This week was unique for me, it was the first time I had worked with a lot of people I haven’t known for very long. I usually work with our pastor and others from our church. This week was different because all camp directors do their own thing. so the schedule was similar but the activities and the way they went about things was different. It was good though.

The obvious way that we all expect Christian Church Camp to be fruitful is in the changed lives of the children who attend. There where children who made professions of faith, and that is truly a work of God, a wonderful thing.
Then there were the growing pains that God allowed some of the staff to go through. Only He knows what those pains were from but I could see some of it happening. People being stretched and pulled, molded and taught God’s ways.

This was actually the last week of camp for the whole year. The camp managers were a little tired (to say the least) and I think they were looking forward to the end. 6 weeks is a long time to have children every week with no breaks in between except to get ready for the next week!

My week, personally, was pleasant. I met some great kids and had two proposals of marriage from two little boys. LOL! I swam once. The other times I just laid on the pool deck and slept. Maybe that’s why I had such a good time, I was rested!

The weather was GREAT! Very nice. And the insects were at a minimum. There was that ‘brown lizard on my bath-towel’ incident, but other than that, not much.

There was a child there this week named Elizabeth who was mentally challenged. My friend Aimee keeps reminding me to be PC and say challenged instead of retarded, which btw simply means slowed down. Anyway, mentally challenged children flock to me, I don’t know why, they always have and I love it. I don’t say a word and they have radar or something and find me.

So Elizabeth finds me and latches on to me for the week. She’s a sweet girl and everytime I would say something to her she would reply with either, “Really?” or “Oh.” Sometimes she would say “Why?”

So one day she said, “I miss my Daddy.” To which I replied, “Really?”
And she went on to say, “Yes, but I don’t miss my momma.”
“Why not?” Her eyes got big and she said, “Because she yells at me and (eyes wider) she spanks me. I wish you were my momma.”
Lots of thoughts here folks. So I looked at her earnestly and said, “God made your momma and gave you to her. If I were your momma, I might spank you too, if you were disobedient.”
Quiet. Then, “Oh.”

So, we were best friends all the rest of the week, regardless of my assurance that other mommas might spank their children, too.

For room mates this week I had a really sweet lady named Christy and her youngest son, Cooper. Sweetest little boy since I had a three year old boy. Lydia loved him and he loved her. They played in the room at night and slept side by side on their little matresses on the floor.

This week will be a restful one, I hope. Actually, 2 weeks of rest would be great. Then its off to Jamaica for a week of VBS and gospel sharing.

I’m sitting here in the middle of 500 acres of God’s beauty, picking up a wireless signal and enjoying my down time.

We have 138 children here this week. Its been a lot of fun! Bro Toby is directing and even though this is his first time in this job, he’s doing a wonderful job. Everything is moving smoothly and the children are having a good time.

Our evangelist, Bro Eric, is doing a super job! I highly approve of how he is teaching and preaching.

OK, I’m headed to the pool! See you soon…..

I will leading the music at church camp from Sunday afternoon til Friday, July 4th.  I would appreciate it if you would pray for the children there, their safety, the leaders to be attuned to spiritual needs, that God will move in lives and that the children will just find acceptance and love.

Are you wondering what leading the music is like?  Its like having an aerobics class three times a day for 5 days!  LOL!  All the songs I teach them are scriptural and have lots of arm movements, clapping and jumping around.

Me  working on a little sewing while the beeswax cools. You can see the already made candles to your left on a primitive candle rack that my son made.

This year my oldest son is building me a very large tripod outside for candle making.  Below is my youngest daugher, Lydia, daydreaming by the fire as she waits for the beeswax to melt. My son David made the tripod in the picture and this is the type he will be making for me soon.

We dip candles and don’t use molds. Molds make some very lovely candles but I prefer the look of hand dipped candles.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I prefer the process of dipping over the process of molding candles.  It is peaceful and enjoyable.

