Empire State of Mind

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Emily Lewin

Drumroll please… ladies and gentlemen, I know that I have been a bit out of touch on here, but I would like to tell you something I’ve been dying to share for the last few months. I had to wait until a few key details were finalized before I could really spread the news, but now I am really excited to fill you in! Deep breath! Here goes! I am planning on moving to New York City on March 15th, 2013. Yes, I know that’s in about a month. And slightly crazy. And kinda…me. :)

I have been living in the Charlotte, North Carolina area since September of 2010 and it has been a wonderful place to be. I have become part of a sweet community and the thought of tearing my heart away from my family and friends here is very sad. Thankfully, CLT is a quick flight from NYC and I expect to be back to visit before too long.

My desire to live in and experience New York was ignited in a conversation with my Grandma Ellie after my Dad’s dad, Papa Bob, passed away two years ago this month. I spent a week with Grandma Ellie in Florida and she told me lots of stories about how she and Papa Bob met and their life in New York City. I remember talking to my friend Susan about it after I got back to Charlotte and she kept saying, “Take the deal.” My response was, “what deal?” Susan continued to say, “Take the deal, do it! Take the deal!” I went to the city last year with my friend Tiffany to visit and see if I liked it. I discovered that I loved New York and felt super comfortable and at home there. So, I am taking the deal and going on an adventure.

The immediate question I get from most people is, “What are you going to do there?” Well, I want to have fun, explore an incredible city, and connect with four generations of family history. I am planning on getting a radiology job and hopefully continuing with photography, Bright Ideas, music, and the other creative things I’ve been pursuing. I want to connect with creative, Jesus-loving, community there and see how much more of who I am created to be I can become in that wide open city.

I’m planning to sell my car and go all in on city life. I’d like to live in Brooklyn, where my Grandma grew up and my Dad was born. There are still many details to be worked out but I told God last July, after coming home from visiting NYC, that His surprises were better than my plans and that I would rest and let Him work it out. So far He has, in far more amazing ways than I ever could have imagined. I’m sure I will have more details to share on that later. For now, prayers would be appreciated! I’m excited!

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Story of My Life: Add a Little Honey

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Emily Lewin

Although I make some interesting food, at times I seem to get stuck in a rut of making the same food over and over again.  Repetition tends to remove the excitement from a once exotic or interesting dish after a few times of making it in rapid succession.  Once I find something that works – which to me means good taste, inexpensive, and easy to make (oh and gluten free) – I have a tendency to eat it until I’m sick of it, which doesn’t take very long.  Today when I came home from work I was trying to figure out what on earth to make with some chicken that needed to be cooked and not make the same old same old.  I happened to be on the phone with my friend Sarah Bryan while trying to do said figuring out and we decided that I should mix up my Curry Chicken recipe a bit by adding honey in place of oil.  I love adding unusual flavors and seeing how well they play with others that are already in an established clique so I decided to try introducing it.  I don’t really use any measurements with this recipe, I just sprinkle spices and drizzle honey until I think it looks pretty and/or smells good, aka “season to taste.”

I coated the chicken with honey and then added Pumpkin Pie Spice, ginger, salt, pepper, curry, and a little cumin and then added another layer of honey.  I started sprinkling on what I thought was yellow curry, which I normally add more heavily than the other spices, and realized (after I’d already fairly generously covered the chicken in it) that it was ginger, oops!  It still tasted super good though so I may do that again on purpose next time.  I made sure all of the chicken was evenly covered in the honey and spices, then I added the veggies and popped it into a pre-heated oven on 350 for about 40 minutes.  The way I’ve made it before it usually ended up being a bit oily but this was super yummy, a little sweet and tangy and moist.

I served it with a salad with balsamic vinegarette and pasta with a bit of butter and feta cheese.  Delish.

For dessert I made some GF cookies from the Betty Crocker mix.  They’re pretty good, a tiny bit grainy but yummy nonetheless.  I overcooked these a bit so they were tasty, just a tad on the crunchy side.

