Musings on Life and Living

Gretch and I made our first attempt at pickling the cucumbers from our garden yesterday. I have no idea what variety of cucumber we planted, but I am certain that they were not the variety specifically bred for pickling (conveniently known as pickling cucumbers). We wanted to try pickling them because our garden produced vast quantities of cucumbers and we were running out of uses for them. As an aside, our bell peppers have been a catastrophic failure. They don't get very big before they rot and fall of the plant. We probably over-watered them. I also have a hunch that garden bell peppers don't grow nearly as large as the ones you can buy at the grocery store. Or we just really screwed up the plants. Our broccoli plants are finally starting to produce florets, and we have a few cantaloupe, but we are worried they won't mature. Our other peppers, however, have been doing quite well. But back to the cucumbers. Gretch had purchased a pickle seasoning mix from an Amish mar...

For a variety of reasons that I don't care to go into detail about lest I get bombarded with spam and unsolicited advice, Gretch and I no longer have a car. We have known this was coming for a while and have been planning for what we would do when we were car-less. We are fortunate to live in a community with excellent public transit, most of the places we need to go to regularly are within walking or biking distance, and we have friends and family who are close by and willing to provide rides from time to time. Of these options, riding bikes has become our preferred means of transportation. We bought our bikes before we moved to our current place, but put them in storage at Gretch's parents' house when we moved out and spent six weeks officially homeless. After moving in, we didn't quite have the room for our bikes and so they stayed on her parents' back porch. Over a year later, we finally got around to bringing our bikes home. Mine was in decent condition, pa...

There is a fairly well-known tradition, particularly among American Latter-day Saints, that when someone in one of our congregations, or wards, moves, the other members of the ward, usually the men between the ages of 18 and 45, help the family load up the moving van, truck, or whatever vehicle is going to be used for the move. In some areas, families move nearby and will make several trips back and forth using minivans and trucks. Around here, in the Champaign-Urbana-Savoy area (what I lovingly call Chambanavoy but most folks just call Chambana), many families that move are going cross-country, and so they rent a U-Haul or some similar commercially-available moving truck. From the time I was a teenager, I have been an active participant in helping with moves. Growing up in Washington, Illinois, though, it seemed we had the occasional family move in but rarely move out . So I learned how to unload a truck but didn't get much experience on the other end. While serving my miss...

(I apologise for not writing a blog post for the past couple of weeks. I was at the Cebrin Goodman Teen Institute without wi-fi for a week, then Gretch was recovering from surgery, and then I just forgot.) When Gretch and I first started our journey of overcoming infertility, I don't think either one of us knew what we were getting into. In fact, when we first started, I don't think we even realised it was about infertility. This is a topic I have discussed with a few people recently. After learning that we are both infertile (at least for the time being--there is a strong possibility of correcting the infertility issues), our doctors shared their surprise that Gretch had gotten pregnant three times; it simply shouldn't have happened. And yet, if she hadn't had three successive miscarriages, I doubt either one of us would have thought to seek out advice from a reproductive medicine specialist. It simply would not have occurred to us that there was an infertility issue...