On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . .

Hey! I remembered something!

Well, actually, Adam remembered something: we meant to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas this year with the kids, giving them a small gift on each day from Christmas Day till Epiphany.

He remembered this when we were out shopping today and the kids got excited about gloves (gloves with snowflakes, gloves with camo print, gloves with flames). At first he said, "Hey, stocking stuffers!" but then he remembered, "weren't we going to skip stuffing the kids' stockings and do the 12 Days of Christmas instead?"

Yes, we were. And now we are, because we remembered in time!

So, I'm blogging just in case any of you out there had similar plans, since these things always go better if you start a few months ahead of time, so you can pick stuff up as you see it. It's a neat way of observing the entire Christmas season and not just the 25th (I hear).

And I promise, we're not being horrible parents by forgoing stuffing their stockings because their grandparents do such a good job of that already. :) Anything Adam and I added was just superfluous compared to the Awesomeness of the Grandfolk.

So now I'm contemplating what else I want to look for: maybe some new Bible story books or prayer cards or such, as well as fun stuff like bottle candy (I know, but they think it's really cool) or pop-guns and such.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Links: Wizards, Writers, Walks, and Walls

-In Hollywood and the Hacker, Steven Lloyd Wilson critiques the way television and movies handle technology:

Movies and television have conjured computer geeks into modern wizards in perhaps the truest sense of the word that has ever been realized, conjuring hidden knowledge from the very air with arcane language and the clattering of fingers. The reality of a computer expert is a black screen full of white text, completely impenetrable to the untrained, but too intimidating for an audience according to the standards of Hollywood. Fancy monitors and slick touch interfaces, anything to put a visual face on the black hole of text that represents real coding. Never mind that there’s a reason coders type. Text is the most efficient form of communication yet devised for interface with the human animal, a dense soup of information that can nonetheless be engineered into speech and processed into meaning like lightning. Graphical interfaces? Touching the screen to select things? That’s nice for your mp3 player, but if you want to tell the computer to do something complicated enough that it would take sentences to explain to another person, you’re going to need words not pictures. If words weren’t more efficient, our vocal cords would have atrophied by now in favor of charades and pictionary.

Great explication- of the way Hollywood treats technology like magic. As Wilson says later in the piece, "The effect is being idolized without understanding the cause." It's a great essay for the person who enjoys modern entertainment, but who doesn't want to digest it without analyzing it.

-In "Hold the Scalpel!", Jim Rubarts writes:

I'd finished the manuscript for my first novel, ROOMS and through connections I made at the Mt Hermon Writers Conference I got the story in front of three agents. All three were interested in representing me. But none signed me.

Why? My story needed more work. My novel was 90% of the way there. But as agent Steve Laube says, a novel from a first time author needs to be 95% - 98% of the way there . . .

I'm fond of this classic writing anecdote which illustrates my view:

An author and a brain surgeon went golfing one spring day and the brain surgeon said, "I'm taking a six weeks off this summer to write a book!"

The author stared at his friend and said, "That's a stunning coincidence. I'm taking six weeks off this summer to become a brain surgeon."

The rest of the post is really encouraging - encouraging in that actually encouraging, tough-love sort of way, not in the there-there-it's-all-just-fine sort of way. Love it.

-Anne's post on discovering new walks around her new home is beautiful.

-Check out the cool Church Year Timeline Kelly's put up on her wall!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Using the Prayers of the People for intercessory prayer

My two oldest kids go to school every weekday now and recently I've been feeling more called to intercessory prayer.

Could there be a connection there? ;)

All kidding aside, I really have been feeling called to intercede more than I have in the past - or perhaps, a better way to put that would be that the Lord has been reminding me that this is something He has asked me to do and He still wants me to be doing it. (I first got the impression that I was really supposed to be doing this on my honeymoon, actually. I remember journaling then that I thought a big part of my job as a wife and a mother was going to be praying for my family.)

One of the things I did in response to this most recent reminder was to email my grandma and ask her about her prayer life. It only made sense, because she's one of the people I always ask to pray for me when I'm in need of prayer.

Her response was both generous and helpful. And as I read her list of the different people and groups of people that she prays for, I thought, Huh, that sounds a lot like the Prayers of the People.

So I've started using the Prayers of the People in my own prayer life. I'm using the version that's in the back of my St. James devotional, as I already have that with me during my Bible-reading time.

And that's it. That's all I've got for this blog. No great spiritual insight, just a passing-on of something I've found useful. If you're having trouble structuring your intercessory prayer life, try the Prayers of the People. Pray them and let them remind you of all the people you were planning to pray for anyway. I'm finding them immensely helpful, both in reminding me of people I meant to pray for and of reminding me of how I ought to be praying for them.

Praise God for his servant Thomas Cramner.

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

Summer Camp!

So . . . when you think of summer camp, what do you think of? What activities, games, relay races, experiences really made summer camp summer camp?

It's research, honest. :) I'd really like to know. Capture-the-flag, canoe-ing, weenie-roasts, sing-a-longs, horses, cabin raids . . . what does a summer camp have to have to make it really, really good? Extra points if it's something competitive.

Thank you!
Jessica

crocheted finished objects: hats, gloves, and more!

