While we were in Germany, a few new neighbors moved in at the tire house.  They’re very sweet and very determined in their work.  They’re also so incredibly hungry.  You’ve never seen worm and bug hunts like these before!

I’m so grateful for our new neighbors.

These moments of gratitude have really caught me lately:

~ how Todd captures the Minot, North Dakota community as they pull together during an overwhelming flood that has erased half their community.

~ the handmade housewarming gift we received from Janery.  I’ve never received a housewarming present before, and I am in love with our new kitchen towels.

~ this “unleash your joy” painting ready to hang above my desk.

~ this photography blog project that connects past stories with present ones.

~ the three day weekend with family, fireworks, and watermelon in America.

~ for TWO new Gadanke journals at my desk, ready to be built.  Ready to share.  Ready to be loved.

~ dreams. There should be no boundaries with the dreams we create for ourselves.

~ for this note:

Dear Katie, my husband wound up in the hospital. It was a whirlwind of MRIs and talk about brain tumors.  So scary.  I was in the waiting room, worrying and fretting.  Then I saw your little things journal in my purse. I’d haphazardly stuck it in there the other day.  Little did I know, right?

I started writing in it.  I found myself reflecting on all the really good stuff my husband and I had to be thankful for.  In the time of pain, you showed me hope.  You showed me gratitude. Thank you for that. –M

(p.s.  No brain tumor!!  All is healthy and good.)

And let’s not forget the lucky winner of a {Journey} travel journal.  It’s…

SARAH R!

She writes, “it would be so hard to choose one place to go! i always love returning to my “home” of the Netherlands, but i would also love to see greece or israel, or head out to thailand. but, feeling as tired as i do this week, a nice, simple, quiet vacation in a cabin in the mountains would hit the spot. :-)”

Send me a note, Miss Sarah.

Now you all have me thinking of travel and adventure.  Sheesh!  We’re trying to settle down, people!

Please share a gratitude you have in your heart today.  Is there a link?  A person?  A moment?

Love could never be so grand and powerful if we held no gratitude in our hearts.

Dear Friends,

I feel so grateful for your kindness as Martin and I made our announcement that we’re going to stay in the US and build a little home in the back of an airplane hangar.  It sounds so weird to say that!  A house in a hangar?

Is there some way I could invite you all over… perhaps for a little decluttering party?!

Yesterday, we had so much fun hiking and flying airplanes.  (I’d take you deep into the mountains with some lemonade and your cars full of random hangar stuff.)

There is this little ghost town up a bumpy dirt road, and the lilacs were blooming everywhere.  I’m sure most of you have had your lilacs come and go this year.  I pulled out my Leatherman and cut a small bouquet to bring home.

Is that weird?  I have my own Leatherman (giant pocketknife tool) that I carry in our car.  My old 9 to 5 boss gave it to me for Christmas; all the other women got jewelry.  I’ll never forget what he said.  ”Katie, I know you, and you need this more.”

I wish only good moments to all of you.

And to our sweet nephew E, just born in Europe… welcome to this beautiful world.

xox

your mountain friend, Katie

p.s.  I’m serious about the decluttering party.  When are you free to stop by?

Sometimes I wake Martin up by turning up the volume on my computer ever so slowly with this song:

Now more than ever.

Over the last year, the course Martin and I have been traveling has changed sooo much.  There has been so much dreaming and dreaming.  I haven’t mentioned any of these plans to you even though they’ve been in the forefront of every decision we’ve made these last months because (1) we didn’t know if this dream could really happen and (2) I don’t think we really knew how to grasp it even if it DID come true.

It wasn’t until we’d been in Germany for two weeks that we knew for sure:

It’s our little family realizing something we never thought we’d do for a long, long time: we’re settling down.

{Love Where We Live} page

We’re back in the United States.  We arrived on Sunday morning.  By Monday night, we were back in the tire house.

Last June, we moved from Germany to the United States.  I thought that saying goodbye to Germany for three months was like retracting my wings.  Germany instantly equaled challenge every second for me.  A foreign world showed me bravery and joy.  Of course, those three months started to grow as a calling kept us in the US for 11 months.  We returned just last month, and of course it became all about prepping for this next journey.

Oh I aboslutely adore Berlin.  But I could never get rid of the itch to be in rural America in the mountains.  It was buried deep in my heart.  It has been deep in my family for generations.  (My ancestors left their German speaking world in the 1800s and settled in this not-yet-a-state region of America.)

I never thought that being the girl back in her home state was ever going to make me grow no matter how much I looooved it.

Boy was I wrong.

Gadanke was born here.  Martin and I both learned to fly here.  We met here.  All our dreams have always begun from right here.

So what are we going to be doing in the Wild West of America?  We’re building a little home.  By “little”… you know what I mean.  teensy.  By “building”… can you guess?  Yeah.  We’re doing it all ourselves.  Martin has been researching geothermal heating systems in school for months.  I’m not even sure I knew what that was before.  (Don’t worry if you don’t either; I’ll fill you in.)

Oh!  But we’re not building this home from scratch.  Boy howdy! (I’m trying to sound more country.  Is it working?)  I’m just going to have to show you this backwards plan we’re so excited about.

Here is home-to-be:

I’m not even joking.

We’re converting a house made for airplanes into a house made for US! The plan is to remodel the upstairs in the back of this airplane hangar into a little 700 square foot (65 square meter) loft.  We’ll enclose the open attic on the upper right, bring up the ceilings, and do about a million other remodeling projects.

Gadanke will still be running full steam.

Martin is still going to be working on school AND developing his dream engineering business.

Our dreams for the summer are going to need so much more than just 24 hours each day.  It’s exciting.  It’s overwhelming.

