Chipolte!

In case you didn't know about Chipotle, it is an amazing place to eat! They also have a fun promotion on Halloween where you can come dressed in certain theme and get cheap burritos! Namely they cost $2, and those donations go to the famers (at least this year). So this Halloween it was a farm theme.

I went as a tomato! Jon thought I looked "cute" - I'm just glad I'm not actually that round.

 And Jon went as a farmer! Here we are together - farmer and his tomato:

Now when we got to the Chipotle, the cashier insisted that we had to come dressed as a farmer, however distinctly on their website they had people dressed as food. I insisted right back, very vehemently, that my outfit was also acceptable, and got the burrito for $2 - almost. She charged for the guacamole.... so I wrote Chipotle about it and am seeing what they are going to do.

Mostly I'm just impressed I would stand up for myself like that! Very cool, no?

We then came home, watched some tv and eat our YUMMY food, and then got some things done around the house. A very wonderful evening for sure.

Happy

Jon is home! He has been out of town at a translator conference for a few days and boy, did we miss each other.

For all those whose life situation requires extended periods of time away from your spouse, my hats off to you. You have my never ending respect and admiration.

So tonight we are busy staring at each other and just relishing being in the same physical space at the same time. Bliss.

In the morning, in the morning...

Jon and I recently began the habit of singing to each other in the morning. I'm not quite sure why, but somehow waking up to a lovely little ditty is more lovely than the grunt you feel! Our songs goes like this:

"Waking up is hard to do
    .... in the morning, in the morning
Waking up is very hard to do
.... very EARLY in the morning" (we sing it back and forth).

Jon made this up one day, and it has stuck. We sing every other line back and forth. We are also introducing this one:

"Good morning, good morning, good morning,
.... it's time to rise and shine.
Good morning, good morning, good morning,
... I hope you're feeling fine!
It's time to get up, and out of bed,
... it's time to wake up you sleep head
Good morning, good morning, good morning,
... it's time to rise and shine!"

One of us has to be particularly chipper to pull this one off though!

Current browsing activity

As we have previously posted, we recently watched "Soul Surfer" which I found utterly enchanting and inspiring. Now it isn't the world's best acting, however the true story is deeply compelling.

I was browsing the web for information on Bethany Hamilton, and came across the story of Nick Vujicic, who was born without arms or legs, to a pastor and his wife. He's a deep believe in Christ, and his testimony is truly compelling and inspiring. I'm still digesting it myself.

In other news: I made some yummy pasta with canned chicken tonight. New favorite :o)

Roller Derby

Today, I actually met a woman who does roller derby! They're actually real people who do that. She's another translator, and we were talking about activities that get us away from the computer and out of the home, and that's her thing. She doesn't have the big build you'd expect for such a high contact sport, but she said she can hold her own against other women who come at her with more weight. She explained some of the rules on who the scoring works with the "jammer" passing the opponents in the "pack" and also how in Quebec, the English words are used as well. And apparently, it's a challenging process to get into Montreal's league: she had to pass tests!

Also, there are apparently men's leagues starting up for the sport. But no, I'm not planning on joining one.

You learn some everyday. And some days, you'll even be surprised by some of the things you learn.

My Seasonal Closet Experiment

This season I am once again embarking upon the great closet-detoxt, with hard data to prove what I do wear, and what I only think I am wearing.

I begin the season by hanging up ALL my clothes backwards, like this:

Once I hang clothes back up however, I always hang them up like so:

By the end of the winter I'll have a mixed-bag of hangers. The ones hung up backwards are ones I never even bothered trying on, let alone actually wear. I can then gladly give them away, as I will have hard data to prove to my own self that I never will wear them, no matter how wonderful they look in my closet. Currently, it looks like this:

We'll see how they all fare the rest of the season! If I don't wear them, surely someone else will.

The Plague of Email

If you have sent me an email recently, I apologize. Although my email is flagged, marked, tagged, and filtered, I still have not yet quite found either the will or ability to keep up with it.

