Daddy and anniversaries

Tonight I lost my dad to cancer. Though I feel incredibly cheated to have lost him so soon, I am very thankful to have had such amazing, unconditional love from such an amazing, incredible man. He was my first and greatest math and statistics teacher and has always been my biggest fan and best mentor.

Also, today was the one-year anniversary of us moving back to the States. I'm so glad that we moved back, and I'm so glad that we live so close to my parents' house. There was a time when I doubted that we were really in God's will for our lives, but I see so clearly now His hand in everything that has happened in my life. I'm so thankful that I was close to home this past year.

March's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

A birthday gift from my mom and dad

Daddy

I took the week off from work this week so that I could help my parents get to Houston for more tests for Daddy. But something happened with Daddy late last week. There was too much calcium in his blood, which does really strange things to your nervous system, as it turns out. So Daddy had to go back to the hospital. When I talked to Mom last Friday morning, she was really exhausted, so I went up there to take the night shifts at the hospital until Daddy was better. Bill came home, too, for spring break, so I came home on Tuesday after a nap. Daddy is feeling better, though I don't know when the Houston trip will be now.

One year ago from right now, Darin and the girls were exploring an ancient monastery on the Mediterranean Coast in Spain. I sat in the car with my broken leg and watched boats come in and out of the harbor and tried not to think about how much I needed a rest room. I'm going to celebrate the day by scrapbooking.

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February's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

Our first and only real snowfall, and the snow melted before the thrid day. I love Tennessee.

Best Friends

I heard the Michael W. Smith song "Friends" this evening. It's not my favorite song in the world, though it's not bad. I suppose I don't really like it because it always seems to be sung at really emotional times, and I tend to be an emotional girl.

But it got me thinking about my best friend, of course, and I realized that one of the main problems with running my own business in the middle of nowhere is that I don't see enough of my best friend.

Living in Luxembourg was difficult because of the time difference. It gave me a very limited window where I could call my parents or my friends back in the States. One nice thing about being in Tennessee is that I'm only one time zone away from most of my friends.

I've had a really difficult time connecting with people around here. I guess I'm just too different from anyone around here. It's hard to find common ground.

I suppose the moral of the story is that I need to spend some time investing in the friendships I do already have with the people that understand me, especially now that there isn't such a big time difference.

Health Insurance

It's been almost two years now since I left my good government job in DC and my good government health insurance. We had health insurance in Luxembourg, I suppose, but we never understood how to use it if we needed it (like when my middle child was bitten and scratched badly by the neighbor's cat), and we never understood how to get preventative care, like cancer screenings.

So this week, my husband started permanently at the job where he has been a temp through Kelly Services for the past eight months. So this week, for the first time in almost two years, we have health insurance.

I am old enough now that I should have had a mammogram or two by now. I've never had one. It's been over two years since I've had a pap smear. The girls haven't had a check-up in over five years. It's been over three years since any of us have been to a dentist, and the two older girls need orthodontia.

We have been doing fine financially. My husband's job is enough to pay the bills, and now my consulting business is taking off and I'm bringing in some money also. But all it would have taken in these past months is one bad illness or one bad car accident, and we would have been in big trouble financially. And though you try not worry, it's something that comes often to your mind.

I think that one of the factors that triggered my mid-life crisis and made me really want to quit my job at the Census Bureau was the death of my good friend Mary Ellen from ovarian cancer. She was only 42 when she passed away. So I quit my job and move to Europe and then move back to the States, and we're in a situation where we don't have health insurance. And you can't help but think that it doesn't matter how old you are---a health crisis can happen at any age.

My leaving the Census Bureau got us out of the DC area. We're in a house we love on land we love. The girls are adjusting to life here, though they still miss their friends in Virginia (as do I). We really are back on the track to having some stability.

It's easy to second guess the choices we've made. If I'd known we'd be without health insurance for two years, maybe I wouldn't have left my good government job. But maybe that's why God never lets us really see what lies ahead. So is it better not to know so that you take a chance, and then it all works out in the end? Or should I have been more careful, and not decided I and my family should be without health insurance right when I turned 40?

