Busy busy busy

No doubt, the length in time between now and my previous blog bears evidence to the busyness of our lives at the given moment. Last night, I preached at our church on Romans 8, today and tomorrow Amber is at a conference in State College for sign language interpreting, and tomorrow I take the GRE in hopes of bettering more scores to increase my chances of getting into a quality PhD program next fall. Hopefully, by tomorrow night I'll be able to breath a sigh of relief!

During the month of June, I was also able to submit a philosophy essay to an academic journal, which is currently being peer reviewed but the editor of the journal said he was planning on publishing it. Additionally, I wrote a book review on a recent commentary regarding the works of Emmanuel Levinas and sent it off to another academic journal. And today, I put in the mail a grant proposal to an organization that offers fellowships worth up to $3000 to do research on the nexus between theology and society. Ah, the games I play all in the name of academic advancement. Now its the waiting game, but it was also a relief to get these projects done and submitted.

This last Thursday, Shane Claiborne visited our church and spoke to a packed out crowd regarding his latest book, "Jesus for President," which I highly recommend. CNN was there too, and you can check out their coverage of it right here. Consequently, some friends from Indianapolis dropped in to see us the same day while in the middle of a road trip, so we managed to go to half of the event, and then stepped out in order to spend time with them (thanks for stopping by Dennis and Heidi!).

How (Too) Firm A Foundation

Finally, after an uphill battle, I think our garden is starting to shape up. Of course, it's still a little bit behind schedule and it won't bear any fruit for another few weeks, at least its starting to grow. Turns out, the dirt in PA just isn't cut out for growing vegetables as its about 20% clay. I talked to an owner of a local nursery and he said, "You could make bricks out of our dirt here. It takes at least two years of tilling the ground here and working in compost and organic materials before you'll get good soil." Nice...Guess we should've looked into things a bit more. No wonder everyone has raised beds around here.

Nevertheless, we've made three big changes that I think have helped us out tremendously. First, we placed our grass clippings around the plants in order to help hold in moisture and keep the ground from drying out so quickly. Next, we broke down and used some 20-20-20 fertilizer we had around the house (we had hoped to go "organic" but... alas...). Finally, I brought home about twenty pounds of used coffee grounds from the coffee shop I work at and we spread it around our plants. So, "with your powers combined..." we're finally starting to see some progress.

In other news, I managed to get an assistantship next school year as an editor for Duquesne's academic publishing company. Not only does it pay for my tuition and offer a stipend, it will provide me an insider's look on the publishing business and provide me some ample opportunities to make contact with people within academia. Part of my job description will be finding scholars within the field who can serve as peer reviewers of the manuscripts Duquesne is thinking about publishing. Additionally, I was just accepted to present a paper on the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, at a national conference in Seattle in late August. My brother Bryce just moved there, so not only will I get to present "with the big dogs," I'll have a chance to see my brother and have a free place to stay.

We're having fun continuing our CVS treasure hunt and earning "Extra Care Bucks" (ECBs) The last couple times, we've combined coupons with CVS sales, and along with the return ECBs, we've actually earned money off our transactions... Craziness. For instance, we purchased everything in the picture to the right for a total of 67 cents after using coupons and ECBs. The last time we went, we purchased some shampoo, deoderant, and other things, and after everything panned out, we spent about 20 cents, and made money on our ECBs. The clerk was incredulous.

Last weekend, we saw Over the Rhine perform in Pittsburgh. It was somewhat of a disappointing show even though we enjoy their music so much. The show was only about an hour long and the seats Amber and I were right next to the speakers. We listened to most of the show with our ears plugged! Overall, we had a fun time though, as virtually everyone we know in Pittsburgh was in attendance. We went out with most of them afterwards to a place called Fatheads that has some of the most amazing hamburgers.

Aside from all these things, I've been busying myself with relearning Algebra in preparation for the GRE which I am retaking in early July for my Phd applications and getting over a cold that Amber graciously passed on to me. I went through a whole roll of Halls yesterday to ease my sore throat, and now I'm on to the perpetual nose-drainage stage... Who knew one head could produce so much snot... (TMI, I know). Hopefully, I'll be feeling better soon so I can stay on top of the various projects I am working onat the moment.

Do You Believe?

