No Arms, No Legs, No Worries

This is beautiful!

Chocolate Pudding Recipe

I was just going through some old emails, and I came across this recipe for chocolate pudding that I "invented" a few years ago.  I'm just passing it along for anyone who might be interested in trying it.  It works best in the winter, though.

 

Chocolate Pudding

Mix up the Perfect Hot Chocolate* recipe with quite a bit of extra agave and extra coconut milk added, and put it in a pan to heat on the stove.  Heat it up a couple of different times and let a few people have some out of it. Listen to some of them complain that they don't like hot cocoa made out of almond milk.  Then a couple of hours later come in and decide you want some and turn the heat back on to medium.  Forget about it and drive around the corner to see a neighbor's t.v. that is for sale, with the car sputtering the whole way (it doesn't like the cold).  Go back out to the car and realize the sputtering wasn't because of the cold, but because it was out of gas.  Go tell the neighbor why you are still in her driveway and be grateful that she happens to have 1/2 gallon of gas in a container in her garage.  Feeling grateful that the car now starts, back out of the driveway and get stuck on the ice patch on the street in front of the driveway.  Wait till the neighbor comes out and laughs at you and have her help you and 3 little neighbor kids try to rock it out of its predicament.  Finally ask her if she has any sand (no), carpet (no), or--then she remembers that she has some long strips of shingles and puts them under the back tires.  The van backs up easily and you can now be on your way.  Go to the gas station closest to your house and realize that the gougers are charging 13 cents more per gallon than everyone else.  Go downtown and fill up the tank and come home at least 1/2 later (but it had to be more) to find the stuff boiling like crazy.  Turn it off, thinking you'll have to throw it out.  Serve it to the family later as pudding.   Smile  realizing that even the ones who didn't like it as cocoa are now eating it as pudding. 
  It worked for me!   
 
*This was a recipe that a friend developed using almond and coconut milk, and agave as a sweetener, but I don't know where it is at the moment.  It probably works just as well with any hot cocoa recipe, though, all things considered. :)

Today!

 

A friend posted this on her blog this morning.  I had never read it before, but I really like it and I'm going to hang it somewhere I can read it often.  

Today

So here hath been dawning
Another blue day:
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away?
Out of Eternity
This new day is born:
In to Eternity
At night will return.
Behold it aforetime
No eye ever did:
So soon it forever
From all eyes is hid.
Here hath been dawning
Another blue day:
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away?
—Thomas Carlyle

Baseball in Heaven! Woohoo!

This is a fun story. I hope it's true (except for the last part).


Rose and Barb

Two 95-year-old women, Rose and Barb had been friends all of their lives.

When it was clear that Rose was dying, Barb visited her every day.

One day Barb said, 'Rose, we both have loved playing women's softball all our lives, and we even played all through High School. Please do me one favor: when you get to Heaven, somehow you must let me know if there's women's softball there..'

Rose looked up at Barb from her deathbed and said, 'Barb, you've been my best friend for many years. If it's at all possible, I'll do this favor for you.'

Shortly after that, Rose passed on.

A few nights later, Barb was awakened from a sound sleep by a blinding flash of white light and a voice calling out to her, 'Barb, Barb.'
'Who is it?', asked Barb, sitting up suddenly. 'Who is it?'

'Barb -- it's me, Rose.'

'You're not Rose. Rose just died.'

'I'm telling you, it's me, Rose,' insisted the voice.

'Rose! Where are you?'

'In Heaven,' replied Rose. 'I have some really good news and a little bad news.'

'Tell me the good news first,' said Barb.

'The good news,' Rose said, 'is that there's softball in Heaven. Better yet all of our old buddies who died before us are here, too. Better than that, we're all young again. Better still, it's always springtime, and it never rains or snows. And best of all, we can play softball all we want, and we never get tired.'

'That's fantastic,' said Barb. 'It's beyond my wildest dreams! So what's the bad news?'


'You're pitching Tuesday.'

Life is uncertain - eat dessert first.

Great Songs for a Sunday Afternoon

I Can Only Imagine



Amazing Grace



My Kindness Shall Not Depart From Thee

Bring the Rain

This is a powerful reminder to praise the Lord in both the good and the bad times. Enjoy!



