Thursday, September 23, 2010

a couple things - one awesome, one not.

first, congrats to my friends Katie and Bret!  They are having a...girl!
they will be awesome parents,
and i'm sure they'll raise their little chica to be as big of a cyclone fan as they are.
it's only right -
especially in hawkeye land. 


second, my home town is under water, shut down, and...stranded.
9 inches of rain today alone - maybe more.

i know it's nothing different than what people just a few miles away from here went through, both in Colfax and up in Ames.  this definitely hits home, though, both figuratively and literally.
i know what floods, where it floods, and how it floods in my home town.  it's just hard - really, really hard - to see people who i've known since i was born have their houses flooded. even though it's much farther away, somehow it's a lot more intense for me.  the floods are worse than i've ever seen in my 27 years, and that's saying a lot considering the town has rivers flowing on almost all four sides of it (N-S-E-&-W).


so here's to praying to God that He
1. continues a very healthy pregnancy for Katie and her little bambina,
and
2. delivers my hometown from this flood.  a divine ark wouldn't be such a bad idea, really.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

romance.

i think the only male reader i have is my husband...

so be prepared to be embarrassed, mister!


not really. :)


just a quick note before i go to bed.


i am thinking as i write, and i want to reflect on something.
it is so, so easy for me to give up on being lovey-dovey.
there are a lot of factors that lead to that, but
nothing is more happy-killing in any circumstance than
bad news.

it can be news from around the world,
news that i hear from a friend or relative,
or "news" i let circulate - or spin - in my head, which consists mostly of lies and
self-disparagement.


so today, in a preemptive move to banish the
self-perpetuating bad news i was about to fall into,
i decided that it was more important to pretty-myself-up (inside and out)
in order to to get myself in a better mood for when i got da hubs from work
than to have completely cleaned the apartment 


i have to say that while i can see things fairly clearly in real life (although
what i see clearly does range from both common-sense matters to abstract concepts),
i definitely have been constantly learning when it comes to this whole marriage thing.


there's always something there to remind me that i don't have
this whole wife thing together,
such as a not-remotely-completely-clean apartment.


but today,
I rediscovered [AGAIN!] that good romance needs effort from my behalf, too
                 (even if it's just a quick shower and putting on a dress).

and that effort?
it counts, and
it's worth it.


i still like it when he brings me flowers*, though! :)





*i'll show you those later.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

where i was on 9/11

i read a couple blog posts tonight where the women described where they were on 9/11. 

i suppose that sometime in the future i will forget some of the details of that day, 
so i suppose i'll recant it here...
                                            not that it's anything particularly remarkable.  
                                                        at least not to me right now. 
what better place than electronic form, right?  

9/11/01

I was sitting in my humanities class 2nd hour, 
looking up something for a research project in the computer lab.
there weren't many of us in that class (all seniors, I think), 
and our teacher pretty much let us do what we wanted. 
someone said, 
                "Hey...a plane went into one of the Twin Towers." 

I tried finding it on a news site, but
so many sites were bogged down that I couldn't get more than a 
small snap shot of the burning building.  
Did I think it was a terrorist attack?  I couldn't find anything on that.
The picture was pretty small, so it seemed like a fire coming out of a window, 
not an inferno caused by a jet airliner with thousands of gallons of gas aboard. 

We went back to class for a bit and then headed to 3rd hour - choir.
People were starting to buzz about this, but with the 
small little picture stuck in my head and a moment's lapse in 
my typically over-serious view on the world, I jokingly and moronically said to a friend, 
"We're all gonna die!!!"
That friend...it might have been Audrey...said to me,
"No, Laura, it's really bad."
Having the guilt complex that I possess, I went to choir wondering what exactly was going on.

And there we sat,
somewhere between 70 and 80 of us,
almost silent (which almost never happened),
watching
watching
watching.  
We had missed seeing the planes hit the buildings in real time.
I'm thankful for that: small town classmates who've 
                                           known each other since we were in kindergarten 
                                                      do not hold back their emotions, 
and every instance of murmurred horror and whispered confusion would have 
turned into shouts of shock and cries filled with flood-like tears. 

Everyone stared as the buildings burned, then crumbled, then collapsed. 
We watched the TV all day,
talked about what might happen,
silenced our friends when Bush came on to speak,
and,
except for 8th period, when my prob&stats teacher made us learn (I was mad)
wondered if anything would be the same again. 

Nothing really was the same again, 
and that's the case for any major event in one's life.
An important factor about this date, among many other factors,
is that it affected all of us. 
Not just one town, one state, or one country,
but - the world. 



More about things that happened after 9/11 later.



Thursday, September 9, 2010

i like this:

i like this dress (so i'm entering)
Vivat Veritas $50 Guest Giveaway      
















i like hugs.

i like friends.

i like knowing what's going to happen next, which i don't. :-/

i like dancing - Paso Doble is on my list of what to learn next.

i like knowing German, but i'm losing my knowledge of it! aah!!!

i liked going home last weekend.  i hope to see my family again soon.

and that's what i like.  for now.