80's and Traffic

I've been on a big 80's kick lately. Big! Huge! (Name that movie.) I really don't know why I've gotten on this obsession lately but it's been kind of fun. I've always been a huge Goonies, Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Breakfast Club and Adventures in Babysitting fan. Every time they come on TV I always have to watch it even though I own three out of the four movies. I also love 80's music. I realized though that I hadn't watched as many as I probably should have. So I've been slowly catching up on some those. It's been fun and very nostalgic. It all puts me back in Salem, IL where I grew up and now I've had a little bit of homesickness for that place. I'll get over it soon. :)

Speaking of longing for some place I have found myself missing Alabama this week. I spent the weekend there and had the best time. My sweetie and I spent most of Saturday sitting at Lake Tuscaloosa with our feet in the water and talking about everything and anything. It was so peaceful and restful. I'm headed back down there this weekend. I usually don't go two weekends in a row but our travel schedule has been messed up because of this reason or that. But after traveling back home Sunday night I'm not really looking forward to going back. I mean, I want to go back to see Alan and my family but Alabama does not know how to plan road work.

Between Birmingham and Decatur I got stuck in traffic three different times! THREE!!! It was ridiculous. The first one was for construction. They merged three lanes into one. That was was terrible. Once I cleared that mess I got stuck again a few miles up the road. This one all the lanes were completely stopped and barely creeping. Then all of a sudden the roads cleared. There must have been an accident and by the time we got there it was all cleared up. Then a few more miles down the road I got stopped AGAIN for construction. I was getting so frustrated. When I finally cleared that mess I put my cruise on 80 and just dared a cop to stop me. I was tired and frustrated and just wanted to get home. I finally got home around 9:30 or 10:00. What should have been only a 3 1/2 -4 hour drive took 5 hours!! I was beyond ticked. But oh well. Those things happen from time to time. I guess it wouldn't have been so bad had I not gotten in stuck in traffic on the way to AL because of an accident. Why can't these people learn to drive correctly? Oh well.

Despite all the traffic issues it was an amazing weekend and I can't believe it's already Wednesday. The week is just flying by. I'm not complaining at all. :) Alan and I are suppose to take his boat out on Saturday for a day of fun in the sun but they are calling for rain so we are just going to wait and see how things go. But I'm excited to head back down there. The people in his church are so nice and sweet and they treat me so well. I'm slowly getting to know some of the people down there. It helps that Chad and Jenny are there and that I've been visiting that church for the past four years.

Oh! Anyone else ecstatic that Kate Gosselin finally got voted off of Dancing with the Stars?!? I'm sorry but the woman cannot dance and I'm all about watching the good ones. LOL!

Happy Wednesday!

Catching Up

Oh my goodness! I didn't even realize it's been almost a whole month since I've blogged. That's terrible of me. But you should be used to my lack of motivation and inconsistency by now. :)

Of course the lack of blogging might also mean that not one new thing is happening to me and thoughts banging around in my head are not really worth mentioning out loud or it could mean that I've just been so incredibly busy that I haven't had time. I choose to believe the latter even though the first is the truth. But anyway, I'll attempt to jot some things down today.

My new furniture did come in and I have to say that it looks GOR-GEOUS in my house. I love it! It's big. Really big...and comfortable. I had no idea it would be that big. My parents were gracious enough to hang out at my house to wait for the furniture since I was working and couldn't leave to meet the furniture delivery boys. But they (my mom mainly) were having a coronary in trying to get the furniture to fit and was calling me every 3 mins to give me an update and sending me pictures on what it looked like. I told her just to wait until I got home and I would help move things around but by the time I got home they had it all in place and I haven't moved it yet. It looks great! I love how big and comfy and full of pillows it is. Now I'm waiting for my tax refund to come in so I can go by curtains for the living room. Once that's done my little house will be so homey I may become a hermit. I love how Uncle Sam is paying for my redecorated home. :)

My sister (in-law) had surgery this past Monday. They thought she had endometreosis. She's had it once before and had the surgery when they were living up here in Nashville. She had been having quite bit of pain for awhile so they (meaning the doctors) assumed the mess was back and they wanted to go in and take care of it. They went in and she had none whatsoever. We were thankful to hear that but was a little puzzled over what was causing her pain. The doctor said that some of her organs were moved around a bit from her pregnancies so he went in there and put things back where they should and performed a DNC and everything went well. But other than being very sore she did very well. Her mom and dad stayed with them the first half of the week and now my mom is headed down there to stay the rest of the week to help take care of her, the house, kids...my brother. LOL!

