He's home!!

Mark is home!! Finally!! He got home Monday at noon. My work was nice enough to let me take the afternoon off at short notice (didn't find out about Monday's return until Sunday morning).

We have VERY MUCH enjoyed being together again!! It's almost like we just got married. We joked that we felt a little like we should have some kind ceremony before we could just go home together ;) Funny! Since Mark has been home he's enjoyed time off and relaxing, catching up on sleep and movies.

Mark got me a gift on his trip. An 80gig iPod!! My 2.5 year old 20gig busted a few months ago and we've missed having all our music in one place, especially on trips. That was a super fun surprise!!

This picture is Mark at his pre-op appointment for his eye surgery that we went to this morning. He's all assessed and approved to move forward with the surgery scheduled on Friday. We're very excited (although he's pretty nervous)! I'm taking the day off work so I can take him to the appointment, home, and take care of him.

If you are wondering about my hair appointment, it was just as fun as normal! If you're interested about how the color turned out, you'll just have to wait until you see me sometime. It's a little more red than last time.

Right now we are at Barb's. Just had a nice dinner and are going to catch up on the past 2 weeks of The Office.

Happy Halloween!

Thoughts in my head today...

I wonder when Mark is coming home? My current prediction is Tuesday (at the earliest). You know, all last week I prayed that God would bring Mark home on Tuesday. But I meant last Tuesday. I wonder if I didn't make that clear and God misunderstood?

I'm excited to eat the yummy spinach dip I made for the fun girlie ceramic party thing tonight that Jos organized. Although I'm not creative so am not looking forward to having my stupid creative thing look like a 5 year old did it.

While Mark has been gone I feel like I've been fairly productive with my time, now I'm ready for a break and some non-productive time.

I wonder when the strange knee, heel, and arch pain that I get randomly before/during/after I run, will eventually go away completely? Should I be doing special stretches? Na!

My good friend Raychel gave me some one-on-one attention the past two weeks and it's been SUPER fun to hangout with her. Love you friend!!

I have a hair appointment on Tuesday and I'm SO excited!! Do other people get as excited about hair appointments?

Pondering. On life and God.

Right now I'm at Barb's during my lunch break, eating left-over pasta and using the Internet. On the way here, I squealed my tires around a tight corner. Other than my purse, sitting on top of some boxes in the seat next to me, sliding into my head, it was super fun!! Sometimes a girl who owns a Mustang just needs to take a corner a little faster here and there.

Those of you in the blogging world might be wondering, "why the sudden influx of blogs?" Well, it's because my life and debriefing buddy is still overseas and me being an extrovert and verbal/written processor, needs an outlet.

When I started blogging I told myself I was not allowed to blog during periods of emotional instability. That is why there is sometimes long gaps in my posts. But in a moment of weakness today, I thought I'd share some things I've been thinking about over the past few months...

I've been pondering an idea about life. Do some things just happen? I believe God knows all and although we have free will to choose what we do with our lives, He knew what we'd choose (although this is hard to wrap the mind around). He's all knowing. I also believe that God does not "react" to things, why would He need to react? He already knew it would happen. So nothing is a surprise to our God.

The question is, does God always have some big huge plan in everything that happens in our lives? Or are some things just circumstantial, the effects of other people's lives rubbing off on us, or just life playing out?

I get stuck on these questions. If God does have a big huge plan for every single thing that happens to us, then are we wasting all these opportunities to learn or grow? Does he hold something back from us until we figure out what he's trying to teach us? What if we never get it? We will always be without the thing he thinks we need to be without to learn the "lesson" he has for us? And why do these "lessons" always seem to be hard, painful, and uncomfortable? Or are the lessons also good things but when it's good we don't notice it as much?

I guess you could say the opposite could be true. If God doesn't have a super big reason for everything bad that happens to us, then it's the same for good things. Good things just happen and are out there. For some reason, it's easier for me to believe the good things are direct from God and the bad things are just life. Maybe it's easier to believe because I don't feel like I deserve the good things and good things don't always happen to me (although God did give me a good thing in my super wonderful amazing and handsome husband!!). But how about all those little things that happen? Like having enough money in your budget to make it to the end of the month, or getting an unexpected refund check, or going to a meeting where your favorite cookies are available on the very day you were craving them. Are those things from God or just life?

There might not be an answer to these questions, but these things I wonder. On some level, I'd like to believe that the hard things are specific occasions God has set up for us to learn something, but when I believe this, I get afraid that I'm not learning it so the hard thing will last for a really long time!! Or at least until I get my slow wits about me enough to figure out he's trying to teach me something and learn it.

Is God all about just trying to teach us lessons? I feel like God is the only place in my life I can go without fear of failure and if I believe that I can fail in how I do a relationship with God, then where can I go? And where did these feelings of failing and never doing good enough come from? I feel like I can never do things quite good enough. I'm never putting my full effort into it, I'm slacking, I'm capable of more. I always feel like I'm failing. I could do better at my job, could keep my apartment cleaner, could make myself look better, could workout harder and run faster, could cook more often, could eat healthier, could be nicer to people, and on and on. Underlying everything I do is this feeling that I could be doing it better, more quickly, sooner, with better quality, more often, or less often. And after a while, it all just makes me tired.

Half Marathon

Sunday morning Trisha (my running partner) and I ran the Girlfriends Half Marathon in Vancouver, WA. This was a GREAT event, for a number of reasons.

