brain train in the membrane

i've been picking up a lot of tim keller books lately. i bought "counterfeit gods" last saturday while visiting city life (redeemer church plant in boston) to see family, and i devoured it within a plane ride + half a day, give or take a couple hours. it was so heart-wrenchingly good that i finally picked up his other book "prodigal God" that i had laying around the house. i remember being similarly affected by his book "the reason for God."

this isn't a review of the book - which i heartily recommend. a lot was revealed to me by his clear teaching - if his words were a set of knives, they'd be wusthofs or shuns, "...piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit." keller's teachings have the ability to propel a chain reaction of thoughts in my mind & bring about much reflection, tears, humility, gratitude, change.

"(His) blessing makes idols unnecessary. As with Jacob, we usually discover this only after a life of 'looking for blessing in all the wrong places.' it often takes an experience of crippling weakness for us to finally discover it. that is why so many of the most God-blessed people limp as they dance for joy." - counterfeit gods

in a convo with the hubs, i was able to assess why keller's teaching is so effective for me - while tim keller is a theologian, he is also a keen anthropologist. he takes the grand truths of the Word and brings it down to real life - the nitty gritty. he examines idol-worship in our hope in politics, ideas of love, greed, and even doctrinal truths. he penetrates the fabric of the world around us through an acutely biblical lens - the workplace, motherhood, socioeconomics, racial tensions...in a way that helps me understand how everything in life exists for His good pleasure.

yet, i know there are those who will find him too intellectual, dry, urbane. hard to imagine how for one person, something can be so life-changing and to another person, dull. this man's teaching affects me in a different way than it'll affect you - there are skeletons in my closet, idol-worship in my heart that are fingerprinted differently in my life because of the past our creative God uniquely planned for me. randy alcorn's books impact tim in a more profound way than they do me. john piper's books will do for you something different than they do to me. et cetera.

i so thankful to God for the teaching of saints with a deeper understanding of the gospel & its intricacies than me - i catch glimpses of the depth & wealth of truth i am striving to understand. what all these men do imperfectly, abridgedly (made up word), God uses perfectly for His plans.

did any of you make it down this far? hahaha, i've heard so many people rant about all-text/sans-graphics posts and how boring they are (and for the most part, i have to agree), so i highly doubt it. if so, i hope you were encouraged! in all honesty, it is more fun to post up pictures & little anecdotes of life, but i do want to occasionally share the good-er stuff too =). tatafornow.

color palette.

heehee. just kidding. we chose two colors to spruce up our quirky little home: one very bright and cheery color for the kitchen. one muted, soft color as an accent for the family/living spaces. pictures to come!

"it had to be done. just once."

i woefully admit that i'm a bit of an achronologous blogger (i also like making up words) - meaning...i have things in queue and post them up whenever inspiration hits, regardless of when something might have happened; because of that, i say a lot of things like, "a few weeks ago.." or "a couple days ago.." or "i don't remember when this happened, but.."

soo...tim and i went to visit my my parents (the shins) in orange county during a weekend some time ago. we were killing three birds with one stone. we went to the O.C. to:

1. pay momma & poppa shin an overdue visit - me & tim
2. watch the laker game with the pops (an unfortunate game. the lakers got massacred by almost 30 points by the OC thunder) - tim & kiiiiind-of me
3. attend a friend's bridal shower. - me

it was an eventful weekend, encouraging, fun, et cetera. but, two things stuck out the most to me. one of the best things about being married has to be finding hilarity in the mundane.

let me preface what i'm about to write/show next by saying i had dreaded this moment since i first saw this abomination pop up on my google reader a few weeks back.

the first words tim sheepishly said to my, "oh no...." when he picked me up from charissa's bridal shower were, "it had to be done. just once."

okay, so the KFC Double Down wasn't THAT bad - definitely not the greasy, heart attack, size-of-my-face creation i was expecting. it's basically two pieces of fried chicken sandwiching bacon & cheese. don't misunderstand - i'm not saying it's GOOD. it might taste okay, but it feels completely and totally wrong.

