Blog (OLD)

My Paint Colors

August 25, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 22 Comments

Because this well could be the most asked question in recent times, I thought it was high time I put all the paint colors in one post. Here’s the only glitch. I can’t remember the paint color of the girls’ vanity and I keep forgetting to call and ask my cabinet maker. I’ll do it, I promise. Also, for your viewing pleasure, I’ll include pictures of the rooms, along with the colors listed. It’s all because I love you and I’m so exhausted from my run with Caiti today that I’ve decided the rest of the day today must be dedicated to things I can do while ~~lying face down on the floor~~ sitting down.

All colors are Benjamin Moore except Sea Salt, which is Sherwin Williams.

The Living Room:: Wall Color–1:1 mix of hazy skies and abingdon putty, Built-ins—Abingdon Putty

Full living room post here!

The Kitchen:: Walls–1:1 mix of hazy skies and abingdon putty, cabinets—fieldstone and great barrington green, ceiling–sea salt

Full kitchen post with sources, here.

The Workroom:: Walls—Conch Shell Pink, Built-ins—Fieldstone

Full Workroom post here!

The Girls’ Room:: Wall–Sea Salt
Full Girls’ Room post here!

The Sultry Master::Walls–graphite
Full master bedroom post here!

There’s now a link to this post in the sidebar so it’ll be easy to access.
Hope your weekend is full and happy!
xoxo,
edie

Open House:: “Java and Jewelry”

August 23, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 11 Comments

Dear Lovies!

You are cordially invited to a very informal gathering/open house at my home next Friday, August 31st from 9-12. My friend Helga will be here with her new loot of Premier Jewelry and I’ll be whipping up some good coffee and snackies and will be happy to show you around the ole homestead, especially if you’ve yet to see it all rebuilt!

I hope you’ll come. I really do. When you decide whether or not if it’ll work with your schedule, shoot me a quick email so I’ll have enough cherry chocolate chip cookies for your pretty self. If you live within driving distance to hang out with us, send me an email proving to me that you’re not an ax murderer and I’ll give you the top secret code. I’m kinda prejudice against ax murderers but otherwise, I’m a lover.

Pretty much, head towards Bean Station and turn left. But if you’re OCD and like exact directions, I’m here to serve.

If you email about this, (ediewadsworth at mac dot com) make sure and put ‘open house’ as the subject and hopefully I won’t lose it the great black abyss which is my inbox.

Two other things you should know:

1) Ruth is in the house!!!! She is a blogger extraordinaire and her cute little picture is this month’s Woman’s Day. I’m so excited she’s here for a visit and her girls are so completely adorable.

2)My friend, Michele wrote THE MOST AWESOME post on The Odyssey. You’ve gotta read it. And I’ve been wanting the bust of Odysseus for-like-ever and she has it! I may have to invite myself to her house and steal it. She was even darling enough to say yes when I asked for her help with our online classics book club. I don’t know of anyone who loves books more than Michele, she is a beautiful book-loving friend, with such a contagious zest for life!

Hope you are at least giving the book a start. I’m still working on posting some reading tips. Be patient and just keep turning the page!

If you could only read one classic book and learn nearly all of life’s important lessons, it would be The Odyssey. It’s just that good. Homecoming is just that good:)))

How to Make Salsa (for canning)

August 19, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 60 Comments

how to make salsa

The first time I ever had this salsa, I was in the North Woods on vacation and Mi-uss Vicki (as my Southern self calls her) brought this to the cabin for our snacking pleasures. I was smitten and determined to never let a summer go by without canning salsa up a storm. This year, I had some stellar help in the sweat shop. It was a virtual tomato fest all day long and we passed the time with Ralph Stanley the Clinch Mountain Boys and their banjos and fiddles. It was a toe-tapping good time. You can’t have my lovely help but I will share the recipe!

Don’t be scared off by the ‘canning’ part. You don’t need a big pressure cooker or canner for this recipe. Almost every jar seals just by the heat of the salsa and the one that doesn’t will be perfect for eating (soon) or sharing. Or putting in the fridge if you possibly have that much will power.

