The Big Haus Diet and Workout

She girds her loins with strength and makes her arms strong.
Proverbs 31:17

There are women who are sluggards. I have been to homes in which a reasonably educated woman spent a whole day, thank you, but in which I feared for my health. I didn't want to touch anything. I didn't want to eat anything. It wasn't her gracious hospitality that kept me there. It was my gracious Christianity. And the Black Hole of Calcutta that was the living room wasn't because of a lack of money. It was a lack of busy.

A sluggard is not merely a poor excuse for humanity beset with the "lazies", but will be, by natural laws, unhealthy. Women all over the Western World are hoping for and attempting to gain a utopia of casual, pointless T.V. lives with intermittent shopping, tramp stamp, and a small dog. And they wonder why they have to consider their diets and go to the gym. The Proverbial goodwife life is an investment in the goodwife’s body. Women naturally know that they are an object of man’s aesthetic appreciation. A woman who longs to serve her husband with an ordered, clean, and beautiful fief is also benefited by the collateral fruit of a stronger physique. I say "stronger" rather than "thin" because that is what the text above says. I also know larger women who work hard in their homes and it keeps them strong and attractive people. It is the blobs who are repellent and their homes are the matching ecosystem.

My own, The Amazing Missus, is a cleaning, cooking, hostessing machine of an 8000 square foot home under the weight of 52 years of my old friend Futility. No gym. No special diets.

Behold!

"It Is Good to be Quoted" E. Bruce Wilson

In Quotes

To say what better men before me would;
To spring alive to lips and heard, adored
Though made of timely words, they timeless stood.
I battle on to say that which rewards.

I’ve rattled on a bit but wonders skirt
My verbage, as if muses heard me speak,
And while not inclined to kiss, they flirt
With waning wit, with promises too weak.

So I will prattle on, while hopes surround
Each lofty thought spun wisely sweet and bright,
To blend my fitted terms on depth profound.
At last in quotes, not yet, but might tonight.

by Evan Wilson

A Capital Wife

Proverbs 31:15
She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household
and tasks for her maidens.

When a goodwife concludes that she serves in her husband's fief, there are collateral tasks revealed. It is often the case that her work must precede his in time of day, that her service should be underway before those that she serves, and even those that serve her, can address their obligations. The attitudes surrounding the “inconvenience” is hopefully moderated by the willingness and trustworthiness already attained. One of the worms this early bird gets is that she gets to set the pace and the agenda for the day (spiritually and materially) by coming to thoughtful conclusions in early diligence. Remember that her "husband doth trust in her", and her efforts are for him and his. The day’s pace, attitude, and the tasks placed on the agenda by her effort will be natural to the ends that the ruler of the fief has desired for it.

And this women is not a shortsighted, bleary-eyed drudge, dragging her tired, fuzzy slippered resentments to the coffee maker so that the beached sea lion still sleeping above stairs can not face one tiny bit of inconvenience on his descent. Such a minimalist doesn't want to be a goodwife, she just wants a tiny bit of evidence to throw in the face of accusations that she isn't. The goodwife extends herself with profit for the fief in view. Her wisdom spends money and labor to purchase long term benefits. She can then invest what she built up to make even more. She does not look at the household budget as a zero sum game with only “x” dollars and “y” demands on them. A profitable viewpoint is not constrained to the money her lord allots her, but can take that money, that time, that food, and any material profit and apply it all to future gains. It is often that a kingdom's greatest imperial expansions are provided by the hard, constant efforts of the grand vizier.

Proverbs 31:16
She considers a field and buys it;
with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.

To Emily: On Goals

My Future Plans

Our going needs no reason’d argument
As dragg’d are we before the certain past
Into the unframe’d hopes ahead, where went
We all, with every soul from first to last.

With scatter’d infinite of maybes, yet
We draft a plan with single math precise
In all its vision, now of then, a bet
Against the House, before we roll the dice.

Our gambling boasts of such presumption, weak,
(Though God and chance and time and rot forbid!)
That we ignore realities that speak
Of stronger bets on what tomorrow did.

