(the above photo is from college days; Will Hoge played Duke’s Joe College Day in ’07, and I’d interviewed him for The Chronicle.  I should go find that paper (which his signed) and frame it.)

over the weekend, i took J to his first Will Hoge concert.  i’ve lost count, i don’t know how many times i’ve seen him (Will Hoge, that is, not my husband).  after this particular show, i conceived of a new goal (a past goal having been: see Edwin McCain four times in one year.  i did.): see Will Hoge play Nashville.  it’s his home town, and though we love him here in Raleigh, I can only imagine what he/the crowd/the experience is like at home.  Collective effervescence all over the place (because if you’re aware of what you’re complicit in, it’s okay, right?). 

I was turned on to him in high school. his music is the soundtrack to my college years, and now that i listen more closely to his words, i’m starting to appreciate his wisdom (though, like his wife–i can’t find the link to the interview–i wonder when he’s going to write a song about a happy relationship).  I’ve gotten hooked on “No Man’s Land” from his new album, “Number Seven;” i’m trying to grow into the rest of it.  Here, i’m still a die-hard Blackbird on a Lonely Wire fan.  In concert, though, we get the best of all worlds–they play the longest set list of anyone I know.  Look out for Will Hoge–the concerts are cheap (literally, and) in comparison to the musical experience.

What fun it is to have your own home!  J & I are relishing the freedom (relative–we are renters…) of space & design in our first little abode.  I think i prefer this small canvas for now, not only does school take a lot out of one, but with freshly-painted, not-white walls, and lovely wood floors, the tweaks we desire to bring out this home’s best are manageable.  Welcome to our home…

  here is our living room/dining room (front door visible on the far side of the tv to the left).  Oh, and i forgot to mention, this home tour is a “where’s waldo” for Ben.  He wanted to help take photos (more accurately, like a child, he sometimes has “mommy days,” and man, has today been one of them…).

see Ben??  Thanks to the delicious fall air, the windows are open and all the SOUNDS are just the most fantastic thing to happen to Ben’s ears.  Another angle on the living room, taken near the front door.

the relatively clean kitchen.  my favorite part of this apartment (well, after the new appliances & hardwood floors) is the enormous windows with deep sills.  do you see the lovely tree outside, too?

you know, it’s harder than you’d think to get a decent, not-too-graphic shot of a bathroom.

notice the lovely windows, notice the crafty (handmade by wifey) throw pillows, notice the afternoon sun…

There is another bedroom, which serves as our office/study/sewing room, but J is in there, writing furiously at the moment, and it’s rather unsightly anyway.  Oh!  i forgot–there is one other room–the laundry room.  It’s even presentable, so i should publish the evidence:and our back door.  last weekend, we were away, but Ben was here with a friend.  Ben ended up alone–out of his crate–for a full day, but the house & he were no worse for wear (we did notice, however, that there were paw prints on the bed & sofa, two places he wouldn’t dream of going if we were around).  A sweet, sweet watch dog.

Some people keep whiskey in their bedside table, some keep the Bible–I have passed through both of those phases, and may very well pass through each again, but right now, there is something else that I need to have within arm’s reach.  Chocolate.  Not even the really good stuff (because, for some reason, when i need chocolate, the artisan offerings seem too pure, too sophisticated–too much of an adventure, and that is not why one keeps chocolate in a bedside table).  The combination of chocolate and caramel speaks loudly to me these days, and Cadbury’s humble version, available at CVS, is like the warm, familiar, comfortable hershey’s, with a little extra ooze.

i always had trouble with sketching in art class.  I was obsessed with lines.  lines connected things and outlined them and told me exactly where the boundaries of each and every thing was.  organization, separation, individuality.  this is how the world worked, right?  so, if this was how things were, why did my pictures look so dead?  i gave up on sketching.  i turned van gogh on my art-skill’s bum.  that is to say–i couldn’t quite get why my sketching of what i saw was so not what i saw, and so i stopped trying to see.

i tried again last week, i tried to sketch.  i remembered to really try to see just what was there.  only what met my eyes.  after a long, long year of patience and pain and growth, i was ready to sketch again–the only thing i saw was light.  more light, less light, brighter and darker and light-parts crossing dark-parts–i realized when i was sitting in the park yesterday that everything we see is all about light.  remember in biology class how we learned about those “cones” in your retina?  how they sensed color by the specific frequency of the light waves?  or something like that…  the point, of course, is that what we see is completely dependent on varying frequencies and amounts of light.

and then it dawned on me that God is described as “light” in certain places–or at least is described as the source of all light and the ultimate light.  So everything in the world depends on God for its existence, for us to see it (not to say that only those things which we see are in existence).