I'm still with Alan. Things are going very well for us and we both couldn't be happier. Are we talking marriage? Yes and we know that we are the ones God has for us but we are just taking our time. I only mention this because we both get bombarded with questions on when we are getting married. We are just enjoying this time of being together. But it will happen and when it does I promise there will be a post with pictures, fireworks, and trumpets to let the world know that I'm finally engaged.

I bought four new tires yesterday for my car. Man, are they normally that expensive? But I desperately needed them. According to my dad and Alan, I was illegal driving on the tires. They had no grooves left on the tires. I guess that wasn't a very good thing. :) But I have four brand spanking new tires and now I feel like a responsible adult and now my family can breathe a little easier when I travel back and forth to AL. (I said they can breathe a little easier. I still speed. lol!)

I'm headed to AL this weekend to be with Alan and to visit my family. I can't go too long without seeing them and since Jenny had surgery I feel like I need to spend time with her. Of course she only uses me for my cooking skills. She has requested brownies a layered salad and homemade ice cream. I think I'll just do the brownies.

I think that catches us up on everything. How have you all been?

Happy Thursday (and Survivor night!! Woo Hoo!!)

I Have a Serious Problem

I know you are probably asking, "Just one?" I have many problems but the one to date that I can't seem to conquer is very troublesome. I can't seem to park correctly in a parking space. This was never an issue for me but it seems as if I couldn't park correctly if my life depended on it. If the space is straight I park crooked. If the space is slanted I park "straight" in it. It's weird and disturbing. It seems that the harder I try to park straight the more crooked I get. What does that say about my personality? I wonder if that means anything. :)


Anyway, I'm so excited. Last night I purchased new living room furniture. I'm very pleased with what I got and I can't wait for it to be delivered which won't be for a couple of weeks. Here's are all the pieces except for the lamps. I couldn't find a picture of them online.

I'm really excited about the tables because they have no glass in them!! I can not stand tables with glass on them. I currently have tables with glass on them and I absolutely loathe them! They are very 1980's and as much as I love 80's movies I loathe the furniture (and the clothes but that's a whole other blog) that was made during that era! But that's just my opinion and if you currently have tables with glass in them I mean no disrespect and do not mean to offend. I'm just stating my own personal preferences.

I'm so glad it's Friday but sad too because I don't get to see my man. He was asked to go along with some friends on a four-wheeler trip somewhere in the boonies of Alabama. I couldn't say no to that sweet and gorgeous face so I told him to have fun. Not that I could give him permission...I'm not that type of girlfriend. But anyway, I won't get to see him this weekend but that's okay because that just means I get to go shopping. See, it all works out. :)

Have a great weekend!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I've been a bad bad blogger this week. Nothing is going on really and nothing has really caught my attention that is blog worthy. But I thought I would drop in and waste a few minutes of your time. :)

My plea last week to get a friend to join me in a book club was a bust. LOL! She emailed me after she read it and said, "Subtle." So that's a no. Ha! That's okay. I will wear her down one of these days.

I had kind of a blah weekend. I think I really chalk it up to the fact that I had a migraine the entire time and no matter how many Advils I took, it just wasn't going away. I think my liver will be severely damaged if I don't go off those things but I have a hard time swallowing pills (meaning, I can't swallow them at all) and Advil tablets are the only pills that I can really get down with about 2 glasses of water. I'm a baby, I know. I choked on a marble and and a fireball candy when I was little and haven't been able to swallow pills ever since. I don't know the correlation between the two but that's the reason.