Before every race, we talk about whether or not we want to run for a good finish time or just for fun. We normally settle on just having fun and if we beat out time, excellent! Same thing with this event. For me, it's two weeks after the Portland Marathon and for Trisha, it's her longest run for a couple of months so we both had potential handicaps going into the event.

The event was promoted for only women and advertised having cute men (who ended up being firefighters) hand out chocolates and food at the end, as well as a gift from a local jeweler. We didn't really pay too much attention to all of that when signing up, but it turned out to be pretty neat.

This was the first year for this event and they were very excited to get 400 participants. Both Trisha and I have done very small events before and didn't have very good experiences so were glad this wasn't shaping up to be one of those.

As it turned out, the run was GREAT!! We did a personal best of 2:17 and some seconds (see my previous post for other half marathon finish times). Although, shaving about 7 minutes off our previous time seems almost too good to be true so I'm almost wondering if the course wasn't measured correctly. But either way, we both did well and felt pretty good, only walking a couple times. It was a low key event with great weather! And as promised, there were men passing out chocolates, little charm necklaces (see picture) and water and other snacks at the finish.

And as an added surprise, I had a voicemail message from Mark when I finished, telling me how proud he was of me!! That was really neat because I love how supportive he is of my running and really missed having him there to cheer me on.

You can view our finisher pics here.

It was really neat to do this race with Trisha and run well and at a good pace. It was our last race of the season and really felt like a great finish to a really good running year! Another thing that was neat about this race is that the 13.1 miles carried me over 703 miles so far in 2007. 702 was my total mileage for all of 2006, which is something I had hoped to do, beat my distance for last year. So that was awesome!

While Mark has been gone

Last week I blogged about the things I hoped to get done while Mark was gone. He's still gone and here's the progress I've made so far.

Updated as of 10/22
1) get most/all of the wedding Thank You cards written (my plan is 10 per day)- Half way done. Hope to finish them this week.

2) get more caught up on scrapbooking (I'm breaking it out tonight to make headway on the big event I want to finish before starting on the wedding album)- Started, but it's a slow moving project.

3) try and eat through food in our freezer, cupboards and fridge, saving on grocery money (e.g. chips and dip, frozen crock pot meal, pb&j, and whatever else I can find) - I've hardly eaten at home, if that counts. And only spent money on 1 meal out so far.

4) try a few bread machine recipes that Mark might not care for - tried one and it was okay. I realized there aren't too many that Mark wouldn't eat that I want to try.

5) clean the apartment - DONE

6) try and "set up" the second bedroom, complete with making the desk functional, organize the bookshelf, hang pictures, update filing - I updated filing but otherwise didn't get any further on this list.

7) hang more pictures - I won't get to this.

8) plan a few social activities I might not otherwise, hangout with Barb, run a half marathon on Sunday, etc. - I ran the half marathon and did a personal best!! I've hungout with Barb and had dinner with my friend Raychel on Thursday night. But otherwise I mostly worked out and worked on my projects at home.

Being husband-less is lame!!

That's all I have to say about that today.

Today I saw...

While at Starbucks during my lunch break today, I ended up in line behind a beautiful woman! She was probably about my age, though could have been younger, dressed casually with straight brown hair, nicely made up face. She had a very cute 2-3 year old little boy on her hip and a little girl about a year or two older, in a wheelchair. The little girl obviously had some type of physical and/or mental disability.

I couldn't tell if the woman was the mother or care taker. Honestly, I was surprised to see such a beautiful woman with a disabled child. I'm not sure why.

Sitting across the room, I watched, trying to gage the level of interaction this woman had with the kids to possibly determine her relationship with them and/or her feelings towards the disabled girl.

Throughout the 30 or so minutes I sat there, the young woman never seemed to smile. She engaged very well with the little boy, but not as much with the girl. She fed her a Starbucks pastry of some kind and wiped her mouth at one point while talking sweetly to her, but most of her attention seemed to be on the little boy. At one point, I heard one of the children making a loud noise and I looked up to see the woman hugging the little boy in her lap with the little girl yelling for what, I assumed, was a desire for similar attention. In fact, it seemed almost obvious that this little girl wanted the same type of attention.

I struggled to try not to judge the beautiful woman, thinking she was mostly turning her attention towards the cute little boy and not enough of her attention towards the disabled girl. After all, the girl deserved just as much love and attention as the little boy. Just because she couldn't communicate or function like a "normal" child her age, didn't mean she wasn't aware of the attention being shown else where.

And then the thought occurred to me. What would I do if I was the care taker of these two little kids? In all honesty, I would have had trouble taking the job to begin with. I might have felt self-conscious when interacting with the girl in public (wondering if people like me were watching and judging). It would have been awkward for a while as I developed a relationship with the girl, which I might have done timidly. I might have felt like I was "scoring" more points because I was taking care of someone who needed special care.

I'm not sure there was a point to this story other than how I was struck by my own quickness to judge others. Whether that woman was the care taker or the parent, she was really trying and who am I to think I could do better in a similar situation? I probably wouldn't, which is why God didn't place me in that position. I'm left feeling like I should pray and should have looked for a way to encourage this woman, no matter how much I may have been a little intimidated by her beauty. She was really making a great effort and that is certainly more than I have ever done!!