We will probably start dipping before it actually turns cold, I like to have candles that are dipped and cured a while by the time its cold. Hopefully I will be able to sell some on etsy this year along with two quilted wall hangings and some other crafts.

I buy beeswax from a company called Betterbee. They have wax that is filtered, which is a white color, and an unfiltered wax that is different shades of golden yellow. That’s the one I get, I love that mellow gold color. I buy candle wick in large spools locally and I usually soak them in boric acid and then dry them. The boric acid makes the wick light more easily and burn brighter.
Did you know that boric acid will also make the flame burn red? Epsom salts will cause the flame to burn a bright white. Calcium will produce a red-orange flame, calcium chloride produces a yellow-orange flame, table salt makes for a bright yellow flame, borax makes a yellow-green flame, copper sulfate produces a green flame, calcium chloride produces a blue flame, potassium sulfate or potassium nitrate (saltpeter) produces a violet flame. I just usually use boric acid or epsom salts if anything.

I love making candles the old-fashioned way. It slows me down and provides an end product that is such a beautiful thing.

There was a time when an easy lunch meant to me, beans, corn, fried squash all from the garden, cornbread and sliced tomato.  That was when I had five children still at home and a big garden to eat out of.  These days I don’t have such a big garden, due to lack of space and I only have three children at home.  Sometimes one of my grown children drops in for lunch and sometimes hubby comes home for lunch but most of the time its just me and the three.

So lunches are still easy but in a different way.  Oh and let me mention I am much older now and I really don’t have the energy all the time like I did years ago!  LOL!  Anyway, here are some easy lunch ideas that I am compiling.

Onigiri. Oh yes, you heard right. A new word for us, to be sure.  This is a Japanese word. Onigiri are basically rice balls and sometimes they are filled with meat or veggies.  I like to find fresh salmon that is a good price and make salted salmon to fill onigiri. I also fill them with stir fried veggies, usually left over from the night before.  I use short grained rice to make onigiri. Short grained rice is usually sold as sushi rice. I cook it with a little rice wine vinegar and agave nectar. Then when it is cooled, I make it into balls and fill it.  I learned a smashing way of making the balls of rice from justbento.com.  You use the corner of a plastic bag to mold it. You can even press a hole in the ball to fill using the bag. Just be sure to wet theinside of the bag before adding the rice.

I sometimes flavor the rice before making it into balls.  I learned that a powdered flavoring that I have been using is considered low-class in Japan. Figures I am way down on the social totem pole in Japan as well as here.  LOL!  But these flavorings are realy tasty.  I buy them at a local oriental market. They have dried seaweed, deired salmon or pickled beets. No MSG just plain ingredients.  My favorite is the pickled beet.

Onigiri is traditionally made into small triagle shapes but we make it into whatever we feel like at the moment, balls, triangles, or that strange shape you get when you use the corner of a plastic bag. Sometimes onigiri is wrapped in seaweed andsometimes there is just a slice of seaweed served with it.  We prefer it without seaweed.

Onigiri probably wouldn’t be enough by itself so I make an egg concoction sometimes to go with it.  I don’t know the Japanese name right off hand…. Oh, I remember it is a tamagoyaki .

You need a smallish skillet for this, one that is used for cooking one egg at a time.  You heat oil in the skillet. In a bowl you beat two eggs, 2 tablespoons water, a teaspoon of light soy sauce, some chopped green onion, a drop or two of agave nectar and if you need the flavor, some benito flakes which is basically fish flavor.  Then you pour the egg mixture into the hot oil and cook like an omelet. You flip the eggs over and then over again, pressing as you flip and cook. You build a little multi-layered omelet. then you cut it in half to serve.  A two egg  tamagoyaki will usually serve 2 people.

Bento is a Japanese lunch box prepared with compartments where every little space is filled with a delicacy. The food is made to look good and taste good.  See this picture of a bento from justbento.com? This is exactly the kind of thing my Mother used to make!  The hot dogs cut into fish shapes is SO my Mother! LOL!

