February, as seen in various ways

Water and sun, where I don't live, circa 7:00 am

I might not have mentioned, but I went to Florida recently.  It was sunny (mostly) and warm (actually).  When I came home it was a February record-breaking 66 degrees, but the weather has gotten decidedly more February-ish in the weeks since.  For instance, the above photo was taken at the beach in Florida, the below picture is a photo I snapped at work this morning.  Same time, two weeks, and about six states lay between the beach and the snow.

Honestly, I loved the beach.  It was delightful.  But the winter has its charms.  It's beautiful, for one.  It gives me a chance to wear all of my cute boots, for another.  And there's always that winter reminder that when it's done we get sunshine, and flowers, and birds, and a fresh perspective on life in general.  Winter serves a certain purpose, as far as I'm concerned.  So I won't complain.  It might not be sand between the toes or sun on my face (no, really, we don't get sun in the winter here), but it's a promise hidden beneath piles of frozen dihydrogen oxide, and an excuse to look at everything in ways I've never had the chance before.  I'll take it.

Snow, where I live, circa 7:00 am

Mornings, part 2

I have a lot of feelings about mornings.  Quite a lot.  I've written about my struggle to overcome the morning grumps, and this has actually been a point of great discussion between me and, well, pretty much everyone I've ever met.

A friend recently said to me, "It seems to me that you're exercised about not being grumpy in the mornings...  but you really don't get exercised about it until the afternoon."  Ouch.  Ouch and that's hilarious.  And also, I maintain that that's not true, in spite of the hilarity of it.

But really, for almost a year now, I've started work at 7:00 am.  More than anything else, it's forced me to get up and BE up in the mornings.  It was one thing back in the day to roll out of bed, wordlessly skulk to the gym, and come home an hour and half later having spoken to not a soul.  It's another thing to get up much too early and have to interact in a meaningful way with people, and to try to not be the one crying.  (It's a daycare.  At 7:00 am.  Someone is always crying.)

But, my distaste of mornings aside, here's a quote I found that I liked that I feel like has a particular significance for my daily morning struggle bus.

We are influenced by our personality, but we are not controlled by it.

Bros.  Brothers.  Brethren.  That's a good point.  It's a fact about me that I don't like mornings.  That's just part of my personality.  But so what?  That doesn't give me free license to breathe fire upon those that happen to be in the same sphere as me in the mornings.  It just means that, knowing this, I have to manage my state of constant drowse.  Maybe I go for a run first thing.  Maybe I drink coffee.  Or Mountain Dew.  Or basically anything with caffeine.  And mostly I just keep repeating the same things I trained myself to say years ago.

This is the day that the Lord hath made.  I will be glad and rejoice in it.

Lord, help me to have a good day.

Lord, help me to do everything today to the best of my abilities.

Things I Learned, 2015 edition

This is my usual annual review.  The only thing I've managed to do consistently, I believe, the entire time I've had this blog.

My usual disclaimer is as follows: This is purposely vague, because I don't have time to include a year's worth of actual things I've learned.  Also, these are things that even if I knew before, were refreshed to me in such a way that I shall henceforth peg them to this past year.  And finally, this list is in no particular order, and the importance of the items are in no way discernible.  Disclaimer over.

1)  Adventures are where it's at.  I don't mean specifically you have to go on adventures, I just mean that I think it's important to be open enough to let life be a series of adventures.  Nothing turns out the way we expect it to, anyhow, so we might as well let go and enjoy all the things.

2)  Spiritual laziness is a thing.  This is pretty personal, but I'll put it out here: there were times in 2015 where I struggled to keep my Bibleing habits consistent.  It's not pretty, and ends up being painful when one finally comes to ones senses and buckles down, but it's the truth.

3)  Mornings never, ever get easy.  I've tried everything to make my mornings be a breeze (I lay everything out ahead of time, I set my alarm clock away from my bed so I have to get up and stay up, I drink much caffeine), but guys, mornings are the worst.  And when mornings suffer, so do the Bible times.  See #2

4)  Everything has to change eventually.  There were choices I made this year in terms of activities where people questioned my motives.  "Why didn't you go to that event?  Why did you go for a shorter amount of time?  What's going on?"  The answer?  I can't do everything.  I just can't.  It's okay to pick and choose and help people understand that not everything can stay the same.  That's life.

