A Few Highlights

So as I mentioned, Derek and I spent Thanksgiving weekend at my parents' house in Columbus, Ohio. It was a great weekend and it was so wonderful to have a few days to spend with my parents, the only down side was that this was the first holiday that my sister wasn't home. She is working at a ski reosrt in Colorado so she doesn't really get holidays off. But here are a few highlights from our weekend:

1. We woke up real early on Friday morning and braved the crowds to go out and find us a deal on a new tv. Our old tv we got when we got married and it has a weak picture tube - so now it flashes on white and bright colored screens and is the most annoying thing EVER. It has had this problem for over a year now, but we have patiently been waiting for Black Friday to come so we could get a deal on a tv. We ended up with a 42" 1080p LCD tv, and it is awesome. I don't watch much tv but the new tv is pretty awesome.

2. We went to go see the Blind Side. My friend Becca said that everyone should be required to see it and she was right. It may be my new favorite movie. I cried through most of it and it is definitely a movie that just makes you want to adopt a teenager who doesn't have a home. It also makes me appreciate the ministry of young life and the fact that young life leaders are in schools loving on students who have stories similar to that of Michael Oher (ok - maybe not at LCA, but at other schools for sure).

3. We went to see the Cavs play the Dallas Mavericks. Derek and I are big Cavs fans (actually we are big Lebron fans, we have matching jerseys that we got the first time we went to see them play) and we got to see Lebron and Shaq and Verejao whoop up on the Mavericks. My parents came with us (they actually bought us the tickets - they are wonderful) and it was such a fun time. There was also this unbelievable circus act at halftime that I can't even describe but I think my mom liked that more than the actual game. It was so fun.

All in all a delightful weekend. I can't wait to go back up for Christmas in a month. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend as well.

Happy Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope that everyone has a wonderful day filled with family, friends and the Lord, and that we all take time to thank Him for the unbelievable blessings in our lives.

I am so excited to head up to Columbus later on today to go spend the holidays with my family. We also had some early Thanksgiving celebrations here in Lexington. On Monday our office had a Thanksgiving luncheon where we all brought side dishes and deserts and our company bought us turkey and ham and we feasted. Then, on Monday night we did the exact same thing with our LCA high school students. It was so much fun!

We had dinner at Maddie, an LCA girl's house and her and her mom made turkey (and rolls and a great potato dish). We asked the students to come and bring a side or a desert and we would all have a Thanksgiving dinner together. (We did this instead of having our regular YL club because LCA gets off for the whole week of Thanksgiving - how lucky are they!) It was such a huge success!

First of all, Maddie, her sister and some friends set up seating for everyone. They put out tables, chairs, and even decorated the tables with center pieces. You can see the pics below - I was so impressed!

Then, miraculously, everyone brought a different dish - no one duplicated. So we had turkey, sweet potato casserole, green been casserole, corn pudding, mac and cheese, cheesy potatoes. and rolls. It was all delicious. Then we had eclaire cake, two kinds of pies and brownies for desert. It was so tasty and everyone had a great time. Check out the spread:

Derek carved the turkey - he has never done this before, but he did such a great job.


Here are some pics of folks enjoying the meal.

It was a great time of fellowship and great food. I think we are going to have to make it a tradition.

I love Thanksgiving food and cannot wait for my third Thanksgiving dinner of the week at my parent's house tomorrow. Not to sound corny or cliche but we really do have so much to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving!

Good Morning Sunshine

Now is the time of year when the sun is rising right when I am driving to work. And this morning, as I turned off my street, I saw the most beautiful sunrise. I wish I had my camera, because even though I was running a little late, I totally would have stopped to take a picture. The sun was barely peeking out over the horizon and I felt like God was saying good morning to me.

Also, this song was on the radio. And this song makes me smile. Kari played it at her wedding for the anniversary dance and for whatever reason that is what I think of when I hear it. I picture Derek and I dancing together. And that is one of the things I love about him, he loves to dance, especially with me, and it makes my heart smile.

So between the sunrise and the song, my heart smiled all the way to work this morning. I hope everyone has a beautiful day and that your hearts are smiling too :)

Pinecones

Anyone need some pinecones? There are loads of great crafty and decorating things you can do with pinecones and it turns out my backyard is full of them. Target sells them for $5.00, but if any of you friends who live in Lexington would like some pinecones to decorate or craft with I would love to give you some out of my backyard for FREE. And if you have any good pinecone craft or decorating ideas please let me know because I would like to do something with all of these pinecones I have collected.


P.S. My pinecones are not short and fat like these, they are more long and skinny.

Highlight of my week (or maybe even my month)

So tonight we had a mall scavenger hunt for young life. For those of you not familiar with the mall scavenger hunt, basically us leaders disguise ourselves and hide in the mall and the students have to find us. The first group to find every leader wins. So here is the cast of characters normally (along with the beautiful Kari Corsi who we all miss lots!)


