Crazy Love: an Eye-Opener

I want to start off by apologizing for yesterday's pessimistic post. It had been a very stressful day, and the weather was just something I couldn't deal with at the time. I'm feeling much better now, and I'm not hating the snow quite so much at the moment.

Today's post is much more uplifting, I promise :-)

I recently finished reading "Crazy Love" for my Bible study. The book really pushed me to jump out of my comfort zone, stop caring about what others think of me, and to stop being selfish. Honestly, selfishness is something that I really struggle with, especially when it comes to my time. I love being at home and doing my own thing, and I realized that I love it way too much. God does not call us to a life of comfort or self-centeredness. I guess it took that book to show me that.

One of the last chapters of the book is chalk full of examples of people who lived radically for Christ. They made themselves nothing, taking the very nature of servants. Sound familiar? Yeah, Jesus did that too :-) And that's what I want to do with my life. It's what I've always wanted to do, but somehow I've lost sight of that lately.

Now that I've realized that I'm being totally selfish and need to reexamine my life and make sure I'm not being a lukewarm Christian, there is another dilemma: where exactly do I begin?

The author of the book, Francis Chan, explains that living radically for Christ means that we need to let go of our insecurities. We need to forget what is normal for people, or even what is normal for Christians. He used the example that he and his family constantly have other people living with them who have nowhere else to go. This may not be normal, but it is what God called them to do. So first of all, I'm going to try to break the mold and not be self conscious about doing things for other people.

Okay, so now I know that I need to ignore social standards, but that still doesn't exactly tell me WHERE to start. Francis Chan also emphasizes that we shouldn't make these huge plans of how we are going to serve someday. Instead, we should worry about it one day at a time. Basically, we should find places in our worlds every day where we can serve others, and show them the love of Christ. Whether it be at work, at school, at home...even in line at the grocery store, or on the road during rush hour.

So that gives me a starting point. I've decided to really make an effort here to start viewing myself as a servant. I'm going to try to find at least one random act of kindness to do everyday. the more anonymous, the better. So hopefully, these little random acts will become a habit in my life, and will evolve into bigger and better things. I figure, ya gotta start somewhere!

"Crazy Love" was a GREAT book! It really opened my eyes, and made me realize that my outlook on Christianity and my relationship with God was a little warped. I learned so much about God, and feel like my relationship with Him has changed. It was a really quick, easy read, but at the same time, was a very big challenge because of the way it made me examine my life and my faults. If you haven't read it, you should!!

You Might be...

You've all probably heard Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck" jokes. Well, today I decided to write my own version: You Might be an Ohioan (you could probably replace Ohioan for Midwesterner as well). And please no Ohio jokes about the fact that if we're Ohioans, we're probably rednecks. I will disagree with you...we're not ALL rednecks, anyway :-P But I digress...

Anyway, this post isn't so much funny as it is just my way of blowing off steam because I'm mad at the weather. I've officially reached my limit, and the winter blues have set in. I'm feeling slightly depressed, and venting helps :-P

You might be an Ohian if you risk your life every time you walk beside your house due to giant, human-killing ice spears just waiting to fall on your head:

You might be an Ohioan if you eat snow every morning as it blows in your face while you brush the 4 inches of it off of your car.

You might be an Ohioan if you forget what things like grass and sunshine look like.

If you are constantly changing your socks upon returning home, because you accidentally stepped in some of the 8 pounds of snow that fell off of your shoes as you walked through the door, you might be an Ohioan.

If you have bumps and bruises all over your body and don't know where they came from, they're probably from all those times when you slipped and fell on the ice. And you're probably an Ohioan.

If you have gotten in a car accident because you couldn't see over the piles of plowed snow that are two times the height of your car as you blindly pulled out of your driveway, you might be an Ohioan.

You are probably and Ohioan if your car has ever gotten stuck in the middle of the highway with your tires spinning because you got there before the plows did. And of course there is always a line of 20 cars behind you, your face is flaming red in embarrassment, and you are simultaneously having a panic attack due to your horrible winter driving anxiety (okay, maybe this one's just me :-P)

If you have visited weather.com anytime in the past three weeks and have constantly seen the little orange or red box that says "Winter Weather Advisory" or "Winter Storm Watch" inside, no matter what time of day or night, you might be from Ohio.

