A Date.

I'm pretty sure I went on a date with my husband tonight. He left me a voicemail asking me out while I was in the shower this morning, then made super sure I wanted to go when I got home from work.

We went out to eat at China Buffet. We bought 2009 calendars at Staples. We bought parts to fix our cable at Radio Shack. We watched SpiderMan 3 with our housemate.

I know what you're thinking...you're thinking, "Wow! It sounds like they've been married for four and a half years." But the truth is, this is pretty much like most of our first dates.

I love it.

Thanxgiving

We're kind of having 3 Thanksgivings this year. Two down. One to go.

The first was steaks with Horshes at our house. Ben's mom and dad and younger brother Josh drove out for the first few days of last week. Hanging out with them was good, but involved eating a lot of red meat that I don't really like and later threw up. But between eating the meat and throwing it up we played two rousing games of Jenga and watched A Mighty Wind. It was great!

Thursday we drove up to Zanesville for Thanksgiving with my mom & dad, brothers, sisters in law, three neices and one nephew. Normally mom is really tense during holidays at her house, but for the past few years Ben and I have brought a lieter of White Zinfandel, or "Holiday Cheer," as I've taken to calling it. Things have loosened up. We at too much food all day and then played Win Loose or Draw--the 1980-something edition of the board game based on the TV show. The girls won 25 to 20. I had to draw such classic subjects as "bootleg whiskey," "Arsenic and Old Lace," "The Jungle Book," and "Michale's Navy."

I'm most excited about tomorrow's Thanksgiving, though. We're having a few people over from church who don't have a lot of money or family and throwing them a Thanksgiving party. My friend Anne is bringing a chicken and some pies and rolls. Ben is making his mashed potatoes, and I'm doing dressing and sides--including a super sausage dressing and a vegetarian option.

It will be great.

Let's try this again.

Most of the time, you can click on these images, and it opens a window with a giant, close up version of it. That didn't happen with my apocalyptic battle locust in the last post, so I'm trying to post it agian. This is my favorite part.

What can I say?

It's "A Really Real Looking Bunny."
In fulfillment of my Christmas gift to my niece, Sandra of "a painting of anything you want."
...I love that kid.

Homecoming

I went back to my home church Saturday. I was invited to speak in both morning services about "how North Terrace short term mission trips changed my life."

My general philosophy of living is becoming more and more divergent from this church, and there's a lot of bitching I could do about materialism, america worship, and country-clubish-ness that I'm going to put aside to tell you this:

God used North Terrace to teach me what it means to make disciples. Sunday was the yearly missions rally and it was a great reminder of everything that the church is doing right. Multiple generations of people who have grown up at North Terrace and gone into full time ministry were represented. It was beautiful. My friend Michael preached and my friend Jessie was there representing a Christian school. Michael and I especially could easily point to mission committee members or missionaries present who had intentionally given us opportunities to feel out what we thought God was calling us to vocationally. Our church has an overall philosophy of "you think you could do this? Let's talk about it and then find a way for you to try it!"

I only spoke for about 4 minutes in each service about my experiences and what I'm up to now, but still, over a dozen people came up to me later just to tell me that they were proud of me. It didn't even feel a little patronizing and the more I think about it, the more I realize it's because the church made an investment in me and my friends. They're proud of what I'm doing and they own it because any ministry I have is fruit of the ministry they had with me first.

I also got to see my brother coach his son in a 7th grade football game. Drew looks like a half size version of Lee and acts like it, too. It's good to see my brother turn out to be a good dad.

On Sunday, I picked peppers out of my parent's garden with my brother Charlie and his daughters. They're beautiful and he looks at them in a way he doesn't look at anyone else.

It was good to be home.

Eye Sore

Um...literally.

It hurt like crazy when I took my left contact out last Thursday. As the night wore on, it hurt more and more. My eye was irritated and pink, and felt scratchy. So I rinsed it with saline. And rinsed it. And rinsed it. It didn't do anything, so I looked at my eye closely, shining a flashlight into it and found a little white dent on my iris. I said a white dent on my iris! It's the weirdest thing I've ever had happen to my body. I went to the optometrist the next day, and he said I had a sterile ulcer--as in, my immune system was trying to kill germs on my eye. I guess this happens to some people when they sleep in their contacts. But I know not to sleep in my contacts, so after being reassured that I wasn't going blind, I tried to figure out what the hell happened.

And then I remembered...

The bugs. I usually wear some kind of protective eye wear on bicycle, but I skipped it one day a couple of weeks ago to take a long bike ride at dusk. I couldn't believe how dense the bugs were on the southern part of the bike path. I got so many in my mouth...and my eyes...so many, in fact, that when I woke up the next day, I found one still in my eye.

So I guess the lesson is, try not to kill bugs with your eyes?

Oh, also, our computer crashed the same day I found the dent in my eye ball. This week has been much, much better.

I make the weather

If it rains as much as the weather says it's going to rain over the next few days I'm going to FREAK OUT.