Light Refreshments Served

Dearest Readers,

We have enjoyed so much your support and love and comments!  A blog is nothing without readers; they are its heart and soul.  We have loved sharing our hearts and minds with you, and will cherish the memories of laughter and friendship developed “virtually” though Light Refreshments Served. But things change, and, to our sorrow, we find it necessary to suspend this blog, at least for the foreseeable future. We hope you will continue to connect with us on our individual blogs.

Love,

Chelsea, Kristy, Kacy, Lisa and Emily

Note from Kristy:

To the wonderful people who have supported LRS:  I’m sorry, we never meant to hurt you.  It’s not you, it’s us.  Can we still be friends?  K.I.T.  www.rabbitintheheadlights.blogspot.com

Note from Kacy:

I grew up in a bubble.  My life wasn’t perfect but I had good parents, nice brothers and sisters, and decent friends whose families were good to me.  Because of my innocent childhood I grew up rather naïve and was particularly sensitive to any bad news.  I remember one night my family was outside and we were standing in the driveway when the sirens of a fire truck came blazing by.  Where were they going?  Who was in trouble?  What had happened?  The sirens got louder and louder, piercing my innocent mind of all happy thoughts as it zoomed past our home and around the bend to reach the source of the emergency.  I was very worried, and I remember looking up at my mom and asking, “Mom?  Does Heavenly Father hear your prayers even if you don’t say them out loud?”  I wanted to pray for the people who needed that truck, but not out loud in my driveway with others around.  “Of course he does, sweetheart,” my mother answered.  And with that, I shot up a prayer to heaven that the recipients of those sirens would be all right. 

I’ve lived quite a few years since that day, long enough for more of my bubble to be burst.  Even in my adulthood my ears are often seared with horrific news of others’ lives that seem incomprehensible to me.  A lover of happy endings, a glutton for peace on earth I (we) am challenged every day to wade through the filth, the muck, and the ugliness in search of the good.  Lately, I’ve been feeling the need for sturdier boots and higher waders. 

Over time I have seen the mark of Satan’s main target, the family, hit the bulls eye on a number of occasions.  But for some reason, the recent news of a friend of mine has hit harder than normal.  The dissolution of her family is not her choice, and yet she will be the one left behind to sweep up the fragments of broken dreams.  She will be the one having to explain to her kids why Daddy left, why he chose someone else over them, why they will only be able to play ball together every other weekend, and why they have to move.  It all seems grossly unfair to me, that one person’s poor use of agency has that much power.  I have heard over and over again how Satan may win a few battles here, but Heavenly Father will win the war.  I believe that, but I guess what I’d like to know is, when the war is over will these kids get their dad back?  Will my friend meet up again with the man she married instead of the idiot who has possessed his body and now drives his truck? 

I don’t know.  Here’s what I DO know.  That’s why He died.  That’s why He suffered.  Not just to take away our sins, but to help us bear our sorrows and our grief.  If it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t matter as much, right?  And if using the Atonement of our Savior can help us bear that pain, then all the sudden it’s not as horrible, true?  Which is why this following scripture caught my attention the other night: 

“But that ye have patience, and bear with those afflictions, with a firm hope that ye shall one day rest from all your afflictions.”  – Alma 34:41 

I love the use of the words “firm hope”.  Not a pansy-like desire, not a dream, a FIRM HOPE.  The kind of hope that loads up a family in a wagon and walks two thousand miles to the “right place”.  The kind of hope that allows you to buy your son a suit and a set of scriptures and send him away from home for two years.  The kind of hope that leads you to church every week even though you have nobody to sit next to.  The kind of hope that has you paying your tithing even though you’re not sure where your next meal is coming from.  And the kind of hope that allows a mother to wrap up her kids in a blanket, kiss them goodnight and say, “Daddy loves you even though he can’t be with you every day.” 

And with that we silence the sirens, send a prayer up to the heavens, and know that we will be all right.

I’m sick.  My daughter is sick.  My son is off track.  It’s a really fun combination if you think about it, but just for my sake let’s not get all crazy and think about it too much, alrighty?  The good news is that I am kicking tail at a scrabble game on facebook having recently played ALL MY LETTERS TWO TIMES IN A ROW.  I’m sorry, did you not know I was that awesome?  Well, now you have been enlightened. 