In the end, it doesn't matter. We're happy and healthy, and I'm learning to really appreciate my new life in Tennessee.

But if you're thinking about having a mid-life crisis, it's very important to think about health insurance. Don't count on having a safety net even if you move to a country with socialized medicine.

January's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

Provenance and effervescent

My brother is two years younger than me and, for as long as I can remember, he's been smarter than me. Which, now, is really cool. But when you're little, it's kind of embarrassing.

Recently my brother used the word "provenance" in reference to my grandfather's organ that he was helping me move into our new house. I have no idea what he's talking about. "Don't you watch the 'Antiques Roadshow'?" he asks. Well, I do sometimes, but I somehow tend to tune out words that I don't know the meaning of. So then my brother decides to help me improve my vocabulary by encouraging me to use the word in conversation to help me remember. Seein's how it sounds so French, and I'm all about learning French, you would think that I could remember this word. But I don't. I have a really hard time remembering the word whenever I find some opportunity to use it in a sentence. And I see the word all the time now, so I don't know how I missed it before. As an example, here is an article on Wikipedia about a really interesting painting by Jan van Eyck, and the article has a section on Provenance.

And for our other French word of the day, we're going to learn the word effervescent.

When I was in the hospital, and sick from the pain medication, I asked them to take me off the IV and bring me pills for pain instead. This, of course, was not an easy conversation for me to have in French. But that night, the nurse brings me a pill in a foil wrapper, and when I open it, the thing is the size of a 2 euro coin, which makes it bigger than a quarter and smaller than those old 50 cent pieces that I used to see sometimes with Eisenhower on them. I can hardly swallow a regular-sized aspirin, so how am I going to swallow this? I can the nurse back and ask her if I can bite the pill, and I make biting motions with my mouth. "No, no, no -- effervescent."

I look on the package that was there in my lap, and sure enough, written plain as day, is the word effervescent. I should have tried to read the instructions. I shouldn't have assumed that I wouldn't understand the French written there. The nurse asks if I understand effervescent. I tell her that I understand, and I put the pill in my cup of water to prove it to her. She asks me what the word is in English, and I tell her a bold-face lie, "Je ne sais pas" --- I don't know.

Sometimes I have serious doubts about my ability to learn French when I have so much trouble with the English.

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No Handies in America

My brother and sister bought me an MP3 player for Christmas, and I'm working on downloading my 100 free songs that came with it. I think I'm going to try to find some of the songs that I would hear on the bus in Luxembourg. I would never buy the CD for some of these people. But I'm thinking that I would like to have a copy of my theme song from Luxembourg --- "So You Had a Bad Day" by Daniel Powter.

I always assumed that I could be the last person in America to own an MP3 player or a cell phone. (And no, dearest brother and sister, this isn't a plea for you to buy me a cell phone.) It's amazing to me how many web sites and businesses and friends want my cell phone number. They look at you like you've just spit on them when you say you don't have a cell phone.

In Luxembourg, no one understands the phrase "cell phone." To most of the people in Luxembourg, they are "mobiles" or "mobile phones." Except the British. They will understand when you say "mobile," but the term they prefer is "handie." It took me a while to catch onto this phrase. I wasn't sure how to respond the first time I heard, "Well don't you have your handie on you?" I gradually got used to this term, and when we got back to the States, I had to be careful to not to say something like, "Did you remember to turn off the handie?"

I overheard some of the British ladies talking about my lack of a handie after church one day when we were still in Luxembourg. The one lady was feeling very sorry for me that I didn't have one. Her companion said, "Apparently, they don't really believe in handies in America." So somewhere in Luxembourg there is a group of British ladies who think that the only Americans who use mobile phones are in the movies --- that "real" Americans don't have mobile phones.

It's always amazing to me what a little bit of cultural exchange can do to clear up misconceptions of foreign cultures. :-)

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Nationality in The English Patient

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is set at the end of World War II in an Italian villa that temporarily houses four very different people: the mysterious English patient of the title, burned beyond recognition; Hana, an exhausted army nurse from Canada; David Caravaggio, an Italian friend of Hana's father; and Kip, an Indian sapper with the British military sent to the area to clear the mines and unexploded bombs left behind by the Germans.

