Look what I got!

Or what I bought, rather. I wasn't really thinking I'd end up buying a car until this fall, but we went by the dealership Monday night and saw this car. It's a 2000 Nissan Altima, but it only has 81K miles on it! Plus it came with a warranty, so that's pretty awesome too.

Dad and I stopped by after work yesterday and test-drove it and the only problem I found with it was that it pulled to the right, but they did an alignment on it today, and it was fine when I drove it again.

So I have an awesome car! I'm so happy I can't stop grinning. :D

Two things:

I started wishing my name was shorter after signing my full name to multiple papers. Dang, my full name has a lot of letters in it...

Also, the car salesman who did all the paperwork made some remark about me being so young. I'm getting ever so slightly tired of hearing that. Yes, I'm only twenty, but really? Since when is that SO terribly young? Ah well. :D

But I have my own car. For real. I don't think it's quite sunk in yet...I suppose it might sink in when I see the chunk missing out of my bank account. ;) And now I need to wash and wax it, get the battery checked, and get a second key made...and probably some other stuff...like adjusting my budget to pay for gas and such.

Oh seriously

I think I've become one of those annoying adults. You know, one that remembers things from when they were younger and insists on reminiscing about when "they were your age...", to the utter boredom of the kids listening.

A couple weeks ago, one of the little girls at church was wearing a yellow dress with a lace collar and I while was looking at it, it suddenly dawned on me that it was "one of those dresses!". When I was her age (9-10ish) there were these dresses, made by My Michelle, I think; they came in various colors and fabrics, but they all had the same exact lace collar. As I recall, all the other girls my age also had one in one of the many colors they came in.

This was the only photo I could find of one of those collars.

So I of course had to tell this girl about those dresses being around when I was little. To her credit she didn't look bored. Maybe I was just an easily irritated little kid. I guess I am and always have been sensitive to anything that seems condescending, which in retrospect, stories like that are not. :P At any rate, I'll try to remember to keep my irritating exclamations to myself...or just say what the heck, and be an annoying older person... Hmm, sounds like a plan. :D

Have done this? And if you're a girl, did you have one of those dresses when you were a kid?

Hi, it's Saturday

And I made another vlog. It came out a little rough because it picked up every bump I went over, and I must not have had the iPod strapped to the sun visor very well.



Oh, and to make a long story short, when I say "the cheese guy", I'm referring to a time a few years ago when my cousins were here to visit. We were a little hyper, as usually happens when we get together, and we went to the grocery store, didn't pick up enough bags of cheese, realized this in the checkout lane, and the guy working in that lane had to wait while we consulted/dithered/ran to get more cheese. Meanwhile, he stood there looking baffled and thoroughly convinced we were crazy.

Moral of the story: don't go grocery shopping with five people, and if you do, avoid making the grocery store clerk's life confusing...they can't handle it.

Okay, that's pretty funny

Or maybe I'm easily amused. I've heard the ABBA song "Take a Chance On Me" several times before and thought it was kind of a cute song. Heard it at the gym the other day and thought I'd look up the video for it. Okay, I now have a completely different view of the song after watching the video. The video is almost making fun of the song, or making it more ridiculous than it already sounds, and I just kept laughing while I was watching it. :D


It also occurred to me that "Why Not Me" by the Judds is almost the same premise. What's up with that?


Overabundance of makeup either way. :D

Well, it occurred to me

On a scale of 1 to 10, how morbid is it that I was thinking about cremation the other day? I wasn't really thinking about it morbidly though, it was just something that occurred to me, possibly because we've met for church in a funeral home chapel the past few weeks. (While that sounds a bit strange, it's really not...it's a lovely chapel, away from the rest of the funeral home and it's certainly much quieter than the hotel meeting room where we were meeting, where there were pans being thrown around in the kitchen on the other side of the wall.)

At any rate, it suddenly occurred to me that I would much prefer cremation to a typical casket burial (is there an exact term for that?), which got me thinking about why more people aren't cremated and trying to think if there was any Biblical reason why that wouldn't be a good thing.

After a little bit of reading about it, the only things I can come up with is that it is somewhat similar to a pagan funeral pyre, which I had thought of, or that it shows some denial of belief in the resurrection of the body. The former sounds more valid than the latter to me. No matter how we're buried, the body is dead and will decompose.

It seems to me like it would be rather symbolic for the body to be returned to dust, such as it was formed from. Is there something I'm missing? Some scriptural/traditional/comforting reason that people have to see the body and it has to be embalmed and buried?

I've only been to three visitations, two of which were relatives, so I had no option but to see the person's body both of those times. Granted, both times I was fairly young, and maybe as an adult this would make more sense. As a kid, I didn't want to go up there...not out of any particular fear, per se, but I just found it extremely weird. And obviously I had no morbid curiosity either. I knew the person was dead, and didn't see what viewing the body one more time was going to accomplish other than making me cry more. As I said, not having been to a funeral in the past nine years or so, I may completely understand if I had to go to one now. In my mind though, I don't.

That's why I wonder if there's something I'm missing. Some reason my loved ones would not want me to be cremated when I die, which, barring a tragic accident/health problem probably isn't going to be anytime soon. :P Cremation, and having the ashes buried in a cemetery seems much nicer to me. But perhaps there's some comfort or some sort of closure (hate that term, by the way) in seeing the deceased person's body? If any of my close relatives died (which is a horribly sad thought) I don't feel as if I would want to be a part of an open casket funeral/visitation. Anyway, with my pondering of this I guess I sort of decided I want to be cremated, provided there's not some horrific reason why that's not an option.

