{"id":138,"date":"2015-01-20T10:44:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-20T15:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/2015\/01\/20\/kitchen-florist\/"},"modified":"2015-05-05T14:56:09","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T18:56:09","slug":"kitchen-florist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/2015\/01\/kitchen-florist\/","title":{"rendered":"kitchen florist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe that January is already half gone. <i>Didn&#8217;t we just celebrate Christmas?<\/i> While I absolutely adore the rush of the holidays and two rounds of company, I admit that I am glad to have the house to ourselves now. This is the first week since we arrived in Florida that we&#8217;ve had some semblance of normal routine.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve enjoyed some gardening this week, as we have a backyard with functional flowerbeds, benches, and swings. I think I missed my college calling, and should have really studied <i>botany or herbology.<\/i> There&#8217;s still time, right?<\/p>\n<p>Does anyone else find it therapeutic to clean and organize things? I spent a whole day cleaning, rearranging, and reorganizing the entire kitchen. <b>It was just lovely<\/b>. A clean kitchen is one of my favorite things. It just makes me feel like I&#8217;ve got my life in order. Also, I&#8217;m dubbing myself an amateur kitchen florist. Fresh flowers make me feel at home.<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/files\/2015\/01\/kitchen-2Bflorist.jpg\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/files\/2015\/01\/kitchen-2Bflorist.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Our first week back in Florida, we spoke at a small church nearby. They were so sweet, and it was fun to get to know a new (to us) local church. We&#8217;re now at <b><i>45% of our required monthly support <\/i><\/b>to go to PNG. We can go when we reach 75%, but we&#8217;d love to be 100% funded.<\/p>\n<p>Josh got notified this week that <b>he was scheduled for his citizenship interview.<\/b> It should be sometime in February. Once that is finished, then he will be a (dual) citizen of the United States of America (and the Kingdom of Belgium)&#8230; not to mention we will be done dealing with the immigration offices and paperwork <i>for.ever<\/i>. It&#8217;s been almost 4 years, guys, and we are <b>so done<\/b>.<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/files\/2015\/01\/campfire.jpg\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/files\/2015\/01\/campfire.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>If you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pinterest.com\/erinverdonck\/\" target=\"_blank\">follow me on Pinterest<\/a> at all, then you know that I&#8217;ve been pinning things like mad. Since we&#8217;re going to the field so soon, where you pay for every megabyte of internet usage, I have been searching for things that I might need or might want to do\/fix\/make. I&#8217;ve been told by other missionaries that investing the time in making your house pretty helps when homesickness and culture shock set in, so I&#8217;ve pinned design things using bits and pieces of easy to find things lying about. Since I have been unable to have a proper garden anywhere we&#8217;ve lived (either because there&#8217;s no room, it&#8217;s snowing basically all the time or we&#8217;re there for less than 4 months), I&#8217;ve been pinning different garden plans and ideas.<\/p>\n<p>When my mother-in-love was here last week, she told me some of the flowers that grow in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and I was thrilled that many of them are Southern classics (camillas, jasmine, and gardenias to name a few). I&#8217;m now dying to build a trellis by our bedroom window in PNG so we can enjoy the sweet smell of jasmine at night. And maybe I can move up from amateur kitchen florist to pro, with blooms I grew myself in my own backyard.<\/p>\n<p>What are some things that make you feel at home?<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/files\/2015\/01\/xx3erin1.png\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/files\/2015\/01\/xx3erin1.png\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe that January is already half gone. Didn&#8217;t we just celebrate Christmas? While I absolutely adore the rush of the holidays and two rounds of company, I admit that I am glad to have the house to ourselves now. This is the first week since we arrived in Florida that we&#8217;ve had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1080,"featured_media":485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3,363,85834,638],"class_list":{"0":"post-138","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ministry","8":"tag-family","9":"tag-home","10":"tag-missionary-life","11":"tag-papua-new-guinea","12":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1080"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/josh-verdonck\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}