Leaving Lux

Rewind to June. We spent the month tying up allllll the loose moving ends. It went really smoothly overall. Moving is like putting a puzzle together. You just have to do every single piece until it's done. And when it's done, it's done. It's kind of satisfying .... if it goes smoothly. The kids were still in school and when I wasn't running them around or attending to the moving checklist, I was BAKING! 

Berenice, my friend from church, made me this really yummy apple tart once. I asked her for the recipe many months later and she said she didn't have one. She just did everything from memory. It's a recipe she'd been making with her mom since she was a kid. So she invited me over to learn how to make it. I took copious notes and I can't wait to try it on my own.  

She was so nice to spend this time with me. She has six kids and was the bishop's wife at the time, so she is a busy lady. She even made little tarts for the kids. So cute! And sooooo delish.

One entire week in June, Noah was home sick with croup. He is very croup-prone, but mostly when he was a baby and toddler. I was surprised he had such a bad bout with it at age seven. Anyway, I took advantage of lots of time at home and made croissants over two days.

It was so satisfying and I must say, I think they turned out about 90% right. Not bad for my first try all by myself! I was channeling my French croissant mentor Hugo, so that's my key to success. Haha.

Another church friend, Elisabeth, is a prolific baker. She is Swedish and has created a little business out of her home selling Swedish cakes and goodies. She taught me how to make her version of cinnamon rolls. 

Cinnamon rolls in any country = YUM.

Psst. The secret ingredient is cardamom in the dough. Game changer. Makes the whole house smell magical. Thanks Elisabeth!

More church friends! I was so fortunate to have good church friends in our Lux ward. There were quite a few American expat families rotating in and out at any given time, and I loved getting to know them all. It takes a certain amount of guts and adventurousness to want to uproot your whole life and plant it in a foreign country. I learned so much from these amazing women. I hope our paths cross again in the future.

Sini was a girlfriend I met on one of my first days in Lux. I was at a playground and I asked if she spoke English. She did and it turned out she also happened to live in my same apartment complex. She and her husband are from Finland and their family was also doing the expat thing. She's awesome and I will miss getting together with her and her cute kids. 

Our former neighbors, the Zajakalas, moved to just over the border in Germany awhile back. We visited them one last time before we moved. We went to a treehouse park and had dinner at their house.

 Their baby Kuba was looking less like a baby!

 I will miss these 3 Musketeers and their antics.

 Justyna always makes delicious meals. This was a rose petal covered cream cheese pie thingy. Wow, I really don't even know what to call it. She told me it was a typical Easter dessert in Poland. I loved it.  We will miss their family so much!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, pile living was our reality for a bit.

We divided everything in "air shipment" and "sea shipment" piles. The air shipment arrives within a month and the sea shipment takes about six weeks.

The movers took two days to pack and load everything.

Breakfast among the packed furniture. Noah will miss his favorite cereal, Fillies.

Somehow the movers backed a sea container into a very narrow driveway. Nobody was concerned.

My suitcase: lots of chocolate.

Bye bye, 4C An Ditert!

Just a boy reading TinTin in an empty apartment.

Bye Biff! This car took us everywhere. We have great memories zipping all over the place in our trusty Biff.

The kids skipped out a couple weeks before their school was finished.

 They had a really good year. This is Sienna and her teacher, Ms. Ojja. I didn't catch Noah's teacher, Ms. Carty, in time for a pic.

 Here they are with some of their good friends.

 

Hitting up Parc Merl a few times. Lots of ice cream and sweat.

 Our last evening we spent downtown walking around and eating dinner.

Travel day! We spent the last couple days in a hotel.

Lux to London was smooth sailing.

When we boarded the plane in London, we waited two hours on the tarmac for a co-pilot to arrive.

When we arrived in Denver, it was too windy to land, so the plane rerouted to Phoenix. Missing photo: The look on my face the moment the pilot said we were headed to Phoenix. Description of missing photo: Bed head and tired rage face.

The plane refueled and went back to Denver and landed fine. This is us waiting for Sienna's bag that wouldn't show up for a couple days.

