Sunday, January 31, 2010

just a thought or two

What am I feisty about, what..what..what...what am I feisty about today.


A little stream of conscience
mixed with a whole lotta stylizing!

brace thine self.


Well, we had a great sermon at church today.

Is Christ a stumbling stone in your life
or the stone you stand upon for all the stability and security you could possibly imagine?

Romans 9:4-7. Believe it.


... are you living free but not running wild,

or falling constantly only to realize it's Christ trying to help you up?
I paraphrased that last part, but it was an excellent sermon.

I love it when preachers convey how only four somewhat succinct verses,
albeit in Romans,
can produce more than an hour of
honest,
heart-wrenching truth
about our lives and the world we live in.

***

My job almost got the best of me yesterday.
...hmm.
Truth be told, though, it's going to make me a fantastic parent.

Truth be told again, that "fantastic" part will only be realized
when my future children,
should God bless my husband and I with that,
will only be accurate based on how my kids turn out.

Well,
how they turn out because of my and my husband's child rearing,
their obedience to God and his son Jesus,
and their repentance from sin and it's good friend Satan.


That be all tonight.

personal bests - chocolate chip cookies


Well,

I am not sure if I'm going to start another topical tag,

but we'll just pretend I'm going to do that for the sake of this particular post.

Oh boy,
do I
ever,

ever,
ever
get excited about
these...




Personally,
they're the
BEST
thing
EVER
to eat.

I wish God put a whole ton o' flavonoids, antioxidants, and omega 3's in these babies.


but let's be honest:

I'm sure they are plump FULL of fatty acids of some kind...



photo credit - pumpkin chocolate chip cookies: http://www.scatterpig.com/2009/10/



Thursday, January 28, 2010

dis- and that, volume #1


i should tag these posts...
...i will.


thinks I dislike, things i like. volume 1.


i dislike the word "maven." i don't know why. am I the only one?

i do like the words "incredulous," "cognizant," and the german phrase "ja, genau."


i dislike the complete absence of punctuation in writing. i'd rather a plethora of commas than absolutely no road signs for what people are trying to say through the written word.

i do like when people use punctuation, even incorrectly. they'll figure it out, but at least they care enough to let their readers know what they are trying to say.


i aM nOt a BIG fAN of RaNDom cAPs...was at a time, not now.

i don't mind when nothing is capitalized. sometimes i feel like putting in the effort, sometimes not.



and that ↑

is all for now.


Wednesday, January 27, 2010

huh...

Maybe,

....JUST maybe....

I'll use this baby (a.k.a. blog) to document the ventures I go on in my small, every-day life.

...small?


eh.


Anyways, here are some things I've got going today and for the next several and, for now, innumerable days:


1. Documentation for work.
Oh how I do dislike this absolutely necessary and equally mundane part of my job.



2. Finding information to keep myself and my dad healthy.

As an aside: In the future I'll write a blog about how much chemotherapy sucks.
Please don't scathe me if it's worked for you or your family.
You know how rough this treatment is.
And I'm speaking via secondary experience (not my own).



3. Cooking. I've got some organic blueberries my husband got from Walmart for all of $3 a pint.
$3!!!!!
Can you believe it? Now, what to do with them besides freezing them for incredible deliciousness later...



...I better make this blog public so I'm not constantly talking to myself...

...as I am doing now...



The end.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

lapsed...

Well, there are a few things that have lapsed since I last wrote.

How about TWO WHOLE WEEKS be one of them?

Geez...

:::sarcastically scolding myself...
...maybe not so sarcastically:::


Actually, the two things I wanted to mention regarding them being "lapsed" were my athleticism and my musicality. This is more so an explanation to my original post.
I suppose I write this because I'd like to change this part of my life... huh.



Athleticism.



I was a three sport athlete in HS and worked out semi-often in college.

**These are both true, but don't take the three-sport athlete too seriously.
I rode the bench in softball my senior year,
but boy did I do those sprints in practice!**


I say "semi-often" regarding working out because that's what it averaged out to be.

When it was time for intramurals or to shed the freshmen 20 (no, not 15...20),
I worked out regularly.
When those events/goals had expired,
however,
I usually quit working out.

That's why "regular" doesn't quite work here.

During my senior and super-senior years in college, I took up dance.

I took 3 dance classes over the course of four semesters,
did a musical skit competition and a lip sync competition with my sorority,
and walked almost everywhere I went.

Lots of dancing,
lots of walking,
lots of whole-milk latte-drinking to make up for it. :)

Kind of kidding...kind of not.


Anyways, after college and the subsequent two years that followed,

I never worked out or was on a team aside from speed walking up-and-down hallways and around where I worked.
So now that I'm working with several special needs people
who enjoy being physically active

AND

I may be resuming activities that will require several
"sorority squat"
poses for photo opportunities,
I do believe that I'm going to have to get these hind-parts back in gear.

That, and I'd like to stunt the many health issues that both my immediate and extended family has dealt with in the past couple decades.



Music.

If I wasn't at sports practice
or
doing insane, adrenalin-driven amounts of research for speech team,
I was doing something with music.