“The sterner part of me, the part that’s determined to be nobody’s fool, says, ‘Just admit it. God is a fiction we’ve invented to help us live with our awareness of our own mortality.’ Dogs and cats think they will live forever, and have no god. I can’t help but notice that the only species that knows from the get-go that it will one day no longer be alive is the one that erects cathedrals and marches around with statues dressed in robes.

“But at the same time a universe with no ordering intelligence of any kind is so barren. I wonder if some of us aren’t too smart for our own good on the subject. It’s easy, especially in this late age, to congratulate yourself on your ability to see through everything, but when you see through everything you end up with nothing at all. Do I, does anyone really and truly want to be so undeluded as to live in a world wholly devoid of mystery and magic?”

- Novelist Michael Cunningham when asked, “Do you believe in God?” in Antonio Monda, Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 36.

Update on the Green/Frugal Experiment

We've had an uphill battle with the garden. Upon returning home from our Memorial Day trip, we discovered that something (probably a rabbit) had taken upon itself to eat the heads off of every one of the tomato seedlings we had planted and a couple of the pepper plants. We could barely tell that anything had even been planted. On top of this, there was evidence of bugs chewing holes into some of the other pepper leaves, and one of our zucchini plants decided to keel over and die. Overall, the ground also looked way too dry and was probably inhibiting growth.

So, this past week, I spent my days bringing in reinforcements. I tilled the garden area again, adding compost & manure as well as some organic supplemental soil. I planted more tomatoes, this time covering each one with their own personal force-field. I planted more peppers, and then sprayed everything with an environmentally-friendly spray that basically keeps animals away because they don't like the smell (kind of smells like rotten eggs). Now, I think we're finally making some progress. Our cucumbers and yellow squash are beginning to flower, the other plants are getting used to the sun, and we've had some good rain over the last couple days. We may even have some lettuce coming out of the ground as well!

In other news, Amber and I are coming up with new and innovative ways to save money. One way is through CVS's "Extra Care Bucks" program. There are numerous people out there who blog on this topic, but essentially it works like this: each month, CVS has products that, when purchased with your CVS member card, give you a coupon of the same amount of the product. In other words, the product is virtually free, and then when combined with other manufacturer's coupons and other CVS discounts, people have figured out ways to actually make money off this program by only purchasing the items that give the biggest bang for the buck. Once you put in $15-20 to purchase your first items with "ECBs," as long as you keep purchasing things that give you more of them, you basically pay nothing in your next visits if you add things up right. We've tried it several times, and not only is it a way to get things for really cheap that will be put to use at some point (even if it means stocking up on 1500 q-tips at the moment!), it's also kind of fun to see how much you can get for the least amount of money. And since there's a CVS a block from our house, we don't even have to pay gas to get there!

On Living Long, Living Fully

This weekend, Amber and I spent 13 hours in our car to drive home to Lafayette, IN and back to Pittsburgh. Of course, with gas prices as they are, one would wonder who in their right mind would be taking road trips so frequently, but it was so worth it. This past Sunday night, my 82-year grandma was baptized and became a member of the church I grew up in. It was such an amazing moment to watch this short, old lady, this gentle, warm spirit, to walk into the waters and get dunked. I was moved as I listened to her testimony - something I had not heard before - and hear her recount the many twists and turns life has brought her and the way her faith has grown since the death of my grandfather and her move to Lafayette.

It's weird how God works sometimes. For years, we prayed for my mom's family and their spiritual walks, and for years my grandparents had issues with my family's Baptist church and its conservative, Republican leanings (and probably for good reasons!). So when my parents first told me my grandma had decided to get baptized and become a member, I couldn't believe it. Then, my mom said, "It's just amazing how all these years, you boys and our family have slowly had an influential impact on her life." And I responded, "Yeah, but it goes both ways. She may be becoming a member of our church, but she's convinced our family to vote Democrat!" [Go Obama!!] What a wonderful thing it is to be in relationships with people with whom we have sharp differences only to find that, through humility, those differences can help shape and mold our own views and turn into dialogue, mutual sharing, and positive influence.