It's a story about books and literature and how they affect out lives. As much as I've been reading since I've been home full-time, I really appreciate that idea.

It's also a story about nationality. The title character in the book wants to create an identity that is completely separate from nationality. He works in the desert with a team of people from different countries, and nationality doesn't get in the way of friendship for these men. To him, his family and his nationality become completely irrelevant. In the desert, and again at the Italian villa, he finds an oasis where he can connect to others without his family's identity and his nationality getting in the way. This is also true for Kip who has found it possible to get along in English society when he finds the right people, people who judge him for want he can do instead of the color of his skin. However, the war shatters the ideas that you can be separate from your nationality. As much as everyone is trying to get away from who they really are, they realize that they can't do that forever.

It's also a story about nationality, and trying to escape from bad circumstances (essentially, in this case, what happened in the war). As someone who moved overseas and understands bad circumstances (though not as bad as their circumstances during the war), I understand the power of nationality in a foreign country. You really **can't** get away from who you are and how you were raised, and it becomes very clear when you are living in a foreign country.

I won't recommend this book to the kids until they are older. I don't think my kids have read enough literature yet to understand everything. Ondaatje draws from several works of literature such as Anna Karenina and Kim, and knowing the plots of these other books really helps to understand what is happening in The English Patient. It's also good to read The Histories by Herodotus first, and two of my kids have read him already. But when the kids are older, I think that they'll understand this book and what it says about nationality.

I do recommend this book, especially for people who love literature. And I especially recommend it if you've seen the movie. Call me a nerd, but the book is much better than the movie.

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December's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

Saint Nicholas Day, 2006

Church Friends in Luxembourg

I can't believe it's been so long since I've blogged here. I think about this blog all the time.

My kids are calmer now than when we first moved to the States. I can speak French to them and they don't give me one of those really harsh stares they are so good at, especially my middle daughter. But as Luxembourg fades further and further from their lives and memory, I find myself more and more missing parts of my life there.

I have really missed Luxembourg during this Advent season. As I mentioned before, I loved the lights all around town, and the Christmas market at Place D'Armes.

But even more than the lights, I miss my church there.

At the Anglican church, we sang the most wonderful Christmas songs. And I realize that they had some problems with their pipe organ, but even on one of it's bad days, it was still a pipe organ, and with the right organist on duty, it was really a wonderful feeling to be singing along on some magnificent old hymns of the church accompanied by a real pipe organ.

I loved Chris's sermons, both his children's sermons and the grown-up sermons. I was never, ever bored during church, and I very often left with something to really think about.

One movie I wanted to see last year was Joyeux Noel, but my husband wasn't crazy about the idea, so we never went. I'm not sure they would have had it with English subtitles, and my husband would have needed the subtitles. I might have needed some help with the French, and as it turns out, the Scottish, so subtitles would have been best. I rented the movie this year, and I really enjoyed it. (OK, the lip-synching was really bad, but the rest of the movie was excellent and made up any minor problems.)

The more I thought about the themes of the movie, the more I found myself wanting to talk about it with Chris and Joan and with the people I knew in the choir. One of the main heroes of the movie is a priest from Scotland who comes up against the Anglican church. I think Chris and Joan, as Anglicans from Scotland, would have had a unique perspective on the whole thing. Also, one of the main themes of the movie was the power of music over war. One of the German soldiers is a famous opera singer from Berlin, and he begins to sing "Stille Nacht" to the German troops, and the tune is recognized by the soldiers on the other side of the line. Then the Scots begin to play "Adeste Fideles", on their bagpipes of course, and the German begins to sing it in Latin. A version of "Ave Maria" moves many of the soldiers to tears, even if they aren't Catholic or even Christians. It was really moving. The original music written for the movie was nice, with an excellent score. I would love having a chance to talk over this movie with several of my friends from choir.

I've tried to email several friends from church, but my email gets bounced back because their email servers think it's spam. I wish I could just send them a note to tell them we're OK. I need to find a way to get their real addresses and send them a letter, and tell them how much I miss them and how often I think about them.