=). here are a couple pictures from our visit to the shin home.

the backyard & my room & my sister's room. i love that my parents haven't changed a thing. i always feel like a little girl when i go home.

i'm posting a lot of food pictures. but this is the real deal - a home cooked meal from momma. after marriage & cooking up a storm in my own kitchen, i am in awe of how quickly my mom whips together these meals...and nary a crumb escapes her cleaning cloth.

so, the greatest part about eating at home has to be our pets. they are so unswervingly loving, dopey, funny, and loyal, altogether refreshing =).

loveable, covetous phoebe staring at my dad's prime rib.

a photo montage of our little pheebs & andy. they get super mopey & droopy when they sense someone is about to leave. i took these pictures in the midst of packing up. tim and i left for san diego about 10 minutes after this.

hahaha. what a pair of cuties. i think a golden retriever or a german shepherd would be the perfect addition to the Yu household, what thinks you? how fun would it be to have a little golden pup running around our home, knocking over paint cans, chewing up our pretty garden, following us around everywhere, growing up with our kids. i'm working on bringing my hubbie around to see it the same way.

p.s.: tim wanted me to make it clear that he actually said, "it had to be done. at least once." uh..please honey. JUST. once.

eat meat.

i skirted around it long enough, but i couldn't escape it forever. i finally made my first steak dinner after marriage!! i know....what's the big deal? at this point, i've made fish, chicken, veggies, pastas, soups, stews, casseroles, etc. what's a measly little hunk of meat? well. a lot...but i finally made it and now i can say rib-eye steak is a part of my repertoire.

i'm not a picky eater, by no means. i am sometimes embarrassed by my junkyard appetite....by my unhealthy desire to eat hamburgers everyday (burger&fries are my comfort food - carl's jr. and red robin are my top picks). still, a girl's got her standards :). red meat is one of those things i'm really picky about when i eat it - it can't be too dry, it can't be dripping. i don't like my meat drowning in blood, in butter, or sauce. it has to be tasty, sprinkled with a good seasoning. annd, i have no confidence i can whip up something top-notch restaurants can't even get right sometimes.

voila! ahh! i'm sosovery sad i lost the link to the recipe - but this is a rib-eye steak with bourbon sauce (cheap bourbon-parsley-beef stock-heavy whipping cream and....?? darn!), garlic mashed potatoes (yukon gold potatoes-heavy whipping cream-garlic-salt-butter), and steamed veggies (salt-veggies-water).

rib-eye steak with bourbon sauce: i was shooting for medium rare but the steaks ended up medium. a teensy bit too dry for my taste, but the sauce did wonders juicing things up. the sauce made every bite savory. i could only eat half because it was too rich, but tim chowed down =).

garlic mashed potatoes: they were just alrite, nothing amazing. in my opinion, mashed potatoes taste best when they're creamy + soft. mine were chunky & a little too starchy. this is in part, i know, because i got lazy when i was smushing the potatoes. these were more like smushed potatoes. the flavor - good. texture - not so bueno.

steamed veggies: you can't really mess these up.

overall? a very educational meal. i learned a little bit about potatoes (let them boil until they're practically falling apart - they'll be moist & the mashing will be so much easier!) and a little bit about meat (searing it on one side adds a crunchy, tasty layer - on a stove, cast iron pots or high-temp skillets achieve the best steak!).

still, my unfailingly generous husband gave this meal a 4!

april showers bring may flowers.

i'd never been a huge fan of flowers. delicate things, they always died too quickly under my care, and always left a polleny, petally mess. they were just pretty little things meant to be admired from the ground. that all changed after my wedding when my eyes were opened to just how beautiful they could be. i'd never seen flowers with colors so bright or deep in so much variety of shape.

