Thanks to Elastigirl...

for nominating me for this award. She is truly one of my closest friends, and I miss her a little bit most days and a whole lot on others. Our time together IRL is precious, but the blog she writes allows me to be with her off and on throughout the week. Thank goodness for the internet.

Here's the explanation and the silly rules that go with it:"These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award."

As for the bloggers that are important friends to me, many have already gotten the award, but I will still list them here:

• Curly Girl: More than just a friend, she is my wonderful sister and inspires me to be more like her every day.
• Jennie: More family, and one of the funniest writers I have ever known.
• Mrs. Swizzle: One of the best all time blog tag lines: Do you ever feel like someone has put a swizzle stick into the top of your head and just stirred things around a little? I do, and I am glad to know there are other people like that in the world.
• Mary Beth: My first blog friend that I met after I read her blog. It was quite exhilarating. Thank goodness she is the least anonymous blogger in the whole world :)
• Princess Mindy: So interesting, and so creative. I look forward to meeting her IRL someday.
• Perplexity Project: More family, and really smart and insightful. Makes me think, which is always good.

So, looking here, I realize I need to make more blog friends. But I love the ones I have. Thanks to you all for brightening my life.

Holiday Blogging

Well, I have to say I've missed a lot of my favorite bloggers over the last week or two. All of us seem to be busy, busy, busy. So I think I'll just make a post to give you all something to read, and maybe you'll take pity on me a post a blog about something for me.

I told a good friend about my blog the other day (he actually knew about it, but just never had signed on before) and he said it was interesting how all my blogging friends seemed to know each other. I thought how funny that was, because there are people that only know each other through the blog, like Elastigirl and Jennie, and while they are both important to me, they have never met IRL.

And so I explained to him that blogging is just like that, we find out about others thoughts and lives and learn from each of the blogs we read. I love clicking through the blogs that are interesting to my blogging friends and learn something new or laugh or look at things differently with each click.

So Merry Christmas to all who read this blog. And thanks to all of you who have enlightened me in one way or another during the last year.

I'm still here....

OK, so I mentioned before I have a facebook addiction problem, and it might just have affected my postings over the last couple of weeks. I have found some long lost friends, and some not so lost friends, and it has been great fun. But I also miss the blog, so now I decided that no matter what, I am going to make sure that I post at least once a week.

Here's what I can't believe. ONLY 6 1/2 weeks until Christmas. WOW. So much to do between now and then. And I'm heading back to the Midwest for a couple of days to see family and friends. It will be nice, and I really miss everyone. That is happening before Thanksgiving. HOW will everything get done? I do not know. But I will just do my best. That's all I can do.

I Missed My Own Blogiversary!!

Hard to believe that it has been a year that I have been blogging. I've been so sick the past couple weeks, that I haven't much felt like doing anything. It was all I could do to go to work and work on homework. Then sleep, sleep, sleep. And somewhere in there my blogiversary rolled on by. I also lost a brand new credit card for a week under my coffee table. Thank God I found it yesterday, because I was sure that I would have to cancel it before too much longer if I didn't find it. And I hate changing to a new number on everything.

So happy belated blogiversary to me. One year of looking at life through the prism of the world wide web. Hope there are many happy years in my future.

P.S. Thanks for all the well wishers. I am finally feeling better and have climbed out from under the mountain of laundry that needed washing and cleaned off the counters and surfaces, so I am back to the world of blogging again.

A Curly World

Welcome to the world of blogging Curly Girl! I knew you were jealous that I blogged and you didn't. (is blog a verb now? I'm not sure) Anyway, if you want to know more about my sister Curly Girl or just check up on her family, check out her blog Our Curly World.

Moving to the Top of the List

I finally got cable installed at my new apartment, and now I have internet access again. More frequent blogging is assured. And I was looking at Elastigirl's blog and realized that her new blog list shows how long its been since the last post on your blog. So I wanted to be sure to move up on the list. I have always been driven to be #1!

I've Been Tagged

AND I've been missing for a month or so. I've got no good excuse, except I have been abstaining from cable in an effort to get settled, so I haven't done any blogging as a result. (That should be fixed in a week or two) But Elastigirl tagged me, and the book I'm reading right now (Jack Canfield's The Success Principles) says that when your mentor tells you to do something, you should do it.

What was I doing ten years ago: Working at a job that made me sad most of the time. Just meeting Elastigirl (I actually got to know her right after her second baby was born). Started meeting with my small group around that time. Made some friends that I still consider some of my closest today.

Five things on today's "to do" list: Today was Saturday, and for the first time in a while, I set all "to do's" aside, and just hung out with my sister, Curly Girl, by the pool with the kids and more kids from the neighborhood. Does work on my tan count as a "to do?"

Things I'd do if I was a billionaire: Set up a charitable foundation that focused on hunger and literacy. I figure if you can eat and read, you can figure most of the rest of the stuff out for yourself. I would not "work" another day in my life, just spend it traveling and enjoying my money working for me.

Three bad habits: Biting my nails, negative self-talk and procrastinating.

Five places I've lived: Near a beach, near the nations capitol, in a cold northern state, in the heartland and now in the desert!

Five jobs I've had: Math Tutor, Bank Vice President, Executive Staff at a YWCA, Consultant, Cashier.

And Elastigirl always takes the five bloggers I know to tag, so still, I have no one to tag.

Nearest Book Meme

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!) Well it is kind of funny you ask, because I am sitting in the library right now, but the nearest book is one of my own that I was using to do some research. It's called Holy Conversations: Strategic Planning as a Spiritual Practice for Congregations.

Find Page 123 and Find the first 5 sentences: This is Chapter Nine: Reading the Congregation's Culture. The section is Dealing with Culture Clash.

Post the next 3 sentences. In either the "congregational training for planning" or the "internal audit" phases, a congregation may discover that it has two or more cultures competing for dominance. At this particular moment in history, culture clash seems to be the norm rather than the exception. We can identify several reasons congreations are experiencing this clash.

*[In case you wanted to know what they are in a nutshell 1) generational differences 2) demographic changes impacting comfort zones 3) size transition] No big surprise there really...


Tag 5 people. Uh... At this point in time, I am so far down on the meme list, that all my blog pals have already been tagged. Maybe I'll start my own book meme. Maybe I'll be the beginning chain instead of the end.

Swapping!

Being so new to the blogging world, I am trying to expand my community of blogging buddies out there on the world wide web. I have read other people's blogs, but I decided that I needed to check out some blogs of people that I don't actually know. Thank goodness for ElastiGirl, my blogging mentor, who has a list of bloggers that she reads regularly. And while I was reading Bits and Odd Pieces of Mindy's Kingdom I found something I had never heard of before. A swap. Sort of like a blogging pen pal, because you learn about another blogger and then you send them stuff that you think they would like. Only rule is it has to fit in a 8 1/2 x 11 envelope. And they send stuff back to you.

SO MUCH FUN! I can't wait!