Commuting to work and Christmas lights

When I worked in an office every day, I dreamed of being able to work at home and never having to dress up, or even working all day in my pajamas if I wanted to. Now that I can do just that, I find that sometimes I dress up just to remind myself of the old days.

There are very few times that I've been missing the two hour commute into Luxembourg city from Kehlen every day. I could sometimes get some reading done, but not on some of the windy roads, and not in the winter time when it was too dark to read.

But I realize now that with Christmas coming, I will miss the Christmas lights on the big bank by the bridge, and at the Christmas market at Place D'Arms, and on the tree at Place de Paris. Having only 8 hours of sunlight in a day would really be depressing if it didn't mean that the Christmas lights could come on at 16:00.

I wonder if we have enough Christmas lights stored away to turn one of our cedars into something like the tree at Place de Paris?

"Multicultural" night

Today was "multicultural" night for supper. The girls are studying "multiculturalism" for a project for church, and part of the project was to make a multicultural meal.

For the main dish the girls chose to make Chinese casserole, which isn't really very Chinese. When I mentioned that to them, they said that I got the recipe from someone who was of Finish ancestry, so that made it a very multicultural dish. They also made Brussels sprouts, because what could be more European than something named after a country in Europe?

For desert my oldest child decided to try to recreate one of the foods that I have been missing since we left Luxembourg---chocolate croissants. So the girls took refrigerated crescent rolls (the jumbo size), rolled chocolate chips inside, and baked them. They weren't exactly like what I used to buy in Luxembourg, but they were really, really good.

At least my kids understand the idea that there are different cultures in the world. I think that they are also not quite as angry as they used to be with Europe in general. After all, a continent with such good bread can't be all bad.

November's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

Time change

I lived in Luxembourg for 13 months, and managed to be in the country for three time changes. The first time change happened while I was still adjusting to European time at the very beginning of my time in Europe. I could barely sleep at night or wake up in the morning, so the time change was just one more hurdle, one more hour.

The buses from Kehlen to town run once at hour, except on Sundays, when they would run every other hour. We would try to catch the 9:10 bus into town for church on Sundays. There was one particularly cold day where we waited at the bus stop for almost 30 minutes before we decided that the bus wasn't coming so we couldn't go to church. We went home, changed out of our church clothes, cooked lunch, and then one of the girls suggested that maybe it was a time change, because her calendar said that it was the end of Daylight Savings Time in the States. So we were at the bus stop at 8:10 instead of 9:10. If there had been a bus every hour, we would have been waiting outside the church instead of at the bus stop.

Our last time change happened while we were on our trip, right before we left Europe. About lunch time, we noticed that all the clocks were an hour ahead of us, so we thought that maybe Germany was in a different time zone, though it hadn't seemed that way to us before. Then we noticed that our clocks were off when we got back to Luxembourg, too. So it took us close to two days to figure out we had missed another time change.

I don't remember the last time we missed a time change in the States. It seems like it's on everyone's lips, and we see it on the web, and in the papers, and on TV. To me, it was just one of the signs of how really out of touch we were with Europe that we didn't even know when the time was changing, didn't have any hint at all that it was coming.

The time change last year happened about the same time our furniture arrived. Though I was in Luxembourg for 13 months, our furniture and belongings were only in the country for four and a half months. It's just another reminder of how much easier things are back in the States.

Foreign Plates

Darin heard a story on the news this morning about a man who was having a plate removed from the bones in his arm, and when the surgeon got the arm open, he realized that he didn't have the right kind of screw driver. So he sent someone to the hardware store to buy one and then get it sterilized. The problem was that the man's plate had been installed in a foreign hospital. Darin thought it was a great story. It made my ankle hurt.

October's Beautiful Picture from Tennessee

Our valley runs east-west, so we can see the storms before they arrive. This storm makes its approach right at sunset. Awesome.

Six Month Anniversary

As we approach the six-month anniversary of our leaving Luxembourg, it seems like a good time to reflect, once again, on what we've learned and how we can improve.

