Displaced.

April 28th. Shenley Park. Pittsburgh, PA.

Rain clouds. Freezing. Wet feet.

Stuffy nose. Fever. Starbucks and OJ (i cheated. i was sick.)

Displaced.

Confined area. 1,000 bodies. Uganda.

AIDS. Children. Death.

White flag. X. Cardboard houses.

War.
Friends. awesome God. unfailing faith. commitment.

Love. Forgiveness. Acceptance. Prayer. 21 years.

Hope.



every war has an end.



if you were one of the brave kids to come out in the cold, wet air and deny yourself freedom and comfort for 24 hours to make a statement that you care, i pray that God blesses you for your amazing heart. we need to continue to be the generation that will do something about all of the crap in this world. we need to listen. we need to be compassionate. we need to get uncomfortable. we ALL need to be displaced.





love,

desiree'

Bonfires.

Bonfires. One of the greatest inventions of old. I'm not sure where the S'more originated, but if you give me a second, I'll goodsearch.com it and find out. Hold on.


Aha! The answer:

Who invented the first s'more?
No one knows. We do know the three primary ingredients (graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars) were readily available to the American public by the late 19th century and very popular in the early 20th.

American cookbooks, food history sources, and newspaper/magazine articles confirm these ingredients were used on a regular basis, but fail to provide us with a definative person, place, and date for the invention of the s'more.

Why?
Until very recently, camping recipes [with the exception of military foods] were typically passed on by personal journals and word of mouth.
The best we can do on the history of s'mores is start with the oldest documented "proof" and hopefully, in time, work our way backwards.
Where did the idea come from? Victorian-era cookbooks contain recipes for "sandwich cookies," soft sponge-cakes filled with jam or cream fillings. American cookbooks published in the early decades of the 20th century contain recipes for chocolate sandwiches (cool) and marshmallow sandwiches (warm).

American food companies were combining marhsmallows, graham crackers and chocolate in the 1910s. These were wildly popular.

From Jason Seremak, the historian for the Girl Scouts of America, I learned that the origin of this popular campfire dessert was unclear, but the first recorded version of the recipe can be found in the Girl Scout Handbook of 1927.

-The Encylopedia of Food and Drink


OH! And in case you were wondering...

HOW GIRLS
MAKE S'MORES
(1) Place Hershey bars on graham crackers.
(2) Toast marshmallows.
(3) Place toasted marshmallows on Hershey bars to melt chocolate.

HOW BOYS
MAKE S'MORES
(1) Eat Hershey bars.
(2) Eat marshmallows.
(3) Throw graham crackers at other boys.


Even though we can't figure out when, where or who invented the distinctive marshmallow sandwich S'more, it still remains a bonfire summer treat. It's all about hanging out. It's about achieving the uniform brown color of the perfect toasted marshmallow. It's about being with friends. Sit back. Relax. Roast a few.

love,

Desiree'

Blanket Forts.

A blanket fort is a construction, generally made by children, using blankets, bed sheets, pillows, and sofa cushions. A blanket fort is also sometimes referred to as a couch fort or pillow fort.

It can be as small as a tent, or as complex as the area it is constructed within allows, up to labyrinthine proportions. Tables, chairs, and beds can be integrated as supports. Heavy books can be used to weigh-down the blanket corners. Lightweight sheets can be nailed to walls. Typically blankets, pillows, or sleepingbags are laid upon the floor within, to provide a cushioned interior.
-Wikipedia


I don't know about you, but my childhood consisted of eating Ramen noodles, drinking strawberry milk, watching Eureeka's Castle and... most importantly...building blanket forts.

Some use cushions, some use pillows, some prefer spacious bunk-bed forts, others like small, closed in forts. As for me in my house, I rocked the blanket fort. You know, when you get a bunch of dark blue sheets and the breakfast stools from the kitchen and build an entire fort city in your living room. It's intriguing to me that we humans like den-like spaces. One time when I was 4 I was outside in my backyard and folded up my Mom's beach chair into a tent triangle type thing and fell asleep for like 45 minutes. My Mom has a picture of it. I used to stand in the middle of the living room playing hide-and-seek with my Mom and I thought because my eyes were closed she couldn't see me. Stuff like that makes childhood so worth reminiscing.

If you took the time to read this... you should definitely build a blanket fort and think about how cool it is to be a kid.

love
desiree'

He was ugly.

I'm reading a book by Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz) called Searching For God Knows What. This is an excerpt. It's amazing.


"I remember hearing stories about Christ as a child in Sunday school, the descriptions of Him being nearly magical, having eyes that would draw people toward Him and an aura that gave people the feeling they were in the company of greatness. This led me to assume Jesus was good-looking. There was a boy at my school who made people feel this way and he was good-looking, and a girl who also was good-looking would quiet a room when she entered. The images of Jesus in the paintings on the walls of our Sunday school class had Him looking like a gentle rock star, or perhaps somebody who played folk music and rarely talked, just stummed on his guitar and occasionally swiped his hair back behind his ear. It confused me later when I read His grim physical description in Scripture. Here is a description of Jesus in the book of Isaiah:

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in
his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and
rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised,
and we esteemed him not. (53:2-3 NIV)

I realize this isn't a lot to go on, but it's enough for us to know He wasn't exactly Brad Pitt. It seems odd to me that God would want us to know Jesus was unsightly. It was as though the way Christ looked was part of the message He was to communicate.

I watched an interview with Mel Gibson recently about his film The Passion Of The Christ. Gibson said it was important for Jesus to look very masculine in the film, and he wanted an actor who was good-looking. And I thought the movie The Passion was quite beautiful, but I wondered if very many people would go to see it if the guy who played Jesus in the movie were ugly. And that made me wonder how many people would follow Jesus today if, say, He showed up in America looking the way He looked thousands of years ago. I wondered if anybody would want to interview Jesus on television. I'll bet, if Jesus came to America and tried to do television interviews, the only people who would interview Him would be the people on public television, because on public television, they are not concerned about associating their television personalites with the commercial endorsement of products.


I read a report in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology that said criminals percieved as handsome were given lighter sentences than those percieved as unattractive. The article said researchers in Pennsylvania studied photographs of seventy-four defendants, judging them regarding their attractiveness, and the trials of the seventy-four revealed that men judged less handsome were twice as likely to be sent to jail than attractive men, who were handed significantly lighter sentences when convicted. In the lifeboat, Jesus was definitely representing humanity as equal, hardly caring about how He looked. One might believe that the unsightliness of Christ was a statement of humility, but this isn't true. It would be inconsistent if Christ's looks were a statement of humility. They were, rather, a statement of truth, and our seeing them as humility only suggests an obvious prejudice."
-Searching For God Knows What, Donald Miller


gets you thinking, eh? if we sit here and say Jesus' looks were an act of God's humility...we aren't seeing everyone as equal because what is there to be humble about if we all are loved the same anyway?? the truth is it doesn't matter what is good-looking. we make it this huge lifeboat society that one person is better than another and it's simply not true. God's eyes says equality.
<3desiree'