...........we love our cozy backer road home, quirks and all. the previous owner & his wife were definitely DIY people. he is a carpenter, so we have some idiosyncratic touches here & there that don't make sense to us - random wooden panels, strange (but useful) storage space in the garage, a weird little office also in the garage, and on and on. but, not all their undertakings leave us scratching our heads =).

his wife is a gardener, and when we first got our place back in november, we couldn't see just how extensive her work was. now that spring's here, we're definitely reaping the fruits of her labor. we've got tiny apples growing on a tree, little strawberries clustering in their bushes...and roses! roses, roses, everywhere!

i've been having a blast making tiny bouquets & giving them to our good friends. we also regularly fill our home with them, and they add brightness and color to otherwise blah spaces. we have white roses with magenta tips, pink roses, peach roses, peach & pink roses, yellow roses, deep burgundy roses....and my favorite: lipstick red roses.

oo, la la! they remind me of spanish royalty! i'm beginning to understand why flowers make such sweet little gifts. they're not meant to last, just to bring a bit of cheer, love & beauty. these particular roses are super fragrant, so their sweet scent is constantly filling our yard. God is a most creative Maker, and i'm thoroughly enjoying His endless artistry.

an unexpected bonus: my hubbie never has to buy me flowers, he just has to walk into our yard & snip a few ;).

two nutcases.

marriage = not just the coming together of two lives, but the combining of two people's belongings & making sense of the mish-mash of possessions under one roof. it wasn't that difficult to be honest. it helped that tim came in with next to nothing & i came in with just a few boxes of clothes & books & bedding.

consolidating our closets wasn't too hard. we just threw out a bunch of tim's no-no clothes: ripped shirts, faded-beyond-recognition-of-initial-color shirts, overly baggy jeans, wife-beaters (i don't like them, yuck), etc. and boxed up a bunch of mine to give away. i get the lion's share of our small walk-in closet with space to spare.

organizing our kitchen was a piece of cake. we had nothing coming in, so everything we have is a product of the wedding (thanks friends+family!). i had a lot of fun putting things away & admiring our shiny new kitchen products (i love my bright red martha stewart le creuset pots and bright red kitchenaid mixer! lots of yummy foods have resulted from those appliances, so they're not just sitting pretty).

probably the one i agonized over the longest is the bookcase. i actually spent quite a bit of time staring at our boxes pondering the best homes & neighbors to give our books on the bookcases. things i pondered:

1. organize topically? i quickly saw the drawbacks to this. tim has java, surfing, coding, "data structures & algorithms" (snort, snort) books. i have cook books, tons of fiction books, random anthologies, book series, biographies....we have bibles, commentaries, references, children books, blah blah blah, etc. our christian books are not as difficult to organize - but we have doubles of many (who wants? scroll down to the end of this post to see what's up for grabs). AND they're all a hullabaloo of paperback and hardback, and bunch of different sizes. i GUESS it wouldn't be so bad to arrange it topically, but it would look so ugly, and i couldn't bear that.
   
   
2. organize by size and color? hahaha, i came really close to copying some super cute interior design blogs that had their entire bookshelf set up this way. it was beyoootiful. but curiously, most of our books are black, brown, dark burgundy, orange and yellow and purple..? ............i need to buy more pink, green, blue and red books to create the wonderful rainbow array i'm imagining in my head. oh, and magenta. i love magenta (darn you blogspot color palette for not having magenta & forcing me to use periwinkle). to buy a book for its cover, is that very bad? heehee. i will resist.
   
   
3. organize by genre? hm. is this the same as arranging it topically? not really? well, we don't have enough genres to do this. it would be...two big groups of books (christian, fiction). maybe three (how-to's/manuals). maybe four (biographies?). maybe ten (references, tiny books, science fiction? fantasy? historical fiction? crime books? textbooks? beep beep beep bop bop boop). i'm too indecisive for this.
   
   
4. where? the most shocking thing for me was seeing how many books tim had. i think i kind of assumed the big bookcase we bought would give me freedom to arrange my books in any which way with a little scootch room in between. nay =(, we've run out of room. where to put our books? hmMmm..
   
