Happy New Year

December 31, 2008 at 9:44 pm (Thoughts and Musings)
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Amanda, over at Oh Amanda did a “Year in Review” that I thought was pretty cool, so I’m shamelessly copying her.  I think she copied someone else, so I feel okay about my lack of originality.

Here’s how it works, for each month I’m going to post the first sentence of the first post that month, and in theory it will provide a review of the past year.  In case the sentences are confusing, I’ll link to each post so you can follow my train of thought – if you care that much.

Here goes:

January:  Can you believe that there is a home within North America without any internet access of any kind?  Well, my parents-in-law live in it.

February: WOW! 282 entries! Well, here are the winners as drawn by random.org

March: For more than two years I have been in search of a modest bathing suit.

April: Amy’s Humble Musings has another thought provoking post that I’ve been mulling over for a week.

May: On Wednesday evening, my mackerdoodle began running a fever.

June: What makes a movie cheesy? I’m sitting in my sister’s family room watching In the Name of the King.

July: My parents, and several friends and aquaintances who reside in varying parts of British Columbia Canada are experiencing a heat wave.

August:  While I’ve been caught up this summer with de-dairying, and night weaning and sleep training, I find that periodically I lose my original goal of doing my best to enjoy every minute of being Mackerdoodle’s mama.

September:  On the heels of reading Queen Bee’s guest post over at Rock’s in My Dryer on being the parent of an only child, I am faced with this article out of the United Kingdom.

October

October

November:  Tuesday is election day here in these United States.

December: “A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey. . .  “  That is the opening of one of my favorite poems: “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot; but it could have been written about our trip home from our Thanksgiving break.

It was a fun excersise, and a fun way to remember how far we’ve come in just a year.  2009 will be another year of change for the Cowan family as we welcome baby KumQuat into our lives.  I am praying that when I look back on 2009, I will have as much fun and laughter and joy in my memories as I have for 2008.

Happy New Year to you all.

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Wordless Wednesday: I Love Nana!

December 31, 2008 at 8:56 am (wordless wednesday)
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Funny

December 30, 2008 at 10:28 pm (Humor)
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Last night in a discussion with my parents, Jonathan said “Can I quote Spurgeon?”  I responded “I love Spurgeon!”

This morning Jawan posted this video, and after laughing at the chorus, I knew I had to share it with you.  You’ll either totally get it and laugh and laugh, or you’ll think “huh?”

The guy who wrote it has a blog which you can find by clicking here.  He’s being added to my list of people I’d like to have sit in my living room.

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Drama Queen

December 29, 2008 at 10:08 pm (Thoughts and Musings)
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If you’ve known me longer than, say, five minutes you know that I’m given to a little drama.  Okay, a lot of drama.  I’m a drama queen, in fact.  I do believe that I may be a partially recovering drama queen, but if I were in Drama Queens Anonymous, I’d still be at “Step One: admit you have a problem.”  I tell big stories.  I love to get big laughs.  I thrive on attention.  Why do you think I blog?

As a part of my Drama Queen affliction, I love anything that involves groups of people watching me.  I love acting, public speaking, doing demonstrations and singing either solo or in small ensembles.  Choirs spread the attention too far for my liking.  Interestingly, the Lord hasn’t given me the opportunity to do any of those things for quite some years now.  It’s been at least three years since I’ve sung publicly, and as much time since I’ve acted, and apart from teaching I haven’t spoken formally in public since at least 2004.  Do you think maybe the Lord has been giving me a time out?  I do.

Veronica, over at Toddled Dredge, who is one of my very favorite bloggers, is doing her annual 12 days of Christmas posts.  This year’s theme is passages from Handel’s Messiah, and today’s post is from Isaiah 40:9 “. . . shine for thy light has come . . . “.  Please read it.  I can’t do it justice, but I think that after reading my above confessions, you will understand why Richard’s story has convicted me so greatly.  Maybe the willingness with which Richard stood is the willingness with which I should sit still and shut up.