Do you have any favorite ways or tricks to mix up recipes you make all the time and add some interest?  Or a favorite unusual flavor combination?  I’d love to hear it!

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Story of My Life: Alliteration Party

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Emily Lewin

My friend Elaine sent me a Facebook invitation and a text a few days ago inviting me to a special party at her house, Prophetic Potato Soup Party (did you catch the alliteration?).  She is leaving for Haiti for 3 months in a couple of weeks and wanted to gather a few girls who are close to her to celebrate life by making a pot of gourmet potato soup and sharing some prophetic (aka encouraging) words with each other.  Elaine is amazing at blessing and loving on people, especially when it comes to encouraging words.  She is a super talented artist and teacher and I’ve frequently been in someone’s room or kitchen and noticed a hand drawn picture taped up to a wall or magnetized to the fridge that is clearly from Elaine.  I’ve been the grateful recipient of several of her pictures over the last year, the one from my birthday is hanging on my wall right now.  Elaine excels in this area.  I was excited to spend some time with her and get to know a few girls who I don’t normally hang out with.  I put together another rainbow fruit plate with the extras from yesterday’s picnic and walked down the street to Elaine’s house in the glorious evening golden hour!  She put together a lovely feast for us and I quite enjoyed myself!  I can definitely say that everyone left greatly encouraged, filled with yummy food, and feeling loved on.

Top L-R: Sarah & Elaine, Sule & Elaine.  Bottom L-T: Erin & Elaine, me & Elaine

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Story of My Life: Latta Park with the Artists

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Emily Lewin

This morning I awoke to rain with a prayer for sunshine on my lips because today was the day of the Winter Picnic.  You might laugh reading that if you know the weather has been like recently (think upper 70s to low 80s) but when we planned the picnic it was still cold out.  We thought it would be SO fun to have a picnic while it was still cool out, with hot soup and hot cider and sundry other warmish things.  Rather than frosty breath and thick socks we found ourselves in summer dresses and flip flops with sunscreen replacing sweaters.  Our hot soup was traded for chilled gazpacho and our warm cider was exchanged for pomegranate iced tea from Trader Joe’s.  I don’t think that anyone was sorry to miss being cold (however there was talk of a re-try next year, but this time in January or February) and we ended up having a marvelous afternoon!

We had three photographers there between me, Anastasia (below), and Rachel (next lower).  We got LOTS of pictures!

Anastasia (our resident pescatarian) made a marvelous vegetarian southwestern black bean salad.

My contribution, rainbow fruit plate and delicious yogurt dip.

This HUGE bee was chillin on the railing right where we were setting up and we were all a bit terrified of it so I was going to try to get it to go away and/or kill it and ended up killing it.  Look how large that is!  That’s all the way from a full story up.

We all brought out own mugs, plates, and silverware which made for such a fun assortment of colorful dishes!

I love the diversity of styles in our group!

Anastasia is identifiable by her amazing hand motions alone.  She has several well known motions for typing and texting, amongst others.  Her epic red hair updos follow as a close second for Ana-awesomeness.

Rachel and I were taking pictures of each other at the same time…I love how she framed her own smile!

Prep for the group shot.

Right as we were digging into dessert (aka rainbow fruit plate & dip) someone walked into the covered patio we were on with a piñata and I had a sneaking suspicion we were about to be kicked out.  My suspicion proved to be correct and a lady came over and firmly, but not rudely, informed us that she had reserved the patio for the entire afternoon and we needed to leave.  It was pretty much perfect timing.  We quickly packed up and took our fruit plate off down a path and found another table in amongst the trees to finish off our picnic in a bit more wild of a setting.  It was delightful!

Latta Park is a long walking path that runs along either side of a little creek, it’s such a pretty place, we’ll definitely be back!

I’m slightly obsessed with tree silhouettes and profiles recently.  I love the way that they all look so different juxtaposed against the sky.