5)  Love endureth all things.  Sorry to be so cliche, but if there's anything that friendships have taught me, is that it takes a lot of grace and love to navigate people.  And, of course, for people to deal with me!

6)  People talk about what's important to them.  I consider myself to be a people person (by that I mean I'm not a plant or animal person, so I must be a people person), but sometimes it takes a great amount of focus to realize that when it all boils down to it, people end up saying what they'd like to be saying if they felt safe enough to say it.  Those things that people want to say?  They are saying.  You--which is to say I--need to listen up.  That was a pretty important one for me.

And that's that.

Crafting. Of sorts.

I love crafty ideas.  Scrapbookery, home DIYs, all that stuff.  But... I don't have/make time for a lot of things, so if I'm going to be crafty, there must be a purpose.  So when VBS came a while ago, and our theme was "Springtime in Paris," our colors were hot pink and black, and I was relegated to making some decorations, I decided that I would attempt a project I saw on Pinterest.

(Okay, I promise I'm not as obsessed as I've been sounding these last few days, but I only just now got around to posting for the first time in a long time, and a lot of what I had to catch up on had roots in Pinterest.  So...  cough.  This is awkward.)

Anyhow, what I saw a was a cute party decoration idea using Christmas lights and Dixie cups.  The lady took scrapbook paper and made some festive cups, and took some well-lit photos.

Personally, I don't take charming, well-lit photos.  Nor do I have time to cut out that much scrapbook paper.  Nor do I have a desire to cut out that much scrapbook paper.

So I thought about it, because I do so like lights, and figured I'd just spray paint the cups.  I mean, spray paint looks good too, right?

So I got some spray paint, and some Dixie cups, and set to work.  Turns out, Dixie cups aren't very heavy.  And spray paint is sort of forceful.  I would spray a cup and it would blow away.  Huh.  So I used a little brain power to come up with this solution.

I got some magnets (I LOVE magnets.  There is nothing I love half so well as finding a good use for a strong magnet.  The only time I wasn't a fan was several years ago when my brother took some of my strong magnets and brought them to the breakfast table, and held them underneath the wooden table to move my spoon.  I wasn't really okay with the whole "morning" thing at the time, so it took me a long time to get over being freaked out when my spoon just started sliding away from me as I stared at it helplessly.  It's funny now, but it was sort of unnerving that morning...) and put said magnets in a cup opposite a regular table knife, as shown.  The knife is wrapped in masking tape, because I didn't want to ruin the knife.  After all, it's my mom's knife, not mine.  So I just masking taped it up and viola, a metal thing to hold on to, that was nicely attracted to my magnets.

I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say it was a string of 100 lights, though I only put cups on every other bulb, per the suggestion of my family.  I did every other cup black or pink.  Anyhow, it didn't look super professional, but I never get super professional at VBS, so I didn't worry about that.  At all, in fact.

In other news, spray paint doesn't really look that awesome, after all.  I tried.

After VBS I inherited the string of lights, which I didn't know what to do with.  I strung it up in my room, because, after all, I had gone to all the effort of thinking of a clever use for magnets, but I needed something else to clutter my room about as much as I need reading lessons.  Which is to say, not really at all.

But I have them.  For now.  They actually provide quite a bit of light, and I enjoy plugging them in at night.

But... I can't imagine I'll keep them long.  Would anybody like some painted Dixie cups on a string of lights?  Up for grabs!  : )

The music in me

I couldn't sleep on Sunday night. Very well, at any rate. I'd had sort of an emotional weekend, and I was just sort of decompressing, and instead of getting much-needed rest, my brain went wild. The weird part, though, is that it wasn't going wild with World-Problem-Solving problems, like usual (no, really, I have education reform plans all up in this pretty little head of mine, but only late at night, and it never makes sense in the morning), but something far, far, less sensible.

I was thinking about words. How if words are just comprised of letters--and we all know letters are just marks we're trained to recognize--then why does it have to be words? If we assigned a musical note to each of the 26 letters, could we learn, over time, to listen to language as if it were a song? We could play each word as if it were part of the grand symphony of life, and we'd know (because our ears would be trained in this manner) what the music was saying.

This is what I laid in bed and thought about for about an hour. There are a lot of issues with this thought pattern, of course, first and foremost that it really doesn't make sense and wouldn't work, due to octaves only having eight keys. I'm sure something could work though.