And in closing, death isn't morbid really, not for Christians. When we die we're going to heaven, to be with the Lord, forever away from the curse of sin, which is truly wonderful, more wonderful than anything on this earth!

All the same, this was a slightly weird post...

Just thought I'd share

I just ran across this blog and entry recently and it thoroughly cracked me up. I'm giggling because she's so spot on! :D

How to Impress a Boy by Baking

And yes, pie seems to be quite impressive. I don't know what it is, but pie is always raved over. Some guys don't like chocolate things, or cake, or even to bother with cookies, but there's probably some sort of pie they adore!

Unless for some strange reason they don't like any baked goods, there's always at least one dessert they really, really like and would be thrilled to have made for them. Girls, please don't abuse that though...it's not fair to the guys. ;) Unless of course you have a really good reason...but...yeah...*cough* I'm just saying it doesn't hurt to have a sort of mental list of what desserts your male acquaintances like, but use it responsibly please. :D

Which reminds me, I should make some oatmeal cookies sometime soon. My dad really really likes them...and I should also make some chocolate chip cookies because, well, I rather like them and want some myself!

Just as He said!

Praise the Lord that all our sins were laid on Christ and He died for them...for there's no way we could ever atone for our own sins! He died for our sins and is risen, and in this lies our wonderful hope.

Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. ~Romans 8:34

Working hard or hardly working?

If you just groaned, that's quite alright...I generally groan/wince/frown when my grandpa says that yet again, but I thought it seemed apropos.

(Incidentally I cannot seem to type "groan" properly. It kept coming out "goram" or "graon". Crazy fingers.)

I've been thinking recently about this apparent need to be busy. Provided a person isn't honestly overwhelmed with all the things they have to do, so many people seem to take a sort of pride in sighing about how they don't have time for such and such leisure activity because they're just so busy____fill in the blank: running something, working, driving places, participating in various activities, etc.

We seem to have developed a culture of busyness. In order to actually be accomplishing something and an important part of society you have to be properly "busy". If you don't have work to complain about you must be slacking off. Maturity and success seem to be partially defined by how much you accomplish...or at least appear to accomplish. As long as you keep busy with little things even, constantly having some project needing to be done "as soon as you have time!", then you're sufficiently busy.

I've been caught by this idea as well to a certain extent. I feel like I ought to be doing more than I'm already doing. I think perhaps it's a feeling of inferiority and a fear of laziness that's making me feel this way because I'm not part of the group of people who are properly busy. It seems like I know lots of people whose jobs consist of sitting at a desk and doing important things on the computer. I don't have any job that requires that, I don't have a desk piled with important papers and tasks to get done. I don't end up with much to show at the end of a work day: I didn't get anything typed up, I didn't email people about work-related things, I didn't take a lunch hour (or work through it) and then go back to the pile of projects on my desk, clocking out at fifteen after five because I was in the middle of something at five.

But is that all really necessary? And I don't say that just to justify myself; I think it's a legitimate question. I completely understand if your job really does require you to work through big piles of things and deal with annoying people...my dad has to do that all the time, and I know he's not doing it merely to stay busy. But is it necessary to put more pressure on yourself by adding extra things to your workload? I feel like I ought to have some other job to do, so that on the days I'm not working I'm still accomplishing something. So do I not accomplish anything on my days off otherwise? If I don't it's only my own fault. It may not be the typical "work" sort of things, but there's certainly plenty of cleaning, cooking, organizing that I could be doing. And when I'm done with that I can sit down and sew or knit something. Or read, or study...the list goes on.

And then my job is not typical work either, but I'm taking care of a little kid. That's important even it's not filled with things I can check off a list at the end of the day. I suppose I could look at it that way:

Do a fun activity
Read a cute book
Read an educational book
Do an activity that builds fine motor skills
Prepare a properly nutritious lunch
Etc. Check, check, check.

But how ridiculously mechanical that sounds. How about we add some planned spontaneity to that list? Not that there aren't some kids who get raised that way, but that's an entirely different subject.

Back to my point, which I've kind of lost track of, I'm not sure why one has to be busy all the time. I mean, it doesn't just depend on the job, there are moms who do the sort of things I'm doing, PLUS being involved in various activities, either for themselves or for the kids, and breathlessly exclaim that they have "No time!!".

How has this happened? Some sort of remaining Puritanical feeling that one must be diligent (which is translated as "busy"), or trying to somehow compensate for so many conveniences and fulfill some need to be working? I really have no idea. (And did I really just say 'Puritanical'? Wow.) I'm not criticizing really, so if you feel like this applies to you, I certainly don't mean to offend, I'm just curious about why we seem to feel this way. Once again, I don't mean necessary work and activities, I mean the things that give one a feeling of accomplishing things. (Does that make sense?) It all boils down to busy-work vs. real work, I guess, and I dislike busy-work no matter the situation.

Personally, I think I need to adjust my thinking as well. Focus on getting done the work I could be doing, and not feeling lazy when I then take a break to do something else. Apart from spending time on the computer most of what I do is not wasting time really, I usually do something while listening to music or watching TV, and I read some non-fiction along with my fiction. :D

I found two articles on this exact topic that I thought were interesting...at least I'm not the only person who feels this way, if nothing else. :)

Does Being Busy Add to Your Life?

Are You Suffering from "I'm So Busy" Syndrome?

Anyway, just something I've been thinking about in my usual confused way. Thoughts?

Too much of teh cute!

And another video.

The little girl I take care of is so cute and talks a lot. :) (I didn't want to put her on the video of course, so you'll only get to hear her.)



When she saw these earlier she exclaimed "Feep! Feep, right there!" Awww!