Confession

Everyone has their weird quirks and habits. Some of mine are the fact that I can’t handle my food touching. I eat my food in rotations (as Allison calls it), which basically means that if I have three different items of food on my plate, I will finish all of one item before moving on to the second. If someone’s shirt tag is sticking out I compulsively must correct it or have someone else do it. The same goes with hair and lint being on someone’s shirt (I’m not talking about just people I know, but also perfect strangers). When talking with friends if I notice that the clasp on their necklace has moved around to the front I have to fix it, or ask them to fix it, before continuing our conversation. The clothes in my closet are organized by color and type of shirt (short-sleeve together, long-sleeve together and then sweaters). When turning in projects or doing homework assignments I generally need at least on person to give me the thumbs up that I have completed the activity correctly (due to my strong need for perfection). When eating candy, for example M&M’s, I organize them all by color and then eat them in such a way that there is the same amount of each color. I fold gum and candy wrappers, instead of wading them up as most people do. All of these things have led me to believe that I have a tendency towards obsessive-compulsive disorder. While I don’t believe that any of these habits are extreme enough for me to be clinically diagnosed as OCD, I’ve often been teased about these habits. I have gotten better with the whole perfectionist thing, but today I think I may have had a relapse. This is where my confession comes in.
I was preparing to make my bed with the clean sheets I had just gotten from the dryer and I noticed that the sheets were extremely wrinkled. So, I decided they should be ironed. I’m not sure if this is something that one normally does, I’ve never really enjoyed ironing, but I know that we have never ironed our sheets at home. At first I was just going to iron the top edge of the sheet, where it was the most wrinkled, but I soon found myself ironing the entire thing and surprisingly found myself enjoying it. I proceeded to iron my pillowcase as well. During this whole process my roommate, Sarah, seemed quite entertained and proceeded to laugh at me. Now that I’ve made this confession, I’m wondering if there is anyone else that can identify with these tendencies. Should I be concerned? Is ironing my sheets as odd as I think? Maybe I can just chalk it up as homework avoidance and leave it at that. What do you think?

Pictures from Labor Day weekend

In St. Louis, just outside of the Arch...
in the arch...
at six flags, we thought we were ninjas...
On the way back to school we stopped at the world's largest McDonalds and took the great photo opportunity...GO LONGHORNS!!!*

*An inside joke: my friend Graddy doesn't like the Longhorns and we planned this ahead of time as a joke, he didn't know we we're doing the Longhorn sign behind him... :)

Pictures from my b-day dinner at Chili's

My roommate and I...
all of us girls...
the guys...

It's been way to long!

Okay, so it has been way to long since my last post. I have been pretty busy and a lot of stuff has been going on. I’m back at school now. I came back a week early in hopes of getting a job sooner, which I did but the events surrounding the whole thing was a bit crazy. I won’t spend time on that story just now, maybe in a different post. Concerning the job thing, I got a job at Starbucks! I started training last week and it’s been going pretty good so far.

Shortly after we got back to school a friend organized a belated birthday party for me. It was a lot of fun. We went out to eat at Chili’s and friends who were on my floor and brother wing last year came. It was really good to see everyone.

Last weekend I went to St. Louis with some friends for Labor Day weekend, which was a complete blast. We stayed with my friend Bekah’s family. We went to the Zoo, the City Museum, the Arch and Six Flags. It was really nice to get away with good friends to relax and have a good time.

I’m going out for a friend’s birthday tonight so I’ve gotta go get ready. I will hopefully be posting again soon with pictures.

New Puppy!!!

As you can obviously tell by the title we got a new puppy. He is SO cute!!! We picked him up today from the vet and brought him home to meet Caesar. That was interesting, but surprisingly went very well. They aren’t best friends yet, but Caesar is tolerating him and only got stern with him when the puppy was sniffing around Caesar’s food and water dish. I don’t think it will take too long for them to get attached to each other.