You are probably an Ohioan if you've ever walked into the grocery store with snowy shoes, stomped on the rug to get the snow off of your shoes, and then been promptly splashed in the eye with dirty parking lot snow-water because the rug has been soaking up hundreds of peoples' dirty shoe snow all day, and it's so wet that the water is literally running off of it, but you didn't notice because you were blinded by the snow that was just blowing in your face outside and all you care about is getting inside out of the snow and promptly drying off your shoes so you don't go skidding and skating across the slick floor. (How's that for a run-on sentence??)

I think I'll leave it at that, although that doesn't even begin to get into all the negatives about this crap. Can you tell I've been a little jaded by the weather as of late? Yeah, I no longer have a good attitude about winter. Although I must say, I held out for a pretty long time! It officially took me until February 17 before I cracked. And that may be a new record for me!

However, if you live somewhere where it's above 60 degrees right now...heck, if you live somewhere where it's above 40 degrees right now, I pretty much hate you. You simply do not understand what it's like to live in this, and I hate you for that.

Just kidding, of course I don't hate you! But I am hopelessly jealous, and seriously pondering the question of WHY I don't live where YOU live right now.

For the record, I don't know what it's like to live somewhere where it gets well above 100 degrees as the norm during the summer. BUT, I can't imagine it being worse than this, and I really think I would trade this for that in a heartbeat. I lived in Belize for week and even got severe heat exhaustion...and it was better than THIS! :-P

I apologize for my general negativity and nastiness in this post. I promise to post something uplifting and happy next time!

Our Valentines Day

Our Valentines Day was...okay. I'm just being real here. It started out really nice! We went to church, and then Hot Dog Shoppe of course :-P Here we are at lunch there (JC was there too!) like every week.
We exchanged gifts. I got him a couple blu-rays and he got me the "Marley and Me" blu-ray and a lot of candy, which I loved!

Then Luke had band practice and I spent pretty much the entire day preparing for and cooking our meal: salad, chicken Parmesan, and garlic mashed potatoes. It was a really crazy meal to prepare and I completely demolished my clean kitchen, but I think it was worth it! It was really good, although my potatoes were lumpy. But it was my first time making them, so I guess that's to be expected. We ate dinner at our new dining room table!

And I had fun decorating the table with red buckets filled with pink beads and candles, my pink strawberry candle, and pink and red candy.

After dinner is where things started going downhill. The plan was to watch the All-Star game, and then a movie while we ate our fondue. Well that didn't quite work out. First of all, the game was on until almost midnight. so obviously for us old people, that was too late to watch a movie :-P And by this time, I was pretty sick of basketball, and getting pretty grumpy. Also, we were still pretty full from our dinner, and after I spent a ton of time setting up the fondue upstairs, we barely ate any. And I have tons of food left over. And it just made me more grumpy. It looked nice, though :-PBTW, I highly recommend strawberry marshmallows. They were delish!

So our day started out nice. But basketball and my bad attitude made the day kind of end on a bad note.

Luckily we are going out to a nice dinner tonight at Carrabbas because we have a gift card for there. So we can make up for last night :-) That is, as long as the weather doesn't get too bad. We're supposed to get another snowstorm, so I may be having my seventh straight day off from work tomorrow. Sigh...I almost want to go back. ALMOST.

I hope you all had great Valentines Days!! :-)

I Wanna Grow Old With You

I wanna make you smile whenever you're sad

Carry you around when your arthritis is bad
All I wanna do is grow old with you
I'll get your medicine when your tummy aches
Build you a fire if the furnace breaks
Oh it would be so nice growing old with you
I'll miss you, kiss you
Give you my coat when you are cold
Need you, feed you
Even let you hold the remote control
So let me do the dishes in our kitchen sink
Put you to bed when you've had too much to drink
I could be the girl who grows old with you
I wanna grow old with you

This song, which Adam Sandler sang during The Wedding Singer, became sort of our unofficial song while dating. It was our ringtone for each other. I've always thought the song is so cute, and talks about just the everyday things that we do for each other :-) I thought this would be fun to post for my Valentine ;-)

And the picture that goes along with "put you to bed when you've had too much to drink" is actually just us drinking pop. lol...we don't really drink, so I didn't have a picture to go along with that one :-P

Anyway, have a great Valentines Day!!

