From a Cluttered Desk

I am Tammy Cardwell, she of the cluttered desk. (Hey, you think I'm kidding?!) I'm having a blast here in Blogland and invite to you to peruse my ramblings. Like a buffet, they offer variety - essentially whatever makes it to the top of the piles that sometimes clutter my brain. We'll eventually cover it all - homeschooling, God, our church, the Eclectic Homeschool Online, books I'm writing and publishing, conferences I speak at, the joys of grandmotherhood, and hopefully chocolate. Of course, this is only what's near the top now. Who knows what's in those piles?

Well, at least positive things are beginning to happen. The loan to start building has come in and I’m heading out later to put it into a special account that will be used strictly for building expenses. All this money will do is buy the first batch of materials, but this is a good start.

Jack has met with the city and found out what we need to do in order to handle things properly where they’re concerned. He’s working on the house plans (Thank God that’s part of what he does, so there’s one less expense!) and the contractor who will be helping us is doing the material take-off. We’ll only have 560 square feet of living space, which is smaller than the apartment we had when we first got married, but praise God it will be 560 square feet of SAFE living space in which everything works (Yeah, we’ve been living with a LOT of nonworking things around here for years. LOL!) and nothing leaks.

One funny. I have a reputation for taking a very long time to make certain decisions, so Jack called me the other day to say, "As long as it takes you to make up your mind, you ought to start looking at paint chips now." Well, I’ll have you know that I chose all of our wall colors within the next few hours. It was easier this time, since I’d been watching enough home shows to know where to start. It was also easier because I will have very limited space for hanging art and knew exactly which two pieces I want hanging in our bedroom and living room. Anyway, he was surprised.

I do have one concern about this new house and that is our cats. We’re designing with them in mind, which is cool, but one of them REALLY likes to claw EVERYTHING. I’ve heard that you can get little acrylic nail covers for cats that keep their claws from doing damage. If anyone knows anything about these and can tell me where to find them, please share.

Continuing Prayer Requests

• INCOME - This money I have now is only a small part of what we’ll need, and it’s a loan that must be repaid ASAP. What my husband is making now is keeping us alive, but not giving us enough to put money aside for construction. (Prayers that CJ Press would prosper would be good too! It’s a relatively new website and publicity is not my strong suit.)
• GREAT DEALS - We’ve already been quoted some surprisingly good prices on certain things, but to do this project for $15,000, which is what we’re planning, will require a lot of God deals.
• NO RAIN - Probably only those who have lived in conditions similar to mine could appreciate my reaction every time I hear thunder or the sound of rain. You have no idea how much I look forward to the day when I can enjoy rain again; it used to be one of my favorite things.

Life is challenging, but this is nothing new. God is still good - more than good - all the time!

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

Pride is a terrible thing, you know?

The Cardwells are going through a crisis and I’ve been hesitant to share publicly. I had my excuses of course, but the bottom line is pride. I didn’t want anyone to know how bad things were. The fact is, however, that we need prayer. So…

Well, I’ll still not share all, but I’ll give the "Reader’s Digest" version here.

Nearly half of our roof is so bad that we’ve already had to abandon three rooms in our home because of roof leaks and the damage they’ve caused. We’d abandon a fourth, but it is our one and only bathroom. Instead, I’m looking into keeping an umbrella right outside that door for those days when it’s raining inside as well as out. (Hey, one laughs or one cries, and I prefer laughter!)

In case you don’t know, we’re in south Texas and it seems that for the past several months we’ve been getting all of the rain that the drought-ridden parts of the country are not, so this whole leaky roof thing has become a major issue.

That’s bad news. Now for good. We have a warehouse on our property that can be converted into a small home. Our plan is to do this, to start construction just as soon as my husband and our contractor friend can get freed up from a job they’re on.

Now for more bad news. At this point in time, we don’t have the money, not even a dime of it. My husband has had some major medical issues in recent years and hasn’t worked much, so to be honest we’ve only barely been making it. (Do you hear my pride screaming as I type this?) Someone is sending us enough money to get started, but it is a loan that we’ll be paying back, and at this point we’re only talking about…maybe a third of the money we need to do the renovation.

