The Shinn Digs

My thoughts feel quite random, but isn’t that sort of what makes a great bouquet? Vibrant colors, flowers of different sizes, shapes and textures. Somehow, the random is put together to make a beautiful piece. I can’t promise this will be beautiful, but certainly random! The bouquet pictured here is my first of what I hope will be a weekly picking from our new “cut flower” garden. I love having fresh flowers in the house, so we decided to do one more (and there may still be another before the summer is through!) garden box. This one is simply meant to grow flowers to cut and bring in to the house or give to someone. The garden is pictured to the left.The last 7 weeks we’ve been a family of six, rather than just four. Our good friends, Matt & Amber Moran, have lived with us while their house was repaired following a dreadful flooding incident caused by the refrigerator! [These machines are dangerous, folks!] Today they moved back into their newly remodeled condo. I must say, I was more than a little sad when Garth moved the two extra chairs away from the dining table tonight. It’s been fun having them join us each evening, though I’m sure their thankful to finally be able to sleep in their own bed after 7 weeks! And our guest room will not stay empty too long … Rebecca’s parents move in tomorrow for the rest of their week’s vacation …

Tonight we had our first salad from our garden! The lettuce, radishes, parsley, and cilantro all were home grown! Oh, and my latest obsession is growing my own sprouts, so there were also some alfalfa sprouts and bean sprouts in there as well (you have to sneak in vitamins wherever possible!) My best guess is that right around FCA Camp time (2 1/2 weeks) is when everything will be ready to harvest … nice. At least we’ll have fresh veggies to greet us when we come home exhausted on July 5th! Enjoy the slide show of garden pics!

Thanks to my dear friend, Martha, I was alerted to this great tidbit … today in the Santa Barbara News Press on page A5, the Public Record section has our names as applying for our marriage license! But … how great is this … just a few names below ours is Martha and Zach (or William officially) who will be getting married two weeks after us … AND one column over is our dear friends Matt and Amber, who got married two weeks ago!!!

Pretty fun to be celebrating all of this new marriage excitement with such great friends! About 4 years ago Martha, Amber and I suddenly found ourselves sitting in Jenny Thompson’s garage preparing the floral arrangements for a wedding (Jenny is a floral designer), as she was a little busy, having just delivered twin boys 2 months early! It’s pretty fun to think 4 years later the three of us find ourselves getting married within two months of each other!

Life is crazy … and it seems to be picking up a bit of a crazy pace right now, but things like a silly newspaper section (that I realize no one reads!) can really bring a smile to my day! Thanks for sharing Martha!

Not ours … Matt & Ambers! Our friends Nate Thompson & Norm Popp (or should I say Nathaniel Thompson!) were the amazing photographers! Nate said he had so many hits on his web site from our site when I posted about the their engagement pictures that he sent me the code to embed the wedding slide show this time! It’s so great to see the pictures and remember what a great day! [My only disappointment in these pictures is somehow no one captured the historic event of me actually on the dance floor dancing!] Well world … you had your chance and blew it … it won’t happen again! Ok … perhaps I’ll dance two dances on December 16th … one each with the two most important men in my life … Dad and Garth. It’s still up for discussion though!

Enjoy the slideshow … sorry it’s not quite framed correctly, Nate!

I don’t exactly remember when it started, but I believe it was probably around 2002 or 2003 … My Tuesdays (well, every other Tuesday) changed. Way back then my two friends, Martha and Marlene, took it upon themselves to get a group of women together every other Tuesday. The cover was, “We need to read more good, thought provoking books, so let’s start a book group,” but the underlying motivation for all of us was, “We need a place to get together with other women for some great connection, prayer, conversation, food, laughs, tears, etc.” So, for the last 4-5 years, we’ve diligently read books in GWEOT (what we call the group) … all kinds of books really. We’ve mostly read slowly, having lives that are too busy to devote hours to reading. We’ve read books by Ben Patterson, John Piper, CS Lewis, and Lauren Winner … We’ve read books that were too deep for any of us to really grasp, and we’ve read Chronicles of Narnia. There have been seasons some of us couldn’t be there because of grad school classes, crutches, surgeries, pregnancies, or Homegroup nights that conflicted. Most times we’ve met at Martha and Marlene’s house, but there was a season we met at Megan’s house while she lay flat on her back, protecting her twin boys from pre-mature birth. We’ve had pool parties at my house, and we’ve met in Audrey’s apartment in the dorm at Westmont. We’ve had Christmas parties and an annual Thanksgiving dinner. We’ve had weekend camping outings roughing the Channel Islands, and we’ve been spoiled for a weekend in a Palm Desert house on the golf course. Original “members,” Cori and Marlene, have both moved out of town, but new members have joined and added to the personality of the group. There have even been seasons we’ve met on Monday evenings instead of Tuesdays! But what was and is always consistent with GWEOT is a group of women who have formed some great friendships. For me, this group is more important than even I realize. I get choked up when I think about all the life we’ve traveled together thus far, in such a short time … weddings, funerals, job changes, babies, babies … more babies. This group is so important to me, and it has little to do with the books we’ve read (we’ve read some great books, but we’ve managed to find some duds too!) Instead, this is a place I can go and laugh, cry, share, pray, be encouraged, listen, rest …

I believe it was sometime on our first camping trip that we decided our group needed a name … all of us just sort of referred to our group as “book group” … too generic to really communicate the depth we felt the group carried. Maybe it was around the picnic table or the camp fire, but at some point we landed on GWEOT … which creatively stands for “God’s Women Every Other Tuesday.” It stuck … it’s the official name that, for me, means so much more than just the day of the week we meet. GWEOT is my peeps … my friends that come together despite new marriages, nursing babies, upcoming weddings … and we just be … be together, be ourselves, be challenged, be encouraged, be supported.

Marlene emailed us all yesterday with these two pictures from her “GWEOT going away party” before her move to San Francisco. I nearly can’t look at the pictures without getting choked up … I just had to share!

One of my favorite meals on the planet is not fried green tomatoes! Instead, it’s clam chowder from Splash Cafe in Pismo Beach, CA. I convinced my road trip buddies to stop for clam chowder in a bread bowl. I might have been the only one to indulge in the incredible meal, as others opted for another fare.