Sarah, Rachel, and I decided to go to a nearby Starbucks, one of our faves on East Blvd that’s in an old house, for some post-lunch coffee.

After enjoying the sun for a while a rain cloud came creeping in and we ducked inside onto the comfy couch just in time to avoid the downpour.  After a few minutes a man walked up and asked if he could sit in the spare seat for 5 minutes.  A moment or two later he began chatting with us and his five minutes quickly turned into many more as he regaled us with tales of his life which included a 50+ year teaching career spanning several continents.   We heard stories about living in Australia for seven years and the fact that his wife was “a dingbat” because she was 80 and still working as a nurse and traveling the world.  We found out during the course of the stories that his name was Mr May but it wasn’t until the end when we all introduced ourselves that we found out his first name was George.  He asked all about us and what we were doing with our lives, where we were from and expressed the most keen attention, admiration, and affection toward us.  Besides conversations with my own grandparents, and that one chat with the lady named Ellen next to the onions at Bloom who told me the most hilarious and outrageous stories I’ve ever heard and that she wanted to write a book about her relatives and call it, I Had To Wait Until They Were All Dead, this may have been the most delightful conversation I’ve ever had with an older person.  Mr May exclaimed, with his amazingly animated face, how proud he was of us, that he loved us, and that we were the reason to keep on living in this crazy world at various points during the conversation.  I’m so glad he chose our little seat to perch in before heading off to mass.

Then we saw a double rainbow on the way home!

All said it was quite a full day, full of good food, beautiful friends, lively conversation, and sunshine.  Ah yes, I am rich indeed.

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Story of My Life: Multidimensionality

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Emily Lewin

Recently I’ve had several conversations with people about the pros and cons of being a multi-dimensional, multi-talented, multi-tasker.  The question raised is whether or not you can truly be pursuing more than one genre at a time and be good at any of them.  Thus far the conclusion that I’ve come to is that, like most things, it’s about balance.  There are points where you have to choose what you want to pursue and go after it if you want to really excel at something, there are things that it’s ok to be a mile wide and in inch deep in, and there are seasons and times in our lives that effect our ability to pursue certain things.  You can’t complain about boredom if there’s always something to do, on the other hand, it can be hard to be truly productive if there’s a million things to do.  :)   Again, balance and also priorities are important.  With those conversations in mind it was interesting to me to walk into my room and notice this little trio sitting together.  It might not be meaningful to anyone else but to me it represented the multidimensionality of my life at this moment.  My x-ray markers (red for Right and blue for Left) stuck to a hospital code card, sitting next to my camera battery, and a card with a free song download code on it.  Health care, photography, and music; besides people these are the main dimensions in my life right now.  It was interesting to see them all comfortably grouped together on my desk, which is the Grand Central Station of my room.  Three biggies, all of which can and have earned me money, can and have brought me great joy, can and have forced me to grow and change and evolve, and all three are active in my life right now, although I’m still learning how to walk out my relationship with each area.  If I want to sufficiently honor myself and each of these things enough to devote the amount of time, energy, and focus needed to grow in them then it will require intentionality and sacrifice.  If I want to be truly, fully multi-dimensional, I need to be intentionally making time to cultivate, practice, learn, and do several different and almost completely unrelated things.  And yet, because each one helps me discover and uncover more of myself and my creativity and talents and drive and passion, they are related, through me.  I know that I can brush my teeth and read a magazine at the same time just fine, but I can’t blog and listen to someone talk or get through one task like that if I’m trying to do 5 other things at the same time.  Perhaps it requires discernment to know what tasks can be safely combined and what ones need to be prioritized to do on their own, it may also be that once you mastered things to the point that they become habits (such as teeth brushing) they can be combined more easily with other tasks without losing quality.  It seems that if I want to be truly productive and consistent it requires making choices about what I want to prioritize.  What are your thoughts about this?  Is it possible to pursue multiple things at once?

