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All the Answers: Planes, Texting, Guilt, and Harry.

September 30, 2015September 29, 2015 Rachel Callahan "Deep" Thoughts by Rachel

Here we go again. I’m really enjoying writing daily again – it’s been a while. Don’t get used to it. Unless y’all just keep asking questions endlessly, which I suppose I’ll find myself writing daily for the rest of time.

Sheri asked,

Have you ever travelled outside of the U.S.? Where?

Yes, twice – once when I was nine years old – my Dad and I went to Toronto together (which I mentioned briefly here), and once when I was 16 years old – I went on a six week missions trip to Cyprus where I administratively helped a missionary (that had formerly been my pastor) set up his new office. Flying to Cyprus was my first time to ever be in an airplane. I flew there with the missionary, and our plane to New York had such an equipment failure scare that they had at least 50 ambulances, lights flashing, lining our runway. My dad later called Delta to ask what had happened, and they denied the whole thing (because 1998 was before Twitter or smart phones – Delta can’t deny anything anymore.)

Ironically, I still love flying.

For my second time to fly, I flew home by myself, and had an overnight layover in Athens. My dad had a Greek friend that had agreed many weeks earlier to pick me up from the airport, but he wasn’t returning calls or emails when it was time for my return flight. So when I left Cyprus, I thought I would be getting off the plane in a foreign country and trying to figure out how to find transportation and a hotel room as a minor who didn’t speak the language (despite going to Greek School as a kid.) But, when I arrived, my dad’s friend (whom I had never met and had no idea what he looked like) was waiting for me. Later, he and his wife took me to dinner at midnight (as one does in Athens) and fed me raw Octopus (as one does in Athens) and took me back to their flat full of marble floors and busts (as one has in Athens.) The next day, I continued my journey home alone.

Which of the following book series have you read? Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, Hunger Games.

Harry Potter – Yes and it’s my favorite book series ever written. I get violently ranty when someone tells me that they’ve seen the movies but haven’t read the books. READ THE BOOKS, people. The movies don’t even fully make sense without the books. <Deep Breaths> I currently spend way more time than is necessary trying to figure out the perfect age to start letting Ali read them. She insists that the age has not arrived yet – they sound way too scary to her.

Lord of the Rings – No. I tried reading The Hobbit when I was a kid but couldn’t get into it. I did go to the midnight showing of the first LOTR movie with my LOTR-obsessed friends and brand new husband. I got very angry at the end when there was zero closure, and didn’t sleep all night because you shouldn’t watch movies with unfamiliar monsters at midnight. After that I swore I’d never watch or read any of them, although I did catch the last ten minutes of the last movie once while Chris was watching it, which gave me the closure I needed. Feel free to get violently ranty on me. I know I deserve it.

Twilight – Nope. Just nope.

Hunger Games – Yes – I was late to the Hunger Games party and read them last summer. I really enjoyed it, and the movies are good as well, although I’m waiting on the fourth one to come out before I watch the third because as we’ve already established, I’m not a fan of movies with no closure.

If you could have dinner with anyone throughout history, who would it be?

I’m really terrible at questions like this. They freak me out because if I pick someone, then everyone will be all like “THAT’S the person you’d pick in all of history??” – but also because I have no idea. And I don’t love eating in front of strangers. What if I get something stuck in my teeth? Or a bit of butter on my chin? No thank you.

I’d rather text with people throughout history.

I like texting with sarcastic, witty people who don’t mind a biting comeback in an all-in-fun spat. So I’d pick Mark Twain, Paul The Apostle, Shakespeare, Marie Antoinette (I didn’t say I had to like the people, but tell me she wouldn’t have a delightfully sarcastic text stream), Jane Austen, a group text with Buttercup and Westley (I get fictional characters too, right?), Anthony Bourdain (history includes people who are still alive, obviously), Tim Gunn, and the creators of VeggieTales Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki (I’ve actually met Mr. Gunn and Mike , but sadly, we don’t have a textual relationship.)

I’m sure I’m leaving out at least a person or two that would be absolutely delightful to text with, so go ahead and say “THOSE are the people you would pick in all of history?!”

What’s your favorite book of the Bible?

Psalms. I find it encouraging, exhorting, and applicable to my life all the time. I also enjoy James because he was a super blunt guy. There’s really no need to soften the blows.

What’s your favorite verse or verses?

Psalm 37:3-8

Trust in the Lord and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him and he will do this:
He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn,
the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.
Be still before the Lord
and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when people succeed in their ways,
when they carry out their wicked schemes.
Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret—it leads only to evil.