A Sweet Day

I left the house for the first time since Tuesday today to go shopping! The snow has finally stopped, and the roads were clear. It felt so good just to get out for a bit!

While I was out, I bought everything I need for our Valentines Day dinner on Sunday night. I realized a lot of what I was buying was chocolatey or sweet. I bought chocolate for the fondue, plus strawberry marshmallows, strawberries, angel food cake and pretzels (although pretzels aren't sweet :-P) to dip in it, plus I bought more chocolate and Oreos for the Oreo truffles I made this afternoon. I was kind of embarrassed at the check out counter with all those sweets! Oh well, it's Valentines Day...I'm sure lots of people were buying that kind of thing today :-)

So like I said, I decided to make oreo truffles today!

I'm not sure what possessed me to do it, but they just sounded good! I decided to just make them because Luke LOVES Oreos. And it's always nice to have something to offer to people if they come over. Anyway, they turned out to be REALLY good. I hope Luke likes them! Here is the recipe if you want to make them...they were so easy to make!
While I was making them, I used my food processor to chop up the Oreos. I don't use it very often, so I guess Ellie had never heard it before. When I turned it on, she looked at me with the biggest eyes, completely stunned. then she ran away. When I was all done making them, I realized I hadn't seen her in awhile. I didn't think much of it, and just went about what I was doing. But after awhile, I realized it had been about two hours since I had seen her. I went around the house looking for her. Gabby was following me and looking too! I kept saying, "Where's Ellie?!" And Gabby would run around and cry because she couldn't find her sister :-P (Yes, I talk to my cats occasionally). It was so cute!

We finally found her up in the attic, hiding in the furthest corner underneath the couch. It was so cute!I kept peeking under every few minutes and tried to calm her down. Finally after about another 20 minutes, she carefully came out. It was so funny! So I guess Ellie is afraid of the food processor. That's better than Gabby...she's scared of my violin. As soon as I open the case, she runs to the bedroom to hide under the bed :-P

Now I think I'm totally ready for Sunday, aside from actually making our dinner :-) I think it will be a fun night, and I'm excited!

Fondue and Romance

I have another snow day today! And we already have Friday and Monday off because of conferences and President's Day, so I consequently have a six-day weekend! Yay! I thought today would be a good time to get my Valentines Day plans in order since I have so much free time (and because cabin fever is setting in and I need to keep myself busy!)

First of all I thought about making a whole, romantic fondue dinner like you'd eat at The Melting Pot. Mostly because I was so excited when I received my fondue set at my shower, but have never actually used it yet! And it's about time! Buuuut, I think trying to cook a whole fundue dinner might be biting off a little more than I can chew. And although it is one of my 101 items on my goal list, I think I'll wait a little longer before I try to tackle it. Plus, I think it would be really expensive to buy everything I'd need for just the two of us. So I thought I'd just make chocolate fondue for my first fondue experience. That should be easy enough! And delicious ;-) I thought about making Valentines cutout cookies since cutouts are sort of my "thing" I guess. But it just sounded like so much work, and I'm still a little burnt out from all the cookies I made at Christmastime. So I thought the chocolate fondue would be enough sweetness and we wouldn't need any cookies! Was that paragraph ADD enough for you?? :-P

So anyway, what is our Valentines Day going to look like? We are going to church, probably followed by a trip to The Hot Dog Shoppe with JC because that is our weekly tradition ;-) Then later for dinner I will make (or attempt to make) some sort of salad, followed by chicken parm., homemade garlic mashed pototatoes, and green beans. We'll eat that at the table (hoping to have our new dining room set up by then, but if not we'll have to eat at our old table in the hallway :-P) Then maybe we'll play a game or two if I can twist Luke's arm. We have had Scrabble for over a year and it's still in the shrink wrap. And then I'm thinking we'll eat our chocolate fondue with strawberries, angel food cake, pretzels, etc while we watch a movie?? Not sure about that yet. I was thinking I could spread a sheet or table cloth on the floor in the attic so we don't mess up the new carpet! And maybe set up a little table there so we can enjoy our fondue and some sparkling grapejuice while we watch...we'll see. I haven't quite figured that part out yet. But I think it will be a fun, romantic evening!