This was really a large part of the message of the pastor this past Sunday. Of course, I honestly did have reservations going back to my home church, and still have qualms about the conservative, Baptist framework, but it was a beautiful thing to see so many people I know and love, hear the old and great hymns of my childhood, and sit under the preaching of the pastor I grew up with. He spoke largely on the need for Christians to spend more time building relationships with the lost, the despised, the dropouts of society. He challenged this conservative congregation to spend time with those Jesus spent time with, those who even secular society consider the scum of the earth and told him it was wrong to cave into the insular, confining sub-culture of conservative Christianity that always lives in fear of what people think of us if we're hanging out with the 'wrong' people. What a message we all need to hear. And who knows, maybe those we consider "wrong" and the lost cases of society can prove to teach us more than we ever imagined. Maybe we'll be able to see the many ways we ourselves are wrong, are lost cases.

Highlights from Memorial Day Weekend

This past weekend, Amber and I went with a couple friends to see the Cubs rout the Pirates on Friday night (good thing we went that night as the Cubs lost the next two in extra innings!). It was a fun night and an active game as baseball games go as the Cubs scored in virtually every inning. As always, the view of Pittsburgh is great from PNC Park (the tickets are cheap too!), and this night's game ended with a great fireworks display.

Then, on Saturday, while Amber's car was getting some minor repairs (to the tune of over $400 - eeek!), we decided to take a road trip to Baltimore and quickly reserved hotel rooms for two nights. We found some decent hotels at a great price out by the Baltimore airport, which was only a ten minute drive from downtown (which beats paying for overnight parking downtown!). So, four hours later on Saturday night, we were walking the streets of downtown Baltimore by the harbor of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore's skyline isn't as spectacular as Pittsburgh's but the harbor sure is an added bonus - as well as the amazing crab cakes!

Overall, we didn't really do all that much while in Baltimore. We walked, shopped, checked the parking meter to ensure we didn't get a ticket, enjoyed the cable TV in the hotel room, and took pictures of the various museums from afar as opposed to actually paying the cost of going in. Baltimore has several museums around the harbor including the USS Constellation, a ship that seized 14 slave ships and freed over 400 slaves while it was in use.

In the cultural district, we viewed the first monument to George Washington, found a monument commemorating the French soldier, Marquis de Lafayette, who supported Washington during the Revolution (and happens to be the person whom my hometown is named after), walked through the Peabody Institute, and strolled by some of Baltimore's other museums.

In the evening, we walked around downtown again, struck up a long conversation with a homeless man (we noticed a lot of them actually) and gave him a couple dollars, and took a picture of the boyhood home of Babe Ruth. Other than that, I just enjoyed taking pictures.

On Living Green

So, I've been spending a lot of time working around the house this summer amidst furthering my graduate studies. Yesterday, I spent a good deal of the day planting some of our seedlings in our garden - which I tilled by hand with a hoe. It was definitely time for us to start planting them since they were starting to overtake our kitchen counter, we no longer had enough flourescent lights to help cover them all, and some of them weren't doing well in the organic soil we had them in. So the thought occurred to me that I'd take ya'll on a little tour of our attempts to live green (AND save money!):

Of course, one of the obvious things to do is to recycle. Unfortunately, Mt. Lebanon only recycles Plastics 1 & 2, glass, and aluminum, but hey at least it’s a start.
Pittsburgh's recycling program is much broader, so we actually have a little collection of other plastics, paperboard, and cardboard we hope to take to a recycling site at some point. We also try to reuse plastic water bottles and run them through the dishwasher before recycling them, but we’re rethinking this one as it’s not the safest of things to do.

Then, there's our huge collection of plastic grocery bags. Thankfully, there is a grocery store nearby that serves as a collection site to actually recycle these things, but rather than contribute to this massive waste of plastic (which take some 1000 years to decompose), we've finally bought some of those reusable grocery sacks... now if only we can consistently remember to take them with us to the store!

Next, there's the pile of recycled paper we have. At the nearby junior high school, there's a "paper retriever" we take these to periodically. There's actually another printer paper sized box in my car full of paper to recycle, that I took over there a week or so ago, but the retriever was so crammed full, that I had to wait for another day. We also try really hard to salvage all the printer paper that has printing on only one side and use it to print out things that aren't important, make grocery and to-do lists, etc.