Lyrics to Bring the Rain by Mercy Me

I can count a million times
People asking me how I
Can praise You with all that I’ve gone through
The question just amazes me
Can circumstances possibly
Change who I forever am in You
Maybe since my life was changed
Long before these rainy days
It’s never really ever crossed my mind
To turn my back on you, oh Lord
My only shelter from the storm
But instead I draw closer through this time
So I pray…

Bring me joy, bring me peace
Bring the chance to be free
Bring me anything that brings You glory
And I know there’ll be days
When this life brings me pain
But if that’s what it takes to praise You
Jesus, bring the rain

I am Yours regardless of
The clouds that may loom above
Because You are much greater than my pain
You who made a way for me
By suffering Your destiny
So tell me what’s a little rain
So I pray…

Holy, holy, holy
Is the Lord God Almighty

The Three Little Pigs

Hang in there for a wonderful ending!

A Good Laugh!

Marriage by Orson Scott Card

AMERICA HAS BECOME tragically ignorant about something we once seemed to understand: marriage.

Even in the church, we postpone marriage later and later, as if it were a particularly unpleasant dental appointment. There's so much to do first — we have to "find out who we are." We have to get our careers established. We have to prove we're successful.

I had a taste of that myself when I got married back in 1977. I had sold my first novel and wanted to get it finished and delivered ... before I got married. So I was just a few minutes late getting to the temple because I had to finish photocopying that manuscript and get it into the mail.

What was I thinking? That it would somehow be better if my wife knew for sure that she was not part of my career as a writer?

That's such a silly mistake — that we must or even can "find ourselves" before we've made that lifelong (or longer) commitment.

Here's why it's a mistake: We don't ever "find" ourselves. Instead, in marriage, we make ourselves.

No, we make each other — as a joint project. We turn ourselves into a perfect fit. Our self is the marriage, and our part in it. There is no "I" without the "we."

In the March 2008 Atlantic Monthly, Lori Gottlieb, a never-married woman who chose to have a child without ever meeting the donor, writes a plaintive lament called "Marry Him!" (See TheAtlantic.com.)

The article is worth reading in its entirety. But to sum it up, Gottlieb makes it plain that while she doesn't regret having her beloved child, she wishes she had done it the right way — as part of a marriage, with a partner.

She talks about the advantages of marriage — even if you don't have a lot of romantic feelings for your partner. After all, she points out, you don't spend that much time together anyway, once you're married. Instead, you have a division of labor. Ideally, one earns the living while the other does the child care and maintenance of the house and home.

And yet, even if you aren't often together, there's somebody who shares your goals and your problems, somebody to rely on, somebody to hear you out. You're not alone.

She remembers, with regret, all the almost-good-enough men she refused to "settle for" because they didn't measure up to some romantically idealized list.

Too bad she hadn't heard President Spencer W. Kimball's remarks on the subject back in 1976:

"'Soul mates' are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price."

Romance is nice. But it is biological in origin. That dizzy head-over-heels feeling is a species of losing your mind, and most of the time it lasts only as long as the chase.

What we keep forgetting is that in marriage, as opposed to romances, you aren't marrying the thrilling wonderful perfect Someone you're looking at right now.

You're marrying the man who decides not to have the dazzling career with the high salary, refusing promotions and transfers so the kids don't have to change schools. You're marrying the woman whose body doesn't bounce back after the third baby, so she's no longer slim and attractive by the standards of the magazines.

You're marrying the migraines and the hemorrhoids and the heart attack and the cancer; you're marrying the irritable, forgetful, lazy, thoughtless, sarcastic, distracted, too-busy days as well as the Kodak-happy ones.

You're marrying the one who works with you to raise the retarded or crippled child, or stands with you at the graveside of the child who dies.

You're marrying the one who can't find work after the company folds or he's laid off; you're marrying the early Alzheimer's, the diabetes, the obesity, the pain of conflict and the struggle of forgiveness.

The foundation of that isn't some ideal of romantic love. It's a commitment based on the goals you share. And real love, married love, is not what you start with — it's what you create together along the way.

How foolish, when our young people wait to find love, or to have God show them their foreordained mate, instead of rationally looking at the eligible people and choosing someone who can and will live up to the commitment of marriage, someone with shared faith, someone with whom you can establish friendship and affection.

All marriages are between strangers. And sometimes it's the boring man who'll make the best husband, the plain woman who'll make the best mother.

It takes time to come to know the other person; it take time for each of you to become someone new and different and perfectly adapted to the other. You'll be there through the whole process, though, because your commitment is stronger than the bands of death.

But as that knowledge grows, so does the real love, the deep love. Compared to the thick, strong fabric of married love, romantic love is a Kleenex. You can't make anything out of it. It's disposable — there's always another in the box.

