

And now, within less than a year of each other, we’ve all had one baby, Heidi is the proud new mama of number 2, and Meika’s got a second one on the way.

When I’m with other moms, I usually feel like I’m younger, like they don’t know what I was like pre-baby, like we don’t have much history together.

For one morning, it was good to watch our girls together. And talk. And know where we all came from.

And here, should you care to watch, is what happens if you load three toddlers into the same crib. (From left to right, Samara, Zora, and Chloe.)

Jumping Beans from Erik Vorhes on Vimeo.

Sitting at our table outside the restaurant, I was having a bit of a nostalgia trip. When I was 6, I marched down this street in Dutch costume with my first grade class (we were holding up boards that showed the ingredients of Dutch soups…). Would 6 year old me have ever imagined me now having pizza and a beer with my 2 year old in tow?

And, while we’re doing the nostalgia thing, this is the town that my grandparents grew up outside of, where about half of my ancestors planted themselves after them immigrated. Would any of them imagine me and the girl sitting out there in the sunshine on a perfect day, sharing pizza, talking about our visit with old friends from seminary (the seminary part, definitely not something they could have imagined…)

I don’t know what those folks who came to the US wanted specifically when they came. New starts, something better, maybe just a little adventure. How far ahead did they look? Did they ever think about what this would mean for their families in 100 years?

And really, do I ever think about these kinds of things myself, where we’re headed, what Zora’s kids will do, where they’ll be, what they will do that would shock me?

But now for the REAL nostalgia trip…after lunch (after the heavy thinking), we went to one of my childhood favorite, the Holland Peanut Store. How can you not love that retro sign? (And, the candy inside is as fabulous as the sign outside promises it will be.)

Holland Peanut Store from Erik Vorhes on Vimeo.

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I’ve used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

Here goes…What about you?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot*
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson*
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt*
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White*
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl*
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’ve been thinking about the classic books lately (I’m reading this, about a middle aged guy retracing the Odyssey and we went through boxes and boxes of books last week while organizing our basement.) This list makes me feel like there’s a whole lot I’ve read and there’s a whole lot I haven’t read. Maybe I should stop trying to find the perfect new book at the library and just hit the oldies for awhile!

1. Zora
2. Erik
3. An incredible family, who I get along with.
4.  A good night’s sleep, more often than not.
5. Moving this week.
6. Fresh bread.
7. A church that love its pastors.
8. Vacation.
9. That I get to preach this week. (That I get to preach ever!)
10. Friendly cats.

I tag Meg, Heidi, and Meika.

I’m preaching on Sunday, and honestly, I’m at a loss for what to preach on. When I’m at a loss, I usually defer to the lectionary. Plus, I need to get this thing written: between the 4th holiday, a week when I have no child care after Tuesday, and packing up the apartment for a move, I figure I’d better have this one close to done maybe even on Tuesday night.

As I see it, these are my options:

1.  I’m just not in the mood for Paul. The Romans passage seems way too heavy for a holiday weekend. Plus, it’s a short sermon (we have communion this Sunday).
2. Same for the Matthew passage. As Erik just said, there are some Jesus-sayings that are pretty nutty, and I’m not sure I feel like preaching my way out of that corner this week.
3. Isaac and Rebekah. Sure. We had the Genesis passage this week for the sermon. And it’s a great story. I just have no idea where it would go.
4. Song of Solomon. Yep. The sex passage. (And, since I drew the straw for the “thou shalt not commit adultery” sermon when we did a series on the 10 Commandments, I would only be solidifying my reputation and record as the pastor who’s said “Sex” in the pulpit most often.)
5. Combine 3 & 4, do something about what could possibly redemptive about sexual attraction. Do my best to keep it PG enough that no one is forced to give the birds and bees talk earlier than they planned to.
6. Ignore the lectionary. Do something for the 4th, kind of a God and Country thing. I’d probably use Psalm 146:

Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD his God.

I think this would likely be more controversial than the sex-themed sermons. Because my general take on God and country is “get your nationalism out of my church.” I don’t think people go for that so much around the 4th of July.

What do you think? Preachers, what are you preaching? Non-preachers, what would like to hear?

First, and most obviously, because that’s just a scary scenario.

Second, because I can only imagine what the more tense moments of that trip were like. teen age drama taken to it’s max, and I speak as one who engaged in a bit of teen-aged drama myself  when hiking in the Sierras with my own family, even when we knew where we were!!