I really like the ending – worrying only leads to evil, people. It’s good to remember.

Aadrw asked,

Which blogs are you reading? What blogs are no longer active but you wish were still around?

So you’ve hit on one of the most guilt-filled facets of the internet for me. When I started blogging, I vowed to be the nicest, most interactive, most relationally in tune blogger out there. I loved blogging because I enjoyed the relationships, and I wanted to fully get to know all of my readers. I’ve met readers along the way on vacations and have even driven to both Mississippi and Georgia for the sole purpose of meeting readers. (Besides the fact that I’ve had a reader and her kid come from another continent and stay in my house for five days.) So for the first four years of blogging, literally read every one of my reader’s blogs (that I knew about) – and commented on them regularly.

(I did not, however, read any other blogs or “famous” blogs – only people I had relationships with. I’ve never been a blog consumer – always a writer and relationship-builder.)

Then a bunch of stuff happened that took great amounts of my time – in 2012, we started homeschooling for real and my jeans posts went viral and increased my readership by a multiple of ten; in 2013 I got dysautonomia; and in 2014 I started Picture Birmingham. I literally could no longer find or make the time for reading everyone’s blogs. And for the past four years, I’ve felt great guilt over not reading my internet friend’s blogs anymore. GREAT, HEAPING, SEARING GUILT. Because I really do love you all and consider you real live friends and enjoy getting to know you better (and still try to do so via comment replies, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), and I hate that I don’t have a few (hundred) more hours every week to read about your lives.

But when I do read, I read some of my closest internet/IRL friend’s blogs (who are incredible writers because I have impeccable taste in friends) – Katherine at Grass Stains, Lora Lynn at Vitafamiliae, and Carla Jean at Inkstained Life (and formerly Jamie at Jamie’s Rabbits but now she’s moved over to podcasting which is the next question), and a few other friend’s blogs who probably wouldn’t want them publicized.

But yes. Guilt. I told you I had great angst. I wasn’t lying.

What are your favorite podcasts?

I don’t listen to many, but running has allowed me to start listening to more than I used to. I’ve listened to This American Life for years with Chris, adored Serial last year (I need to know if Adnan is innocent!), and I religiously listen to my friend Jamie’s now-famous and absolutely fantastic podcast, The Popcast (PLEASE go listen to their Urban Dictionary episodes right now. Your life will never be the same. In both fantastic and horrific ways. Then come back and let’s talk about what we’ve learned. Or not, if you’re my Dad.) I’ve also dabbled in Off Camera with Sam Jones and Invisibilia.

More answers…tomorrow. Who would you text with in all of history?

All The Answers: Part One.

September 28, 2015September 27, 2015 Rachel Callahan "Deep" Thoughts by Rachel, Actually Possibly Informational, Don't Listen to my Fashion Advice

My eyes have finally recovered! They got worse before they got better, and then I went to the beach and exposed them to the Florida sun for four days straight. So yeah. I take care of myself like that.

But your questions.

THANK YOU for your questions.

Seriously.

They’ve been extremely therapeutic for me to ponder, because one of the reasons I’ve been blogging less lately is that I’m overthinking everything – I feel like all of my posts should be creative, yet I also feel like I’m significantly less creative than I used to be (or I am out of ideas after over 2,000 posts.) So I end up finding a reason why nearly every post idea I have would be boring or offensive or both.

Guys, you have NO IDEA how much angst I put myself through on a daily basis. Just ask my friends and husband. I’m The Worst in my head.

But your questions have reminded me that non-creative topics can be interesting, too – I usually talk myself out of writing about many of these things because I wonder why you would care what I think about everyday stuff. I’m still not really sure why you do, but the fact that you care enough to ask is strangely relieving…I can just talk about normal things sometimes and at least one person won’t be bored. I don’t have to wait until we get overrun by bats or I’m inspired to write about Uranus to blog.

So. I’ll be answering your questions all week in the order in which they were received (just like my Gynecologist’s nurse’s voice mail message states), and feel free to add any new or follow-up questions in the comments.

Without further ado, you guys.

Kim asked,

Have you read any good books lately? (Or listened to?)

Not super lately, but I went through a phase last year where I seemed to find more time to read. My favorite during that time was The Rosie Project – it was a delightful book about a character very akin to Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory. However – the sequel, The Rosie Effect, was a total train wreck that I couldn’t even finish. I kept hoping it’d get better but then I heard from others that it didn’t so I quit reading it because I was getting seriously stressed out. But the first one is my favorite book in quite a while.