So to my family, friends, and spammers, I am not ignoring you (unless you are a spammer then, yes, yes I am ignoring you), I simply have not quite found the right balance in life between social media (a la Facebook), blogging, text messaging, phone calls, and - most importantly - actually conversing with my husband. That is so easily lost in the hub-bub of it all!

With some good news, we may have finally found an electronic calendar that works on our computers and on our phones, which has helped us a great deal. Most importantly, we are beginning to see how busy we have become through various commitments, which is a good thing to see on paper and realize "oh wow, we are busy." Additionally I can schedule things with people on the go! Hurrah! So next time you see me, feel free to casually ask "So, are you free next Friday?" - even if you aren't, I can tel you if I am :o)

ESOL

Jon and I recently started teaching ESOL at our local church. It is very new for both of us and we are learning as we go. While he teaches the advanced class, I am working with one individual who has zero english. Not one little bit, and it has been a challenge the past few weeks to even establish basic class room etiquette.

Tonight felt rewarding. Powered with the simple phrases I taught last week "I don't know" and "I don't understand" - I can finally figure out if she is understanding anything I am saying! I'm also learning the power the stick figure and barely decipherable drawings; I was able to communicate what "homework" was with some cave-man like drawings of a home, a school bus, and a school house. She also is gaining confidence in the communication that can happen through powerful pointing and the word "What." She is armed with homework for the next few weeks, so we will see what happens.

It is becoming quite fun and rewarding, and I am grateful for the opportunity.

Oh the places we'll go.... maybe....

Tonight Jon and I plotted out our trip for November, when we plan on trolling through Kentucky to spot out places to live some day. This is very very hard to do, as there are some beautiful places to live in Kentucky, and only so many days to really see them all! So we prayed about it, took some off the list, and hopefully charted a path through some interesting towns, with low costs of living, and some culture to boot.

In other news, we hosted small group at our home today! Our leaders home is still recovering from the intense flood water we had here a few weeks ago, so we had the opportunity to see if our new space works with a small group! It was wonderful and the smaller spaces allowed for an easy flowing conversation, rather than shouting across our living room. I even managed to make some kettle corn for the occasion.

Additionally, in honor of our First Anniversary, Karl (the group leader) made us cake! The decoration is truly amazing:

Here we are blowing the candle out:

(note to self - blowing out a candle does not an attractive picture make.....)

Thoughtless Thursdays, revamped

In my current state of thoughtlessness, I think it fitting to re-instate Thoughtless Thursdays, even if it is on a Friday.

"Through loosing my arm, I am now able to embrace more people with one arm, than I ever could with two." - Bethany Hamilton on "Soul Surfer" (or, at least her character).

Check your spelinlg

Yesterday, as I was walking to the nearby county park looking for some soccer, I noticed something written on the back of a sign at the park's entrance:

I almost have the impression this is a warning from experience...

Tetris vs. Angry Birds

We both recently, and separately, downloaded games to our phones for those moments when your brain needs a little break and you have the time to give it one.

Sara downloaded Tetris.
Jon downloaded Angry Birds.

Sara is slightly obsessed, Jon much less so, but is glad to have a game on his phone while his wife indulges her obsession.

(slight sarcasm....)

Tetris is so much fun! I'm not sure why, other than the slight strategic thinking it requires, plus the amazing feeling of getting something done... even if it is just stacking blocks in a straight line, and the challenge of doing it under increasingly complex situations. While this certainly is very life-like (especially getting things done under increasingly complex situations), having it limited to stacking blocks is somehow liberating.

Jon is enjoying angry birds, for a reason completely unbeknowst to him, other than the sheer pleasure of it. Cute cartoons flying a cross the screen, blowing things up, knocking things over, and the animals are cute and round to boot.

Somehow I feel like our game choices reflect on our personality - perhaps they do, perhaps they don't. That said, we are enjoying them - in moderation of course!