The puppy is 10 weeks old and we picked him out at the local animal shelter on Thursday, a few hours after he and his brothers and sister arrived there. He had to get all of his shots and get fixed before we could pick him up, so he wasn’t ready to come home until today. His mom is a Great Pyrenees but we aren’t sure what his dad is. Needless to say he’s going to be a huge dog, which is exactly what we wanted. :) After a lot of deliberation we finally decided on his name this morning at breakfast (thanks Aunt Damelee). We decided on Solomon but we’ll probably call him Sol (pronounced like Saul) for short. Here’s some pictures we took of him right after we brought him home.

Funny Video

My family has been harassing me to post…I don’t really have anything to post about so I decided to share this hilarious video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDKhZ8l1n8A Enjoy!

Traveling and other tangents...

So, some of my friends are overseas on missions trips and studying abroad. I've been looking at pictures and reading blogs about all of these amazing experiences and it makes me want to travel overseas. I guess it's in my blood...all of my siblings have lived overseas for at least one year and I haven't been out of the country since March '06. :( So, today I came across this article and I thought it was pretty interesting. I’ve heard that American’s don’t make very good impressions when traveling abroad. I find that very unfortunate and try to be purposeful in how I present myself specifically when traveling.

It makes me wonder how mindful we are of how we act in public. I hope that we take into consideration who/what we are representing. In other countries we represent Americans (depending on what we are there for) we also represent a school, ministry or family. What are our actions saying about what we represent? What kind of impression are we leaving with those who come in contact with us? (Not sure how I got off on this tangent, my main purpose was to just share that article I read…) Anyway, please leave comments and let me know what you think of the article…or anything else I’ve said. :)

Time

I randomly woke up at about 5 am this morning. I tried to just go back to sleep but for some reason I’m wide awake. This kind of thing has been happening a lot over the past few weeks and I’m really not sure why. I didn’t use to have problems with a normal sleeping schedule but now either I’m waking up several times in the morning, unable to fall asleep at night or sleeping in really late. Kind of a weird combo and on top of that I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams…so I don’t really know what is up with me.

Anyway, so I decided to take advantage of the fact that I couldn’t sleep by spending some time with the Lord. (And obviously blogging…) As I was doing this, I realized how much I’ve been neglecting Him. It’s kind of weird how as Christians we talk about how much we love the Lord, but how much time do we actually spend with Him? Not how much time do we spend at church, or with our Christian friends…but how much time do we actually spend devoted to communicating with Him? I know that I don’t do it enough. What really gets me though, is that even when I neglect to spend time with Him, He’s always right there ready to spend time with me. Now that’s an amazing friend! How many friends would be sitting around waiting to hang out with me if I neglected to even talk to them? Or when I did talk to them I just asked for favors. We have an amazing friend in God!

I guess the other thing that really stuck out to me about this too, kind of goes hand-in-hand with what I’ve already said. A few years ago I read a book called The Five Love Languages. I’m sure if you haven’t read the book you’ve probably at least heard about it. For those of you that haven’t, I’ll give you a brief rundown of the book. Basically, the author lists five different ways in which people speak and receive love. Quality time, Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Physical Touch and Gifts. My top one is quality time. I’ve thought about how much it means to me when my friends spend time with me and how awful I feel if I haven’t gotten to spend time with my friends for a long time. I kind of equated that with God. I wonder what His love language is. I wonder if He feels the same way that I do when I haven’t spent time with my friends. Now, I’m not trying to go on a guilt trip or anything, I guess I’m just trying to make myself more aware of how my actions or lack thereof affect my relationship with God. It’s not just that I’m missing out when I don’t spend time with God, but also that I’m hurting Him when I neglect to spend time with Him. That’s not to say that I have to be in my room all day everyday, spending time communicating with Him. That is completely unrealistic and He is a reasonable God. It does mean setting aside some time for Him. It also means being purposeful in communicating with Him. Just like I use various ways to stay in contact with friends and family throughout the day, I can stay in contact with God by just talking to Him and being mindful of Him. Well, I don’t really know how I ended up here….but I guess I’m done with this tangent. This really wasn’t intended to be a preaching time or anything so please hear my heart in all of this. Wow, my blog has certainly turned into something different than it started out to be. Well, I have to go get ready for work.