Weekend update

This weekend wasn't too terribly exciting, but it was still good. Friday night I went to Maurice's for dinner and to meet up with Lauren, Sally, Maurice, and Jon. We left from there and headed to United States of Mind (aka USOM) for their open mic night, where Maurice was also volunteering (although I never saw him do much). Turned out to be a Dwelling Place reunion, almost - several people from our church showed up there. It was an ok night, but in hindsight, I think I should've been a bit more social. I knew several people there, and didn't really talk to any of them except for those I rode with. I'm going to resolve to do better about that next time, I think.

Saturday I was completely and utterly lazy. I can't say I was completely useless, because I did get some grading done for the online class I'm teaching. That was really the only thing of value I did on Saturday, though. I didn't even take a shower, get dressed, or ever leave the house. A bum, I was. Call it being cavey if you want, but I really think it was more sheer laziness than anything. ;)

Sunday I went to church, where Shane continued his series on evangelism and we had tacos for lunch. :) (Funny how I put both of those in the same sentence, huh?) I finally remembered to bring the microwave I'd promised to donate, so now we have two microwaves. After lunch, I went thrift store shopping with Sally, Lauren, and a friend of Nicole's. We had a lot of fun with that, even though the main thrift store we wanted to hit up ended up being closed on Sunday. I got 5 sweaters for around $10. Woo-hoo! And being the girls that we are, we decided to go for ice cream after our hard afternoon of shopping. ;)

Sunday night I spent getting caught up on all the boring stuff I'd been too lazy to do, like laundry and putting away dishes. I also watched some more episodes of Lost... more about that later, I'm actually working on a "Lost" blog post. :D

This morning I actually managed to get my arse out of bed and make it to the gym. Yay me! I lost 1.4 pounds last week...

Get along with everybody?

I'm not really sure how to start out this blog entry, other than "hey, I've been thinking about something recently, and I just thought I'd share." So...

Hey, I've been thinking about something recently, and I just thought I'd share. It kinda started when the other day I was with a friend of mine, and he started almost making fun of someone else that I knew. Someone I'd just met, in fact. The person I was talking to didn't even know the person they were making fun of. They were just basing it off of a conversation they'd overheard. This kind of got to me, which I indicated to him. Later on, he realized what he was doing and said he was wrong - he didn't even know that person. But, I mean, I see this happen all the time, really. With everybody.

How often do we make fun of people? And I don't mean joking around with our friends to their face. I mean, how often do we see a friend do something or hear them say something, and two minutes later we're talking to another friend about it making fun of them? And it's not even just our friends - like in the instance I mentioned with people from work, this guy hadn't even met the person he was making fun of.

I know I'm super guilty of this, so I'm really just thinking about it and how I should be better about it, honestly. What everyone else does is up to them, but I've probably seen pretty much everyone do it at some point - it's a pretty common thing. Why do we do that? We think other people are weird and do things that are stupid, but why do we go around all the time talking about them when we think this? It probably shouldn't be said unless it's something we're willing to tell them to their face. And how weird are they really? I've always said that "normal is relative". There's no such thing as normal, really, so doesn't that make us all pretty weird? We've all got freaky things that we do on some occasion.

These thoughts came back to mind last night when I went to my house church and we were reading Romans 12. I volunteered to read, and although it was different, I think everyone really liked The Message when I read from it. Here's some of what was in it that got me to thinking about this more:

Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath.

Get along with each other; don't be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don't be the great somebody.

Don't hit back; discover beauty in everyone.

If you've got it in you, get along with everybody.

*****

"Make friends with nobodies."
"Discover beauty in everyone."
"Get along with everybody."

I may not always be good at it, but I really try to do this. I've talked several times about my theory that because we're "created in God's image", everyone has some different quality or likeness of God in them. And not getting to know people causes us to miss out on a part of God that it would have been really good for us to see. I don't want to miss out on that. Every person I meet that I really have an opportunity to get to know, I try to take that opportunity. I try to realize that everyone has their weird things about them, but that doesn't mean we can't find value in knowing them. I guess that's why I have such a wide spectrum of people that I call "friend". I get comments sometimes about having interesting friends. ;)

But I think I can honestly say that I've learned something from all of my friends. There are insights that I've gotten just from knowing people and seeing what they do and who they are that I might not have thought about if I'd never met or gotten to know them. And my hope is that they can all say the same thing about me... :)

Just more food for thought.

'Twas the night before Christmas...

[DISCLAIMER: If I miss anyone's name in this post, I'm sorry. I could leave out the names, but I like showing off how many friends I have. ;)]

Well, I believe the holidays have officially worn me out. I'm off work next week, and I'm planning on using it to recover. This week - well, I haven't been worth a whole lot this week. Good thing there's only one major goal this week at work - to get the application I've been working on for the past 8 months into production (finally), before I leave. So far we've managed to push it off until the very last minute - tomorrow at 5 pm. Cross your fingers - it's do or die time.