Many of the things I had read *before* we went to Luxembourg said that to help the kids transition back to the States, we needed to keep reminding them that we were Americans and not Europeans. Studies of kids whose parents move overseas for jobs (outside of the U.S. military) show that those who want the kids to do everything to "fit in" with the new culture produce kids that have trouble adjusting to the new culture, the U.S. culture if they move back to the U.S., and often an aversion to moving overseas as adults. This was especially true for children of missionaries.

One of my former boss's main criticism of how my husband and I had handled things was that we had created an "American island" for our girls, so of course, they could never be happy. When I look back at our year in Luxembourg, I don't see how we could have done anything else. The government schools in Luxembourg didn't want my children. Language schools in Luxembourg don't teach children (that's what the government schools were for). I didn't make enough money to send them to a private school. All that was left was our American island.

In the end, it turned out for the best. We didn't stay long in Luxembourg, and the transition back to the States was fairly easy. I'm not sure, in the long run, that the transition to Tennessee was that much worse than if we had moved here straight from Northern Virginia. The kids and I miss our friends and our church. There is a learning curve to being poor---no more eating out, no more big presents for birthdays and Christmas. But that would be true whether or not we had been to Luxembourg.

Darin and I had wanted to leave Northern Virginia for some time, but I don't think we would have ever done it if I hadn't been offered the "perfect" job in Luxembourg. Moving to Luxembourg got us out of our very comfortable life with our very comfortable salary in Northern Virginia. Darin and I had been longing for peace, quiet, and the ability to see the stars at night. Now we have all those things. We may have less spending money, but we have a great farm, wildlife and stars to watch, less stress, and that quiet we wanted.

What are we missing? Mostly health insurance. Would it be better to be in Luxembourg with their socialized medicine? No way. Even when we were in Luxembourg, we never understood the system enough to get dentist appointments, or check-ups, or things like mamograms, etc. I'm 42 years old, and I've never had a mamogram, and it's been close to three years since my last test for cervical cancer. The kids need dentist appointments, and braces. But could we get those things if we were in Luxembourg? It would probably have been possible, but we didn't have anyone to show us how.

What would be different in our lives if we had moved straight from the DC area to Tennessee? For one, I would never have learned any French. I really enjoyed that part of living abroad. But on the flip side, the kids learned some French and now refuse to ever speak it. There is a deeper hatred for all things French that is usual for an American, especially in my middle child. We have a deeper appreciation for America. We hear people talk about the problems here, like "lack of affordable health care" and immigration, and those problems seem so small compared to what they are facing in Europe. There is talk of how this country is so deeply divided, and how the gap is widening, but we still solve things peacefully, for the most part. This is not the case in Europe, especially in France. I suppose that maybe I wouldn't have a plate in my leg if we hadn't lived in Luxembourg, but I'm adjusting to that also.

My prayers now for my family are for an easing of the anger against Europe, for new friends in Tennessee, and a job for Darin that will give us health insurance. A year after we have insurance, I can get the plate out of my leg. Maybe by then I can convince the kids to speak French again, and we can live our lives with our wonderful appreciation for this country, and none of the negative side-effects from living in Luxembourg.

Here's to the next six months.

A Hearty Good Morning to Ye!

Yes, I know that time just be flyin' by, but it is again one of our family's favorite made-up holidays --- Talk Like a Pirate Day!

(If you've never celebrated the day before, I encourage ye to try it today. It's a wonderful way to make life a bit less stressful.)

The crew here in Tennessee has been under the weather, so the emailin' and bloggin' has been on the light side o' things, but I shall try to remedy that today.

Bon sang! Though me pirate talkin' skills are still sharp for English, I be havin' some trouble rememberin' how to talk like a French pirate. I may have to sneak downstairs this afternoon to watch me pirate movie in French to recall the old phrases. If you be wantin' to review your French pirate, please see last year's blog entry.

I wish ye all the best on this fair holiday. Godspeed to ye, and always a strong wind!
From Mad Matilda, and the rest o' Cap'n Pete's crew: Pegleg, Abby, and Jane.