All You Need is LOvE!

I love it when my husband calls me during the workday to tell me something he's excited about.

I love it when my neice calls me her Aunt Choody.

I love it when I find out there was a 10 point curve on one of my final exams, especially when I didn't bomb it to begin with! Woo hoo!

I love it when it suddenly downpours rain, and the sky gets so dark and the clouds hang so low you think it will never shine again, and then as fast as it came, the storm rolls away and the sun shines through and the world looks all clean and shiney and new, and better than it did before the storm. There's a life lesson in that somewhere, I'm sure.

I love it when I drop the lid to my new fat marker at work, and I look and look everywhere. Under my chair? No. Behind my trashcan? Not there either. And just when I'm about to give up, and I'm afraid I'm gonna have to throw the marker away, my co-worker walks by and says "What's this?" and picks up my marker lid. Day saved.

I love it when my dog can tell I've had a bad day, and instead of whining for rubs like he usually does when I walk in the door, he sits beside me on the couch, and lays his chin in my lap, and looks at me with his big brown eyes and sighs.

I love it when my husband texts me random punch lines to inside jokes at random times throughout the day.

I love it when I am thinking about a song I haven't heard in a long time, and then I turn on the radio, and it's playing. "G-L-A-M-O-R-OUS!"


OH! I thought this was pretty neat, so I'm gonna share it with you (as if anyone other than me reads this blog anyway!)

I always wanted to have my own little garden. When we got married, I tried to grow tomatoes. No go. They died. I tried to grow mums. Dead within a week. I planted flowers and peppers and vegetables, and nothing NOTHING would grow. I bought MiracleGro, and fancy heads for my hosepipe, and garden tools from Lowes. Nada.

Last summer, I was visiting my grandparents at their house, and I commented on my grandmother's iris blooms. Now, my grandparents are kinda known for their garden. It's dynamite. Papa would find these beautiful flowers and plant them for Grandma, and she would tend to them and keep them looking as pretty as her. She said that she had so many iris blooms, that she had to thin out the flowerbed, and dug up a ton of iris bulbs. Papa insisted that I took a bag of bulbs home with me and plant them at my house. I tried to refuse, explaining that I would only kill them, but he insisted, and if you knew Dial Holder, you knew you coudln't tell him No to anything! "They're easy to grow!" he said. "They'll be blooming next spring and you won't have to do a thing! I promise!". I took the bag home, but honestly, just so he would feel like he'd won.

That bag sat on my front porch for days before I did anything with them. I did plant a few bulbs in the flowerbed in front of our house, not even clearing out the weeds first. I basically just dropped about 5 iris bulbs and kicked some dirt on them and forgot about them. I wanted to tell him the next time I saw him that I had planted his iris bulbs like he wanted me to. I didn't get that chance. He died, very suddenly, about two weeks later.

Weeks went on, and months went on, and I never did plant the rest of those iris bulbs. It was just too sad.

Easter Sunday, we were pulling out of the driveway on our way to church, and I gasped. I coudln't believe it. In front of my house, in my flowerbed, were 5 beautiful lavender iris blooms, more beautiful than any I've ever seen except for at my Papa's garden. He promised they would grow, and they did. They grew and are probably about 18 inches tall and just as full and lavender as you can imagine.

Now, I'm not trying to say that my Papa is "looking down on me and tending my flower bed full of irises". I know where he is right now, and it's surely not looking down on me. He's enjoying his reward and waiting on the day of judgement to be with all of the saints in Heaven. But what I am saying is that he was right. I did what he said, and they are more beautiful than I could have imagined.

I love it when I look at my flower garden, and can hear my Papa say "They'll be blooming by next spring!" like he was right beside me.

Sonny Coon, Sonny Bear,
Trudy

My Non-resolution Resolution

I have some of the greatest friends on the planet. And fortunately for me, some of them go to church with us here at Boiling Springs church of Christ. We all decided a long time ago that we wanted to join a gym together, because misery loves company, right? Well, unfortunately, we didn't all have the money to do it right away (and by "we" I mean "I"), and to benefit in the deal this particular gym was having, we needed to all pay up front for the year. Thankfully, I was able to save up enough, and with money I got for Christmas, was able to join the gym! I have gone everyday since joining now, which was 12/30/09. I really really really love it. I've never ever worked out really before. I mean, sure, I've played in a backyard football game, or an intramural softball game (if there were no other warm bodies to man the plates), but to have a routine and work at it and stick to it and most of all, ENJOY it, I'm totally new to that. I'm really loving it and hope to stick to it. I love how proud of myself I feel when I walk out of there knowing that I'm doing something really good for me, but I really love how proud my husband is of me, and since that is my second goal in life, I am happy for that.

This is going to be a fabulous new year, I can tell already. We got pulled over on NYE on the way home from a friends' party. We were trying to get home before midnight, and so we left with about 15 minutes to go. We were only about 3 miles from home, when we got blue lighted! Yep, that's right. We got a pulled over. Now let me give you a little background on this... the party we came from was at a church friends' house. The theme was "The Roaring Twenties", so we were all decked out in costume. Dan was dressed like John Dillinger, complete with handgun. So as we are waiting on the cop to come to the window, he's frantically trying to hide the phony gun, and I'm saying "Dan! Dont look suspicious! Just show him it's fake!". Chaos, but he managed to get it successfully under the driver's seat before the officer reached the car. Luckily, he was just looking for drunk drivers, and since we hadn't drunk anything harder than Sprite, we were off the hook. But yes, we spent midnight NYE with the blue lights flashing. So romantic!

I hope you all had a great and safe New Year's! Love you all!!
Please continue to pray for the Grays.