New books

Today the sun is shining and it actually got up to 29 degrees. Some dear friends of ours stopped to visit this afternoon. And I got a box of books in the mail today. As I mentioned in my last blog, I ordered a bunch of books from Christianbook.com. My favorite author is Karen Kingsbury. I read the five books in her Redemption series several years ago. But they are followed by 3 more series that continue about the same family, the Baxters. The firstborn series has 5 books, and the Sunset/Sunrise series has 4 books I think and then the Above the Line series has 2 but 2 more to come yet. The Redemption ones I checked out of the library but then my daughter bought me one of them knowing I wanted to own them all. For Christmas she got me the first two of the Above the Line series. So I decided to bite the bullet and order the missing ones so I could start over and then read on through all 16 of them. I couldn't put my finger on the one she bought me from the Redemption series but I had it in my head that it was the first one. So I ordered the other 4 and all the rest. Now that they are arriving here, I found the one I had and it was actually #2 Remember. So now I have a second one of that one coming and will not have #1 unless I send in another order. I am so frustrated with myself that I didn't look before I ordered. Now it will be another 2 weeks before I will have the whole set and can start reading them all. Oh well, books don't spoil for waiting. I love books! My daughter does too. I used to just have one or two authors that I collected. Now my whole house is nearly full of books. Shelves are completely full, 2 deep and others piled on top. There are books in boxes and piles of books in corners. I have started weeding some out to give to our church library for others to read. But I have so many favorite authors that I can't part with! Who are your favorite authors? We won't part with any Karen Kingsbury, Beverly Lewis, Wanda Brunstetter, Linda Nichols, Tracie Peterson, Liz Curtis Higgs, Nicholas Sparks, Richard Paul Evans, and quite a few others. My favorite all time book was Not My Will by Francena H. Arnold. I first read that one when I was a teen and I've reread it so many times and I cry every time I do. What authors do you collect? What do you do with your overabundance of books?

Blogging

I've noticed how many of my blogger friends, blog often and about one particular subject each time. I tend to blog less often and just randomly ramble on from one topic to another. Is there a correct way to blog? Am I breaking some cardinal rule of blogging? Does anybody know? Should my entries be short and sweet and about a select subject? For Christmas I was given a Psalm journal. Each day has 3 or 4 Psalms and then one page to journal on. So each day my journalling takes exactly that one page, no more and no less. Maybe my blog should be limited to a certain number of lines or paragraphs. Have you seen the movie Julie and Julia? I did and was rather disappointed in it, but the basis of the movie is that Julie decides to start a blog and each day she makes recipes from Julia's cookbook and then blogs about them. I admire the fact that she blogged everyday. I also admire the premise that she cooked her way clear through that huge French cookbook in one year. I'm not that creative or dedicated though, so you are simply "treated" to my random ramblings about life in general. I apologize.

BJ came home Tuesday getting home Wed. AM at 2:30. He drove straight through leaving his home in Colorado at 9:45 Tuesday AM. But he beat the storm coming in on Wed. night which lasted throughout Thursday and caused two more snowdays at school here. So Wed. night we opened Christmas presents with him and Cassandra has been making lots of wonderful meals for us. Last night the 4 of us even played a game of euchre together. That was fun. The Christmas tree and decorations are still up because Cassandra insisted they had to be up when BJ got here. I am itching to take them down now though, but haven't gotten her to agree yet. We'll see.

We've been sorting through my piles of books I've read. Some are boxed to donate to our church library. Some are bagged up to loan out to friends of mine. Some have been posted and mailed off to other readers through PaperbackSwap.com. And then I got online and ordered another $200 worth of books from Christianbook.com. I love Christian fiction. My daughter does too. We get disgusted with how secular authors so often feel they need to throw in sex and smut to liven up their books. We prefer a good story plot to embarrassing details.

