Shout out to my dad Wayne Church on his 55th birthday! He’s quite possibly the best dad ever! Wish you didn’t have to work today. 
Here’s a shot of the pineapple oatmeal cookies–Dad’s favorite–I made for him. A double batch, of course. And yes, strange as pineapple oatmeal cookies sound, they’re quite delicious.
He cleans house, too! Just wish I could get him to wear my flowered apron!
I got a package in the mail yesterday from Grandma Helen for my anniversary. While it included the cursory card, the shape of the package confused Chris, but I knew exactly what I would find inside.
Grandma has been telling me stories about her childhood and my mom, Aunt Kathy, and Uncle Michael’s childhoods for as long as I can remember. Naps at her house always started with a story or two about their adventures.
She has had some health problems spring up in the last year or so, and she doesn’t sleep well at night, so Grandma has been writing down her stories and sending them to me. She’s given me the rights to do with them as I like–maybe to work on publishing them one day!
It’s little things like this that confirm that God knew what he was doing when he chose this family to be my family. Even though I have not inherited Grandma’s storytelling talent, I have on some level inherited her penchant for the written word. Heck! Her package of photocopied stories even came indexed with story titles, dates written, and characters involved!
Today is Take It and Blog Friday over at SGFblogs.com, and this post is a response to the question, “How did you meet your significant other?” If you like my post, trot on over there, and read what everyone else has posted, too!
Chris and I have a funny little story. At least I think it’s funny, but I am terrible at telling stories, so I’ll just give you the timeline and fill in the details.
This is point in the story where destinies are reversed and we begin “running the race” together. From that night forward, we were pretty much on a fast track to true love, much to the annoyance of Betsy (and I think Barron). (Little did they know that they’d be married in what we predicted would be the far-distant future.) Of course, there is much more to our story since this is just the beginning, but I’ll save those juicy details for another blog post.
I organized our closet this week. It’s nowhere near as pretty as I’d like it to be, but at least our shoes are not piled into his-and-hers wicker laundry baskets any more. And my cute/funky purses are no longer in plastic containers; now they’re out where I can see them, and theoretically, use them more often. I even got rid of three pairs of running shoes/sneakers. I still need to clean out the summer clothes I didn’t wear this season. (Tip: At the beginning of every season, flip your hangers around so they hang backwards off the clothing rod. When you wear something off of one, flip the hanger around. By the end of the season, it will be clear what you wore and what you didn’t.)
And in a non-closet-organizing note, I’m looking into the Getting Things Done workflow. Mainly, I need a better system at work. Not because I’m disorganized, but because I answer to 15 or so people, and I need a workflow that I can give to them and say, “Hey, this is how I work best. If you need me to do something for you, this is how to get the best results.” So I’m working on inboxes. A physical one at work, three email inboxes (yes, I must have three: personal, work, Austin Creative), and eventually an inbox at home. I also need to work on a workspace at home (GTD says it’s a bad idea for spouses to share workspaces. I concur.) And I need to turn my laptop bag into a portable workspace. (Not a far stretch. During grad school, I carried an office supply store around in my bag. Mini stapler, hole punch, Post-Its, binder clips, paper clips, Visine, Uniballs of every color, dry erase markers, mechanical pencils, mechanical erasers, pencil lead, highlighters, white-out, Page Points, and at least two writing style guides. I was equipped to grade a paper at a moment’s notice. I miss those days…)
Six miles tomorrow + a wedding. BBQ Sunday night. I have a bit of Austin Creative work to do, but I think I’m going to indulge and break out some Jane Austen this weekend. I need to rest my brain. Have any excellent weekend!
I think I have recovered from my weekend. Talk about a whirlwind! I spent Friday hanging out with my family for the brother’s college graduation. Always the center of attention, Jacob received the longest applause and a standing ovation from the entire crowd. Of course, he was the last name called, and good things come to those who wait. Friday night, Chris and I went on a late-night date to see Angels and Demons. Having never read the book, I liked it far better than I liked The Da Vinci Code; it was not nearly as controversial and much easier to follow.