When we got to Avis, they were so poorly staffed, it took two hours. In the end, we got to Adam's parents' home at 4 am. We were supposed to get there about 7:30 pm. YIKES. That's what you get when your whole internationally moves goes smoothly otherwise.

Book Report, January - July

JANUARY

The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
Adam knows I love memoirs and saw this one on a list of "best memoirs of 2017" so he got it for me for Christmas. It was another similar to When Breath Becomes Air, which I'd read last year, another personal account of what it's like to face death as a 30-something. This time from a woman and a poet. I'm not into poetry, although I wish I was, so I was hoping to like this. But me and poetry. We just don't really mix. So, while it was really lovely and just so beautifully written, I wanted something a little more straightforward. It was equal parts nice and a bit funny and plenty sad. But I just didn't love it. A few days after I finished it, my sister told me the widow and widower of both of these authors got together and are dating! Sooooo cute and so happy for them. I was glad I read both books because I felt like I knew these people and understood this love story already. A very sweet ending.

Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
Every 3rd person on the planet has told me to read this book, and I finally obliged. It's set during the depression in Seattle and tells the story of the young men rowing for the University of Washington. They are a hardscrabble bunch but they pull together and become a great team and go onto greatness. It is such a great story and so masterfully told. It lived up to the hype. Now they need to make a movie!

I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends by Courtney Robertson
This was the tell-all memoir of a former villain on The Bachelor. It was just as juicy as I'd hoped.

Walden by David Henry Thoreau
I've always wanted to read this book. It's been on my shelf for years. I finally realized I wouldn't read it unless it was via audiobook. So that's what I did. I appreciated several of his little gems about the simple life. My favorite is, "I love a broad margin to my life." I get it. Having time is one of the biggest luxuries you can have in a world of busyness. Otherwise, he was kind of insufferable. I am fine with anyone pontificating about the rightness of their life choices, but when you talk about everyone else like they're idiots, it kind of kills the mood. Good job, Thoreau. We're proud of you for building a cabin and watching the pond for hours. We learned from your experiment.

FEBRUARY
Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett
I've listened to Krista Tippett's podcast On Being off and on for many years. I've always appreciated her moderate voice when it comes to spirituality and religion and I was pleased to find out she'd written several books. I really, really enjoyed it. It was published 10 years ago when her podcast was called Speaking of Faith. She talks about her own lifetime faith journey and weaves in commentary from her interviewees. Really interesting and uplifting.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
This lady can write! I loved every page of this book. Best known as a poet, Lockwood uses words to create images better than any author I've ever read. Her descriptions are just .... wow. It's a book about her upbringing as a child of a Catholic priest, but it mostly details the time she spent living with her parents while she and her husband dug themselves out of a financial hole. Her parents are endlessly entertaining and there were plenty of laugh out loud moments. But there were also serious reflections about her falling out with the religion and how she views it now.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
Don't read this book if you don't want to feel bad about everything. Womp womp. But it does make me want to improve, too, so that's good. He talks about how America's food culture has evolved and how much of what we eat now can hardly be defined as food. He offers some good tips to getting back to our food roots. I felt bad for a bit but was also inspired.

MARCH
Zealot: Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
Well, this book ruined Jesus for me. Okay, not completely. But kinda. Aslan talks about the historical Jesus verses the Biblical Jesus. He lays out historical facts verses Bible stories. I liked it. I'm glad I read it. And his closing statement sums up how I feel about it: whether Jesus was just a man or an actual deity, he's someone worth believing in and following.

The Wisdom of Sundays by Oprah Winfrey
Queen Oprah drops wisdom about universal truths in this book. She takes her favorite interviews from her show, Super Soul Sunday, and puts them in chapter form for us all to enjoy. This is the type of book that's perfect to pick up occasionally for a boost of inspiration. I really enjoyed these golden nuggets.

Hunger by Roxane Gay
Oh man. This was a very tough read. I love memoirs and I think part of that is I like the inspiration that comes with them. People typically tell you their story interspersed with the wisdom that they pick up along the way. Gay tells you her story and it is not a happy one and there’s nothing uplifting about it. Not at the end, not ever. I’m having a hard time even typing a review because I guess I always assume there will be at least a tiny shred of redemption in the story arc. But nothing. Maybe that's a good lesson, too. Sometimes you can’t rise above the crap life hands you. You do your best but some pain just goes too deep.