We’ve got a lot of de-cluttering and cleaning to do first.  Also?  This airplane needs an engine so it can get out of the way.

So that’s the plan!  We’re both super excited to share the process of making THIS home with you in the coming months.

This decision hasn’t been easy.  But yet at the same time, it was soooo easy.  Deep in our hearts, we know this is just right.

POOF!  I’m giving you a {Journey} travel journal from the shop and a ticket to anywhere in the world.

**GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.  THANK YOU**

Where will you go?

Would you come visit Europe for some site seeing and hazelnut ice cream?

Would you slip into the quiet mountains or the beach for some relaxing?

Or maybe you’ve got something completely different in mind.  What is it?!

Tell us your pick and which travel journal color you’d pick, and I’ll randomly draw a winner for a {Journey} travel journal.  (Sorry – travel expenses to dream place #1 not provided)  ;)

**GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.  THANK YOU**

Meanwhile, we’re traveling ourselves today.  Some of you commented over the last few weeks, “I can’t wait to see what you guys have planned next!”

Well brace yourselves because this change is so big that even Martin and I don’t even know how to handle it yet.  At all.

I’ve had a crush on this journal ever since it arrived on my doorstep back in the US.

The Wilson Family over in Oklahoma put together this {Something Serious with Something Silly} journal from Gadanke.  They took it with them to restaurants and around town.  They had it on the dinner table and over at the couch.

They all contributed.  And I just love what they created together!  The book is over at the Share Your Journal page at Gadanke, so you can go flip through the fun pages.

A million thanks to Shan of Family Brings Joy and her cool little family for sharing!

I’m tickled to introduce (perhaps even reintroduce) Lisa – aka Satsumabug.  You might know her from flipping through pages of her {She} journal over at Gadanke.  What you may not know is that this girl has a serious knack for hosting parties, decluttering, and getting some craved stuff all at the same time.

If needed, I was completely ready to get on my knees to beg Lisa to share her ideas with us.

But she wouldn’t have it.  All she asked was that I show you the fabulous skirt that she made.  (See her wearing it below?  Isn’t that the cutest?)  She and I both sewed our first piece of clothing at the same time… and that’s such an empowering achievement.  So GO LISA!  ;)

I think you’ll love this party idea!

It started with two things: a messy closet, and a craving for waffles. Oh, and Katie’s post about her lonely citrus juicer. So: three things.

I had a closet full of neglected garments that I just knew could find happier homes with my friends, and I figured their wardrobes looked the same. So I organized a clothing swap among my women friends.

They brought their unwanted clothes to my house — along with a hefty helping of accessories, to ease the burden of size-matching — and we had a dress-up party over baguettes and spreads. (Note for next time: buy more baguettes.) Everyone went home with something, and I took the leftovers (clothes, not bread!) to a local women’s shelter.

At the same time as I was organizing the clothing swap, I developed a craving for waffles. A strong, lingering hankering. Waffles are one of those things that — as far as I know — you just can’t make without specialized equipment.

I decided to buy a waffle iron, but I don’t like Belgian waffles (the thick ones with big, deep indentations) and it was shockingly difficult to find a reasonably priced, non-Belgian waffler on Amazon.

So I posted a request on Facebook.

My friends and I soon had a thread going about the relative merits of Belgian and classic waffles, waffles for breakfast versus waffles for dinner, and best times to throw a brunch party. Out of all that, I discovered that my sister’s fiancé had his mother’s old waffle iron gathering dust in the back of a cabinet. He brought it over to our house, and I threw a brunch party with the help of my friend Chelsea‘s waffle iron (which she got from her mother).

Somewhere in the midst of all that waffle talk, I read Katie’s post asking if anyone wanted her citrus juicer, and it occurred to me that everyone seems to have these sad orphans languishing in their kitchens: the impulse purchases, the Christmas gifts, the now-ignored friends of bygone days of differently-focused cooking.

Why not host a kitchen swap, modeled along the same lines as my clothing swap?

And this time men could be invited too! I haven’t actually hosted the party yet (it has been a busy couple of months), but I got so excited about the idea, I hopped up out of bed and wrote it all down. Here’s how I envision it:

The swap will be comprehensive, covering everything a kitchen might possibly need.

1. Kitchen gadgets are a no-brainer, but guests should also bring cookware, bakeware, dishes, drinkware, and cutlery in clean, functional condition.

2. Cookbooks and food books will also be welcome. I confess this is the category I’m most excited about.

3. This part might be tricky, but I suspect many of us also own edibles/ingredients we don’t use. My friend once gave me an almost-new bag of whole wheat pastry flour he’d bought for a single recipe. He was happy to unload it; I was the one who scored. My line on edibles-swapping is that they must be fresh, look fresh, and smell fresh. So a recently-purchased package of arborio rice would pass muster, but a questionable jar of jam with no sell-by date shouldn’t leave your house. (This is where it helps to swap with friends whose fridges and pantries you trust.)

4. To me, the garden is an extension of the kitchen, so my swap will also be open to garden items and bounty: herb cuttings, extra pots, a bumper crop of avocados or Meyer lemons (we can hope!).

5. It’s perfectly okay to show up empty-handed with intent to leave the party otherwise. Non-cooks and owners of tiny/growing kitchens should bring drinks or potluck dishes as their contribution.

I’m very excited about hosting the kitchen swap and am looking forward to making it happen.

Recently I also learned about a growing “food swap” movement, where avid home cooks, bakers, and jam-makers get together to share their creations. My friend Emily started the one in Los Angeles; there are also others across the US. Check out this article to read more and find a swap near you.

So how does the kitchen swap sound to you? Would you attend such a swap? What would you bring, or hope to leave with? (And if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area: would you like to come to my swap?)