On Saturday, we trekked to Overland Park, Kansas, for our oldest nephew Cameron’s senior piano recital and high school graduation. He is one talented kid, and he tackled some pretty difficult music. I can’t wait to see what God has in store for him! Got to spend a little bit of time with the rest of the family. Not nearly enough time for all five kids, but they’ll be in town in two weeks to hang with the whole crew: Schmutzler clan (2 adults, 5 kids), Bryson clan (2 adults, 3 kids), and Austin clan (2 adults, 2 cats). And Chris’s parents. And Chris’s grandparents. That will be a crazy weekend, but hopefully there will be some time to do some spoilin’. I LOVE being an aunt!
Sunday. Lots of meetings. But we got to hear my friend Heather’s testimony. I’ve read it a million times because she’s written a book, and I’ve done some editing on it, but it was so different hearing it in person.
Today. Ran 2.93 miles with Sarah at 6 AM. If I am going to get any running in this summer, it’s got to be in the mornings. I am forcing myself to wake up early with the promise of coffee. I don’t want to jinx myself by saying that if this goes well, it could be called pre-marathon training, so let’s just say that if this goes well and I stick to it, I might be doing a long-distance race this fall. (!!!) We are meeting at Crossfit on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, so we can hit the road right after her class, and we’ll be running 30-40 minutes. On Thursdays, we’re meeting at a local track to do a speed class. I’m sure I’ll have a vomiting story on Thursday for you.
Lunch with Heather. Dinner at Chris’s grandparents’ house for a birthday dinner for his mom. We’ll either play cards or watch the Dancing with the Stars finale.
And really the rest of the week is easy peasy. Well, I have to do everything twice this week because I’m off ALL NEXT WEEK, so that could get a teensy weensy hectic, but it’s nothing terrible. And my boss leaves town on Thursday for a 10-day trip to Europe, so there’s the possibility I might get hit with a handful of extra tasks before he leaves. But it will be worth it for one week of freedom, sweet freedom!
I was off of work for Good Friday last Thursday and Friday, so I ventured home to hang out with my family in Clinton. Chris couldn’t come because he had to work; I missed him but still had fun. On Thursday afternoon, Mom and I putzed around town and ran errands. We stocked up on Easter candy for the weekend at Walmart before heading home to make dinner. I had requested gumbo, and somehow I got conned into making it for myself. I spent a better part of the afternoon brewing it up for the rest of the family.
We didn’t do much Thursday evening. Mom and I watched the new episode of CSI, and I worked on a crochet project. Friday morning, Mom and I slept in long enough for Dad to drive all the way to KC for work, get rained out, and drive back home. He decided to get a hair cut, and the rest of us met him in town for lunch at Pizza Glen. I’m sure this pizza isn’t the best in the world, but I have a special place for it in my heart. I love their pizza!
After lunch, Dad and Jacob worked on my Blazer in my Grandpa Norman’s shop. The plan was to have Dad replace my rotors because a mechanic in Springfield told me that the rotors had so much wear that they could no longer be grinded smooth. Dad and my brother Jacob got the tires off and discovered that my rotors were fine. We measured the difference in width between the new and the old rotors: 15/1000th of an inch! So much for the self-touting “Christian” mechanic I went to. This is the fourth industry where I’ve experienced Christians as the worst people to work with: design, construction, car repair, and food service. Not happy.
We made good of the day, and Dad changed the oil in the Blazer instead. O’Reilly’s took the rotors back, no questions asked. While Dad and Jacob were wrapping up, I shot the other end of Grandpa’s shop. I know it looks gross and dirty and about to fall down at any moment (which isn’t far from the truth), but I have some found memories of “helping” Grandpa and Dad with their projects and “working” in the office.
After we finished with my car, Mom, Dad, and I went to Calhoun to visit the babies on my Aunt Kathy and Uncle Martin’s farm. This first picture is of my dad holding one of the baby goats. They were so inquisitive and curious; they reminded me a bit of Mowgli.
Again, here’s Dad. This time he’s with Brassy and her new colt. Brassy is sort of bossy, so we had to be careful with her in the pen. Daffy, Kathy’s other mare who foaled with week was also in the pen; I have some video of her and her colt that I hope to put on YouTube this week.