The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz
Add David Leibovitz to the list of gay men I have crushes on. He is so nice and so funny but also a little saucy and snarky. Leibovitz’s story is about moving to Paris in middle age after a successful career as a pastry chef in San Francisco. He came to the right place and his stories revolve around his foibles and fumbles as he uses his food expertise to win the hearts of the Parisians. I ate up every bit of his melodrama. Even better, I read it while I was in Paris on my own solo adventure! There’s just nothing like pastries and Paris.

The Long Haul by Finn Murphy
Murphy is a trucker who specializes in moving people start to finish. He’s the first, middle and last point of contact for people moving just down the street or across the globe and he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. He shares his love for the job and some funny stories. I really enjoyed learning about his daily life, trucker culture, and about the types of people who are in that line of work.

APRIL

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
This was a novel about eight or so random people who met at cooking classes. They each have their own complex backstories and as the book unfolds, you witness how their lives intertwine as they prepare food and eat together. It's sentimental and sweet and I enjoyed it most of the time. Mostly for the food descriptions and little thought nuggets about how food preparation, meals and mealtime plays a big role in each of our stories.

Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler
This is the third book I’ve read in what seems to be a new genre: terminal cancer patient memoir. This one is different from the other two I’ve read, as Bowler took this serious subject and made it funny. She shared her story with terminal cancer while juxtaposing two religious traditions that she is most familiar with: the prosperity gospel (the group she studied for her PhD thesis) and the Mennonites (the dominant religion in her family life). It’s warm, insightful, sweet, sad, sincere and funny. I loved it.

MAY

Bachelor Nation by Amy Kaufman
I'm a Bachelor/Bachelorette fan and have always wanted to know more about how the show is made and what really goes on behind the scenes. This book gave me quite a few answers. Like what the questionnaire entails for applying to go on the show, the tactics producers use to encourage zany behavior, and the power of editing that makes the contestants seem legit crazy. Loved it!

Chasing Slow by Erin Loechner
Phew! I finally made it through this one. It took me a couple starts and I finally finished it. Loechner explores her life story and the push and pull she's had to achieve and find meaning. The more she achieved, the less she understood what she was aiming for. I really wanted to like it but found myself rolling my eyes quite a bit. Too saccharine, too earnest ... unfortunately it gets a MEH from me. But she is a lovely writer and she does have some moments of brilliance. Maybe the book is to be enjoyed sloooowwwwllly over a loooongg period of time, picked up and put down at leisure...but when it kept going and going and going, I just hurried up and finished it. Lesson not learned.

Educated by Tara Westover
Hold on to your hats, this "I escaped a crazy family and lived to tell" tale is a doozy. This memoir could be described as Glass Castle: Survivalist Mormon Edition. Westover grew up in a tiny town near Malad, Idaho. While her family was active in the Mormon church, her dad's core belief system focused on the end times. The family stockpiled food and weapons. They prized self-sufficiency above all else. They mistrusted government and did not file birth certificates. They had their children at home and they home schooled as well. After one of Westover's older brothers decides to strike out on his own and go to college, she starts seeing her family and the world she grew up in differently. It's a long, difficult road away from her sheltered life into a totally unknown and unfamiliar world. It's gripping and heartbreaking. She tells her story brilliantly.

JUNE 
Nothing? I guess I was busy moving...

JULY
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser
If you love Laura Ingalls Wilder, you'll love this book. It's a biography about her life and also much of the life of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, another acclaimed journalist and writer. It lays bare what the Little House on the Prairie series did not and spoiler alert: settling the wild American west was not all running barefoot and cozy cabin fires. It was difficult and terrible. It took me many months to read this book but I savored every page. Fraser is an expert researcher and writer. I just loved this book so much.

Family Pictures in Our Forest

In June we had family photos taken in the forest behind our place in Luxembourg. We have many wonderful memories there and I love how the photos turned out. 

Photos by Neha Poddar