Random

One of my favourite blogs to read is Conversion Diary. Each Friday features a series called 7 Quick Takes. (Click here for this week's installment) Here are my seven quick takes:

1. In the hallways of work, I saw a little group of women. A group of little women, actually. Not actual little women, just short women. All five of them were just over 5'1'' or so. I started to spin stories of how they came to know one another, such as: they each noticed someone else was also keeping their lunch dishes in the cabinets below the counter in the kitchen, tired from having to drag over a stool to be able to reach the higher shelves. Over time they crossed paths, and looks of commiseration and humour grew into friendship and support. Ten years on, they're Godparenting each other's children.

2. Number Five Nephew just had a run-in with an immovable force: Daddy. Five didn't take too kindly to it, but realizing that daddy wasn't about to give in, he turned on his wobbly heel, and took his wail to where mommy sat on the sofa. He made quite a picture, naked in his diaper, his soft and plump 16 month-old body producing such volume, as he just stood there, looking at her, mouth open, displeasure emanating from deep within. When mommy got up to get him a bottle, he continued wailing, but followed her from room to room, trotting on his ankle-less legs...my heart should be wrenched, I know, but I laugh every time. I love this little guy so much...especially the baby dinosaur grunt he makes these days, with a big smile on his face as he pushes a Matchbox car across the table. The picture is Five on the beach. Everyone else was squealing in the surf, having a gay-old time -- he was having noneofit.

3. I've posted already about the book I'm reading: the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I'm so close to the conclusion now, I ration myself with paragraphs at a time. I'm enjoying the story so much I don't want it to end. The story has become so much more than I expected, which doubles the delight I feel in having found the book in the first place. Read it; do please, I'm sure you'll enjoy it too.

4. I am moving in a week's time, and then again in a month's time. This pleases my restless nature, but frustrates my longing for a forever home, a place of my own where I truly belong and can just be at last. Heaven will fulfill that need, I know, but surely there's a place here on Earth that will fit like home? My home? I hope to find it soon, and hope it is the place waiting for me at summer's end.

5. Before I move, I am taking a weekend to retreat. This is not going to be an official spiritual retreat of silence and contemplation, but it is going to be a time of quiet and reflection. God is calling me away this weekend, and I'm eager to hear what He has to say. I used to make a regular habit of going on retreat. In the frenetic and frantic world so many of us live in, we really do need to deliberately cultivate silence and stillness.

6. Speaking of silence and stillness, there is a wonderful film called Into great silence which I recommend as a beautiful work of cinematic art, but also as an aid to coming to quiet within yourself. It is a documentary of the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps.

7. It rained today. Again. Not just drops of water falling from the sky, but RAIN. If you were to imagine an ordinary day of rain as being like the gentlest setting on your showerhead, what we experienced today could be likened to the massage feature. I feel damp from the inside out, which strikes me as a very good reason to make some cocoa.