The holidays were busy and tiring, but good to me. When asked if I wanted for Christmas, my response was that I hadn't really given it much thought. The truth is, no one really needed to get me much of anything because I got what I wanted - a degree and a job. I got both of those Christmas presents around the middle of December, so I was set. Anything else after that point was just icing on the cake for me. And blessed I was.

One thing I enjoyed was getting to spend some much-missed time over the holidays with people from my house church at BOL. The last house church meeting of the year was December 22, and I attended after quite a bit of absence the last few months. And I was welcomed back with open arms. It felt like I hadn't even been gone at all. I love those people so much. I've heard about bad experiences that others have had with their cell groups, house churchs, growth groups, Bible studies or whatever, and I feel so blessed to have been and still be a part of such a wonderful group. They have a way of making me know when I'm not there that I'm missed and still much loved. I'm also especially thankful for what an encouragement they've been in getting me through school these last few years. So the time I spent with them over the holidays (both that last house church meeting and a somewhat impromptu game night on New Year's Eve Eve) was welcomed.

Christmas Eve started off with the opportunity to attend a morning service at BOL, which I hadn't been able to do in a while. Again, same thing - welcomed with open arms. BOL-ers are good people. :) Then it was off to Bob Evans for the traditional Christmas brunch (which became lunch this year) with my friends. This year our crew consisted of Crystal, Doug, the Broaddus clan, Ron, Seren and Patrick, Ian, Tom, and Tim and Fia. We had fun and somehow I ended up at a table with a bunch of Rose-Hulman alumni. I'm not sure how that happened, but I think they all appreciated the opportunity to be among fellow geeks. ;)

The rest of Christmas Eve was spent finishing my Christmas shopping and wrapping presents before collapsing from exhaustion. (I had a LOT of presents left to wrap!) The next morning I headed to my parents' house in good ol' "Lebtuck" (as it's known by some). Typical day with the fam. My mom always makes a huge lunch for stuff like this, and always some kind of good dessert. That's one thing I really enjoy about going home for holidays - you get to eat the food you grew up on. I eat out all the time, so it's a nice change.

I was kind of disappointed that this year my mom didn't buy the usual gifts for me and my brother. Don't get me wrong, I did like the gifts I got, but I've gotten used to getting a couple of things. Every year since my grandparents passed away, my parents have always bought me and my brother two things: one of those really big, thick peppermint sticks and one of the big cans of popcorn with 3 sections in it. To me, this has always kind of commemorated my grandparents. These were things that they liked, and I was starting to like the tradition of remembering them that way. But my brother and I mentioned that we missed them this year, so I have a feeling they'll be back. ;)

Christmas Day evening was spent with the Broaddus clan and the rest of the single people escaping their families on Christmas. Nice time with my other "family". We drank, and cuddled. What better way to spend Christmas? ;)

For some unknown reason, I started out thinking that my New Year's would be bad. I'm not sure why I thought that, really - just a feeling I had. But that whole weekend actually went quite well, starting with a nice chat with a friend over Starbucks, then spending Friday evening playing games with John, Shannon, Crystal, Crystal's friend Melissa, Caleb, and Mo and Dan. Maybe next time Caleb will learn to not give away the wrong card when playing Fluxx. :)

New Year's Eve itself was fun and kind of eventful. My roommate (Angie) threw a party, and I played a new game called Apples to Apples with her, Adriel, Robert, and Doug. I also taught them how to play Hex Hex (which had to be spelled out to anyone who called and asked what we were doing). All of us and Nicole played Hex Hex while Crystal and Lauren watched and made comments from the peanut gallery.

Shortly after Tom arrived (I'm still really sorry about leaving like that, Tom) and after we finished taking pictures of all the girls wearing black shirts and jeans (which was all of the girls),



Crystal, Nicole, Lauren, and I rushed out the door to make it over to the Broaddus house (could that be the new Mecca?) by midnight. We rang in the new year by clinking glasses of champagne and I got my midnight kiss from a really hott... 3-year-old. Isn't he the cutest?



Shortly after all the midnight celebration, we talked to Jon, who (after putting his kids to bed at 9:00) had to ring in the new year alone and sober. He made the joke that we should make him a whiskey sour and the four of us girls could fight over who got to bring it to him. This, of course (us being the sweet, wonderful, beautiful girls that we are), made us look at each other and go - "We should do that! Which one of us is sober enough to drive?" Lauren won, and the four of us, none of which were sober, one of us being under the legal drinking age, and with an open container of alcohol (the almost-forgotten whiskey sour) in the car, made the trek to Beech Grove to make our friend Jon's first few hours of the year a little bit better with some alcohol and some, um... affection. ;)

After returning to the Mecca, I decided to retire for the evening (morning?), since I knew we were planning to attend church in a few hours. My beautiful (but not as smart as me--this time) ;), Sunday-school-teaching "sister" chose to stay up longer before finally collapsing and having to be carried upstairs to bed. We did (somehow) make it to church on time the next day, however. (Thankfully, church people never start anything on time.)

Thus ends the (wow, really long) story of my holidays. And explains why I will spend next week, my vacation, catching up on some much-needed zzzz's...