And here we all are disguised:


I threw on a hat and glasses and just tried to blend in, Derek tried to dress skater-ish, he pretty much is always going to be the easy one to find, Keith put on a suit and sat on a bench reading a paper and laughing as kids walked right past him, and the highlight of my week: Megan dressed as a man!! Here's a close up for you:


I laughed for 5 minutes straight when I first saw her. She put a mustache and side burns on with mascara. People were staring, no one knew if she was a guy or a girl. And the best part: when she was in the bathroom, a girl walked in and asked if she was in the wrong bathroom! When she saw Megan, she thought she was in the men's room - hahahahahaha! Highlight of my week, or maybe even my month (we'll see how the rest of the month goes).

Unfortunate Aspects of Work Part 2.

I guess I jumped the gun on my last post, because I didn't realize that today another unfortunate thing would happen. Today at work, I had to go to webinar on methods of determining when roadway signs need to be replaced based on their retro-reflectivity. I know, you all are wishing you had my job right now.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of adding the word retro-reflectivity to your vocabulary, let me explain. You know how at night when your headlights hit a sign and it becomes brighter so you can actually see what the sign says? That's called retro-reflectivity. And the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices - the book that regulates all roadway signs - yes I have one of those too, it lives a few shelves up from my safety vest along with some other exciting reads {see below}) has just established minimum standards for retro-reflectivity of signs. So today, I got to sit through an hour (it was actually 2 but my boss and I left halfway through it - thank goodness for lots of work to be done back at the office) of different methods to determine if your signs need to be replaced.

Seriously. The only redeeming thing about this hour was that I got free Jimmy Johns. Now I promise no more posts about work for a good long while, so you all will continue to read my blog.

Unfortunate

As most of you know, my 9-5 (or 7:30-5:30 in my case) is spent in the world of traffic engineering. As someone who likes to have friends and be social, I try my best not to talk about my job outside of work. This past week however, my job brought my nerd status to an all time high. About a month ago my computer at work died. I came in one morning and it wouldn't start. No blinking lights. nothing. totally dead. The part that was needed to fix it was apparently on back order, so they decided to buy me a new computer. It came in at the end of last week. I set it up Monday. Turns out, it came with two monitors. So now my desk looks like this:

Confession: I am beginning to like having two monitors.

I've also had to wear one of these 3 times in the past week:

Confession: I didn't have to borrow one, I have my own. It lives in my office with my dual monitors.

Please still be my friend.

Held

A little over a month ago tragedy hit my office at work. One of my coworkers and his wife lost their baby days before she was expected to deliver him. I remember when I found out, it was right as I was getting ready to go home. I got home and balled my eyes out as I told Derek what had happened. They were so excited. They had been trying for several years to have children and this was to be their first. It didn't seem fair that this was happening to them. He was literally dancing around the office earlier that day, so excited for the arrival of his baby boy. There aren't words to describe this sort of devastation.

One of the most frustrating things for me was not knowing what to do. As an office we bought them gift cards, sent flowers and wrote notes of encouragement in a book of prayers for them, but I wanted to be able to do something to really show them how much God loves them, and was frustrated because I didn't know how to do that. I am the girl whose most significant loss involves my cat Sam running away while my family was on vacation when I was little. I'm being serious. I have grieved with many friends who have lost loved ones, but I myself have never experienced that loss personally. I don't know how you approach someone who has just lost a baby and tell them that there is a God who loves them more than anything and will be with them and hold them through this horrendous time, even though that same God has the power that could have prevented it from happening in the first place. If someone who had never truly experienced loss came up and said that to me I would probably want to punch them in the face.

So I prayed for them, because I didn't know what else to do. And then the other day I stumbled across this: www.audreycaroline.blogspot.com. The blog of a mother who lost a baby girl 2 hours after she was born. And she loves Jesus. The blog begins soon after they found out about midway through the pregnancy that their baby wasn't going to survive. This blog chronicles how they deal with that and their faith in the Lord through it all. How they know that the Lord is good and has the power to prevent these kinds of things from happening, and how they choose to continue to love Him and allow Him to heal them when he allows it to happen. It's incredibly sad but incredibly encouraging at the same time. I urge you all to go there and read from the beginning.

So this is how God answered my prayers. He gave me this blog to share with my coworker and his wife. He showed me someone who could express everything to them that I wanted to, but it's someone who actually knows exactly how they feel and is able to beautifully put into words what I would stumble over. I pray that they would know how much God loves them and how much he longs for them to take their sorrow and brokeness to Him and let Him carry it for them and just hold them. If you want you can say a prayer for them too. And one more thing to leave you with is this song by Natalie Grant, Held. It's one of my favorites and I think its appropriate.