Maybe, just maybe, I shine with Christ’s light when the spotlight is aimed somewhere else.

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And Now For Something Brainless

December 28, 2008 at 8:48 pm (Just Life)
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Apparently my brain fell out somewhere over the past week, because I posted my Wordless Wednesday on Thursday and didn’t notice until today.  I even scheduled it to post on that day.  So to give me time to recover what portion of my brain isn’t dedicated to gestation and fighting off the temptation of Cadbury Ornament Eggs, here is a post of things I didn’t write:

These people have too much time on their hands, but it’s pretty cool.

Don’t you like reading predicitons people made for the last year?  I do.

This guy batted a 0%, and confidently ends the column with an expectation that at least one prediction will come true.

Joe Scarborough confidently predicts that Barack Obama’s political aspirations in 2008 will be short lived and that Al Gore will come to the rescue of his party.

But these guys manage to have some pretty accurate predictions, if only because they disagree with each other, guaranteeing that one is bound to be at least partially accurate.

And finally, the hurricane predictions have become some of my favorite reading as we pass through yet another drought summer from lack of hurricane and tropical storm activity.

Hope that keeps you busy while I try to get my brain caught up.

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That Smell

December 27, 2008 at 1:22 pm (Thoughts and Musings)
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Isn’t it funny the feelings that smell evokes for us?

For instance, the mackerdoodle has had a stuffy nose the last few days and I’ve been applying menthol rub at night before bed.  The smell makes me think of my paternal grandmother every time. I don’t really know why, I just know it does.

We received a home made trail mix from one of our students before the break.  It contains almonds, craisins, and coconut and the mackerdoodle has been eating it every chance she gets.  As a result when she snuggles up to me she often smells of coconut.  I breathe in the smell and it’s like a tiny beach vacation in one deep breath.

Right now I’m making Turkey soup, and as the smell of turkey wafts through the house I think of warm holidays on colder days in my childhood.  It’s almost as if the smell itself makes me warm and cozy.

Smell is a powerful thing.  It’s one of those common graces that the Lord has provided, but which we so often take for granted.

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He Loves Me . . . He Loves Me Not

December 26, 2008 at 7:31 am (Just Life)
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One of my favorite “once a year” treats in the entire world is Cadbury Easter Creme Eggs.  I LOVE those things!  So imagine my delight when I happened to see on Oh Amanda that Cadbury released their Creme Eggs for Christmas!  I have been on the prowl for these creamy, eggy, chocolaty delicacies ever since reading Amandas posts – a fruitless prowl, but a prowl nonetheless.

On Monday I had to stop by Walgreens to pick up some photos I had printed.  While I waited at the photo counter, I asked Jonathan to check and see if they had any Ornament Eggs.  After I had collected my photos, we left the store and I assumed my search had once again proved to be vanity.

When I got home, he presented me with this:

Yeah.  That’s 48 Cadbury Ornament Eggs.  Half of me said “Cha-Ching!  Who loves me!?!”  The other half of me said “Oh, please let me not develop gestational diabetes from consuming 48 Cadbury Ornament Eggs in three days of creamy, eggy, chocolaty gluttony!”

You’ll be proud to know that I have not only shared my bounty with my family, I have rationed myself to one egg per day.  Jonathan assures me that he was just trying to be loving and not at all trying to kill me in one of the most delicious ways possible.  I believe him.

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Wordless Wednesday: Isn’t Nana and Papa’s Air Bed So Much Fun?!

December 25, 2008 at 6:28 am (Mackerdoodle, wordless wednesday)
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Gather Round, Let Me Tell You a Tale; A Tale of a Plan Gone Awry.

December 24, 2008 at 4:35 pm (Just Life)
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I had such a great idea this year.  Instead of sending out annual New Year’s letters that would take up my entire Christmas break, I thought I’d get ahead of the curve and send out Thanksgiving cards and letters.  That way I’d have the entire break, and the lead up to the break, free to prepare for guests, prepare for the end of the school semester etc.   I would be ahead of the curve, and on the ball, and I’d have free time.