And here is another fun shot of the baby goats. They were not camera shy whatsoever.
Mom got a hold of Brassy, too.
And this is my favorite picture! It has the funniest story! Aunt Kathy took me and Mom into the barn where the kittens were, and while she was looking for the other litter, Mom and I checked out this basket of cats. It was dark, so I couldn’t tell exactly what I was looking at, but I said, “Uh, I don’t think, I mean, this isn’t a cat.” What I saw were two sets of ears that were not in any way kitten ears. They were bunny ears! Goldie, the momma cat, had evidently found them and adopted them. We figured she was saving them for dinner, but she was letting them nurse, and they were in perfectly good health!
After the farm, we went home for dinner and hung out with my brother and his girlfriend Brandi. We watched Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace while playing Sorry! and Clue. Mom says it’s happened before, but this was the first time I remember Dad playing board games with us. We had to teach him how to play Sorry!, but he caught on quickly and had to say “sorry” to Mom quite a bit.
Saturday morning, I met my best friend Jenny and her boyfriend Matt at Ben Franklin’s Coffee House in town. I worked there when I was in high school and have a few fond memories of that place. We drank our coffee and ate our pastries and chatted for about an hour before heading our separate ways.
For lunch, we piled into the Suburban and headed to Martin City for some famed Fiorella’s Jack Stack barbeque. I live for this stuff. Seriously, when I die, doctors will find Jack Stack’s BBQ sauce flowing through my veins. I’m sure there are plenty of other fantastic restaurants in Kansas City, but I will never know because eating at Jack Stack is mandatory when I go to KC. We split a rack-and-a-half of onion rings, and I ordered a Hatfield sandwich with ham and turkey. Yum!
After lunch, we headed back home, taking a detour in Harrisonville to stop at the Family Center (for martin houses) and then to Chilhowee to see the school where Jacob will be working as an ag teacher next fall. And after all that, we were still too full to get dessert at Dairy Queen, so we went home. Once packed, I hit the road again and headed back to Nixa. And that was my whirlwind weekend at home!
And lest I leave Easter Sunday out, that was quite the day, too! I had 12 kids in my KidLife class, but we all survived. For lunch, my in-laws brought sandwiches, and then we played Canasta for a few hours. And there was lots of coffee drinks and desserts, too. I crashed on the couch around 5 PM and slept for 2.5 hours! I was so tired!
Sheesh! This has been a whirlwind week. Lots and lots and lots going on. All of them awesome. But none of them allowing me to sit down and think and write even though all of them are blog, Twitter, web development related. What a catch 22. Let me share a few of them, so you know what’s going on.
As many of you know, I’ve sort of dove in with the Springfield Bloggers Association. Mostly ball picking upping, which I’m happy to do. I love blogging. I love bloggers. You all know this. I hope that’s one of the reasons you read me nearly every day. Anyway, I’ve been at work on the SBA’s blog for a week or so, and I met with Andy Cline last night to discuss the blogroll and other possibilities for the group. The site is ready for visitors (but be patient, we’re still tweaking a few of the features/design elements), and if you’re in the Springfield area, I encourage you to submit your blog to our blogroll. If other local bloggers help promote SGFblogs.com and help it grow, it could quickly become a hub for bloggers in Springfield. We don’t know what that exactly looks like yet, but that’s why we need lots of bloggers to participate and help shape the group and site.
Linden and I finally wrapped up our Twitter help guide (code name: Hawk) this week, and it will be published on our blogs starting Monday. A bulk of today will be spent getting my posts ready. We decided to split the four posts between us, Sarah, Linden, Sarah, Linden, so we can share the traffic. Once we’re done publishing, we’re having my husband design a little ebook for us. Chris is helping me with another top-secret project next week that has to roll out on Thursday, so he’ll do the ebook after that. Truly, this has been one of my favorite collaborative writing projects. I really haven’t done any outside of school, and group school projects are always rough when you’re the overachiever. I always got the fuzzy side of the lollipop, so to speak. Anyway, collaborating with Linden has been super fun, and this project counts as my first international writing project.
