Warmer Climes

Tomorrow morning we're off to Arizona-Where the sun always shines (hopefully) and winters are much warmer than here. (really hopefully) We're visiting my mother. She's always been able to email but she tells me now that her computer doesn't work at all. She can't get onto the internet and she is stymied. It is possible I'll have blogging withdrawal because I won't be able to log onto any computer at all. I won't even have access to email. Horrors! And I was planning on uploading some great pictures of the Grand Canyon, or the smog in Phoenix. Be prepared: It's possible my blog will not change a bit until I get back. It doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about y'all. (and feeling relieved because you have cold weather and we don't). Just means, now you know what's going on here. See you in a week!

Chocolate!

Our neighbor supplied Ron with some Chocolate chip cookies the other day. She was returning a favor. Why couldn't she have been like the neighbor who gave us a jar of pickled herring? I hate pickled herring. But who doesn't like chocolate chip cookies after all? That was a disaster for me! I love chocolate chip cookies. And I'm supposed to lose 10 lbs. Yikes! I ate 3 after work. Just like that and they were gone. So I went to the wellness center to exercise them away. And you know what? I only burned 85 calories. (that was a 30 minute workout on the elipitical machine going 3 miles!) I don't think that equals 3 chocolate chip cookies. This is harder than I thought.

The color purple

You are a purple person if:

Your mornings are purple and squishy around the edges. (in other words you're up before the sun)

Your king has clothed YOU in purple!

Winter makes all your extremities that odd shade of purple. (because you don't mind being out in the cold)

You could live with a purple bedroom or purple carpet or someone else who dearly loves purple.

You're an optomist.

You're a dreamer.

You're adventerous.

You're romantic.

You're Sensitive.

check out these purple ideas: http://lavenderearth.com/contents.html http://www.underdown.org/

And of course don't forget to read:

Lily and the Purple plastic purse

Harold and the Purple crayon.

So add some color to your winter days. Be purple!

The Color Red

I always wanted a fire engine red vehicle. The closest I ever came was my maroon stick shift sporty beretta back in my commuting days. I finally decided that color is the least important thing about a vehicle. Be content with...grey. or tan. So I was. Really. But can you believe that after 11 vehicles (including 3 pickups) we've finally got a red one! Hot Dog! Among all the cool things this came with is the "new car smell". An expensive perfume. Nice. So you'll see me in my red truck, tooling down the highway fiddling with satellite radio or onstar or the 6way CD player with playlists and wish for the good old days when you worried about people talking on cellphones! Gotta go... Need to break in that red truck!

A little coloring helps the workload along

I was doing a pretty tedious job at work today (you really don't want to know, but it involved adding tag lines to MARC records one by one). I had quite a bit to do actually and part of it involved using a yellow highlighter to mark off paper records as I finished them on the computer. One of my co-worker's little girl happened to be there and as soon as she caught sight of the yellow marker she stopped her skipping. She was immediately intrigued. Yellow, it seems, is among her "favorite" colors as is using a marker! She was jealous that I was getting to use the yellow marker! Her enthusiasm and excitement over my yellow marker made me re-examine my monotonous job. It had more excitement than I thought after all! We all need a little bit of "yellow marker" in our lives. Keep looking at things in light of the "color" that's there that we don't see anymore. Marvel at it!

Traveling light

I, as most of my community, family and friends would agree, am not a rich person. That, of course is all relative. Not rich by American standards anyway. But I have so much "stuff" I could supply a third world country with their basic needs just from my own personal second hand store-i.e. the things I use for camping! It embarrasses me to see my pile of camping towels, sleeping bags, cookware, seating, games, shoes, hats, and other gear. What I need to do is go back to basics...tent camping. I don't need all this to really enjoy the outdoors. In fact, if I didn't have to haul all this along I'd probably go more often.
Which seems to lead into something I've been thinking about for quite some time anyway-the "Traveling light" through this world I live in. What is the "stuff" that I have that keeps me from giving myself over to following hard after God? What is it that weighs me down - my own self centeredness that keeps me on payment plans for some new, bigger, brighter, better thing rather than throwing it all into serving. So many needs. Well, let's not get carried away. If I only worked on following God into one area of need I'd be doing better than I am right now.
So Goal 1 for 2007: Drop some of my load. Go light so I can serve better.