I am also tired.  I took something like a seventeen hour nap this afternoon and then woke up and thought, “Man, I sure could use a nap.”  So I went back to sleep.  I’m not sure if the boy who lives here has been fed today, but he’s got two hands that work so hopefully he has taken care of it.  If I had a liquor cabinet and a deviant child this would be a good day for him to get sloshed behind my back.  Not sure why my mind just went there but since it did, let’s just be grateful that he is a good kid and I don’t stash any booze. 

In between my naps and fetching ginger ale and barf bowls for my daughter, I decided to check my email where I found this clever little nugget and thought I’d share.  Happy Monday!

Why LDS Women Stress 

As Latter-day Saint women, we are practically obsessed with anxiously engaging ourselves in good causes. Maybe it’s subliminal. 

Glancing through the hymnal last Sunday I noted that as sisters in Zion, we who are called to serve, are all enlisted to go marching, marching forward because the world has need of willing men, to all press on scattering sunshine. We wonder if we have done any good in the world today because we have been given much and want to do what is right, keep the commandments, press forward with the Saints, choose the right, and put our shoulders to the wheel going where He wants us to go. However, as the morning breaks high on the mountain top, truth reflects upon our senses, and while we still believe that sweet is  the work, we also realize that we have work enough to do ere the sun  goes down.  And thus we ask Thee ere we part, where can we turn for peace?

Valentine’s Day, for me, is a fun day to eat a lot of good chocolate, a reason to make fluffy sugar cookies, and a holiday to treat my kids and my husband to sweet little surprises. It is not a time for me to write a poem, wait 2 hours for a dinner reservation, or plan a romantic getaway. This year, for example, I bought myself 2 pairs of shoes and some exercise clothes for Valentine’s Day. And I was excited about that, as in : Great Valentine’s Day!

Because my maiden name is “Valentine,” Valentine’s Day has held a lifetime of expectations for me. As a child I was so excited for Valentine’s Day. It was a day of small gifts (always a cherry chapstick in there), candy, red-themed meals and lots of attention due to my name. As a preteen, I had visions of what Valentine’s Day might come to mean: romance! I envisioned dozens of roses delivered to my door–some from boys I liked and some from -gasp-secret admirers! I dreamed of sweetly penned poems, and even slightly cheesy stuffed animals that I would forgive because, well, the sentiment was felt. Those dreams were never filled and somewhere in those awkward teen years, I came to know Valentine’s Day for what it means to me still today: Friendship Day.

When I was sixteen, I got an anonymous bouquet of flowers delivered to me at school. I thought I might die, it was so exciting. Most of my friends (all of them. every. single. one) had boyfriends and I never had had one. And here it was Valentine’s Day and the note said “Have a Great Day!” with NO NAME! The rest of the day I imagined it was from Evan, an upper classman I had a crush on. I don’t know why I thought he might like me or why he’d send flowers, but I had that little glimmer of teenage hope that it could be him. I went home, my heart still fluttering, when my mom mentioned that this 27 (TWENTY-SEVEN) year-old from the local singles ward was moving and sent me the flowers because he was moving. She knew because one of his friends thought it was creepy and “thought she should know.” I had never had a conversation with him. My fluttering heart was crushed, and now I just felt stupid. I wasn’t flattered, I was embarrassed. (I learned later that this “friend” who called my mom gave this guy a barbie doll named “Lisa” for Valentine’s Day. Is it just me, or is this super creepy?)

I never did have a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, as luck would have it, on Valentine’s Day until I Topher and I dated. We were engaged on February 26th, because he didn’t want to propose on Valentine’s Day because that would be “too obvious.” I dated one guy beginning in March and ending in September, and another broke up with me in January and we dated again in the Spring. So close, so close! A traditionally romantic Valentine’s Day was not meant for Lisa Valentine. And now, as part of Topher’s acting and directing training and job, he is required to go to an acting competition/festival for the regional area every year. He has gone every year since he proposed (15 years) and the festival always falls on Valentine’s Day. Every year.

So I hope you had a happy, fun heart-shaped, red-food, sticky sweet reason to eat something good and to send out a fun card holiday! And, in case you’re wondering, Evan and I remained friends and, years later, when he was backpacking across America with a friend, he stopped by to say hello to his friend in Utah. I came home from church to find them on our lawn cooking oatmeal on a small propane camping stove. I fed him, we chatted, gave him a few cans of food and sent him and his friend on their way. And that, my friends, is what Valentine’s Day is all about.