Also fun was Where’d You Go, Bernadette? It was exquisitely crafted in a creative format, and was highly enjoyable with the exception of one glaring continuity issue toward the end of the book. I don’t understand how you can end up with such a gaping plot hole in a published work. But it was still lovely to read, and fun to get all indignant about at the end.

Chris and I have been listening to the audiobook Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on and off starting on the way home from our anniversary trip to Savannah. We have watched the movie a couple of times (as should anyone before visiting Savannah), and are enjoying the longer, more meandering format of the book.

(All three of the above books come with a language warning.)

On my nightstand currently is Andrew Peterson’s series, The Wingfeather Saga. I’ve heard fantastic ravings about it and can’t decide whether I want to read them to myself first or read them aloud to the kids. Based on the minimal amount of time I currently have for reading, I’ll probably read them to the kids.

As for what I’ve read aloud to the kids in the past year, we finished the Narnia series (which should be every kid’s first read-aloud series) (but they must be read in the PROPER order as C.S. Lewis intended, not the horrible no-good oh-so-wrong order they now package them in. The ONLY correct order is The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, The Last Battle. If you read The Magician’s Nephew first, I’m likely to yell and scream at you repeatedly, as I regularly do (in my head) to the publishers.) After that, we read my favorite childhood book, The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler – which was completely magical for me and a tiny bit magical for Ali. We have also been reading James Herriot stories, Aesop’s Fables, and I have tried to start reading them some poetry for the first time ever. And, of course, I’m still reading Ali my blog from the beginning – she calls it her personal history book.

And, to address the Most Important Alabama Literary Question of the Year, I have not read Go Set a Watchman yet, but did start the other highly controversial Harper-Lee-Related book, The Mockingbird Next Door. I might at some point read Go Set a Watchman, but I’ve read enough about it not to be excited about the prospect.

How’s homeschooling going?

I’ve got an entire post in the works about this, but needless to say, Noah is not quite the delightful, attentive, eager-to-learn student that his sister has always been. That’s why God made him so adorably cute. So that he can get by in life on his looks.

I jest, I jest. He’s a very smart kid. (Noah, when I read you this post one day, I promise you’re brilliant.) (And also brilliantly contrary.)

The Washing.

September 15, 2015September 14, 2015 Rachel Callahan I'm a Glutton for Adventure, Picture Birmingham, Storytime

Yesterday, I took a three hour nap.

I cannot recall the last time I took a nap at all – but it came with reason.

Last weekend was Birmingham ArtWalk.

Besides the frantic preparation all week, Artwalk itself consisted of Friday night from 6-10pm (and setup starting at noon), followed by Saturday from 10am-6pm – of constantly chatting with other humans.

I adore other humans. And I adore meeting humans from the internet. But an entire weekend of it takes a year off of the end of my life from pure exhaustion.

Last year, I did not sleep a single second between those two time periods because I could not de-extrovert to shut my brain down. This year, I got approximately three hours of sleep.

But the adventure of the weekend…that was the real story.

Let me count the ways.

First, the children and I got sick early last week. What this meant was that I was incapacitated just a couple days beforehand when I would normally be scrambling to finish everything, and that I was trying to cover up a lingering cough all weekend so that no booth visitors suspected me of having The Bubonic Plague.

(I didn’t. I swear. Coughs just won’t go away.)

But the greater impact of our illness was that the children couldn’t go to a friend’s house Friday so that Chris could help me set up, or later that night so that Chris could sit with me at Artwalk. This wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if there hadn’t been The Monsoon.

But first. The children went downtown with me at noon when it was time to set up my booth. I put Ali to work de-linting my tablecloth, and Noah put himself to work whining about how hot it was.

Chris came from work and did the tall-people-needed setup for me, then took the kids back to work with him and left me to finish setting up my booth for that evening.

Except that, by the time I got everything like I liked it, I was also getting extraordinarily nervous about a line of storms that were currently in North Alabama.

Artwalk was supposed to start at 6pm. Those red spots looked bad – and I didn’t want everything to get ruined. I had tent sides, but I’d never used them, it looked like I probably had leaky spots in my tent ceiling, and I realized that perhaps I should have an insurance rider on my Picture Birmingham inventory – because since all the profits go to a ministry, I personally buy it all up front then pay myself back for the cost as they sell – which meant a lot of my money was potentially about to get very, very wet.

I watched the sky and I prayed.

I prayed that the rain would break up – that there would be a hole in the storms – that Artwalk would somehow escape the storm’s grip.

But the rising wind was not giving me much confidence – I was already having to use bubble-gum-like putty to unsuccessfully hold my canvas stands in place.