Anyway, I had a migraine and it wasn't going away. On Saturday my boyfriend decided to change the oil in my car since I hadn't had it changed and was about 3,000 miles overdue. But the process took a long time. We had gone to his parents house because that's where all his tools were. It was a windy, rainy dreary day. His parent's live in a small town outside of Northport. Their house is located on top of a hill and they have a carport/shop that is near their house. Well, as I said it was very rainy and freezing all day. But I stayed out in the shop to help Alan and when I say help I mean, I watched, Alan change my oil. Anyway, as we (he) were working on my car I could literally hear this huge gust of wind head up the hill. I had never heard anything like this before I seriously thought it was a tornado even though it was way too cold for one. Anyway, all of a sudden we hear this huge bang of metal and then the shop started shaking. I really thought the place was caving in even though it was a very sturdy building. Then I looked out the opening and saw a brick fall from the sky. Alan has a ski boat that he keeps at his parents house and has it set up right beside the shop with a tarp and a canopy covering it. The canopy was anchored by huge cylinder bricks. Well, this gust of wind picked up one of the bricks and threw it in the air and it crashed down on the roof of the shop and fell to the ground. The roof is a metal roof so you can imagine how loud it was. So we went around the side to check the boat and the wind had blown the entire canopy up and over the shop. It was one big piece of twisted metal. So we had to clean up all of that which took some time and didn't help my migraine at all. The migraine finally went away Monday morning. I guess this means its time to get my eyes checked again. I'm sure my eyes have gotten worse since my last eye appointment which was three years ago.

But the good news is that's it's St. Patrick's Day so I hope you all are wearing green. I am wearing green contrary to what people think. They are saying I'm wearing blue but it's a blue-green sweater. So it's in the green family and it so counts!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Book Club

One of my favorite movies is The Jane Austin Book Club. I don't own that movie and I need to make a note of picking a copy up the next time I'm at the store. But anyway, I absolutely love that movie. I'm not sure of why I love that movie so much except that I love the concept of a book club.

This week I was emailing with a friend back and forth regarding a book that I let her borrow to read. A couple of weeks ago we went to watch Dear John together. While we both loved the movie, I had told her that night that I loved the book so much more. She asked to borrow the book and then when she finished reading it we started comparing notes about the book and compared it to the film. While I loved the book better than the movie she loved the movie better than book. Now, do I wish she shared my sentiments about the book-movie comparison? Not necessarily. She had some good valid points for her reasoning and I feel I had good valid points on my reasoning. I loved the discussion (as much as you can through e-mail) and it got me to thinking.

What I loved about The Jane Austen Book Club is the fact that a small group of people read a book a month and got together to discuss the story and characters. They used their minds and imaginations and had intellectual conversations. Today's world is all visual now. We have a TV program for just about any story or genre you can come up with. We have virtual everything now where it's almost people telling us what to think and how to feel. I know that this doesn't apply to everything and everyone. But we live in such a virtual world that do people really use their minds? I know that they do but I hope you see where I'm going with this.

I love to read. I love to get wrapped up in a story and create the images of the characters in my mind. I love to visualize in my mind what their house, cars, clothing, and city would look like. As much as I love movies, I do prefer books ever them. When I read a book and then watch a movie based on that book I'm so disappointed. The characters and cities and situations are never what I had pictured in mind where I thought was a little better than what I actually saw on the screen.

I love the fact that books make me use my mind and make me think about things that I wouldn't ever before. I love the way they make me look at myself and ask what I would do if I were in that situation. I love how when you and a friend read the same book you are having personal face time with them and talking about what you got out of the story. This then lets you get closer to the soul of that friend and learn what they truly are about where you start to form a bond or closeness with that friend that you didn't have before. Your conversations go past the day to day business and clothes and small talk that you normally would have. I'm not saying that reading a book together is the only to find this closeness in friends and family but it's one way to do it. Or maybe I'm just trying to find the courage to and convince some friends (cough *Tammy* cough) to join me for a few months in trying out a book club with a few friends...no matter how busy you might be. That's another thing...who has the time these days? I'm just as busy as the next person but I think I could find time to squeeze this in.

Anyway, these are just thoughts floating around in this head of mine today. :)

Have a great weekend!

Sadness All Around

This has been a sad week it seems. I know that death is all around us every day and I know that it will touch us all in some way in our life. This week seems to be worse. I guess it started for me when I heard that Marie Osmond's son took his own life over a week ago. Now, I do not know the Osmonds personally but I am a fan. (That's right. I'm an Osmond fan and not ashamed who knows.) I think what made me so sad for them was the fact that they are so grounded in their faith but it's a faith that is so wrong. They seem to be unbelievably nice and sweet people and it hurts my heart to know that they are so far away from the truth but yet know the truth. Does that make sense? Plus, suicide just does not make sense to me. I just can't imagine being in a place where I think the only out is to kill myself. I know it happens and many people commit suicide every day but I just can't imagine what they are thinking in the midst of the act.