Put whole tomatoes in boiling H20 a few min; then peel off skin.

16c.chopped tomatoes

2c. green peppers

2c. onions

3 jalapeno peppers

6 garlic cloves/chopped

11/2 T. salt

1T. pepper

3T. chili powder

3T. sugar

1/2c. lemon juice

1/2c. vinegar

Simmer:30-40 min.

To thicken I put in 1 sm. Cans of tomato paste.

You can adjust the jalapeños for your own heat level. We made a hot version and used 5 peppers per batch!

Simmer 30-40 minutes.

Makes approx: 5 1/2 qts.

I can’t exactly remember how many tomatoes it takes to make a batch of this but it’s probably close to 16 med/large tomatoes.

If your jars are clean and warm/hot, the jars will seal without doing a water bath. My jars weren’t even warm and all sealed minus one, which was perfect for eating the fruits of our well-earned labor! If you’re a little more precise and OCD than me, than by all means you can boil them in jars to ensure sealing. They sometimes won’t seal until 12-24 hours later but if they don’t seal, make sure and eat or refrigerate!

Happy canning and hope your week is full of lots of homemade joy!

To find other recipes, visit my recipes page!

If you’re interested in joining our new classical book club, check out the new forum! We are reading The Odyssey for September!

Lifeingrace Forum and other things I’m thankful for…….

August 15, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 21 Comments

Here’s what been happening on the home front……

Forum

I can hardly even believe the response to the book club.

You people are as crazified as I am.

Y’all seem so genuinely excited. I thought I was the only person I knew who could get so excited about reading The Odyssey. You validate my nerdiness in the best kinda way. As some of you know who follow me on Facebook, I’ve had trouble with the email list. As in, I entered forty thousand (slightly exaggerated) names and email addresses and blog addresses into my system and then my system refused to send the email because there were too many recipients. I still haven’t figured out how to send it because I’m a little tech-challenged.

Soooo, my trusty side-kick Nick gave me the brilliant idea of setting up a forum on my blog so that we’d have a place to discuss and ponder our deep and brilliant thoughts on Odysseus. It’s a stroke of genius. Y’all are gonna hate me because I don’t think I’m gonna get the email thing to work but hopefully you’ll forgive me when you see the coolness of the forum page. The bottom line is—joining the forum is how you join the book club. At least for now!

If you click in the menu bar on lifeingrace forum, you’ll get to the main page. I’ve created a forum for homeschooling, faith and bookclub so far and will add more later. If you click on book club and then ‘getting started with the odyssey’ and then ‘the lost art of reading’, you’ll be able to read the first email. You should also sign into the forum so you’ll be able to participate in the discussion. I’ve linked to an article there from the LA Times, written several years ago, called The Lost Art of Reading and it’s a fascinating article about how, as a culture, we’ve lost the ability to slow down and contemplate real ideas and thoughts because we’re so saturated with soundbites and tweets and urgent (but often irrelevant) information. I think it’s a good place to start as we begin a journey of reading often difficult classic works. I’m working on a video blog full of reading tips for the Odyssey so maybe I’ll finish it this week. If you want to be a part of the book club, go ahead and purchase The Odyssey and get started! We’ll discuss it in increments beginning the second week in September.

Cashier’s Showhouse

In other news, my friend Angela, from The Painted House, invited me and few other bloggers to her cottage home in the Blue Ridge Mountains to do a tour of the 2012 Cashiers showhouse and to do some shopping and antiquing in Asheville. I’ll be spending the night Friday night and visiting the house on Saturday. Asheville is one of my favorite corners of the world so it should be lots of fun. If you live in the area, you can buy tickets to the house on site and I can email you directions. There’s more info here on Angela’s cottage website about the tour! Thanks, Angela!!!!