Phones and Life in General

We now have official phone numbers, one for home and two for our cells. If you want them, contact us for them :) [Mine is the same as before]

Other than that, my conference is over, and we have two days of relative "normalcy" ahead of us. The home is increasingly more functional and is such a blessing to be in during the day.

I myself am exhausted from three days of a long commute to the National Harbor and spending time around LOTS of people, in addition to some fairly intense learning about a mundane topic. So- off to fold laundry then head to bed!

Mail System!

First, huge shout out to the Google Android System, Picassa Albums, and Blogger, which are all so seamlessly integrated it took me about 45 seconds to take these pictures on my phone and upload them here. It's beautiful, wonderful, and promises many more pictures on our blog. 

Here is our new post office in our home! We were having a challenge keeping track of our mail. When we came in, it inevitably ended up on our kitchen counter to be sorted, which turned into piles around the home, which of course ended up being general chaos when it came to paying the rare paper bill or fulfilling our pledge commitments - and of course the credit card offers rarely get shreded.

Enter - system! We (Jess and I) found this at Office Depot. I think it's meant to sit on a desk, however it was light enough we figured we can hang it on the wall. So now as soon as we come in the home, we can sort our mail to see what we need to see immediate, what is for us specifically, and what can wait awhile.

Tonight we finally labeled each shelf to be clear what we are putting on there. The top level is for "Actions" - the mail we actually have to do something about, like the bills to be paid. The next two shelves are for Jon and I personally, primarily for our business communications. Next we have "Philanthropy" as we find there are alot of charitable organizations we receive mail from and want to read. Following is the shelf for "Other" - primarily for the credit card offers we need to shred, and for various other things that can wait a few days until we get to them. And, finally, in typical librarian style the final shelf is reserved for all things "Oversized" - like magazines - so we can still sort them here, however they won't block visibility.

Thanks for reading!
(random note: almost every time I typed "mail" in this blog, I automatically spelled "email" and had to re-do the word. Funny.)

Conference

This week I am at a conference which is mildly interesting in topic, but oh so interesting to watch people and procure swag- what vendors use to lure you into their booth for a freebie, and then hopefully get you to recognize their brand and learn about their product.

Today I am now the proud owner of four new t-shirts, three new bags, a journal, a pad of paper, a pen and a myriad of brochures. I only had to sit through two lectures, about five sales speeches, and lots of pretending to be interested to procure my new wardrobe and writing gear. Not to bad for a day of work, and I have two more to go! Now I did actually learn about some of the major vendors in this field, as well as learn a few neat things as well, however the free stuff is a welcome benefit.

Our NC Trip

We are back! We were able to visit Rocky Mount, Asheville, Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill this weekend, as well as Coats, NC for a beautiful wedding. While we aren't itching to move to the area, we were able to see some great places.

In Rocky Mount we stumbled upon their BEAUTIFUL library, chatted with a librarian, and then wandered over to the nearby museum. There we ended up wandering to the children's museum, which had live dinosaurs and a very interactive science section!

Jon getting dangerously close to the baby dinosaurs....

Greenville was interesting and collegey, however there we learned that we aren't "artsey" people, which is the main focus on the town. So one town off our list for sure.

Next we went to Durham and wandered around this beautiful town for awhile.

Jon stares down the local bull in the middle of the town:

We found this interesting math sculpture, which had every potential placement of the eight cubes together. Jon quickly figured it out, and here he is explaining it to me (he'd have to explain it again to make perfect sense...) He got very excited.

 And I thought this version was nice to sit on!

We then wandered over to Duke University, which is GORGEOUS and has a beautiful chapel designed by an African American architect, which I thought was fascinating.

Here is the chapel:

The rest of the campus was breath taking as well.

Our cousins wedding went beautifully, however I neglected to take any pictures to share. We had a wonderful time hanging out with family and enjoying the picturesque farm where it was held. This morning we went to an Anglican church where Jon's dad was preaching, ate lunch with the parsionhers, and then Jon drove me through Chapel Hill, which is where the best library school in the US is located. I'm very grateful for a husband who understands his wife's penchant for libraries and academic institutions.