Side note, while I’m thinking about it. I’d been working on a big new project for CJP. I hinted at this in my last blog entry and had intended to do it within the next few weeks, but there’s simply no way I can pull it off with everything else that is on my plate right now. Frankly, the word overwhelmed has applied to me much of the past week.

Like I said, this is the abbreviated version of the Cardwells’ story, but it’s enough to alert my friends to the fact that we need prayer. Please pray?

Celebrating Jesus, even when it rains!
Tammy C

I’m working on a really big project for CJ Press. I’ll be revealing it in the next few weeks, so you’ll want to keep your eyes open. In fact, though I don’t officially have a mailing list for CJP yet, I am working on putting a newsletter program together, so I strongly advise you to send an email to orders@cjpress.net and ask to be put on the mailing list. That way you’ll be in the know even if you happen to miss the pertinent blog post.

Trust, me; you don’t want to miss this!

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

Something I was just reading reminded me of an incident that happened years ago (LOL! Almost 20 years ago). It’s one of those things that tends to stay with you.

I did something really stupid and injured my back, BADLY. It was so bad that I was out of church for weeks, which was a thing that hadn’t happened since our early years. When I was finally able to go to church, I sat at the back both because I wasn’t able to walk very far and because I couldn’t sit in the padded pews for too very long without being in agonizing pain; I had to get up and walk every few minutes or suffer terrible consequences. Oh yeah, and I was alone, because my husband had service responsibilities that kept him elsewhere.

I distinctly remember one point in that first service back. After sitting too long, I stood up, turned to walk up the aisle, and froze. For several very long seconds I was literally held immobile by pain and my own body’s response to the pain. For a scarily long time, my body wouldn’t let me do anything but breathe, and that was shallow.

By the time I snapped out of it and started moving up the aisle again, a member of security was almost to me. "Are you okay?" "Is there anything I can do for you?" He was very concerned, and seemed even more concerned when I assured him that no, I was fine and just needed to walk a bit. With obvious reluctance, he let me head on out into the foyer alone.

Or so I thought.

I found out several months later that what he actually did was get on the mic (Our security team has radios) and let all of the other security people know where I was and where I was headed. I never had a clue, but they watched me all the way to the ladies’ restroom and I’m sure that if I’d taken too long one of their wives would have been sent in to check on me. They watched me all the way back too. Evidently they kept an eye on me every service until I was sufficiently recovered, or so I surmised from what I was eventually told by one of them.

Angels watching over me. That’s what they were, a very natural reminder of the angels God has given charge over us. Just like I had no clue about them and how close an eye they kept on me while I was recovering, we usually walk through life clueless about what God’s angels are doing for us in the background.

I sure do appreciate those angels!

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

Okay

I’ve HAD IT

I am ready for the rain to stop.

I am beyond ready for the rain to stop.

It’s coming in my house now, by the bucket full, any time the rain comes down with any strength at all, and I’m fed up to HERE with all this RAIN.

Someone wanna give me a new house? Someone wanna give me a new house that’s DRY?

Celebrating Jesus regardless!
Tammy C

I’ve been so blessed. We at CJ Press recently released my newest eBook, A Homeschool that Handles the Hard Times: A Guide for Christian Homeschoolers, and immediately made it a part of the Estes benefit (Which was a HUGE blessing to that family, by the way!). On Saturday, I received the following email.

I’m stepping out on a limb a bit, writing a recommendation for a book I’ve not finished, but in this case I don’t know how soon I will be able to finish it. LOL!

My youngest son drove us to a funeral this Friday and he had Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, by Donald Miller, in his truck. I managed to get about halfway through it and am impressed. It’s not your average fare. It’s a provocative, raw look at one man’s experience with Christian Spirituality. It’s a book I want to finish reading.

If my son will only hurry up and finish it so I can.

Have a great Sunday!