God Bless Texas

By some lovely turn of fate, a wonderful group of Lutheran bloggers have taken me under their wing and raised me as their own. We’re headed to Texas in September for a weekend of Lutheran Awesomeness and by that I mean—-cowboy boots, country line dancing, BBQ eating, antique-shopping, cocktail-drinking along with lots of food, fun and fellowship. Y’all do know how much I love Texas, right? The home of George W , Friday Night Lights, big hair, big belt buckles, and cowboy boots. I can hardly contain the joy. In preparation, I’ve been practicing The Boot Scootin’ Boogie. Then, because my friends are so awesome, they sent THE most adorable teaser in the mail……

Thank you Adriane and Lauren and Kellee! I can hardly wait.

Chickens

I love my chickens. You can call me Ellie May if you want and I won’t even be offended. But look at how productive the little buggers are. We’re up to 4-5 eggs a day! It’s simply a beautiful thing. The daily ritual of finding eggs every day in the nesting boxes is priceless. We let ours out to free range a few hours in the evenings and granted, they make a mess of the mulch. But it seems a small price to pay for happy, healthy birds. They follow me around and try to ride on the golf cart and have been known to make a mess of my flowers. Other than a few minor annoyances, they are so much fun to have around.

In other news, we started school this week and I’ve been working on a ginormous post about our curriculum and goals for the year. Hopefully, I’ll have the stamina to finish it.

Friends

::I was blown away this weekend by this post by my friend Denise. She lost her grandson in a terrible accident and I love that she’s starting to use her gift of writing as part of the grieving process. Please keep their whole family, along with the Winstead family in your prayers as they continue to face new ‘firsts’ without their little boys.

::My friend, Patty, never ceases to amaze me with her writing and photography. She has such a beautiful way of seeing the world and is perhaps the most thoughtful woman I know. I’m so blessed that she’s my friend. I got the sweetest card in the mail from her today—the highlight of my week! Thank you sweet dear:))

::My friend, Ruth, is coming to visit us next week with her two precious littles. Ruth and I met at Blissdom and I’m not sure if she realizes how much her story has touched me. I’m so thankful for her and can’t wait to see her again. She wrote a beautiful narrative of how we met that blessed me so much.

So much more to share but so little time to blog.

Hope y’all are having a beautiful August!

Mwahhhhhhhh!

p.s. Two more things: 1)I’ve sorely neglected lifeingracegirls this summer so if you’d like to guest post there, please email me and we’ll get it going again! I may have to start begging you:)

2) I’m planning an open house on a Friday very soon (in the next two weeks) so if you live in area and would like to see the house, drink some good coffee and visit awhile, keep your eyes peeled for more info!

Read Well, Live Well::A classical online book club

August 9, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 59 Comments

Well, you convinced me to do it.

Albeit, it’s not like you had to twist my arm or anything but I’m so excited to announce the birth of a new online book club for those desiring to read or reread the classics. September is a perfect time to start, since school will be starting for most of your kiddos. I’ve debated and hemmed and hawed and done extensive research (i.e., frantic google searches) on how best to conduct an online classical book club. I think for our purposes, we will do a chronological approach instead of a genre approach. In my (amazingly, wonderful) real life book club which I started four years ago, we chose the genre approach and went by semesters. So the first semester, we read classic novels and then proceeded through every other genre, following the suggested reading list of Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Educated Mind. Novels are easier to read and so it was a great way to ‘ease in’ to reading classics and we’ve since been through the book once, picking and choosing titles that were interesting to us.

But I like the chronological approach better, as a way of following the development of western civilization and how one writer’s work builds on the writers before them—although we’ll even alter that as need be. I’m still working on the reading list but I think we’ll start with The Odyssey first. Reading classics is its own odyssey, if you will. And there will be times when you feel as if you’ve been kidnapped on a strange island by a sorceress who is bewitching your mind. But reading classics will definitely help you on your journey home!

Let’s start with The Odyssey for September and then I’ll let you know when I’ve had time to work on the rest of the list. I have this translation and it gets great reviews and if we all have the same copy, it’ll make discussion easier.