A couple of weeks ago we got together with several of my husband’s siblings to clean out his mother’s house prior to  its pending sale next week. His mother actually died two years ago, but it has taken this long to face the inevitable and just get in there and do it.

Our own house is pretty full of our stuff, so we didn’t lay claim to much. But, along with a couple of nice pieces of furniture, we did end up coming home with several boxes of books. Why did we do this? I ask myself. Particularly considering that we already HAVE way more books than we have places to display them. And a book is not something I can abandon lightly. I love books. I have easy access to books, so I possess a good number of them–more than I’m ever likely to open again in this lifetime, let alone read. And yet giving a book to Deseret Industries is for me almost like sending a child to an orphanage.

Larry felt the same way about these books from his mother’s home. I persuaded him to release his grip on the old Encyclopedia Americanas, but the Children’s Literary Library could not be abandoned. His mother had read those stories to him as a child. He wanted to read them to HIS children. All right, well, his grandchildren, then. And the Physical Science set; there might be something in those six volumes he would want to reference. Never mind the fact that Physical Science itself has probably changed pretty significantly since the publication of those books; never mind the easy accessibility on the Internet of anything he would want to know in the (unlikely) event that he had a sudden science question–he NEEDED those books. So we have them.

This got me thinking. I have a theory that we ALL have something like this in our homes or lives. I have friends, for example, who possess enough fabric to supply an entire small country with quilts. Others have scrapbook supplies, cooking utensils, dishware.

Here’s my question: What is the one thing you have more of than you’re ever going to be able to use? And what is it about that “thing” that compels you to keep amassing it?

If I was in 5^th grade and said, “I love my brothers,” then some punk would undoubtedly pipe up and say, “Then why dontcha marry ‘em?”  And I’d say, “Because I’m not from Arkansas, I don’t want all my babies to be deformed and because I don’t want my husband to have strong decorating opinions.”  I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow my parents managed to raise FOUR boys who if you asked, “Is it ecru, beige or ivory?” they would have definitive views.  It is one of my favorite traits about Cory, that he doesn’t have opinions about how to spruce up the house.  I will never forget an experience we had when we first moved to Colorado – we had just transferred from a furnished apartment to a condo and so we needed a couch, and one of my brothers who also lived here at the time was in the process of redecorating their home and also needed a couch.  So we thought, “How fun!  Let’s go couch shopping together!”  We walked into a store and I said, “I want this one,” and Cory said, “Okay” and then my brother and his wife spent the next four months weighing the pros and cons of floral vs. plaid.  In our last house there were numerous occasions where Cory went to work in the morning with one color of kitchen and came home to an entirely different one.  If it wasn’t for the fact that paint smells so much I’m not even sure he would have noticed.  

Lately I have been itching for a project.  Adding to my restlessness I have become addicted to this blog where the ideas flow faster than Marion Jones on steroids.  I LOVE this chick and her handyman hubby!  Anyway, I had been contemplating what to do to add some color and texture to this room without breaking the bank: 

I naturally thought about doing window treatments, but that would involve hardware, fabric, and sewing which translated into a lot of money and a lot of work.  Then I went to The Lettered Cottage blog and saw this picture:

The bell is the main character in her post, but what I noticed were the shutters she had installed on either side of her mirror.  I thought they were a fabulous detail, and became inspired that this was how I could dress up my kitchen nook.  I began to shop around and found paintable shutters at Home Depot which were going to run me a little over a hundred dollars.  Not bad, but still more than I wanted to spend.  Finally I had a stroke of inspiration and discovered a package of cedar wood paneling – the individual pieces snapped together so I could make my shutters as tall or as wide as I wanted to, and I could also cut off a small piece to glue at the top and bottom for added character.  The whole package was something like $15 and it would be enough to make the four shutters that I needed.  Without access to a table saw at home I simply asked the Home Depot Guy (his official name on record) to cut them to the size I needed and I was in business.  

The project was diverted when I had my emergency medical situation so when my parents showed up to help me that week I put my Dad on it – he finished the easy assembly and then corralled Drew to come help him paint them black, per my request.  In the weeks since my surgery, however, I decided that I wanted them to be a distressed turquoise color.  So, yesterday I bought turquoise paint and some mocha glaze and went to the basement to finish my project.  Here is a shutter after two coats of Benjamin Moore’s “Florida Keys Blue”:

Then I whipped out my hand sander to sand the edges, revealing some of the black previously applied by my Dad:

I followed this up with a coat of Mocha colored glaze – the full bottle cost me $19.99 and I hardly used any of it, so if you can get a smaller can of glaze you could save even more because you don’t need very much of it to get the job done:

And here is what it looks like:

The wood I used was very light weight, so to attach them to the wall I simply nailed them in!  Here’s what they look like up in the room:

Total cost on the project was about $50 and it was all done before Cory and the kids got home from mutual/scouts – Cory is not in love with it but knowing how happy it makes me he is playing along.  It’s not chocolate and roses, but I think it’s his own special way of saying, “Happy Valentine’s Day”.  I’ll take it.