So since I can not hope to rule the next,
And if my God permits my presence there,
T’will be by wisdom how my peace effects
Whatever come, whatever will and where.

by Evan Wilson

Now We're Cookin' With Gas

She is like the ships of the merchant, she brings her food from afar.
Proverbs 31-14

We see a metaphor for a Goodwife's cooking abilities in international trade. The point of the metaphor is not in the financial aspect of trade deficits or a declining dollar, but in the range and breadth of her food provision capabilities. Out of a net spread wide come rewards, passed through her selection and efforts, in what she puts on the table. While nobody wants nor expects that every day's menu must be replete with arcane food groups, the Goodwife's menu shall not be limited to a pedestrian “hamburger helper” and a rotation of the easiest, most accessible items. We must realize that nobody thinks (like the family in the commercial seems to), that the woman whose cookies came mixed, sliced, and on a ready-to-bake pan is going to any effort, past foisting on the unemancipated offspring her mundane self-absorption. “Let’s all pretend that I cook and please credit me with a reputation!” These are called "convenience foods" for a reason. If a box of Stouffer's Lasagna is pulled out of the freezer because you just returned from a vacation and you have no time to do anything else, God bless it for being convenient. If your life needs a stockpile of convenience foods because every moment of that life is playing "Real Housewives from Whatever God Forsaken Culdesac You Live In" or you can't be bothered to learn how to cook because you like reading romance novels, the convenience it provides has been demanded by your world-without-end inadequacy.

Is “world merchant” the metaphor for your kitchen? Or would it be, “Mom, you are as intriguing as, Oh, I dunno,... as tap water.”

Tub Time

Just thinking. Well, I was soaking in the tub and thinking. What was I thinking about? I was thinking about wives who have complaints about their husbands. They hear the admonition from the Apostle to respect these men and either throw the impertinent Apostle over the side of "Her Majesty's Ship Amazonia" or look at the attempt through narrowed gaze wondering how they shall honor their husbands when said husband is such a fool. They want to have a husband they could respect but the command did not include a special dispensation to disrespect those men that have not risen sufficiently in the wife's esteem. The husband's faults, seen clearly by fifty percent of the population, are that he has not seen fit to look and love like Antonio Banderas, think and write like St. C.S. of Lewis, and work like an AnteBellum slave. Some of these more religious women make the attempt to "honor" the pond scum that fathered her children with fake noises of reverence. This is a wide spread problem and my tub was expending all its porcelain force to resolve it.

There is a basic error here. It is presumed by the modern that the Bible tells a wife to respect something that is not respectable. Maybe the Bible is not sufficiently up-to-date. Maybe modernity is filled with stupid people. Maybe husbands, masters, and emperors are better human beings then the average wife, slave, or citizen. Maybe the universe is not just astronomical distance but is also cosmological height. Maybe in a universe infested with height, it requires faith in height (and height alone with no admixture of your egalitarian nonsense, thank you) to live Biblically at all. "But," you say (feeling your every-waking-hour-bitchiness being torn away from your french-manicured claws), "does not he have these faults?" Yes, Einstein, he does but this is about your faults, your disobedience, and your excuse making. Just sayin'. Maybe.

This is what the difference is between an licit observation and an illicit complaint. Superiors are in charge of correcting their inferiors. Seems like this is a basic task reserved for the superior. And observation of fault becomes bitchy complaining when an inferior doesn't think anything odd of correcting "uphill". They don't even believe in the "hill". Your observation of fault will blend with your definition of who you are in the relationship. Are you less, are you a peer, or are you better? Change your notion of what a husband is.

So once the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves and were submissive to their husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are now her children if you do right and let nothing terrify you.
I Peter 3:5-6

And if you don't keep thinking that you rule just as much as he, you will find that your husband's manifest errors remain observable but entrusted to agents higher than yourself to discipline. You can rest. You can reverence. You can respect.

You already know this. You already agree with me. Answer me this, should children be expected to honor a mother regardless of her outbursts, her moods, her inconsistencies, her mistakes, her outright uniformed judgments, and her lack of style (yep, really, just deal with it)? You and I think they should. I have a reason. You are just selfish.

"If you see in a province the poor oppressed and justice and right violently taken away, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them."

Ecclesiastes 5:8