Payaso de Miercoles: Tucci and Platt

These guys have great faces.

Much Needed Song of this Monday: Wait by The Afters

One of my all time favorites. Tears every time.

Am I ready?

It's ten minutes until candle light service and I am not ready. I just finished mopping and making spinach artichoke dip among twenty other things to have people over afterwards. I am sleepy and the parsonage is quiet except for the Christmas Carols I have on in the kitchen. 
All day I have been writing this blog in my head and now I don't have time, which will probably be on my tombstone. She didn't have enough time to write an epic anything or even a decent blog about Christmas and all the happenings that go with it.
Like the surprise Shigeko gave me on Tuesday-girly and fun. My sister getting a new job. The last two weekends of gig, party, party and paint and gig party, party, party, party/gig. And the amazing amounts of good food. And Akemi's testimony, a missionary to Cambodia, and how it fits into all this. 
I am behind 260 emails, but I open one that says prayer in the subject line and keep the prayer for her and her family in my breath as I work all day, cleaning and cooking and thinking-wondering what the Lord is doing. How his victory will come down, for her, for us all, this time. This Christmas. 
And am I even close to ready?

Monday's Much Needed Song of the Day: Hard Candy Christmas-DOLLY!

I'm not having a hard candy Christmas, but I just found the old fashioned candy at the dollar tree! And I love this song:)

Aww, Sugar, Sugar.

     I am not technically on the Atkins diet, because. well, I can't stay on a diet. But years ago I joined with some friends at work to see who could lose the most weight. Within, the first six weeks,  I went from 162 lbs. to 148 lbs. and I didn't even do it right.

     I was amazed.

     Not just at the weight loss, but at the extent of my addiction to carbs. I usually ate carbs early in the morning-cereal, bagels, yogurts, fruit etc. But by nine, also known as first period as I was teaching middle school at the time, I was gnawing my hand off, forcing myself to wait until second period for the granola bar in my desk drawer and then running over students at 11:25 to get to the lunch waiting for me in the teacher's lounge fridge.

     When we went on the diet, I realized how much more hungry I WASN'T and how my day stopped revolving around snack time. The two year old inside me had matured, although I can still always use a nap.

     Today I was reminded of this. I still don't eat a lot of carbs, but I don't keep track either. If I want cheesecake, I eat it, If I want rice and beans and tortillas, I eat them, but this usually happens in the afternoon or evening. I like a big bowl of cereal before bed, too.

     Today, however,  I ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Okay, so it probably added up to three servings and 600 grams of carbs or something, but I love frosted shredded wheat. 

     By noon, I was dizzy, confused and my hands were shaking to high heaven and I was trying to figure out why.

     I was CRASHING.

     I found myself in the middle of the kitchen starting to organize the tupperware, warm up food for lunch, pour myself a soda, load the dishes, but not finishing anything. 

     I was trying hard to not feel like a junkie and open the fridge and devour the last half of the peppermint ice cream I'd been saving for my kids, so instead I grabbed an apple, a huge chunk of cheese and made myself sit down and take deep breaths. I am not exaggerating. 

     Eventually my hands stopped shaking and I could see straight and I felt human again. This used to happen to me all the time when I was pregnant or nursing and is why Chris' modus operandi for dealing with my cranky behavior is food-good food, lots of it. That is what clued me in to the fact that I am majorly affected by food and that somehow, what and how I eat, affects my sanity.

     This time of year doesn't lend itself to sanity, but I have managed to listen to a zillion Christmas carols and still not buy one gift. The parties, though, the parties with the sugar-filled treats and fun friends and wine and music. Oh, well. Maybe sometime around January 3rd, my eyes will stop spinning and my heart will stop racing and I'll take a nap and be back to "normal."

Monday's Much Needed Song of the Day: Feeling Good?

Yeah.

Slacker Blogger

After I lost the epic Thanksgiving Blog, I have been unmotivated to "finish" a new blog. That was brutal. The continuous saving feature on Blogger saved my accidental cut of the whole piece, when I was just trying to cut a piece of a Kahlil Gibran poem. My face went hot, my stomach lurched, and I moved away from the computer fast and dusted something while I thought about the four hours I had taken to write.


It should not take four hours to write a blog. I know this. I just haven't believed it yet.


I hesitate to sit down to write a new entry unless I know I have at least an hour. I have about twenty ideas in my head at all times, so it's not for lack of material, it's for lack of stillness. During the holiday season and the end of the semester, I don't have many whole hours to be still.


My mac battery is dead, so I also have been using that as an excuse for at least some of the reason I have been inconsistent. I can't pull my computer out waiting outside of piano, drum, viola lessons; I have to be plugged in. And it's hard to get the ideas from the journal or zillion scraps of paper to the screen to the post.


Blah, blah, blah.

Either way, they're just excuses.


Be still. Think, write, post.

Monday's Much Needed Song of the Day: Hello Walls

My grandma's favorite song. Hmm.

Curealities: Drowning in Blue by Chloe Curiel

Drowning in Blue

Wallow in whatever’s coming.

The future is an orb,

the one that floats above

a blue spinning flame in

a locked up room with twenty

guards insuring its safety.

They have cemented every crack

of light, every slit of past

and present, and have made

darkness out of it.

The blue hue is the only shimmer,

the only guide. It is

closely watched and protected.

What is to come is something unseen.

There is a great secret, constantly

hushed to keep it that way.

And a blackness where only drowning in

whatever’s left is permitted,

surrounds this mystery.

And I believe that it is so unknown,

that a tangible being could not think it up.

Payaso de Miercoles: Benigni, reminding me. . .

I lost my tribute to Thanksgiving post that took me way too long to write anyway, among other technical and everyday-life difficulties, so I skipped my Tuesday post again.


This is the clown I like for this day. Clever and brave. Oh, to be so.