But I got on this whole thing about what these proposed musical words would sound like. Would mean-sounding words sound... mean? Like you know how the word "harsh" sounds sort of, well, harsh? And grating really does bring to mind a grating feeling? I mean, because we haven't grown up with musical words, we don't even really know how our brains would interpret something like that.

While I miss the sleep (yes, I still miss it), I don't really regret that hour of puzzled thought I put towards the harebrained scheme. I knew that morning couldn't be that bad. After all, my Good Mornings still sound like words, not like angry feeling expressed through music.

Something to be thankful for, yes?

Morning morning morning

I'm not a huge morning person, a fact to which most of my friends and relatives will attest. However, no matter how much they still joke about my terrible personality in the morning, they have to admit that I really haven't been my "regular" grumpy self in the mornings for at least a year or two. I've made a concerted effort to not grump around in the mornings. (Oh, and I'd like to point out that my waking-up ability is far stellar than a good portion of people I know, so I certainly have that going for me, sorry, lovers-of-the-snooze-alarm.)

I decided one day a while ago that I was done being grumpy. I certainly wasn't winning friends or influencing people (except to influence them more towards the grumpsterly side of things) by grouching around in the mornings, and I certainly wasn't being a very good testimony to anybody. So in the mornings, when I wake up, I immediately fill my head with three things. One: This is the day that the Lord has made, I will be glad, and rejoice in it!! Two: Lord, help me to have a good day. And three: Lord, help me to do everything I do to the best of my ability.

Mind you, I jump out of bed to turn off my alarm clock, which means I'm usually standing up by the time I get around to thinking all those things, but they're certainly the first things I think. Which, as it turns out, may actually be helping after all. The other morning I was out and about quite early, and I happened to smile at some lady who stopped in her tracks and told me that I had a nice smile, at which point someone else (who I don't really know, they apparently just pretend they know me) told her that I was "always so cheerful in the mornings." Really? Me? Cheerful? In the mornings???

Wonders never cease.

I think it's just because His mercies are new every morning. No matter how early that morning may come, He's always got something wonderful in store for me. It's a good feeling.

With age comes... boringness

While reading through old diaries of mine the other day I realized that I am boring these days. I mean, legitimately not interesting. My diaries used to be hilarious. My emailing habits were laugh-inducing, at the very least, while maybe not hilarious, per se. For instance, I was looking through emails the other day and came across this email (this is only a fragment of an email, we used to email lengthy missives to one another multiple times a day) that I wrote to friend mrg. This was from April 2006, should any of you wonder how long ago it was that I used to be funny. How I wish I understood why I stopped...

"It snowed 2 nights ago, did I tell you? Freezing cold. As in Jo-could-almost-see-her-

breath-inside-the-house cold. I hate sitting through breakfast when it's cold. Partly because sitting through breakfast means that I'm awake, partly because breakfast implies that it's morning, partly because I hate all mornings, and partly because I'm not huge into cold. Just thought you should know.

"Ahh, I miss those old mad scientists. Do you ever wonder what would happen if a bunch of crazy Einsteins just kinda jumped out of nowhere and started talking? Talking about anything, really, because they talk so funny. Sometimes I have to wonder. Those crazy geeky-type people: do they realize that they're not normal? I mean, really, do they understand that there is a world or "normal people" (should the rest of us in the world be considered normal, which, looking just at the example of you and I, is quite unlikely, but compared to the Einstein guys we seem normal enough) that they just don't fit into.

"Good grief, am I still talking? I honestly have no idea where that came from. I have no idea why I started talking at all. Oh man, I think I need a nap. I hope you're faring better then I, because I think my condition is deteriorating. Do I have a condition? I hope so. Conditions seem fun. Fun in that very I'm-most-likely-going-to-die kind of way, but hey, that could be fun. OK, yeah, I really do have to go."

I guess that's not that funny, but I can't even tell you the last time I wondered about Einsteins jumping around and talking. In fact, that was likely the last time. I don't entirely miss those days, I think my brain wires were criss-crossed and somehow they've gotten somewhat untangled, which is why I'm old and boring now. I just miss that I had the ability to say words like that.

Though why I wanted a condition, I'm really not sure. Though if you died from something, huzzah, you'd be in Heaven!