Here’s to balance and intentionality and learning to live a full, multidimensional life.

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Story of My Life: The Estonian

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Emily Lewin

Yesterday we got a new housemate named Hanna-Liisa!  We’ve been down to two in our house of four since the beginning of the year when two of our roomies migrated North for jobs and new beginnings.  Hanna is a student at MSU and we are excited to get to know her better!  She’s returning our house to it’s international tradition, we’ve had an Australian, a Brazillian, an Italian, a Canadian, and a Ugandan (maybe others that I don’t know about) that have lived here.  When I first moved in it was Pennsylvanian, Colorado, Italy, and Canada.  I don’t know much about Estonia but I’m quickly learning more from Hanna.  I grabbed a screenshot of a Google Map to give you a rough idea of where it is in relation to the rest of Europe.  I love getting to know new people, especially from other cultures.  Thus far I’ve discovered a few things that Hanna loves, including: working out, youth ministry, youth in general, gypsies, cooking (very healthy and delicious food), baking, and yogurt.  I’m glad she’s part of our adventure of living in this house!

Yes, we do have a giant fork on the kitchen wall.  No, we didn’t pick it out and put it there.  Yes, there is a matching spoon on the other side.

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Story of My Life: New Friends & New Flavors

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Emily Lewin

I’m still out in the boonies at my grandparents house, which is an amazing and lovely place to be!  Today I had quite a full day with them between church in the morning, lunch with them & my aunt & uncle in the afternoon, then hanging out with some new friends in the evening.  Have you ever met a person, or a couple, who you bump into at intervals but have never actually spent time with or gotten to know, but you just have a connection somehow and you know that eventually you’ll be friends with them?  Well that’s what it’s been like for me with Jake & Stephanie for the last year, until today that is.  I saw them at the River with my grandparents and we finally had that it’s-time-for-us-to-hang-out moment.  I agreed to dinner with them and we met up at their house and headed over to Brixx.  I have to throw in a plug for Brixx right here, it was the best gluten free pizza I’ve had so far.  It definitely surpassed the Mellow Mushroom for GF pizza goodness.

Because I hadn’t spent time with Jake & Steph before I didn’t feel like it was the right time to bust out my camera and take tons of pictures of them just yet.  I think there will be moments for that in the future but for now I wanted to let them see me without a lens in front of my face.  I had a marvelous time hanging out with them and hopefully will be seeing a lot more of them if they succeed in their plans to move to Charlotte.  They also have an adorable little son named Samuel.  I love meeting new people and making friends but more than that I love actually building relationships and really getting to know people beyond the introductions.  I have a conviction that people are more than where they work or live, so much more, and it is such an adventure to take the time to really get to know someone beyond the surface.  What’s your favorite question someone has ever asked in the process of getting to know you?

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Story of My Life: To Grandmother’s House I Go

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Emily Lewin

Through my growing up years I always wanted to live near our extended family and experience all of the big family things such as big holiday meals  and other family celebrations together.  Although we’ve never lived near them since the time I was a little girl the Lord has always provided sweet “adopted” family to fill the gap.  My move to Charlotte changed all that however and I now live within 3 hours of my grandparent’s house and only twenty minutes away from one of my uncles.  The holidays that I wasn’t able to go home to Colorado for I got to spend with extended family, including Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2010 and Thanksgiving in 2011.  Isn’t it interesting to see the way the Lord answers our prayers?  It usually doesn’t look like we thought it would (I thought it would be my whole family together), but he does give us an abundance of sweet things.  I’ve enjoyed getting to spend much more time with my Mom’s parents than ever before (my Dad’s mom lives in Florida) and in the process building relationship with my cousins and the rest of the family.  Last weekend was my Grandma’s birthday and I was going to come visit but it didn’t work out so I drove up today and will be here for the weekend.  They live “in” a smallish town in North Carolina, although where they actually live is about 25 minutes outside of the town.  The end of their road is just about where the “boonies” start.  :)   This house has become a sort of refuge for me and I look forward to coming and relaxing, watching random sports and game shows on TV (with all the ads muted), chatting with Grandma, and sitting up late having long talks with Grandpa.  We just finished one of those talks, he is off to bed and I’m not far from bed myself.  I just had to share one quick picture from today…and then I decided to edit all of them and share them…and now the upload is going so slow I may just have to go to bed and share the rest “later.”  Less sleep for me but more pretties for you!  :)   Enjoy!

