Toward the end of January, we celebrated my dad’s 65th Birthday. As a tribute, I (with the help of my mom) put together a slideshow of his 65 years to run in the background at the party. Here is that slideshow.
Warning: It’s about a 20 minute slideshow, so grab a cup of coffee.
Happy birthday, Dad! I hope I look that good at 65! May this be your best year yet!
In 2001, I had a joint bridal shower with one Bethany McNichols in Seattle. We were both to be married that summer to our respective fiances, whom we met in the Theatre department of Seattle Pacific University.
We laughed, exchanged gifts, socialized, ate, and somehow ended up dressed in gowns made of wrapping paper and bows.
It was the beginning of the next stage of our lives. But I have a feeling that at that time, if you had told us that less than 9 years from then, we would both live in Texas and be hanging out with our combined 4 kids, we probably would have laughed in disbelief.
Funny how the times change…
I’m taking a writing class to improve my creative and copywriting skills and by all accounts, I really should be doing my current assignment right now (since it’s already a week late). However, I had to take a break from my 3,000 word story that I’m frustrated with right now because I no longer care about the plot or characters I have thusfar created. This indicates a major problem and probably means that I should start over with something new, but since I’m short on time, the prospect of starting over makes me groan. I therefore feel obligated to continue muddling through the structure I have already set up.
Anyway, I wanted to take a break to express how happy I am that J has this marketing job. It’s fun to be watching TV with him and when a commercial comes on hear him say “Hey, we did that.” For the first time in two years, he’s not hating his job and for the first time in three and a half years, seems to really be enjoying his job. That’s priceless.
Until May 2003, we were trekking through life at a relatively amiable pace. We were financially and otherwise independent, both working, and had bought a house. Suddenly, our lives were run off the road and brought to a screeching halt when J’s boss took a dive off the deep end of sanity. Added to that major problem was also the issue that our mortgage company had originally mis-estimated our mortgage payment and sent us a letter in May stating that the monthly payment would go up by 20%. That was 20% we didn’t have.
Before we knew it, J was out of work in a dead economy, and we had to sell our little house and move to Texas seeking shelter from my parents. We lost everything we had put into the house that we had only lived in for ten months, were unemployed, and J was still recovering from the emotional hell that boss-man had put him through. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that our beloved puppy, Japp, escaped from the yard the day we arrived in Texas and was killed by a speeding driver.
Since that point, try as we might to get back on the track of life and progress over the last year and a half, we seemed to be doing little more than spinning doughnuts on the side of the road. J bounced from junk job to junk job, each time getting further from his intended field (we soon discovered that the job market in Dallas was not much better than the job market in Seattle) and while I was generally steadily employed, it was never enough to pay the bills. For the first six months of our stay in Texas, I was working for my Dad, and although I enjoyed the job and took it very seriously, I couldn’t help but feel that it was something of a handout. A handout I was extremely grateful for, but I still had the need to earn my own way.
There were times when we were able to save a little money, but something always came along to instantly eat away the savings that we had painstakingly accrued.
And now, J and I both have jobs that we love and obtained “on our own.” Even better, we don’t have to choose each month between paying the bills or paying rent (gasp!). Though it may have suffered some dents along the way, it appears that our little car has made its way back onto the highway and is once again heading in the right direction. Hope is a powerful thing. And God is good.
And now I’d better get back on track with my writing assignment.
4:00PM. It’s totally raining outside the window at work. Hopefully it will let up before I have to walk out the door in thirty minutes. Oh crap, did I shut my sky roof? Yes, apparently I did. Well that was my panic attack for the day.
I found blogs for some people I knew in high school today and it sent me back. I suddenly found myself reminiscing about how messed up things were in high school. And I would wager that I had a pretty good high school experience, as they go. I can’t seem to remember anything particularly warm and fuzzy about it, but I mainly chalk that up to bad memory. There must have been something good about high school.
I think I experienced some sort of selective amnesia after hs graduation. I had to ask friends today to send me pictures of people I knew I should remember, but can’t. I don’t remember very many events, and the ones I do remember seem to always be those that involved my utter mortification...such as - well, we won’t go into that one. This isn’t a diary after all. But the list does include my best friend having seizures, a bomb threat at Prom (though that wasn’t so bad, I was ready to leave), a myriad of speech and theatre tournaments that I hated, one very messed-up relationship, and a never-ending battle with eyebrows that refused to cooperate.
I think most teenagers go through a “finding self” phase sometime around sophomore year of high school. I didn’t hit that phase until my freshman year of college, so I spent the majority of high school with a sense that everybody else knew something I didn’t. I guess that pretty much sums up my high school experience: a (quite possibly accurate) sense of cluelessness.
Perhaps that’s why I can’t bring myself to scrapbook high school. It seems that for me, life began in college.
It’s finished raining now. I love Texas rain. It’s one of the things I missed in the five years I was in the Northwest. It rains, it pours, and it’s done. Bam bam bam. Likewise, I’m done reminiscing about highschool. Soooo many better things to do with my day. Like play video games while I wait to go home.
8:30pm. AAAAGGGGHHHH. Scan scan scan scan stitch stitch stitch crop shrink sharpen save open upload save. Scan scan scan scan stitch stitch stitch crop shrink sharpen save open upload save. Somebody has to invent a better way to get 12x12” scrapbook pages on the internet. I’m done for now. My eyes are crossing and my back feels like it’s made out of Legos.