I have been caught in a bizarre spiral in which every area of my life seems to be sort of out of control. Work: WAAAAAY behind on numerous projects, without even the ability to predict HOW I will accomplish them. Home: All my adult children seem to be cycling through with needs–car trouble, a death in the in-laws’ family, roommate struggles. Church: I’ll admit it, YW is kicking my trash. After slightly over three months, I still feel  ill-suited for this calling.

I realized how badly I was doing when I spent about three minutes this morning trying to force a reluctant key into the ignition before I finally realized I was trying to start the wrong car. (Or rather, right car, wrong key.)

It’s kind of starting to freak me out.

And yet–last week, when I really, truly, desperately needed it, miraculously I was able to work uninterrupted in my office for several hours at a stretch on several continuous days. Some meetings even got cancelled. That NEVER happens. But it did, and it happened for long enough that now, suddenly, I can see a faint flicker of daylight again in the deadline tunnel.

And yesterday, when I was wandering to the craft store trying to find material for a gold flag to add to our YW values collection, which we need for New Beginnings TOMORROW, I not only found some darling quilting quarters with which I can make whole new, much cuter flags, but I had a brain flash about the refreshments and also a friend told me how I could create gold cupcakes so we can have ALL the value colors. (I would just like to add peripherally that although gold seems like a great color for virtue, it is difficult to incorporate on many levels.) And I had enough strength to bake a hundred cupcakes so the girls can come over and frost them in those value colors tonight in preparation for New Beginnings TOMORROW, so I might just live through it in time to move on to our combined-activity Olympics Night next Wednesday.

What I’m saying is, I seem to get the inspiration or the time or the energy I need, right at the very hour when I need it. I rarely have it any earlier, and it never lasts any longer, but the Daily Bread is there This Day. Every time. And for that grace, I stand all amazed.

Are you getting married this year?  Do you live near Pocatello, Idaho or close enough that you can get there?  My niece is a photographer in that area and is currently doing a giveaway for a free engagement session.  Here is a picture she took a couple of weeks ago of my niece (a different one!  I have a lot of them and not a single one that I don’t like) on her wedding day:

How cute is that?!  Click here for details if you’re interested.  If this giveaway doesn’t apply to you or anyone you know then I suppose all I have to offer is a little eye candy of this lovely family on the beach that she took this summer.  The dad is my brother – featured once on ESPN highlights for storming the field at a Padres game and stealing 2nd base, and a couple of years later on CBS when he won over $40K on The Price Is Right, he’s not just another pretty face:

Here’s a closer one of his two older kids, still too innocent to know that their father was once arrested for said Padre game debacle (but baffled the security upon proving his sobriety at the time).  Hey bro, is this too much information to be sharing with the internet?  Because I still haven’t told them about that picture I have of you in the dress.

Now as a little weekend bonus I’ll share one more, because it just so happens that I know this really hot blond chick (and the mom ain’t so bad either…I guess) who also had pictures taken by BHI with her family last summer:

I’m not going to twist your arm or anything, but it might be worth it!

“Of all the warning sounds that animals make, I think the one that’s the least effective on me is a kind of clicking noise.”  – Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts” as seen on Saturday Night Live 

The last home we lived in was almost 20 years old and had two smoke detectors – one on the main floor and one upstairs.  The only reason we had one on the main floor was because I saw a Dateline NBC episode once where a firefighter had been to visit a lady’s house for a random incident, noticed she didn’t have a smoke detector and felt so strongly about it that he brought her one the next day as a gift.  (You know what happens next, right?)  A couple of days later her house caught on fire and if it hadn’t been for that smoke detector on the main floor her baby would have died.  I went out and bought an additional alarm that day.  It was easy to install – I threw a battery in it and stick it through my awesome popcorn ceiling which resulted in my carpet looking like it needed some quality time with Head & Shoulders shampoo. 