Chris left work at 4pm and went to Lowe’s to buy me Cinder blocks and bungee cords in the attempt to hold my tent to the earth. He and the exceedingly antsy children arrived around 5pm to help me prepare for the storm.

Perhaps this wasn’t the best plan, but it was the plan we had.

The crowds were super light at the beginning of the show – the ominous clouds and weather reports kept people away. I tried to be attentive to the few visitors I had while scrambling in my mind exactly how I was going to keep my inventory dry and praying that it would all somehow miss me.

But it did not.

In retrospect, we should have all packed up and called Friday a wash. But it had originally looked like a thin line of storms, and Friday night was always the best night of the show, so no one wanted to miss it.

A little before 7pm, the rain began to fall, and just minutes after the first drops, the worst of it hit. Lightning, whistling winds, and a river through the alley I was calling home.

I found myself fighting with the zipper on my last side wall as the wind whipped me and my tent about. My prints were sealed but not waterproof, and the dripping tent was splattering on them and the custom print racks my Dad had made me.

When I finally got the zipper un-jammed and zipped up, the inside of my tent was soaked and getting more splattered with rain every second.

The walls, which I had ordered from Amazon to the exact specifications of my tent, were clearly the wrong size. They had gaping holes at the top and were blowing around like curtains. They kept 80% of the rain out by the sheer fact that they were there, but they were not even close to being waterproof.

I walked to the back of my tent where all of the electrical plugs were located, and they were now in an inch-deep stream of running water. I quickly turned off all my lights, leaving myself in the dark but hopefully a little less likely to get electrocuted, then gingerly picked up all of the surge protectors and sat them out of the water on the cinder blocks.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I didn’t die immediately. Then I stepped out of the puddle to go back to the front of the booth and quickly get my prints under the table to try and protect them.

About 20 of my 8x10s fell out, bending their corners. I yelped in frustration, then realized that there had been a chorus of similar yelps and screams in all of the booths near me since the storms started.

This was not the ArtWalk we’d signed up for.

I was completely soaked through at this point, so I sat down on the wet ground, found a dry corner of one of my tablecloths, and began frantically drying the print sleeves.

To forever record this catastrophic night, I even attempted a selfie – with a flash, since I was in the dark – something you should never do.

The storm was bad, y’all.

I sat there, dodging raindrops, wondering why I’d not just packed everything up before the storms.

After over an hour of attempting not to float away, there was finally a dry pocket in the storm. I crawled out of my puddle and peeked under the tent into the dark downtown alley.

I was alone. Very alone. It was only 8:30pm, but all of the other artists had left. The show was supposed to last until 10pm, but the chances of people re-emerging after/if this storm ended were nonexistent.

I took advantage of the break in the storms and carried all of my prints to the car – no small undertaking, but I wanted them to be home and in the air conditioning overnight to help with dehumidification.

I got in the car and said “Okay, God.”

The accountant inside of me was screaming in agony – here I’d invested all of this money into buying prints for ArtWalk so that I could help The WellHouse, and yet I sold nearly nothing on the first night. I was nervous for my inventory, nervous for the weekend, and wondering why God had me agree to do this show.

As I got on the interstate, I found myself praying “Just assure me that I’m in Your will. If I’m in Your will, then the circumstances don’t matter.”

God immediately flooded my mind with all of the confirmations He gave me when I started Picture Birmingham, and the ones that had come in the year and a half since. He reminded me the burden he had put on my heart for those trapped in sex trafficking, and how He had specifically given me a new passion and talent for photography for this very purpose. I was able to breathe again and quit worrying.

When I got home, I was better able to assess my situation. My tablecloths (which I had also grabbed) needed drying, but most of the prints were perfectly fine, by what was surely a miracle.

I spent an hour that night drying the print sleeves, and only ended up with a pile of my 20 “Storm Damage Items” that I marked down the next day.

And the next day.

It was gorgeous.

The storm was followed by a cold front, which made Saturday the most delightfully comfortable day of the year. There was a nice breeze but not too harsh, the sun was out but it wasn’t too blazing, and they opened the show two hours early to make up for the catastrophe of Friday night.

I got there early enough to completely reset my booth, and the day was delightful. People came out in droves, and I had a shocking number of Instagram, Twitter, and blog friends come visit me.

Despite Friday night being a total wash, I ended up selling 60% more than last year. God protected me, God reassured me at my most uncertain moments, and God provided for the mission He had me there to help.

Thank you to all of you who came to see me. You were a blessing to me, and an infinitely bigger blessing to the women rescued by The WellHouse.

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