I've finished a few things lately. First, a little vest for a friend's soon-to-arrive baby:

I love how it looks a bit like an old grandpa sweater. I think it's the folded collar that really cements the look of the piece:

Little baby boys so often look like funny little old men, I thought the old-man vest might be especially cute. :)

I crocheted it in Wool-Ease, my first time using that yarn, and I quite liked it. The wool content takes away that artificial slickness you sometimes get with acrylic, but it's still largely acrylic, so it'll be easy for the new mom to just toss into the wash if it gets burped on.

Then, I finished another Christmas present, a beanie crocheted up in a self-striping sock yarn:

This was the project I carried around in my purse for a few months, working on it here and there as I was out and about. Happy with how it turned out, but glad to be done with it!

Then, a favorite, my dad's handwarmers:

This was fun because he actually requested a pair after I wore my own pair on our backpacking trip, except he wanted some in green. I hunted about, found a yarn that would work, and played with the pattern till it fit him. They're his stocking stuffer, but not a surprise, as I kept making him try them on as I tried to adjust the pattern!

Then, I made up just a few more yarn-eating baskets. I had fun with these, but I think I'm done with them for awhile. I achieved my goal of using up some yearn I had no other plans for and making room for some yarn that my sister had recently passed on to me. Everything fits in the crates I have set aside for yarn storage again.

Here's my favorite:

I like the subtle, tweedy appearance.

This one's not bad either:

This one, however, is downright Seussian, from the garish colors to the crazy corners (hey, I was experimenting):

I have no idea what I'll do with it.

And, finally, one last, heavy-duty tote:


Whew! That was a lot of single crochet stitching! I just started up a new project, using some of the laceweight cashmere I harvested from a thrift-store sweater, and I think it'll be a nice change of pace after all this heavier work.

Of course, the laceweight is so light and delicate that it snags on any bit of rough skin on my fingers and threatens to tear if my tension is even slightly too tight. So it's got its own challenges! But it's delicate and pretty and just what I'm in the mood for now.

What are the rest of you working on?

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

7 Quick Takes- Quotation Edition

1. I've been mulling over this line from Mumford and Sons for a long time: "If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy/Then I could have won."
I think this is something you want to avoid having to say.
2. I'm also mulling over this from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise."
3. More goodness, this time from Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."
4. And this one, I think, could apply to television and the internet: "Leave the presence of a fool, Or you will not discern words of knowledge." - Proverbs 14:7
5. Have you ever heard the old chestnut, "God moves in mysterious ways"? I would like to point out (having just discovered the fact myself) that the poem that's from ("Light Shining Out of Darkness" by Cowper) ends with:
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain. *
So . . . the poem ends insisting on pretty much the opposite of what everyone who quotes the more famous first line means.
6. The above-quoted poem also includes this cheering stanza:
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take:
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
7. And I've been thinking, all week, about John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward." I thought of it because of the famous line, "Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die; What a death were it then to see God die?" and because of the heartbreakingly hopeful end, but when I went to read it again, it was the beginning that struck me:
Let man's Soul be a Sphere, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is;
What a thought, eh? that the intelligence that moves the sphere of our souls is devotion. (It was an old belief that the heavenly bodies were moved by intelligences proper to them.) "Devotion to what?" is the next logical question. But Donne goes on:
And as the other Spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motions, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey;
Pleasure or business, so, our Souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Doesn't that sound familiar? We admit pleasure or business in place of devotion to God, and like a moon caught in the gravity well of a planet, we're whirled away from our native trajectory and spin far, far, far from our proper courses.
The poem goes on, of course, to talk about which direction Donne is facing versus which way he ought to be facing, and why, and what that means, but I've found myself simply sitting and soaking in the idea that it is devotion that moves me in the direction I find myself going each day.
"Devotion" and "attend" were the two words I started the year with. What am I given over to and where am I looking? Anyone who's every mountain-biked knows that you go where you look (which is why you don't look where you don't want to go - don't look at the scary ditch or you'll find yourself heading over the handlebars into it).
This poem is all about that.
If you are what you repeatedly do . . . well, you ought to think about what you want those repeated actions to be. You ought to attend. And having attended, you'll quickly be called to devote yourself to God - he who has ears, let him hear. If you pay attention, you can't help but hear His call.
But alas, Lord, we are "fools and slight". So the poem ends the way that it does:
O think me worth thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rusts and my deformity,
Restore thine Image so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know me, and I'll turn my face.

More Quick Takes to be found over at Conversion Diary.
Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

*emphasis mine.

Extra Links: Edition Question-Not-the-Need

Erm, I forgot two links on the last post, but they're both about yarn, so if you're not into yarn (and you're not someone looking for ideas for my birthday), you can skip this post.

First, isn't this the prettiest blue-and-green combination you've ever seen on spun fiber? It's called "Mallard" and it's lovely, and I want it in laceweight, yes I do.

Second, there is such a thing as Doctor Who yarn. Oh, let my nerdy heart rejoice. Check out this colorway, called "Tenth Doctor", in TARDIS blue and cool-suit brown. I could see doing another Visage Lace Beret in sock yarn from this colorway and whispering "Allons-y" to myself every time I walked out the door wearing it. Hee, hee.

I think the whole Internet is just one giant nerd-enabling device, don't you?

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

p.s. Yes, quoting Lear in the title is silly. Yes, using the word "need" in reference to yarn is silly. Yes, I know, I know.