However, if you already own it, just read the one you have. My girls and I have been reading it aloud this summer and I purchased this copy for them (Odyssey) by Stanley Lombardo, which was recommended by the Duke Talented and Gifted program, and is a little easier for them to understand. It’s still in poetry form and as far as I can tell is a great junior version of the book. I’ve been taking an online course on The Odyssey so I’ll share what I’ve learned as we go along. I may move our discussions to my other blog so that people who aren’t doing the book club aren’t continuously annoyed. We’ll see. I also need to add your email address to the pool is you’re joining the book club because I’ll be sending emails occasionally, instead of posting onto the blog.

Also, I’m thinking we might have to do a live book club at my house at the end of the year to celebrate!

So……

If you are still interested, email me at ‘ediewadsworthatmacdotcom’ and make sure you put ‘book club’ in the subject of the email or it will get lost in my email abyss.

I would encourage you to go ahead and buy the book and start. It’s challenging. But remember, reading classics is a skill that you must practice. It doesn’t come natural to most of us. Just keep reading and don’t get bogged down by too many details. Just keep turning the page!

We will likely discuss the book in the middle of the month and then again at the end.

I’d also highly recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. It will be good motivation to keep on trucking!

I made this cute little button for you to place on your blog as a way to spread the word and it will link back to the book club category of my blog!

and here’s the code to place the button on your site::

Yay! I hope you’ll join us! More info to come on tips for reading classics and themes to watch for in The Odyssey.

And here’s a quote to leave you with—from Odysseus, himself.

“May the gods grant you all things which your heart desires, and may they give you a husband and a home and gracious concord, for there is nothing greater and better than this -when a husband and wife keep a household in oneness of mind, a great woe to their enemies and joy to their friends, and win high renown.”

p.s. If you have a blog and would like to be included on the blog list of book club members, let me know by including your blog address with your email address!

Read Books and Live Well, part 2

July 31, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 69 Comments

Some of you asked what’s on the proverbial night stand. Be careful what you wish for……..

Flannery O’Connor once got a letter complaining that her writing was not ‘uplifting’ enough. The reader was tired of the dark themes and twisted characters. This was O’Connor’s reply,

“There is something in us, as story-tellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least must be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether and so he has forgotten the price of restoration.”

In a larger sense, the stories and essays that we’ve gotten from the greatest authors have come to them at great price. I live and die by their books—by the hard fought words of someone else. All day, I hear the drone of culture and the drivel of my own self-centered voice in my head and I know that I am impoverished. I don’t have the right words and so I need to borrow them from someone else—–from someone who has read better books , lived in a saner time and has paid a steep price for the kernels of truth they so generously share. The words of my favorite authors color my world and wipe away the fog that our modern, consumerist society has accepted as the new status quo. I think Flannery O’Connor was right. We have forgotten the cost of redemption.

Perhaps the masters will help us remember.

**********************

My current stack is influenced by the Circe Conference speakers and by our study of the Ancients this year in our homeschool. Some of these books, I will read from cover to cover. Some I will start and never finish. Some will so capture my imagination that I will read the same chapter or even the same sentence over and over again. I don’t follow hard and fast rules when I read. But I’m thirsty for words that aren’t my own.

Here’s my latest reading list. Hope you find something helpful for your own journey.

1. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays Wendell Berry

2.Leisure: The Basis of Culture

3.Flannery O’Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America)

4.The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 T.S. Eliot

5. The Prince and the Pauper (Dover Thrift Editions)

6.The Complete Aeschylus: Volume I: The Oresteia (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

7.The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger

8.Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education James Daniels

9.The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis Leon Kass

10.The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories

11.The Problem of Suffering: A Fathers Hope

12.The Homeric Hymns

13.The City of God Augustine

14.The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

15.The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition

16.Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book Walker Percy

17.Standing by Words: Essays Wendell Berry

18.The Odyssey

19.Mind of the Maker Dorothy Sayers

20.Wild Iris

Someone mentioned that maybe we should have an online book club? Whatcha think? Would you be willing to read the classics with me? We could be geeks together. We could have our own cheer and make homemade shirts? No? Book worms have more fun 🙂