The third project that’s been crazy consuming is completing applications and proposals for a few continuing education classes I’d like to teach at our local community college. Of course, they’re blogging related. I have three blogging classes–beginning, intermediate, and advanced–outlined, and I have a few social networking classes outlined, too. The classes are for the summer, and I need to get on the ball and get them out the door, so they can be reviewed before the summer schedule is wrapped up and mailed to the community. I hope there’s some interest in them. I love helping bloggers work on their blogs. (And I could use some extra cash.)
So my blogging may be a little scarce for the next two weeks or so. I’ll try to get in a few updates here and there, but don’t worry if I’m not around. I’m here. I’m checking in. Just not writing too much. Oh, yeah, and then there’s Easter and I’m going home to hang out with my folks for a few days, and there’s not much in the way of Internet speed there. I just stay up with my mother until 2 AM talking every night.
Anyway, have a great weekend! And if you’re in Springfield, stay warm. Snow is coming. (But that’s a blog post for another day.)
…but I don’t really want to talk about it. So instead I went to YouTube to find kitten videos to cheer me up. This one of a kitten vs. an electric toothbrush did the trick. Hope you like it.
Today’s blog post is a response to Linden’s post Passions: How to be Happy Despite/Because of Them? from Friday, which was a response to Lorraine’s post Passions and How to Put Them to Use. Both posts got me thinking about the things that I’m passionate about and how they present themselves in my life.
Now, I’m hesitant to use the word “passions” in this post because as a Christ-follower, I’m used to this word in context of the Bible. And in the Bible, “passions” is solely used to describe sin related to sex. For this post, I’ll be using the word “excitements” because truly these are the activities, hobbies, and interests that get me excited. Let’s start with the most obvious…
Writing
I don’t remember when I started writing or even when I started loving writing. I bookmark my childhood according to the books I read, and those good books gave me a love for the well-crafted word that I return to even today. I wrote a handful of poems, short stories, and essays as a kid and early teenager but let very few people read them, so it wasn’t until high school—in my junior and senior composition classes with Mrs. Frankenfield—that I shared my talent with others. My favorite projects were a problem/solution essay about the football game parking problem (junior year) and an expository essay about Charlotte Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Even when my dual-credit comp class wrote exit essays to send to CMSU, I didn’t think I was a great writer. I was just writing the required essay and received a perfect score, the only perfect score ever given to the loads of students across central Missouri taking that same class. Once in college, my mom (of all people) introduced me to the professional/technical writing program, and I still don’t know why I listened to her and pursued it.
Even so, I still can’t say that I love writing. Writing is not some separate thing like sushi or my cats or running or even Chris that I’ve attached myself and my adoration to. For me, writing is how I express myself. It’s so deeply ingrained in me that it hurts my brain to not put pen to paper. As Gloria Steinem once said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel as if I should be doing something else.”
Reading/Good Books
I firmly believe that my ability to write well came from a love of reading. Again, I don’t remember my first book or when I began to love reading; it’s just something that has always been a part of my life. My best friend Jenny and I became best friends because we both loved books, and even today, all of my closest friends are voracious readers. And when we get together, we inevitably come to books in our conversations. I don’t read books as much right now because my other excitements often get in reading’s way, but good books and reading are always there.
Editing
Like writing, my excitement about editing comes from my love of reading. Having pored over hundreds of books in my adolescence instilled in me what the English language is supposed to look and sound like, and when it looks or sounds wrong, I can’t help but notice. Every day for a semester, I sat on the edge of my seat in my technical editing class, learning new proofreading marks and typographical symbols. That semester, I spent nearly every Friday night sitting at home working on my editing project. Yes, I needed to put that much time in it, but heck, it was the most fun I’ve ever had on a class project. I could still easily see myself working for a publisher or newspaper copy editing books and articles for grammatical problems. And still, one of the best gifts Chris ever gave me is the Chicago Manual of Style, an editor’s bible.