My daughter's "best friend" from preschool on, got engaged for Christmas. This has caused several heartaches in our family. We are happy for the friend, but now that she is the second of my daughter's classmates to be getting married this summer, my daughter is even more aware that she has no boyfriend. I have tried to tell her there are worse things than being single, but it is hard to understand when your best friend is planning her wedding. The other heartache is that although my daughter is one of the bridesmaids, she has been upstaged by a girl who has made my daughter's life miserable since junior high. This other girl is the maid of honor, and loves wielding the power. When they all went to try on dresses and be measured the other day, my daughter ended up driving alone the 140 mile roundtrip while the others, bride included, piled into the maid of honor's car. Then they promptly left her in the dust as they were breaking the speed limit and my daughter won't. She had mapquested the store and when she arrived, they weren't there. So she called them and they were eating lunch at the mall food court without telling her, of course. So she sat alone in her car at the store for half an hour waiting on them. Then when they tried on dresses, the one the bride had picked for them was strapless and not a style my big girl would look particularly good in, but at least it had a full skirt and was comfortable. So the m of h convinced the bride to change to a very tight, very form-fitting, strapless dress. So my daughter had to pay $120 for a dress that will look bad on her and that is so tight and straight she is uncomfortable and can hardly move in it. Then as they left the store, she was told they were going on to two other stores to look at dresses for the bride. They didn't know where they were but would follow the bride's GPS. My daughter was informed they would not let her follow them across town because she drives the speed limit but she could sit and wait there until they called to tell her where they ended up or she could just go on home since she really wasn't even needed any more. Then they took off and left my daughter sitting alone in her car in the parking lot again, but this time in tears. She drove home with a horrible headache and feeling like a total outcast and like she had lost her oldest friend. I was furious and really thought she should call and cancel her dress order and tell the bride to find someone else. But she is too kind-hearted to do that and will just go ahead and be miserable. What can I tell her? Not all girls are as mature as she is. Not all friends act like friends all the time. I am so proud of her for sticking by her beliefs and doing the speed limit even though it meant she had no lunch and caused her to be rejected by the others. Although the bride herself was not overtly mean to my daughter, it angers me that she allowed the maid of honor to be. It angers me that she chose that mean girl to be her maid of honor when my daughter has been a much better friend and much longer than this other girl and she knows how that girl has treated my daughter. We had planned to spend a lot of time and work and money making a very nice gift for the wedding, but I now don't want to do anything special for her at all. I've heard of "bridezillas", but have you ever heard of maids of dishonor? I told my daughter as far as I can tell she has two choices, either refuse to be in the wedding at all or paste a big smile on her face and be a much better friend to the bride than the bride is being to her. Do any of you know of another option that I am missing?

Anyway, that is my blogging for today. Thank you for letting me ramble. I think maybe I'll go try to take down my Christmas stuff.

Happy New Year 2010

Well, it's a new month, new decade, and new year. A friend of mine recently lost his grandmother at the age of 110. She had lived in 3 centuries, and parts of 12 decades. Can you imagine all the changes she saw? She would have been born in 1899. Just think of her seeing her first automobile all the way to the space shuttle. All the way from the first radio and TV to hand held computers. From crank telephones where you told an actual operator who you were calling to teeny tiny cell phones. I think I've seen a lot of changes in my own life, and I'm less than half her age. My first cell phone (mobile phone) was about the size of a lunch box and sat on the console in my car when I went on my rural mail route. I got 15 minutes a month for $15 and my husband dared to say I "wasn't worth that much money". He thought it was a wasteful expense. Now our cell phone bill is over $100 a month and all 3 of us carry one of those little buggers in our pockets. I grew up without TV due to religious reasons, and you have no idea how often I wish we still didn't have one. I hate how it is on constantly when the others are home. I hate the Dish that brings in so many poor choices of programming. I remember when I was a teen trying to shape up, how I'd lie on the bed or floor and do sit ups and leg lifts and etc. till my muscles screamed for reprieve. Now my daughter has a Wii and Wii fit plus. She does hula hoops and marches in a band and does boxing and kung fu and yoga and step aerobics all without leaving her little balance board in the middle of the livingroom floor. Then when she gets done it automatically weighs her and tells her what her BMI is and even graphs it for her so she can see how she's making progress toward her goal. Do you remember the little "wing windows" on cars? Not sure why I just thought of them, but I did. So much has changed since I was born in 1958. I used to sit and write letters by hand and stick a stamp on the envelope and mail it off to my pen pal. Now I just update my blog and figure she'll check it when she has time. I used to find out what was going on in the lives of my cousins when Grandma came to visit us and told us the latest news. Now I can get on facebook and in no time at all I know what my cousins are doing today and what they had for supper last night and what their kids are up to. I can even see photos and videos of them at any given time. I wonder what this decade will bring our way. More wars? or peace? What new technology that we can't live without? Births? Deaths? Sickness? Health? Marriages? Divorces? Whatever it brings, I want to walk closer to my Lord in 10 years than I do now.