Book Envy

My husband and I have a voracious appetite for books. Reading has its ritualistic spot in our daily lives: every night, before going to sleep, we grab a book from our respective piles and dig in.


Here are the two books each of us has been reading the most, can you tell whose is whose? (hint: look at the right side bar...)

The other night, I was about to dive back into Middle Earth when Michael started telling me interesting facts he had learned from his book about world religions. I found myself wanting to put down The Two Towers to read his Guide to World Religions. This happens all the time, not only to me, but also to him. We call this desire to switch over to what your spouse is reading "book envy."


I recently came down with a major case of book envy.


Although I had read Corrie ten Boom's autobiography as a child, I had forgotten most of her life story. Michael read it recently and told me incredible stories of Corrie's family providing a refuge for Jews during the Holocaust, their eventual arrest by the Nazis, and her utter devotion to God even while suffering in hellish concentration camps.

Can you believe this sweet thing risked her life to save
people who weren't her ethnicity or religion?
What an amazing, Christian woman. I want to be like her.

One simple story from Corrie's childhood has not left me even weeks later. It has subtly impacted the way I see the world.



I asked Father about a poem we had read at school the winter before. One line had described “a young man whose face was not shadowed by sexsin.” ... And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”


He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.


“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.


I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning. 


“It’s too heavy,” I said.


“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a
load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”


And I was satisfied. More than satisfied—wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions—for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.”


In the Nazi concentration camps, Corrie was continually presented with a load much too heavy for her to carry. As she witnessed the deep depravity and suffering of human beings, she continually handed this load over to her heavenly Father.


For whatever reason, God has given me a heart that is tender toward the deep suffering in the world. Therefore, I give my prayers, my money, and my career to addressing these issues. But, sometimes I can hardly stand to hear one more story of someone using their power to victimize others. I ask God, "Why?" and I get limp answers, if any answers at all.


And this is when I hear God, through the story of Corrie's father, telling me that I don't have to carry the suffering in the world. He will carry it for me. And that's where I begin to find peace.

Indian Vegetable Curry

Beautiful ingredients make delicious food.

I have been craving really good Indian food for a few months, but my favorite Indian restaurant is over 1,000 miles away in Colorado, so I decided to make this Vegetable Curry recipe that I found in my favorite cookbook ever.


Once I saw how fresh and colorful the ingredients were, I busted out my camera and went hog wild playing food photographer.

The final product was so good! I daresay it even tasted authentic. Plus, it is super healthy and the ingredients are super cheap.

Here's the recipe:


Start the rice. Do Basmati if you're going for authentic! Heat until sizzling:

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons cumin seeds

Add and cook a little bit:

• 1 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic

Stir in:

• 2 teaspoons of hot curry powder

Stir in (all of these ingredients are approximate):

• 2 cups canned chickpeas
• 2 1/2 cups cubed sweet potatoes
• 2 cups cauliflower
• 1 cup chopped green beans
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon chicken bouillon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• black pepper

Cover and cook until vegetables are tender. (~10 minutes) Stir together in a small bowl:

• 1 cup plain yogurt
• 2 tablespoons flour

Add to the vegetables. Cook all until heated through. Serve over rice garnished with chopped almonds.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Second to delicious, practically free food, the thing I've enjoyed most about gardening is appreciating in a new way how my food grows. Pre-gardening, I generally knew that seeds sprout into plants which produce flowers and fruits. I got that.

But, to actually watch it happen is a whole different story.

Here's one of my plants producing a beautiful, white flower. Can you tell what type of plant it is yet?

The flower dies and in its place, a fruit magically appears. (I guess I still don't understand everything.)

And the fruit grows and grows into a full-fledged bell pepper!


By the way, did you know that orange and red bell peppers are merely ripened green bell peppers? I geeked out about that once upon a time and now I'm proving it in my backyard!

The same is true with tomatoes. Here you see blurry, yellow flowers on the right, a teeny green tomato with a little flower shrapnel still attached, and larger green tomatoes to the left.

And here, flower is clinging to the very tip of the green bean that took its place.

And then there's this guy who is so cute that I don't mind the little holes he munches in my leaves.

I am so grateful for my little plot of land, and I'm so glad that we have tried our hands at gardening.

One Cookbook to Rule Them All

I am astounded and overwhelmed by the vast number of cookbooks which are available anywhere from grocery stores to hardware stores to the library. And with the prevalence of recipe websites, you can find directions for any dish in less than .2 seconds. The problem is, many of these recipes are not tried and true.

And that's where this big beauty of a cookbook comes in.

Joy of Cooking contains 4,500 recipes that have been perfected over 75 years. Everything in this book is accurate and delicious. (I sound like an ad, but believe me, no one is paying me for this!)


It contains recipes that are super easy,

fun and adventurous,

and so awesome that I will probably only ever dream about doing them.

Tapping for maple syrup.

(Just kidding! I make grilled cheese all the time and it's so easy,
I have no idea why there is a recipe for it in the book.)

So, consider starting your Christmas Wish List now and consider putting Joy of Cooking on it!

First Week of the Last Year

I just finished my first week of my last year of law school. It was a doozy. I feel like this guy:

When I registered for the fall semester, I was drawn to classes with intriguing titles like "Hate Speech" and "Mental Disability Law Seminar" over classes with boring titles (and material that will actually be tested on the bar) like "Wills & Trusts" and "Marital Property." 


Here's a sampling of the questions that my professors have made my classmates and me discuss this week:

• How would you draft a date rape statute?
• Should the law prevent a church from burning a copy of the Qur'an? (i.e. When should safety and decency trump free speech?)
• If you had to choose, would you rather have quadriplegia, blindness, deafness, epilepsy, or a cognitive disability?
• How should the law define "family"?
• Should people with mental disabilities who have committed crimes be forced to take medication in order to make them competent to stand trial even though they otherwise would not be competent?

Come to think of it, I highly doubt that I will ever have a significant say in society on any of the above topics, and yet my heart and brain get invested as if I will. But, I guess that's just the nature of academia: lots of theoretical discussion in class and and it's the clinics, summer jobs, and post-grad career that teach you the nitty gritty of practice.

For now, I will choose to enjoy this last year of the mental gymnastics that we call "law school."

Mutton Busting

At rodeos, parents with children under six can volunteer their little girl or boy to compete in an event called "mutton busting." This is how it works.


1. Parent carries child, who is scared stiff, toward a large sheep that is being restrained by two, strong, full grown cowboys. The child buries her face in the parent's neck.

2. Parent places child on the sheep's back, tells him to hold on tight, and the sheep bolts off. The child buries his face in the sheep's neck.

3. Within seconds, the child is thrown off, and his or her little body does scary things in the air.

4. The child hits the ground, begins bawling, and is scooped back up into the arms of the parent.

Something in my gut tells me that when I have little kids, I will not be volunteering them to mutton bust!

Double Rainbow, All the Way

Flying into the Denver International Airport, I was greeted with dark clouds sending sheets of rain to the ground, sunshine on my plane, lightning, bad turbulence, and a double rainbow. It was a pretty spectacular way to be welcomed by a state of many weather extremes!