All the things you think you have to do before you get married are a waste of precious time. Start the marriage, then do the other things for and with each other.

None of your plans will work out exactly as you hoped; but the partnership of a good man and a good woman who are "willing to pay the price" will outlast all such plans.

My wife and I are only 30 years into this journey, so we're still working it out. But I imagined the end of the mortal portion of the trip, and wrote this:

Well Paired Team
By Orson Scott Card

You don't arrive at marriage, lonely hearts.
The wedding's where the lifelong journey starts,
Forced to travel with a clumsy fool
Or trot along behind a receding dream
(You had to stop and help me when I tripped,
While you would never stick to my passionate script),
Using one another like an ill-made tool,
Like ox and antelope yoked in a single team.
And yet ... somehow, together, we managed to pull
An empty cart straight uphill;
And look — the creaking, rickety thing is full
Of crockery, old rags, a child or two.

At the start, knowing nothing, we said "I will,"
And now look at all the things I made with you,
All our baggage, all our breakage, art
By unskilled artisans, yet beautiful,
Yours and mine, no matter how peculiar;
New and strange, no matter how familiar.
Some passages were merely dutiful.
Who could know, on our ignorant starting day
That, pulling such a long and weary way,
The man, the woman, strangers side by side,
Would end the trek inside each other's heart,
Trading forgiveness and repentances,
Finishing each other's sentences,
Only to be stranded,
The team — for now at least — disbanded.
Now we see how all the road maps lied:
Our destination was the yoke we shared,
Badly at first, but by the end well paired.
And only when you died did I leave my home
And pointlessly, empty-carted, roam.
You don't arrive at marriage, lonely hearts.
The wedding's where the lifelong journey starts.

Zion--Building Up The Kingdom of God on Earth

Judge Not

I had a wonderful opportunity a couple of weeks ago to be able to work in the LDS Bishops' Storehouse in SLC for a few hours a day, for several days. The storehouses were built to help fulfill one of the missions of the Church, which is to help the poor and feed the hungry. First thing in the morning, there will be a line of people outside their door wanting to work for food. They take as many as they can and find work for them in the storehouse, in exchange for some groceries. Those who work the morning shift, also get lunch. People from all walks of life come there, many whom I would be afraid to approach on the street. It was wonderful to be in that safe environment, where I was given the opportunity to take people around the store to pick out the groceries on their order form, that had been decided on with the help of their bishop, or the bishop at the storehouse, if they are transients without a permanent address. The experience helped remind me that people are just people, and we are all carrying around our own set of baggage. In mentioning the experience to a friend a few days later, she said it would be so helpful if everyone of us had to wear a badge that said something like: "I'm broken. I am an alcoholic," "I'm broken. My child is prison for dealing drugs," or listing the myriad other weaknesses that we all have. It seemed like something like that would help us all to realize that we are all in need of compassion, and to realize that none of us is any better than any of the rest of us. I think if we could see into each others' hearts, we would approach people more in an effort to help where we might, than to judge them for the issues we perceive that they have.

I'm sure the badge idea will never come into vogue, though, because most of us are so self-conscious about our weaknesses, that we'd probably never go out of the house if we knew that everyone got to know everything about us. It's probably all part of the long-term plan that we can't know that now, but we have been told that all will be revealed in the next life. As we judge, so shall we be judged. It seems like we would do well to just learn to love and accept everyone as they are and leave the judging to God. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't be careful, if care is needed, but maybe by learning to be closer to the Spirit we will know when to be careful and when to be helpful.

In her book Consider the Butterfly, Carol Lynn Pearson talks about a day that she had been called to jury duty. After showing up and going through the questioning, she ended up not being chosen to serve that time. As she left the courthouse and headed to her car, she was thinking about the idea of being released from jury duty, and she realized that when Jesus told us to "judge not," he was essentially saying that we, too, have been released from jury duty. We can work on ourselves and leave the judgment of others to God. What a pleasant thought!

This is the new "wear your seatbelt" ad the UK is showing on TV. It was started by some guy not hired to do it, but because the cause is important to him, he came up with this idea. And now it's being hailed across the world as a beautiful commercial!! The video has become so popular with the general public that people are forwarding it to friends/family on their own so quickly that it has spread all over the world in a very short time.
Click on the video to open it up so you can see the whole thing.

Have you not heard?

This version must the from the New Inspired Version of the Old Testament. I really liked it with the picture, but I wanted to put King James' version here, also, because I love the way the poetry flows (expanded to include verses 28-31):

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:

But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.