My time is consumed.

I don't really mention my other time consuming hobbies on this blog, this isn't a themed blog, but mostly I just want to talk about how life is.

I have a couple of hobbies: civil war re-enacting, skateboarding, reading, and I also do triathlons. I don't know what can get more time consuming than being a triathlete. I have always been very busy and I'm not sure what convinced me to pick up that. I guess athleticism has always been rather important to me, from my hardcore figure skater days to my ambly high school cross country and soccer days, to my hurling team in college, and then classical ballet...and now finally triathlons.

Triathlons are annoying, I'm not going to lie. You have to run, and swim, and bike, and that means a lot of cross training. It's hard to ballence training for three sports, buying stuff for three different sports, and still coming up financially and mentally on top of things.

When I first started doing them, I threw myself into it with all the energy I could muster - and that wasn't a lot. I was exhuasted. I was swimming in the morning at 6:00, going to classes, going to work, and then training when I got home. After a second shower, I went out with my freinds but usually ducked out early because I was so tired. I even fell asleep fifteen minutes into the aqua teen hunger force movie. We won't talk about how I managed to get decent grades while sleeping through the second half of this semester.

I'm not sure when it happened, but my body adjusted. I get up and greet the rising sun and in my neighborhood, where noon is the normal wake up time, it seems as if everyone is quiet, the houses still asleep, not a soul awake. Sometimes I wish that I had someone to share my quiet mornings with, someone to sit on my porch and drink tea and read with me, share confidences and listen to the strange and silly dreams I've had overnight. But mostly I am selfish and want to keep everyone out of my mornings, I want my golden hours to myself, when the sun comes in warm, settling on my page, causing the manuscript to glow. Sometimes I walk, very slowly, down to the river and back and I hold out my hands to the sunlight, trying to catch it.

But mostly I just read in the morning. Books are my breakfast companions - they are quiet when they need to be, loud when called upon to scream at you, at once moving and comforting, startling and calming.

Grace

I am reading Les Miserables again. I listened to the musical and it inspired me to pick up the book that, for whatever reason, I have been carting from apartment to apartment for the last four years, from the floor and open it's dusty pages.

I wrote little dates in the margins when I finished each section and I have offically not read the book in seven years. I hardly remember much of it, but this time I am reading it slowly, carefully, underlining, making notes in the text (I am a chronic margin scribbler) and letting the excellent writing of Victor Hugo sink in.

This story is one of beautiful, heavenly grace, and so far, no other passage has described this better:

Jean Valjean has just come upon the bishops house and has been welcomed in. He questions the bishop's Monsieur Bienvenu, decision and this is the response:

"You need not tell me who you are. This is not my house; it is the house of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether he has a name, but wether he has an affliction. You are suffering; you are hungry and thirsty; be welcome. And do not thank me; do not tell me that I take you into my house. This is the house of no man, except him who needs an asylum. I tell you, who are a traveller, that you are more at home here than I; whatever is here is yours. What need have I to know your name? Besides, befre you told me, I knew it."

The man opened his eyes in astonishment:

"Really? You knew my name?"

"Yes," answered the bishop, "Your name is my brother."

If only I could show that sort of grace.

Summer Gardens and Moving.

This Saturday I found myself with some extra time after the skate kids let out early and an afternoon to myself. I called my friend Diane to go out to lunch and lunch turned into sewing and reading on a blanket in a park and an amble around the botanical gardens.




The rose garden was in full bloom and my nose was tickled by the gentle smell of a thousand roses in a June day.




The botanical gardens have been around since the 1930s and heavily reflect much of the original design. The beds are all neat and tidy and I wanted my own space to work in the soil, but I'm moving - no point in planting yet.




Today I signed a lease on a new apartment. I’m going to be sad to leave my little two bedroom flat with its fabulous painted walls, hardwood floors, and sunny windows, but I am trading it for a shaded three bedroom with leaded glass, wood paneling and two fabulous roommates. the living space is huge and well maintained and I'm exited to sew curtains and other fabulous things for it.




We can start moving in as of today, but I have to wait an evening before I start carting things over there since I am busy tonight.




I’m so excited, though, I can’t wait!

Summer is in full swing!

Last night I tried to make some shortbread cookies with the space shuttle cookie cutter I picked up at the Sonora Air and Space Museum on my trip to Tuscon. My kitchen (we don't have air conditioning) was 80 degrees, and the dough was falling apart. I left it in the refridgerator overnight, and hopefully it'll harden up a bit.

In between mildly sucessfull, but very difficult to make batches of cookies I read a Grace Livingston Hill novel. The lovely woman over at Plesant View School House turned me on to those novels - they are fluffy christian romances, that hold the home and family near and dear to the heart. I only own one, though I have read a few that I checked out from the library. They are perfect for a settling down evening, all wrapped up in a satin bathrobe and my oldest most raggidy sleep shirt.

I read Marcia Shuyler, which is described on amazon as "Grace Livingston Hill weaves an enchanting love triangle and introduces one of her most delightful characters in part one of the Miranda trilogy. Two sisters are as different as night and day-and inexplicably linked by the man they both desire. Kate Schuyler lives only for what pleasures her in the moment, while Marcia Schuyler sacrifices her youth to marry her older sister's jilted fianc?. Can Marcia endure living in borrowed clothes and a borrowed home with a borrowed husband? Is there hope to win her husband's love when Kate returns, spinning a web of deceit? "

It was a light book and I finished it in an evening, and it left me feeling very satisfied with the outcome.

I love a satisfying book.

I listened to Les Miserables in the bathtub (of cool water to calm down from the cooking heat) and finished it while reading, and the two stories reminded me how there can be so many forms of depth. Les Miserables is a story, to me, of resounding grace on all accounts. It is a story of learning how to give grace and get grace and how to cope with the aftermath of grace. I read the novel when I was a sophmore in high school, all 2,222 pages of my copy, marking little dates in the margins when I finished each section. The wisdom and beauty (and the detail in facts and figures and forms...) of that book remain with me and when I am struggling hard to give or recieve grace I think of Jean Valjean the hunted, full of grace, Javert the hunter, unable to recieve grace, and how if you cannot give grace you are not open to recieving grace.

Grace is a rather difficult thing to comprehend, to explain, but you always know it when you see it.

After finishing up the novel and thinking a bit, I tucked myself into my lavender bedsheets and fell asleep with the fan on my face.