"Give me eyes to see the world surrounding me...

give me strength to be only me" -OtR/Dido


So I’ve been in Mexico one week! It hardly feels like I ever left, just like it feels when I go back to Ohio. I jumped in with both feet. I had Sunday off, but hung out with the family anyways since I hadn’t seen them in a while. The kids asked me what I got them for Christmas knowing that they already received my gifts. ;) Unfortunately, I wrapped them so long ago I forget what I gave them! Although one girl is using the purse I got her for school.

The kids really enjoy having me back, even if I already have made oatmeal for them!

While the Midwest has a cold wave, we are having a heat wave. Thursday night it was 70 degrees after the sun had already went down. My family went to the beach on Friday and Saturday. I’m really enjoying the weather! (although my house NEVER warms up. If I’m not in the sun, I have long sleeves on.)

My trip back here was a little frustrating, as I sat on the runway for an hour and a half while they de-iced our plane. It doesn’t take an hour and a half to de-ice a plane, its just that the de-iceing employees (or their equipment) weren’t all out there yet. Better to be safe than sorry, so I’m very happy they took the time to de-ice the plane, but I realized that maybe I’m not as secure and confident a traveler as I thought myself to be. I got stressed out, knew I was going to miss my connecting flight, and wasn’t nice when I asked the stewardess for the phone number to figure stuff out. In the end, they took care of it before I could even phone them. All my stress and worry was ridiculous, because I was getting picked up from the airport by friends of mine, who LIVE IN MEXICO, and therefore are used to schedules changing, people being late, flexible, calm people. Sometimes when we are embarrassed by our emotions we hold it all in (missing people) and then it comes out where it’s not supposed too (being mad at the stewardess).

Before I left Ohio, my siblings and I did go sledding, I might put the videos up on youtube. I think we were out there enough time for my brother to say “it’s not gonna work” and we tried the big hill a couple times. He ran, pushing me down the hill…that worked, but not exactly sledding, even with his efforts I only went 50 feet. So we switched spots, except we went to a part that is usually landscaped so it was bumpy with the root balls of the plants that reappear in the spring. We didn’t remember that it was landscaped until I went down the snow covered speed bump hill of death. It had much more snow on it than the “official” sledding hill, and steeper- the speed made up for the bumpiness. We went down three or four more times, and then after a grand total of 10 minutes sledding we retreated to the car. Matt had come without gloves on, I had snow down my pants, and Carrie had only come b/c she loves me.

C—was singing a lot today. She sang all of “Happy Birthday” in ENGLISH, and also said “Thank You” in English to me. She has grown up mostly hearing impaired, and I have a hard time understanding her Spanish. She must have acquired a lot more English than I think in her time of being cared for by English speakers. I already knew she said “wa” (what) when she is confused. I know that Louise has started working with her on English one day a week, but this is like, woah!

Well, I’m gonna leave you with some quotes, and a promise (perpetually unfulfilled!) to write less, but more often. I read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott on the second flight (instead of talking to people that looked like they had just came back from Costa Rica and Café Britt) and she’s all “short assignments!”

From God was in this place, and I, i did not know by Rabbi Kushner (the ellipse are me making the passages shorter)

“The story is customarily offered as a “miracle” that God performed to get Moses’ attention…The “burning bush” was not a miracle. It was a test. God wanted to find out whether or not Moses could pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. When Moses did, God spoke. The trick is to pay enough attention to what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep. There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention.”

“Real love means that self-fulfillment comes from forgetting yourself and serving another. Love persuades us to regard ourselves as nothing. To set another’s self as more important than our own is mysteriously gratifying. We give our selves away. For this reason, Dov Baer’s idea that we must make our selves as nothing and the experience of loving are identical….We are so fully present, unbounded, and un-self-aware that we are not even aware we are present.” (This is totally echoed in Theology of the Body- Christopher West said something LIKE…we were made to give of ourselves and feel most complete when giving…but I need to read the real book now)

“Religious rituals are a funny sequence of things we do to help us remember that we have forgotten why we have been created, and gently provide us with the instruments of return. They are ancient techniques for sending us back to everyday life with a childlike sense of wonder.”

From Dave Matthews

If you give, you begin to live.
You begin, you get the world.

From Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Quoting her father- “This is the great tragedy of California for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death- the greatest leisure of all.”

Quoting her friend, Tom “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people do.”

Books finished: Bird by Bird, Dirk Gently's Holistic Dectective Agency-HILARIOUS.

Books I'd like to read in the new year: The Bible in SPANISH, Architecture of Happiness by de Botton, Status Anxiety by de Botton, Contemplative Prayer by merton, How to read a film, Green Mansions, Wanderings, Man in White, Rules of Engagement by Prince, Outline of an Anglican Life, Rosshalde, The Alchemist, Orthodoxy, Cost of Discipleship, something by Umberto Eco, Ender's Game, Lillith by MacDonald, Following Jesus, Surprised by Hope, Four Loves, anything I haven't read by C.S. Lewis, The End of Poverty by Sach, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, Honest to God by Robinson, something by Sayers, something by Willard, something by Wendell Berry, and maybe The Jesus I never Knew

I gotta get my book borrowing on.

I'm packing...

...to leave for Mexico on SATURDAY at 5:30 AM.

(so this is a quick commercial break.)

It was my intention to only take one suitcase back down this time, as I'd left *half* of my stuff in Mexico.
Except I forget which half.
and I'd intentionally brought things back to Ohio that I knew I didn't need anymore.
But now I forget which things I'm supposed to leave here at home.
so my possessions are now singing at me...
"should I stay or should I go now???"

hehe.
quite the dilemma.

I've had a cold for 3 weeks now, so I resorted to another doctor's appt and got a shot! I like shots.
I think the salty sea air is going to help things out a lot, and the non forced air heated houses.

I've been getting rid of things. I found a list of "to read" from 2000, and on that was Ender's Game So I've wanted to read it for 9 years yet haven't :)
I got rid of 3 more boxes of stuff. Threw out a drawing of my 4th grade classroom that I'd made to figure out how many kids were in my class (to buy Valentine's or something) I've always been a visual person I suppose.
I threw out old phone lists from before I ever had a cell phone. so many colours of ink, numbers crossed out and rewritten, red, blue sparkly, pink, orange, even lip liner. Documentation of how many times friends had moved in excited strokes.

One of the lovely things about early winter is all the green underbrush. It seems strange to me that the trees would be leafless and barren, and yet there is the promise of new life crowning their bases. The roots hibernate in the protection of the shrubbery, twisted together, imitating families of dormice.

Granted, it isn't early winter anymore, and now everything is brown. or white, where the snow fell :)

I think large schools of fish, tornados, and snow flurries on the highway move the same. They scurry, twist, swirl, and are generally unpredictable.

(I think my brother and sister and I are going to sled tomorrow morning, but just for like 15 minutes, since I'm sick.)

We played Apples to Apples and all the cards I earned described the character from Legally Blond perfectly, (except for foreign) clueless, funny, popular, briliant, sexy and responsible.

I beat everyone with 340 points in Wizard, my first time playing the game EVER. my work here is done....

coming? quotes, and some highlights from Theology of the Body.