Orchestra,
choir,
and the occasional practicing of the piano were definitely
a part of my rearing as I grew up.

Sadly, I haven't had that kind of an outlet, and I'm losing my intonation.

Time to get back into it, but I need to figure out through what mode.

I've got my viola.
I don't have a piano.
There is the opportunity of joining my church choir,
but that doesn't meet too often (I don't think).

I'll figure something out.



And soon, I'll probably switch to writing about something other than myself.
Sound like a plan? Sounds like one to me!



That's all...for now.

Friday, January 8, 2010

sup. hi. guten tag.

Hey all.

Or just hey to me?
Probably.

Let's talk about a couple elements of my last post.

Or instead of "let's," maybe it'll be "let..." I still haven't decided whether or not I want to declare my blog to the whole of my family and friends yet. Probably will...still hesitant. That hesitancy is a whole other post in itself.

Anyways, I digress.

One major element I'm going to explain here is where "feisty" comes from.

The short of it:

Romans 12:11 - 11Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.
Thanks www.BibleGateway.com for the quick copy and paste.

The long of it:

This last year, like I mentioned before, was not the best one for me.

I had just started to truly get over a very rough first job out of college
(Suburban high school 10th grade English teacher...
I know),

started working at a restaurant in my old college town as a server
(read: fumbling at a job I'd never done before
all while seeing a lot of friends from
when I was "everything" I wanted to be in college after
I had my own personal trauma at said first job),

and having very few-to-no friends available to fellowship with
(although I did have my husband,
but any sane wife knows
that her husband can't be her everything.
He IS human.)*


After having to move from our old college town to husband's home town to live at some family property to save money (because
almost none was coming in compared to what was going out; read: student debt), I came to a personal turning point in my young life.

I was

down,


down,


down.

Didn't want to look for work, but needed a job...bad.

Didn't really want to wake up, but I knew I needed to to see the sun that day.

That sort of
"down."

It was on a trip with my husband to my home state (which is thankfully connected to his home state) that I heard a short sermon on this Romans 12:11 verse on the radio.

Our stations we listen to were fading away, and the Christian station was the first one that came in clearly. Note that this trip was for an interview I had at a school for a mid-year opening, which was testing every single one of my nerves.

It was an epic fail, and I do mean epic, but maybe that will be important to describe at a later time. Right now it's not, because the most important (yet quite subtle) thing that happened to me on that trip was hearing this verse.

One thing I had lacked in my life over the last year was zeal.

It was lacking in every aspect of who I was, and that night I started to slowly turn the corner on this ride in life and began to choose to live again.

It was tough, and it still is, but I eventually realized that choosing to live and choosing to be full of zeal is as much in God's will as a phone call to do his Work in Mozambique (or other choice nation) would be.

So, I'm on that zealous path, and hopefully this blog will be one of the many reminders to stay on it for good and not fall off again. This time, this path is with God, and not on my own.

I was going to talk about what I meant by being a "lapsed" musician and "lapsed" athlete, but I think I'll do that next time.

It's been fun.

:)

*That will probably be the last time I put a period at the end of the final sentence inside parentheses, as I'm pretty darn sure it belongs outside of it. I just wanted to do that for style and fluidity.** ** Yes, yes, I'm an English teacher, but I've been a punctuation-and-grammar-fan since my AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) obsession back in the day. Yet I do like to play around with all things Language Arts - spelling, font, punctuation, sentence formation - and bend the rules a bit. Maybe you'll see a period inside a parentheses after all.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

quick start

Here's my first entry. Let's see how long this blog lasts.

This may or may not be my third attempt at real blogging,
i.e. actually writing something consistently,
and by consistently,
I mean more than once a month, year...etc.

Welcome, to whoever is reading this.
Maybe one person, maybe more, maybe no one.
We'll see.

I'll explain more about why I'm even doing this blog later, but for now, the first day of this decade (actually, the second day and some change),
I wanted to start off with a quick and simple intro.


This last year I was pretty
bummed,
misdirected,
uninspired,
and unsure of
who I was or
what I was doing with my life.
I figured out, though, that through the trials my husband and I experienced in 2009,
I was a lot more than just those four things.

Most of all, I figured out that there is no reason for me to be those four things, even if I don't have a clear goal for my life at the moment. That's what God taught me, and He has called me and every person on earth to be a lot more than that.

So for now, this is what I know about me:
I'm Laura.
I'm a christian.
a wife.
a teacher (on paper, not by trade at the moment).
a friend.
a creator (but not The Creator).
a competitor.
a lapsed athlete.
a lapsed musician.
and maybe - or definitely - a few other things.
And...I'm feisty.

Not feisty as in agitated, angry, nor discontent. Feisty, as in the fact that I'm choosing to live instead of just choosing to wake up.
I'm choosing to actually do something with myself instead of being complacent about it. I'm choosing to actually speak up and not to just let life float on by.

I'm choosing, hoping to be feisty: spirited, spunky...and maybe a little scrappy?
full of energy, courage, animation...and definitely a little gumption.
Hopefully never lacking in zeal, keeping spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.

Feisty.
Like I ought to be.