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

I am back from my trip, trying to return to life as usual. I should have known that wouldn’t happen, of course. The very first thing I was supposed to do, yesterday, was teach an online workshop for the History Super Seminar. Instead, my uncle passed away and I spent the day traveling and attending his funeral. That was rough in many ways. Feeling like I’d failed the seminar attendees and coordinator was rough. Caring for an active two-and-a-half-year-old when I was seriously feeling the heat and humidity after a week in the mountains was… Man, I don’t know what I’d have done if our youngest son hadn’t been there to help. (Neither Mom nor Dad could get off work.)

Stress

Which brings me to the point of this post. While I was away, I realized yet again just how much stress I deal with (or fail to deal with, as the case sometimes is) on a daily basis. It literally took me days of being in the mountains without responsibility to relax enough that the pain in my upper back went away - not a good sign. So when I was talking to God, Wednesday morning, about the battle between stress and me, He told me to pick the pencils back up, to go back to drawing.

I’ve been feeling nudges in that direction for a while, but I thought it was just envy of my artist friend who is cranking out some fabulous portraits lately. I guess I should have paid a little more attention to that still, small voice, eh?

So I spent something between an hour and two hours drawing today and it was wonderful. God knew exactly what He was doing, because I lose all track of time and space when I’m drawing, and the satisfaction that comes with creation is…well, it’s special. You can tell it’s been three years, because what I’ve produced so far today in no way resembles the photorealism I was working towards when I stopped drawing. I definitely have to retrain my eyes to see the subtleties and my self to slow down and be patient again. Stil…

Yeah, this was a good thing, is a good thing.

Now to replace all of those art supplies I’d already passed on to my artist son. LOL!

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

Those who are fans of the original Star Trek and Lord of the Rings will love this.

At our moot (a gathering of Christian Tolkien Fans), we’ve spent the past three nights watching the LotR trilogy, and we discovered something none of us had ever noticed before.

Boromir and Theoden are both redshirts.

Yes, it is true. And I cannot help but wonder if the costume designers did this on purpose.

This bit of trivia brought to you by the CTF Moot Society. "Moot early. Moot often."

Celebrating Jesus!

Tammy C

My sisters in Christ, that is. I came away for a week’s vacation. I may have mentioned in an earlier blog that this is the first non-working vacation I’ve taken in years, and I am having an absolute BLAST! This experience is turning out to be everything I had hoped for and more. We went to church together last night, and I felt as at home there as if I’d walked into a sister church; worship was awesome and the word was truly heart reaching. Then we came back home and had even more worship around the piano…beautiful. And then we pulled out a special DVD: The Fellowship of the Ring. Ah… perhaps I failed to mention that this is a group of Christians who also happen to be Tolkien fans. The movies brought us together and last night… Hehehe…. I was finally able to watch the movie the way *I* have always wanted to - talking to the characters ("Don’t dooooo iiiiiit!") making the utterly ridiculous comments that spring to mind, quoting the lines as the characters say them (The group calls this movieokie)… We were all doing it (Okay, so three of us were really ‘bad’) We were laughing so hard our sides hurt through most of the movie (Someone even asked me at one point if I’d been drinking. LOL!) I honestly don’t know when I last laughed so hard for so long. And we’re doing it again tonight, with The Two Towers. YAY! I was thanking God just this morning for this very special group of ladies. We are a unique crew, comprised of people from widely ranging denominations but with a unified love for each other and people in general that I see as a "type and shadow" of what the body of Christ is supposed to be. We love on each other, share our thoughts, encourage, question, answer, nudge, support… Really… I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but if you have various groups of friends you often find yourself only showing certain sides of yourself to each. As one friend put it to me recently, "On the list of things that ‘no one knows about me’…" But this group is different. They pretty much see every side of me, and they accept all of it. (hmm… Just like Jesus) This is one of the few ‘places’ in my life where I’ve experienced this and I truly treasure it, and I am TOTALLY enjoying this week of hanging with my sisters. Be blessed! Celebrating Jesus! Tammy C