In Raleigh

Currently we are in NC to attend the wedding of Jon's cousin. It has been so interesting to travel around the state, which we did today, and I'll have to fill you in on some of our fun discoveries.

On my heart this evening however is something sad we saw on the highway today. We were traveling to Raleigh around the beltway, when suddenly traffic slowed down in my lane and the one to the left. Of course we stopped to make our way around whatever was going on. As the car head of me veered to the left to get around what appeared to be a large piece of rubber, I did the say. Only as we were half-way around and gaining speed did we realize it was a dog that had been hit, writhing and yelping in pain. At this point we didn't know what to do. Our traffic lane had sped up, there was no real convenient place to get over, and even if we could get over, we would have to run back through traffic to help? Is that a wise decision?

I kept moving as it was the only thing I thought I could do. 

Looking back I wish I had pulled over somehow, if at least to alert other drivers to slow down as well and that something was truly amiss. And, if only to now have a peace of mind in knowing if the dog ever received help. I can see all the other drivers being equally as shocked as we are, however I'm hoping God provided at least one person with enough knowledge about dogs to do something. 

At this point I have to trust we were a non-part of the dog's hopeful rescue, so that we can learn to have a quicker reaction time for when we are suddenly struck by something, or someone, who truly needs our help, in a place completely unsuspecting.

However, if any of you hear of a dog-resuce outside of Raleigh, please let me know. 

Keeping the Forest Wet

I may have blogged about this analogy before, but it is worth blogging about again!

During our pre-marital counseling at some point or another, we were told to always keep our "forest" "wet" - aka, keep our relationship always saturated with encouragement, trust, and support, even when we don't really "need" encouragement, trust, or support. That way, when the "lightning" of life strikes - conflict and hard times, the forest is so wet it won't go ablaze; the relationship will be able to sustain the numerous strikes being thrown its way.

We have taken that to heart over this past year and have consistently (not always admittedly) made sure to keep our relationship a safe and welcome place for the other person, where we can be encouraged. It has been sappy and, for many, perhaps somewhat nauseating to be around us, however we have been determined to practice this "wetting" of the forest.

These past few weeks we now are beginning to see what our counselors were talking about- life's storms come. Between loosing Ticky-Tacky, travel through several states, a cell phone debacle to end all cell phone debacles, a crisis in a close friend's life, and the many other things life has thrown our way in the past few weeks, our relationship has not gone up in flames.

I know without a doubt that it is the Lord holding us together to Him through His grace and mercy that He has displayed to us through each other over the past few years. That said, I'm so much more committed to making sure the "lulls" in life are used to prepare for the "storms," through continued encouragement and strengthening of each other through words and quality time. With the hustle and bustle that has been the past month, it has been hard to sneak in quality "us" time, but we have had reserves to draw upon that have kept us from smoldering.

So, I write this as a reminder to my future self to keep pursuing and strengthening our relationship, to you all to encourage you in your relationships, and to Jon for all his compassion, encouragement, and hugs which have been in abundance for the past few weeks!

My first antiquing trip

So, for the craft room my mom recommended getting a table to expand. I didn't quite understand until I actually started "expanding" and quickly saw how some extra space would be well utilized. So while we were traveilng back from a vineyard in the Shennandoah Valley today, we thought we'd pop into an antique store to find a suitable table. I had never been antique shopping before, so wasn't quite sure what to expect! Lots of junk, some really good stuff, and really decently priced furniture.

While we were poking around, Jon found a "sewing table" for $15. Perfect! We then found out it was 50% off. Even more perfect! We then found it expanded - even better! But wait till you see what else it has....

And OLD sewing machine! Unfortunately it is not the kind you move with your feet. It is electric, however there's this pedal you push with your knees to get it to move. That said, it is "working" however VERY slowly, so we'll play around with what we can get it to do - it would be fun to have it work!

Here is what it looks like in the space:

And here it is all folded up with stuff on top of it. Unfortunately the piece that covers the machine is gone - hence the cheaper price - however hopefully we'll be able to get a piece of wood to patch it over.