My first hurdle was actually finding a Thanksgiving card.  Type “fall photo card” into any of the search engines and you can find half a bazillion Halloween cards ( do people really send Halloween cards?)  and three Thanksgiving cards, all of which have strange cartoon turkeys on them.  I cleared this hurdle when I discovered the Stamped Envelope who designed a Thanksgiving card just for us.

Unfortunately, through no fault of the fantastic staff at Stamped Envelope, and entirely through my lateness in ordering, the cards arrived after Thanksgiving.  As I opened them, thinking that if I got them out that week I’d still be okay, it hit me: Thanksgiving in Canada had been six weeks ago.  even if I had mailed them at the beginning of November, three weeks early for US Thanksgiving, they’d still be almost a month late for the full half of my list that resides in Canada.  Additionally, my Aunt lives in Australia and doesn’t have a Thanksgiving holiday at all.  The “clever wind” slowly seeped from my sails.

I then found myself caught up in all of those things which I had anticipated: preparing for guests, enjoying my guests, preparing for the semester end and preparing for more guests.  The busier I got, the less clever my Thanksgiving cards looked, until finally I decided that I had to either send them horribly late, or waste the money and not send them at all.

So yesterday I mailed out Thanksgiving cards.  Next year it’s New Year’s cards.  You can probably expect them sometime in March.

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Memories

December 22, 2008 at 9:17 pm (Family and Friends)
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DO you have stupid, irelevant memories of moments that should really be insignificant?  I know that I do.  For instance I have a memory of spending three hours on the floor in the living room of my parent’s home while my sister tried to teach me to roll my R’s.  By the time my mother got home we were laughing so hard that our sides hurt, but we couldn’t explain for the life of us what was so funny.  I still can’t, but just thinking of it makes me smile.

I remember one year our parents left us at home alone while they took a trip to somewhere for something.  While I was getting ready for school one morning, I heard my sister screaming like a terrified wild animal at the base of the stairs, and went tearing down to find out what the heck was going on.  She grinned and said “April Fool.”

“Don’t do that to me!”  I yelled at her.  “I thought a satanist had left a goat’s head on our front stairs!”

She dissolved into laughter and fell on the floor, managing to gasp out “Oh yeah, that’s the first thing that would have crossed my mind.”  She was still laughing about it days later.  In fact, I think she’s laughing right now.

I remember hearing my sister calling my name one evening as I was lying in bed.  I got up and padded across the carpeted hall in my bare feet.  I opened her door to see her lying in bed.  She grinned and said “Seeing as you’re here, will you turn off my light?”  I am ashamed to admit that this worked more than once on me.  A lot more.

I remember taking hours to wash the dishes, and taking hours to walk home from school.  I remember tobagganing behind the Buhler’s house and shopping in Smithers.  My sister is there in all of those memories.

We’re only 17 months apart (I’m older, just so there’s no confusion) and did so many things together.  We were often in Sunday School classes together, every second year we were in classes together in our small Christian school, we had the same friends, and so attended the same birthday parties.  We were together so often that new people got our names confused.  We fought with all the fervor and violence that two strong headed girls can employ, and we were so very different in so many things; but when I think about the best times of my life, my sister is in almost all of them.

I’m proud to admit that she’s now my best friend.  If I had the choice to spend an evening with any celebrity or my sister it wouldn’t even be a choice, I’d pick my sister.  We could still spend three hours doing something stupid like trying to roll our R’s.   Although we’d be interrupted by our children, we’d still end up laughing until tears poured down our cheeks.  She’s the only person I call just to chat, and we often chat for more than an hour, covering everything from doctrine to diapers to digital photography.

It’s her birthday today, and I can’t be with her, so I thought I’d bring her into my bloggy world and it can be another memory we can have together.  Happy Birthday Melissa.  I love you.

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