Web 2.0
I honestly don’t know where my excitement for Web 2.0 came from. I don’t come from a hugely tech-savvy background, but I have always been a quick learner. My undergraduate program required one web development class, which required us to create a web site, but mostly we focused on writing for the web and learning Dreamweaver. After that, I worked on a website for my internship and then at LifePoint, but even then, I hardly knew anything about Web 2.0. One thing kept leading to another. I got on Facebook. I started a Blogger blog. I began reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. I learned XHTML and CSS. I wrote my thesis about Web 2.0. I installed Google Analytics. I signed up for Feedburner. I took Javascript and PHP classes. I moved to WordPress. I bought my own domain name. I bought my own hosting. You get the picture. All of this adds up to the crazed online gal I am today.
Running/Heath/Fitness
One more thing I could devote all my time to. And again, not sure where this came from. I wasn’t the most athletic kid growing up. I took lots of dance classes and tried softball, basketball, and volleyball. The only thing that stuck was tennis, and I played on my high school’s tennis team all four years. Somewhere between freshman and senior year, I became an athlete and started running and weight-lifting. I loved weight-lifting and encouraging my partners so much, that I decided I wanted to pursue athletic training and dietetics in college. I had a big dream of being a trainer for an NFL football team, but it turns out, I hate chemistry. Hate, hate, hate it. And you sort of have to know chemistry to go anywhere in dietetics. and at SMSU the athletic training program was more demanding on students than being an athlete was. I switched to tech writing before I even got to college, but I still love learning about health and fitness.
When I started running in grad school with Linden, it quickly became another excitement of mine, something I wrote about more than once on this blog. 5Ks, 10Ks, and a half marathon ensued. I joined the Y and took strength training and spinning classes, and I got the bug to be an athletic trainer again. I haven’t pursued that, but I sometimes wonder what could’ve been if I pursued this field instead of writing…
History
I never considered a career in history even though history was one of my favorite subjects in high school and college. I think this excitement came from my dad, who loves old war movies and who would’ve studied history had he not dropped out of college. It’s funny to think of my dad as a history teacher, but he’s such a good story-teller, he’d have been really good at it. I also love my seventh grade history teacher Mr. Stillwell, who got me excited about Missouri history and Harry S Truman. Pair these influences with a good biography or a novel of historical fiction, and you’ve got a girl who loves studying the past. Right now, my favorite time period is the turn of the 20th century, during the era of the new Biltmore estate and Edith Wharton‘s novels. I also love biblical history, the Renassaince, and World War II. I’m so crazy about history and good books (and now art, since I married a designer), that I’ve considered developing a holistic homeschooling curriculum that studies history in the context of its literature, art, inventions, people, etc. so students can really dive into specific time periods. One of those projects that will probably forever be on the back burner of my brain.
Dance
This is a silly little excitement of mine, but I have loved it every since I was a little girl. I think every little girl dreams of being a ballerina, but I was obsessed with it. When we moved into our house when I was seven, we painted the walls ballet pink and carpeted it with pink carpet. Even into high school, I kept parts of my ballet-themed room. I started taking dance classes when I was four or five, dropped dance for acrobats when I was in elementary school, and picked up ballet when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Mind you, I was never a great dancer. I was the worst in the class, and I always felt like the other girls and my teacher were annoyed I was there. I quit dance classes in middle school because it wasn’t fun anymore, but in high school, I took some swing dance classes and danced in show choir. In college, I took a few ballet and jazz classes, and I met Chris, who happened to have ballroom danced in high school and who taught me some of his Latin favorites.
I don’t do a lot of dancing now, but I still get excited about it. You can guarantee that if any dance-related TV show or movie is out, I’ll be watching it. And as selfish as it is, I hope that when Chris and I do have a kiddo, that God will give me a dancer.
Others
Those are the main excitements in my life, but others make their way into my activities from time to time. Crocheting, photography, cooking, crossword puzzles, math, and organizing all make their rounds into my evenings at least a few times a year.
All these big and little excitements have shaped me into who I am today. Weird, isn’t it? To think that when I watched old war movies with my dad or walked into my first dance class or read that first chapter book, that they would have had such an impact on me. Many of these excitements don’t make their way into my life every day, but they’re always there, waiting for me to get excited about them again, if even for a little while. I love it!