I truly was a strange child, most likely because my parents bucked the traditional norms in child-raising. I was a free-spirited, independant child. I followed my inclinations in education and hobbies. No one ever told me I couldn’t do anything. I wore homemade clothes, not something all that common even in the 60’s and 70’s, I collected rocks and I could hold intelligent conversations with adults, probably because I was an only child and not around children much til I was school age. I was the first girl in my elementary school to wear pants to school and got called to the office for it. It was a pantsuit, actually. Remember those?  My Mother was called from work to come get me and she promtply told the principal that since it was the middle of winter and I walked to school, I most certainly would be wearing pants. End of that conversation. LOL!  Everyone started wearing pants after that, even the teachers. I think that was 1968.

One of the strange things my Mother did for me, strange at least to my childhood friends, was to pack elaborate lunches for me when we would go on field trips and outings at school.  When I was a child we went on many field trips each year and we were to bring a lunch. Instead of the common fare such as pb&j, chips and a cookie, my Mother packed lunches like:

fried chicken leg, celery sticks with pimento cheese, homemade pickles, homemade cheese crackers and carrot cake. 

OR….

Tiny tomatoes, each one stuffed with a tidbit of homemade chicken salad, homemade cheese straws, cream cheese and dates spread on brown bread, oatmeal bars.

And she arranged these lunches in flat plastic boxes so that the contents looked like something out of a food advertisement.  All my classmates had to peer into my lunch box before we ate, they were fascinated.  I remember one particular year when she took a 5# coffee can and painted it with gold metallic paint and then painted red and silver designs on it. The lid on the can came on it from the store and it had a red handle on it. It was a natural for making a lunch tote. She would pack layer upon layer of delicacies and delicious food in that can for me, including a canned Sprite.

At the time I was a little embarrassed at having such an culinary artiste for a mom. But as time went on I grew to enjoy her artistry and attempted to emulate it.  Our meals were never typical of modern, urban professional families.  We ate plain foods but she always dressed them up. I never had a Coke or a twinkie til I was about 17 years old!  Everything in our house was homemade, from puddings to pizza, wrapping paper to curtains.

Imagine my surprize… when I started researching bento boxes and simple lunch plans and found that my Mother, here in the edge of nowhere, USA was making them way back in the 60’s 

Ranch Dressing:

Yield: about 1 1/3 cups

Good-bye for now, Tasha….. and thank you…

The pot sits on a cork round and the press doesn’t even get WARM when I pour hot water in it to make coffee because it has a double glass wall.  Its not exactly like any of the Bodum pots listed on amazon.com, so it may be out-dated and not made any more. But it is so nice. Looks like 8 cups. It has a glass handle and  a little cork round it sits on.  The closest I can come to matching it at amazon is $29.95, but they don’t really carry one that is like it. The manufacturer’s price is $49.99… I went to the Bodum site and found one that was very similar except mine has a glass handle and it was $69.95.  And the greatest thing about this french press coffee maker? I paid $5 for it! They have another one, want me to go get it for you?  :D  I should have gotten it, but I was so giddy with my find that I wasn’t thinking straight.  LOL

I weeded today too but there weren’t very many weeds. I am glad for that! I put the thyme and basil in a big pot and added one big thyme plant to a really big pot of sage. I’m sort of hoping that I can bring some of those pots in this winter.

The larkspur is about done. It was so pretty while it was blooming vigorously. This is what larkspur looks like…

I would like to set out a geranium and some coreopsis today, too. The most important chore today though is going to be to rake and clean out all the sticks and debris from around the back of the house and deck. Sarah has raked, Sam has picked up…..but I haven’t checked their work yet, so we’ll see how much more work there is to do presently.

I made pizza margarhita for lunch using homemade pesto, fresh tomatoes, fresh basil and mozzerella cheese, it was delicious!

Back to the garden!