If we can't get it to work, I'll put my "new" sewing machine on top, and then we'll be all ready to go! It was quite the find, and I'm very grateful for Jon who not only found it, but also figured out a way to get it into the car, and then tie the trunk down so we could continue exploring the area. Thanks honey for encouraging my budding domesticity.

So - crafting anyone?

Extreme Home Maker Over: Mom Style

Today my mom came over to help us with our home! It was mostly in order, however I was hoping to create a little nook for crafting and additionally hang some pictures on the wall. At the end of the day we ended up with basically another room, re-designed dining room and living room, and pictures hung up in two additional rooms. All for under $100. Seriously. My mom is a miracle worker. Even better, Josh & Jess were in town and stopped by to help out! Jess coincidentally had potato salad that helped us make it through dinner :o)


Before: This is our big living room. You can see the blank wall staring at us, which I just hadn't been able to get any pictures on - way to big. The small table in the corner was my attempt at creating a creative space, however being open to the whole room made it hard to get mess. Jon is here working very hard on something...

Here it is in the other direction! See? Big room!

AFTER! So this is HALF of the room. We found some fabric at Joanns to put over a frame my mom had,w hich centers the room. We also got the groovy lamp for the corner, which is also the first thing you see when you come into the room. The book shelf was moved to the center of the room which divides the space! It's SOOO cozy! And here are the four very hard workers who made it happen:

And here is the new sewing nook just on the other side!! yippee! I'm looking forward to being able to explore a bit of creativity by leaving the sewing machine out to patch up clothes, and maybe create some new ones. So very exciting!

So, we "accidentally" ended up completely re-doing the dining room on accident. Mom found a table/chair we had on there which worked well in the new space. Unfortunately we were also using it as an extra counter space for the bread machine. So we needed to create a more workable situation for the bread-machine and are other appliances. This ended up by moving a big hutch we have (you don't see it here), dividing the hutch so that we had more "counter space" (you can see both pieces stacked up against the mirror) and somehow deciding to use a beautiful table cloth as a curtain to set the theme of the room. I love it!

So this is simply just amazing. First, I'm blown away by the creativity and energy of my mother - it's astonishing what she can do with a few "moving men" (the discs you put under the furniture to move it - also known as "people movers"), nails, and a bit of ingenuity. And the easy with which she does it is purely amazing - it's so impressive! I can't believe how much better this space looks and feels!

Secondly, I'm impressed with the enthusiasm that Jon, Jess, and Josh brought to the project!  I'm come from an amazing family.

Now - it's hard to sleep when all I really want to do is stay up and enjoy these rooms!!!

Back in the saddle

Good news: I'm actually writing blog posts in my head during the day. Good sign my brain is returning for a little while.

Bad news: My brain lacks energy to produce them in the same brilliance they had during the day. However, now that I finished 'The Help' I can return to sleep normal hours. Somewhat bitter sweet I'd say; the book has been a pleasant companion during the last few weeks, although I'm sure Jon will be glad to have his wife back! He has gotten alot of reading done to though.

random things:
Jon and I are aiding our church in the re-design of their website. I'm in charge of content structuring. You know you're a bit nerdy when you leave a whole meeting on the content construction of a website,  and you are beaming.

We are in the process of changing our cell phone plans and it simply couldn't be more complicated. Although AT&T has great phones and great service, their customer service and website are abominable.

We have the Ooma. Glowing in blue. Once we get the new number ported, y'all will have to call us on it.

I'm trying to figure out a way to organize our mail better. Ideas?

This weekend - a long one - will be nice to settle things down here before they pick up heavily in the month of October!

Where have I been?

I have been intentionally absent from blogging for the past few days for these reasons:

1) Processing everything that has happened for the past few weeks.
2) Trying to keep up with the house between being gone and other things happening.
3) Nose deep in the book "The Help" which I'm enjoying so much. I have 15 pages left!!!!! but sleep awaits.... Can't wait to tell you about it!