Here’s a picture of Grandma & Grandpa on their 56th wedding anniversary last fall, the celebration of which I was able to join because I live so close!  Aren’t they the cutest?!

 

Probably my favorite of the day.  Imagine my delight upon looking up to see a tree full of cardinals just as I parked in their driveway.

 

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Story of My Life: A Walk & A Salad

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Emily Lewin

We had another gorgeous day today!  I finished working at 5:00pm, first week of new job done!  I got in my car and the temperature was just perfect to drive home with the music blasting out the open windows.  After I got home I was immediately torn between being really hungry and wanting to get out and enjoy the weather with a walk.  I decided to walk first since I knew the light would be gone by the time I was done eating.  I changed into some awesome linen capris that I got at Loft last year and a tank top (summer clothes what?) and of course flip flops, grabbed my camera and headed out the door.  Right as I walked out a friend of mine walked by and we ended up making the round of the block together catching up.  I love living in community!  The sky was an amazing juxtaposition of perfect blue and puffy white clouds on one side and rolling gray storm clouds on the other.

I loved that this gray cloud looked like it was scuttling itself through the blue sky to the other side where it belonged.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow…

Upon returning from the walk I decided to make myself a burger since I had been craving one since smelling someone grilling out this afternoon on my lunch break.  Isn’t it funny what an immediate impression a smell can make on us?  It can conjur up a memory, start our mouths watering, or our stomachs turning, or our imaginations reeling with one whiff.  Because of the lack of hamburger buns I decided to make myself a salad with the burger on top.  I mixed in some sea salt, pepper, steak seasoning, and garlic powder to the meat and while it was cooking I washed and cut up some lettuce and cucumber (the only salad-y things I had on hand).  I decided that cheese would be good so I added a slice of muenster to my burger.  I finished it off with some oil & vinegar dressing and parmesean cheese.  I give you the Upside Down Cheeseburger Salad.  It was tasty!

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Story of My Life: Flip Flop

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Emily Lewin

It’s that time of year again, time to bust out the flip flops, tank tops, skirts, summer dresses, and sunscreen.  We’re not quite fully there yet but we’re well on our way.  Today I was going to try to meet a friend and her kids at a park near where I was working so I took these flipflops with me knowing that it would be too hot to wear my bulky tennis shoes at a park in the afternoon.  I walked to the parking garage, pulled off my shoes and socks and slipped my feet into the purple goodness $2 Old Navy flip flops from last year.  They are are totally worn in with the imprint of my foot firmly implanted in their thin foam but they represent so much sunshine and fresh air that I was excited to feel their slightly textured soles against my feet.  I did manage to make it over for lunch but only with about 15 minutes to sit and eat and because I was hurrying to eat I neglected to take any pictures…oops!

I was thinking about the fact that right now, in the spring, there is a bit of a flip flop effect happening.  Seeds that were burried under ground are springing up, leaves that were rotting on the top of the earth’s surface are melting into the soil.  Trees are budding and bursting into bloom, clothing the barrenness of winter boughs with bright colors and textures.  The birds are singing again.  There is a tangible change in the season going on.  Things are flipping from winter into spring, unfolding and opening.  Can you feel it?  Can you see it?  Can you hear it?  flip flop.  here we go!

 

PS I’ve been playing this album (Brian and Katie Torwalt’s Here on Earth) constantly for the last two or three days.

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