I was going to surprise Luke with tickets to go see Jim Gaffigan, our favorite comedian, in Columbus on the 27th and that would be my Valentines Day gift to him. But they were just about sold out! I could only find single tickets available. So I guess maybe that will have to wait, but I really want to see him live sometime!! I guess he will have to settle with a card and some chocolate or a blu-ray this year. I have to confess, I'm not the best gift-picker-outer in the world :-P

So how are you celebrating Valentines Day?? Are you staying in, or are you going out to brave the crowds? Does anybody have any really creative ideas for V-Day? I would love to hear all about them! :-)

V-Day Love

I knew as soon as January was over, my life would get a little more exciting again :-) So far in February we've gotten new carpet and redecorated our attic/living room, we've gotten the biggest snowstorm I can remember in a long time, and have consequently had a FUN Saturday sled-riding for the first time in years, had Netflix movie marathons, and I've had a snow day! On top of that, we had a fun party on Saturday. And coming up, we have one of my FAVORITE holidays: Valentines Day!

This week I decided I'd post a lot about V-Day. Because I love it so much :-) Today I thought I'd write about my love for Valentines Day, even back when I was single :-)

Honestly, sometimes I really miss high school me. I was so innocent and even naive and had not a care in the world. I rarely had boyfriends in high school, but had a GREAT group of friends, a wonderful family, and a fun youth group that I was really close to (which Luke just happened to be part of! If only I knew then what I knew now ;-)). I really had nothing to worry about back then besides my grades. I would spend my weekends going to the movies with my friends, or having girl's nights with them where we would stay up way too late talking and giggling. Oh, and I could eat 4,000 calories a day and not gain an ounce. That was nice too ;-) But that's besides the point...

I think my best high school year was my junior year. I was seventeen, young enough to still be under my parents protection yet old enough to start feeling a little freedom. I was a hopeless romantic. I was completely single, but knew that God would write my love story. I knew that my prince charming would sweep my off my feet someday, and all I had to do was sit around and wait for him :-) I just couldn't wait until it happened, but I was okay with the fact that it hadn't yet. Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing. I'm glad I was able to hold onto my innocence and be okay just being me. Most of my friends had lots of boyfriends, but I can look back and be glad that I didn't.

So anyway, it was Valentines Day 2002. Seventeen year old me woke up and got ready for school. I'm sure I was wearing a pink sweater. I only wore one color back then ;-) I remember walking downstairs and finding the packages on the kitchen counter: one for me, and one for my sister. Yes, my parents gave us V-Day presents every year growing up, even when we were older. Come to think of it, my mom still gave me one last year! When I was married! lol...anyway...

I opened my package. Inside was chocolate, of course, and a book :

I had seen the movie when it had come out a few weeks before, and it was easily my new favorite. I was so excited when I opened the book, I wanted to skip school and just stay home and read it!

I went through my school day, probably only receiving a few Valentines Day Carnations from my friends (I always hated this V-Day tradition in high school btw! Way to make the single girls feel bad!)

When I got home, I closed myself in my bedroom and devoured my new book. I read it all that evening. I cried, and I just knew that real love would be like the love that Jamie and Landon had for each other. Then I ate some chocolate, took a relaxing bubble bath, and watched a chick flick or two. I let my imagination run wild about when I would finally fall in love and have a boy that would do anything for me like Landon would do anything for Jamie. Oh my goodness, the part in the movie when Landon helps Jamie accomplish some of the goals in her life list STILL makes my heart skip a beat. After approximately 3,782 viewings :-P When he puts the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, and then takes her to the state line so she can "be in two places at once." Ahh, it still gets to me! My absolute favorite part is when they are in the play together, Jamie sings her song looking absolutely beautiful, and then they spontaneously kiss while the curtain closes. Be still my teenage heart!

So anyway, all that to say I love Valentines Day. I've always loved it. For me it was an excuse to be girly and to celebrate the day that I would finally find my "Landon." Well guess what! I found him! A mere two-and-a-half years after that special, single Valentines Day :-)

This Saturday, Luke is having a bunch of guys over to play video games and do other guy things (I'm so glad I'm a girl!! :-P) And I think I decided I'm going to read and watch "A Walk to Remember." to get me in the romantic mood for Valentines Day on Sunday. I have some fun things planned (as long as I can get to town sometime in the next few days in this horrible weather!) But I'll write about those later. Enjoy this week! And even if you're single, celebrate your single-dom, and the fact that God is writing your love story, right now!