   
5. hm.
   

anywho, =] i did finally get down to brass tacks & i ended up having a grand ol' time shelving this beast. one side is meticulously organized, but i kind of lost motivation halfway, so the second shelf is haphazardly thrown together. heeheehee.

heh. heh. heh. and there's our big fatty television smack dab in the middle. we don't have cable, but we love watching movies on that thing.

sigh....i suppose at the end of the day, most of these things will only seem to matter now. what we prize will change, and what we carefully arrange will be discarded or swapped out for something new. i am enjoying God's many blessings given to our little family and even delight in them, but we joyfully accede that the only lasting treasure is the gospel. it repairs our marriage, and keeps us continuing on the same course, and causes us to grow.

double, double toil and trouble:

• instruments in the Redeemer's hands - paul tripp (cc)
  
• holiness - j.c. ryle (sw)
  
• recovering biblical manhood and womanhood - grudem & piper (at)
  
• the cross centered life - mahaney (jw)
  
• the grace and truth paradox - alcorn
• nasb bible (with writing in it)
  
• more to come - will update after we get the rest of our books.
  

melting pot.

the fact that tim is taiwanese and i'm korean isn't your average cultural clash. being in a inter-ethnic marriage didn't require a huge adjustment on either of our parts. it helps that we both only have the loosest ties to our motherlands. my korean-ness ends at listening to kpop -2pm, 2ne1, big bang are the current faves, all thanks to a past roomie of mine.

it was God's great goodness to me in keeping me from marrying into a korean family - i was spared a lifetime of mortification for my atrocious konglish & lack of cultural know-how. growing up, i always got away with blundering around with kindergarten-level korean. tim's taiwanese/mandarin beats my korean, but only by a small margin. and thankfully, both our parents are ultra understanding of this, so we've managed to dodge some of the stickier in-law interactions. i have mixed feelings about our loss of heritage. i'm pretty sure tim and i will send our future kids to some kind of language learning program - but, that's another story, another day.

essentially, we have similar priorities, values, upbringings and interests, not to mention our unity in Christ, so it rarely crosses our minds that we're taiworean. but every once in a while, we'll both feel our roots tugging at us - the strongest when it comes to: 1.) family, 2.) food, 3) language (minimally).

after getting married, i wet my feet in korean cuisine by cooking up things that i have never cared to learn to make in the past - stews, meats, fried rices, etc. tim is a good eater and has (thankfully) enjoyed most everything. still, i couldn't help but notice the growing differences in our palates. i like things spicy/flavorful/marinated/robust- indicative of my korean taste buds (see? i've got it in me somewhere). tim likes things more mild/less sauce/less dressing/less salty. i've never really enjoyed pork and mushrooms, and...well...chinese food is rampant with the stuff.

anyways, i thought i'd experiment & surprise tim one night by cooking up something from the chinese cook books i got. (i got 4 korean and chinese cook books from bridal shower/wedding. i use them excessively). unfortunately, this isn't really the kind of stuff that tim grew up on. fortunately, he loved the meal and gave it a 4.5!

the kung ka-pao! chicken was my kind of stuff! tasty, yummy goodness wrapped up in a little crunchy surprise. and, the good thing about cooking it yourself is that you control how much garlic/salt/soy sauce/ginger/etc. goes into your sauce, so it doesn't have that pungent and overly salty gunkiness of some take out places.

egg flower soup - tim had been requesting it for a while, so i finally nerved myself up to make it. uhh, what the heck was i waiting for? it was so easy peezy! it's basically: chicken broth/soy sauce/green onion/and...EGG! the neutral flavors balanced out the kung ka-pao

green onion pancake - too doughy this time around. i made it again about a week later, and according to tim, it had the perfect consistency of an authentic green onion pancake made in china! my sneaking suspicion is that he is just being overly encouraging, knowing my insecurities over my rookie wife ways.

=) excited to explore more culinary delights. any recc's for recipes? oh! and if you want the recipes, i will give.

p.s.: hAPPY 24th BIRTHDAY diane Cho! thanking God for having such a sweet soul as my best friend. i love you!!