A lot of things have changed in our new home, beginning with the fact that we now have eight, EIGHT! smoke alarms.  At first you might think, “Oh how nice, now if little Johnny ever tried to sneak some reefer into his room, or light ants on fire with his magnifying glass through the sun shining through his window, or if little Jane lights a candle while using nail polish remover or tries to burn her trash instead of taking it to the garbage WE WILL KNOW ABOUT IT.”  But what you are NOT thinking about as you survey and admire the safety feature of EIGHT! smoke alarms in your house is, “Hey, I can hardly wait until it’s 2:30 in the morning and one of those bad boys decides that it is DONE with those batteries.”  Done!  With a capital ‘D’.  And for the love, why is it always 2:30 in the morning when they decide this? 

It was indeed 2:30 a.m. when I was awakened by this incessant beeping sound.  The thing is, however, it only beeps ONCE in ridiculously ineffective increments of a minute apart making it virtually impossible to locate the origin of the problem.  *Beep!*  I thought it was coming from the guest room so I walked in there, stood under it and waited that crucial minute to be sure.  *Beep!*  Crap.  Wrong room.  Maybe it’s the one in the hallway.  Move.  Stand.  Wait.  *Beep!*  Nope.  It’s definitely coming from downstairs.  Move.  Stand.  Wait.  *Beep!*  Definitely NOT coming from downstairs.  Back upstairs I go to Samantha’s room.   *Beep!*  Not Samantha’s room.  Cory may have heard me say something bad and he was roused from his slumber.  “What are you doing?”  I quietly articulated in whispers my genteel strategy for trying to locate the offending &$%!*$# alarm.  *Beep!*  A-HA!  I am pretty sure the sound is coming from Drew’s room.  Move.  Stand.  Wait.  *Beep!*  Bingo!  That was it.  All I had to do now was yank the battery out – then I would deal with it tomorrow and go back to sleep.  Open.  Yank.  Close.  *Beep!*  “What the…?!”  I had the right alarm, but it was not enough to remove the battery because the blasted piece of crap was hooked up ELECTRONICALLY.  The battery is just a backup for the electricity!!  Very well, I’ll just replace it with one of the 87 batteries we keep stashed in the drawer downstairs.  Let’s see…what do we need here…a NINE VOLT?  Interesting.  We don’t seem to have ANY of those.  Double AA’s?  Triple AAA’s?  I have a plethora.  Nine volts?  Our lightsabers don’t require 9-V’s so we don’t happen to have a drawer full.  It was now three o’clock in the morning and Cory said, after putting on his red cape, “I’ll just run to Wal-Mart and get one.”  Now that the whole family was alert and would not be sleeping until the alarm was officially SHUT UP, we decided to use our time wisely and read the scriptures.  Just kidding.  Who does that?  I have to be honest though, I DID go in the other room and say a prayer – I specifically asked that the battery would fix the problem after Cory got back because, and I am not exaggerating when I confess that I said, “If this doesn’t work then somebody is going to die, and I don’t want to go to jail.”  Call me sacrilegious, but a girl has to do what a girl has to do. 

Cory returned, prayers were answered, and we finally went back to bed.  Thanks to Costco I now have a sleeve of nine volt batteries in the drawer just waiting, and I am DARING for them to do this to me again.

Congrats to reader “mirien”, she is the lucky winner of “Stay Put Socks“!

I recently discovered MormonLife.com, which is this amazing site that bills its role as “scouring the web for all things Mormon.” They pull together links to news stories, blogs, headlines, videos, a big variety of Mormon-related stuff. I love this because there just seems to be so much out there, and I could spend my whole day jumping around. This site leads me quickly to the stories I’m most interested in, so I can always speak knowingly instead of just giving people blank looks, which I am wont to do because I don’t seem to live close to ANY grapevine.

I like this site a lot. But now I like something about it even BETTER. Mormon Life has just started an opt-in once-weekly e-mail that sends, right to my inbox, headlines with links for the top ten stories of the week, including videos and other fun stuff. So now, even when I’m too preoccupied to remember to visit the site, I get a quick nudge (FREE, of course) that keeps me in the know. This is so much fun for me! Now I don’t have to try to guess where to look for the latest, or find stories in a hit-and-miss fashion. The Mormon Life crew does the work, and I get the great stories: fast!

You can click here to sign up to start receiving this e-mail. And then pop over to Mormon Life and take a peek. Betcha you’ll love it!