I'm assuming that most of you know that I work for my denomination, Free Will Baptists. I work in the Home Missions Department as the Administrative Assistant to Richard Atwood and David Crowe. Richard is the Director of Missionary Assistance and David is the Director of Development. I try not to talk about work too much on here since it is a National department and most of you that read this blog is a Free Will Baptist. I don't talk about it much because I don't want to get myself into trouble by saying the wrong thing or giving out too much details on certain things that happen within our department. But on Monday we did get a call from one of our missionaries saying that his wife's brother had died suddenly on Sunday. It was pretty devastating to them and so I'm asking if you will pray for LeAnn Ledbetter and her family. LeAnn and her husband Randy our missionaries to Salt Lake City, UT.

Then last night I was talking to my sister (in law) when I get a call from our General Director, Larry Powell. He had called to tell me that Richard Atwood's brother, Brian, had passed away from a heart attack in Huntsville, AL. Brian is the father of International Missionary to Spain, Brooke Turnbough. I went to college with Brooke and her brother Brandon. My heart goes out to all of them. Richard and his wife, Sandy, went to Huntsville last night to be with Brian's wife. It was a huge shock and we are getting many calls here at the office regarding it. Again, I ask for your prayers for the Atwood family.

Then, (I know the bad news keeps coming) I read online that the actor Corey Haim passed away early this morning. This saddens me almost as much as the death of Marie Osmond's son. The news reports say that he died of a drug overdose. I am a child of the 80's and so to see him pass away at just 38 years old was a shock.

So today feels so odd to me and I'm having a hard time trying to find a way to end this post. I guess it's just a reminder that the life is precious and we need to always tell the people around us that we love them. It's a reminder that we are here on this Earth for just a moment and we need to do all we can to tell people about Christ and to live and serve Him to the best of our ability.

I Don't Know What to Name This Post So This Will Have to Do. :)

I'm such a terrible blogger or at the least I'm a very inconsistent blogger. My dream is to blog everyday but sometimes I get too busy to blog but I try to blog at least a few times a week and last week I only made it to one day last week. But again, for the millionth time, I'll try to update more.

I had another great weekend. Alan (my wonderful and loving boyfriend) and I have gotten into a routine now when he comes up to Nashville to visit me every other weekend. Since we both work on Fridays and then he drives up we are both a little tired and don't want to go back out so we've gotten into the routine of my cooking dinner or ordering out and watching a movie. So on Friday I made a lasagna which was very good and I didn't have the fiasco as I did last time. Then we turned on The Informant. I was interested in seeing this movie because it takes place in Decatur, IL (my father's birthplace) and was the company ADM. My aunt worked there for years and my cousin is working there now. So I have a little bit of ties to the movie. But, oh mercy, that was a boring movie and we both pretty much fell asleep. I love Matt Damon but goodness that movie was not funny, it was confusing, and just plain boring.

Saturday we got up and browsed Home Depot. We went there with a purpose but browsed the light fixture section also with me dreaming of changing out all my light fixtures. I needed a new cord for my dryer and so we had gone there to get a new one and then my very handy boyfriend fixed it and now I have a dryer!! You just don't understand the level of excitement I have over this. I no longer have to drag my huge pile of laundry over to my parent's house every week. I guess I could have let everything air dry but really, I just didn't want to do that...plus I got a home cooked meal at least once a week. :) We then headed over to OpryMills mall and walked around and browsed some stores. That was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time and I mean A LOT of time at Bass Pro Shop. We spent quite a bit of time looking at the boats and ATVs. Alan had a speed boat now and we plan to use it quite a bit once the weather gets warmer. I'm excited about that. Our relationship started in the winter where all it's done is snow and have bitter cold temperatures (at least bitter cold for AL and TN) and we haven't really done much but stay indoors and watch movies. We both are looking forward to getting out do some boating and all that other fun stuff outside.

I realized after going back on some posts that I really don't talk about Alan a whole lot. I know that after writing post after post of how I longed to find someone that I figured I would write about that once I did find someone. But now that I'm in this relationship I find that I don't necessarily want to share too much about us. I mean I am crazy in love with this guy and I seem to fall more in love every time I'm with him and we have the best time together. So even though I'll talk about him from time to time I just won't share as much as I thought I would.

Oh! I watched the Oscars last night and I was very happy to see Sandra Bullock win for The Blind Side. It was such a great movie and she did an exceptional job. Also, I think Meryl Streep is so cute and I wish she could have won also. She is one of my top favorite actresses.

Have a great week!