You have to wait!

When I was little and would tell my grandpa that I was so excited and "can't wait!" for something, he would always say, "You have to wait!"  I never liked that realization.  

I've realized something about myself since moving into our house.  I'm not a very patient person.

Rephrase: I'm not a very patient person when it comes to big things.  I can wait for a long time in a grocery store line or to get into a building.  As long as I'm not freezing, stressed about time, or have to go to the bathroom, I can wait for a looooong time.  Getting to places early and waiting for them to start?  Great at that.

But... When it comes to our yard or our basement or other various projects, and I can envision how I want them to be, I just want them to be that way.  And it frustrates me when we don't have the time or resources to make them that way now.  Our yard is great but it's overgrown with weeds.  We don't have a ton of money for plants or special dirt, but when you rip out weeds, you have to replace them with plants and then maintain the area or the weeds just come back.  That's what happened last summer - we ripped it all out, couldn't replace it or improve the dirt, and now we have to rip it all out again.

Plus I have so many pretty organization ideas to help keep our house clean and pretty!  But everything costs money and we're using ours for something we want more right now, which is a finished basement.  

I'm trying to apply this quote I read in Why Do I Love These People?: 

…We generate excessive tension by worrying about whether our experience is abnormal [in this situation, whether our grass is less green than others' or our house less organized than we wish it were].  We beat ourselves up because we worry we're falling short of the ideal… We load ourselves up with guilt and consternation to the point of being frazzled, so much so that we are unable to enjoy our experience.

I love that way of saying it so much more than "Find joy in the journey."  :)

___________________________________________

"…We generate excessive tension by worrying about whether our experience is abnormal.  We beat ourselves up because we worry we're falling short of the ideal… We load ourselves up with guilt and consternation to the point of being frazzled, so much so that we are unable to enjoy our experience."  - Po Bronson, Why Do I Love These People?

Conference weekend

I love General Conference.  One thing I love about General Conference weekend, other than getting to listen to a real live prophet of God + others tell us what God would were He here, which is my absolute favorite part, is that, for the past couple of times, Kelli has gotten to come spend at least part of it with us! which is so fun.  That's the only sad part of having moved - I don't get to see Kelli and Michael as often as I could before.  So it's really fun when I do get to. :)  Kelli came up for the whole weekend!, and our friend Sheridan got to come up for all of Sunday.  It was pretty perfect.

I got a sample of Campbell's Go! Soup in exchange for a review and pictures of us eating it. 

They wanted us to use the thought bubble. "I love this chorizo soup!" That's true.

Kelli also liked it.

For some reason, they also wanted us to use these tattoo moustaches. 

We got bocce for Christmas and have this fun field by our house to play in!

___________________________________________

"You know what a storyteller is, don't you?  It's a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don't."  -- Sandra Dallas, Prayers for Sale

running late

from http://www.forgottenbookmarks.com/2011/12/im-late.html

"It is the private glee of the man who, in his hurry to work,

has taken the wrong train and now surely will be late."

(left in a used copy of Madness & Civilization by Michael Foucault)

___________________________________________

"[The Jolly Roger] was the cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name."  - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Why do I love these people?

This is the new book I've started.  Why Do I Love These People?: Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families, by Po Bronson.  I found it at a thrift store today for $2 and thought, Hey, why not?  I don't usually read non-fiction books, but I'm ready for a new book and this one is written like a novel, so I thought I'd give it a go.  So far it's been really good!  Here's part of what it says on the jacket - it does a good job of explaining what the book is about. 

It begins on a river in Texas, where a mother gets trapped underwater and has to bargain for her own life and those of her kids.

Then, a father and his daughter return to their tiny rice-growing village in China, hoping to rekindle their love for each other inside the walls of his childhood home. 

Next, a son puts forth a riddle, asking us to understand what his first experience of God has to do with his Mexican American mother. 

Every step - and every family - on this journey is real. 

[This book contains] stories of people who have survived tremendous hardships in their families and who managed to create a better experience today... These stories show us something utterly profound and yet beautifully simple: what's really involved in loving someone.

I love that last part, even though I think it should've been written as a question:)  What's really involved in loving someone?  Each chapter in the book is about a different family.  It tells why they were struggling, what they did to overcome that struggle and better themselves, and then gets all wrapped up in a moral or a "how to apply this story to more than just this family" paragraph.  It's an encouraging look at the family (and other relationships, too), especially when a current fashion is to belittle the family.   (That idea, in and of itself, is an interesting one - the fashions surrounding families.  That's largely what the first chapter is about.)

I'll let you know how it goes!

___________________________________________

"Do not be fooled by those incredibly ordinary stretches [talking about sitting around in the living room together] into believing it is not something profound.  Do not be fooled into forgetting about the special moments."  - Po Bronson, Why Do I Love These People?

Boy, why are you crying?

Well, I finally finished it!  Yes, it did take me a despicable amount of time:) but I loved it!  It was really fun to reread this book.  It's so different than you expect it to be.  I'd even read it before and was surprised by a lot!  I remembered being surprised at how violent it was; I was surprised this time by how funny it was.  I also love when books' narrators are almost their own character, and there's a lot of that in Peter Pan.  It's really fun :) For example, towards the end, the narrator is talking about how maybe we should tell Mrs. Darling that the kids are coming back, but she'd ruin the fun, or maybe we could do this fun thing, but she'd ruin it, or maybe we could do that fun thing, but she'd suck the fun out, and then he says, 

You see, the woman [Mrs. Darling] had no proper spirit. I had meant to say extraordinarily nice things about her; but I despise her, and not one of them will I say now…. However, as we are here we may as well stay and look on.  That is all we are, lookers-on.  Nobody really wants us.  So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hope that some of them will hurt.

AND THEN, two pages later, he's describing how she much she misses her children and says, 

...I find I won't be able to say nasty things about her after all.  If she was too fond of her rubbishy children she couldn't help it... Some like Peter best and some like Wendy best, but I like her [Mrs. Darling] best.  Suppose, to make her happy, we whisper to her in her sleep that the brats are coming back.

What in the world?  He goes from hating her to being her biggest fan - in two pages!  Hilarious.  I literally laughed out loud.

Anyway, I'll repeat what I've said before - if you've never read Peter Pan, you should give it a go.  I think you might love it.  :)

___________________________________________

"[Hook] was not wholly evil; he loved flowers (I have been told) and sweet music (he was himself no mean performer on the harpsichord);" - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

running shorter on wisdom

That's right!  These are my two wisdom teeth.  I got them out on Friday morning and I don't think it could've possibly gone better.  They weren't running into nerves or other teeth, they weren't buried... They came in just like regular teeth, so it was a really straightforward tooth-pulling.  A little bit of numbing gel, a numbing shot on each side of my mouth, a little pulling, and they were out!  I only bled for a few hours and was good to sing at the stake Easter performance that night!  I ate baby food and meal replacement drinks on Friday, baby food "graduates" and baked beans on Saturday, and a ham and baked potatoes dinner on Sunday.  Not too shabby!  

___________________________________________

"But above all he [Hook] retained the passion for good form.  Good form!  However much he may have degenerated, he still knew that this is all that really matters."  - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan