not that otta has been cooking much the last two years, but hey. she’s finding her smile again… maybe she’ll find her way back into the kitchen. barefoot, course.
and by the way… what is this thing where i’m suddenly referring to myself in the 3rd person? i think that could get annoying. stop it, otta!
and… Joe won 20 otta points. now we’ll have a contest to see what ideas my 4 faithful readers come up with for what 20 otta points will get you. coz i got nothin. (it is early in the morning and i haven’t had my decaf nonfat extra hot no whip mocha yet… this is not my best time of the day for ideas.)
and i’m finding my smile again. it’s been MIA since mid-december of 2006 and i didn’t even have to help move a herd of cattle from new mexico to colorado to find it (20 otta points* for the first person who correctly identifies that movie reference!).
i can’t even explain how joyous this is.
God is the best father who ever, ever was.
and i have the best friends on the planet (have i said that before?)
.
.
.
*you’ll just have to take a chance on what 20 otta points will get you.
so this afternoon, while i was planting flowers, i had the television on (by the way. i’ve found a revolutionary new way to plant flowers. if you just do one or two at a time during commercials, you can get them all done during the course of an afternoon and you’ll never break a sweat. in fact, you can garden in your church clothes. no need to get all grubby and muddy.)
yeah. so i had the tv on and it was either hannah montana or the last 45 minutes of ladder 49. not being an unsupervised nine-year old, i passed over hannah montana and opted for ladder 49.
so, in the mid-nineties, sociologist charles murray teamed up with some other guy to write this book called the bell curve. it was quite controversial at the time because the primary premise was that intelligence determines class structure in the U.S.; and even more controversial was the idea that intelligence is perhaps genetic.
i didn’t know about the controversy when i was reading the book in 1998. the thing i most remember is the idea that Read the rest of this entry »
do not, no matter how long and boring the meeting and no matter how circuitous the conversation, do not yawn out loud in a meeting full of senior managers and your director.
just don’t.
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update:
i didn’t do it on purpose. i wasn’t trying to be disrespectful. i’m just so sleepy today! and it just came out.
… and you and your friends need to wait an hour for triple A to send someone to unlock it after hip hop class, it helps if your car is parked right in front of a really cool semi-new irish pub that you’ve never visited.
and no… it actually was not i who locked the keys in the trunk. which is a relief, because, you know… normally, that would be me.
and i’m HAPPY! for no other reason than that it’s saturday, i’m not sick, it’s beautiful out, the dogs are happy and tired after their jaunt to duke forest, my friends and i have fun plans for the rest of the day, and oh… did i mention? I’M NOT SICK!
life is good. God is good. that’s all. i just had to say it out loud to as many people as possible at once.
i should maybe wait to tell this story until i’m not so tired and not so full of mexican food (we LOVE torero’s!), but i’m dying to tell you now, so i will.
when i taught junior high english in texas, my good friend B (the sweetest canadian you’ll ever meet) taught first grade, in the same school. i left to teach english in slovakia and Read the rest of this entry »
you know. when you don’t remember until you’re finished with your shower that you took the towels out last night to wash them and didn’t put new ones in.
so annoying. and kind of messy with the wet footprints trailing to the linen closet.
it helps if you have a westie whose favorite way to get a drink is water that’s anywhere but the water bowl. this includes, but is not limited to, muddy tire tracks, mosquito infested mud pits in the woods, the bathtub, the dining room floor after a burst kitchen pipe has flooded the house, rusty cans in the recycling bin that are filled with week-old rain water, and of course, wet footprints on your hardwood floors.
God is so funny. i have never met anyone with such a CRAZY sense of humor. i am LOLing.
the funniest, craziest, most absolutely unlikely thing just happened at church. this particular thing has only ever happened to me once before in my life. i’m not going to tell the story today, but i wanted a place marker on the blog so i can come back to it at the end of august and say: remember that day in june when i finally said i was going to wait for God?
God is just too, too, too much. and i mean that in a good way, of course.
it’s not easy to realize you want something that you can’t just go out and get for yourself. and i think the lesson (one of them, anyway) that i’m supposed to be learning right now is that of waiting for God with patience and grace and quietness and trust.
not one of those things is easy for me. in fact, on my own, they’re all quite impossible. but that’s what i need to learn. i don’t need to be keeping Read the rest of this entry »
i have a way around this at restaurants: when i open a menu, whichever section my eyes fall on first, that’s the section i order from. you know… fewer options.
otherwise, i’d never, ever make up my mind. (this doesn’t always work out well. for instance, if there’s a large martini section or the wine list is included in the menu.)
i wonder if i can find a work-around for real life?