Then, there's our wonderful compost pile Amber convinced us to start. It begins with putting our table scraps in our 5 gallon bucket... yuck. And then, combined with yard clippings, dead leaves, and so forth, we have a growing little pile outside. Its just a big pile of nastiness right now, but in a year, it will be usable compost (hopefully!). Combined with our recycling, its amazing how little we take out to the curb each week for trash day. Most weeks, we have one trash bag and that's it.

Next, we have our seedlings and garden. Two summers ago when we owned a house in Indianapolis, we had a bumper crop of cucumbers (well, until they got diseased...), yellow squash, zucchini (mmm, zucchini bread!), one lone pepper (stupid rabbits!), and more tomatoes than we knew what to do with. That time, we purchased all the seedlings from nearby greenhouses. Now, we started from the ground up with seeds in our dark basement which were then moved under flourescent lights in our kitchen when they started to sprout. Again, trying to reuse, we scrounged the house as much as we could to find containers we could utilize as temporary plots. Thus, many of our seedlings started in old plastic containers that used to contain ricotta cheese, sour cream, and shredded cheese, along with styrofoam cups from Panera Bread and Hampton Inn that I had picked up at some point and finally had a reason to use. We even used some of our rubbermaid containers that had AWOL lids.

We were totally amazed at how many plants came up. At one point we had a dozen zucchini, a 17 yellow squash, 5 cucumber, 35 peppers, and 98 tomato plants (ok, so Amber really likes fresh tomatoes!). We managed to contribute about half of them to our church which has been selling seedlings to raise money for their urban farm where they are trying to reclaim unusable land in the city of Pittsburgh and use it for something redemptive. Then, we gave some away, some died (sadness!), and others have relocated to the garden where we hope other seedlings will go once we think they're ready. It's kind of scary taking them outside. Kind of like a mother bird kicking her baby out of the nest - You're afraid the cold air might kill them or the hot sun will wilt them... so we'll see what happens!

And there’s our “wild garden” – well, actually its just wild mint growing all over our yard – yes, right next to the huge hole in our driveway wear the neighborhood squirrels, chipmunks, and even raccoons frequently visit. I’ve been able to boil some of it to make some GREAT-tasting mint water.

There are still other things we've done too in order to live more green and conserve energy. We try to unplug things that we don't regularly use, such as our computer printer, toaster, blender, DVD player, and paper shredder, as unbeknownst to a lot of people, you're often paying for a little electricity even if things are just plugged in without being on. We turn off our computer screen and try to turn off lights when they're not in use. The thought occurred to me the other day that if Amber and I stay in the same room, even while doing different things, we can use a lot less light. During the day, I try to use as much natural light as I can instead of having lights on in the house too. We keep our thermostat down lower than is typical and I just wear a sweater (Amber doesn't like that one too well). We try to wash our clothes on cold whenever we can and try to limit having water running too long or more than we need. Heck, I've even found a way to collect rainwater in order to reuse that - all our other gutters drain underground, but here there's a hole in our gutter and drips unto our sidewalk! LOL.
We've also tried to cut down on our impact on the environment in the chemicals we use. We've switched to environmentally friendly detergent for our clothes and dishes by Biokleen and Seventh Generation, which is a bit more costly, but we've managed to by them on sale and with coupons which helps. We've also tried to limit our use of draino in unclogging our bathroom sink, which seems to clog up about every week. I've managed to create a pipe cleaner out of old guitar strings which I use to essentially "floss" the drain as much as I can. Then, I use boiling salt water as a more environmentally-friendly (and cheaper) means of unclogging the drain. A mixture of baking soda and vinegar supposedly works too, but I've had difficulty being successful.

Other money saving tips we've tried to do: Aside from owning Honda Civics, this past year, I've walked and used public transportation as much as I can. Last night, we needed to take a walk, and decided to walk to Library instead of making an unneeded car trip. We've also started paying more attention to the grocery store sales and only buying what is on sale, and have decided to get the Sunday paper for the sole purpose of getting the coupons. In Pittsburgh, there are a few grocery store chains and have found that those that don't provide the gas perks on your food purchases (which is basically a scam and largely caters to those who drive big-ass SUVs) are WAY cheaper.

I think I've exhausted our list. If you have some good ideas for going green that I haven't mentioned, I'd love to hear about them!