there and back

We did it.
mission accomplished. we hustled through 13.1 miles of downtown Nashville and hills to boot.
Nashville is a great city. I really really like it. if, heaven forbid, i should ever want to move from Austin - it might be there. maybe.
i don't know.
who am i to say? my life is but a vapor.

speaking of which. i turned my air conditioner on when I got home last night to knock some of the dankness from the air.
and that's when i realized that the little fan in my living room and my bedroom's cieling fan were both turned off. i feel as though i distinctly rmember them being on when I left on Friday morning.
I haven't heard of any type of crime outbreak in which the criminals pick locks, sneak in and turn off the fans in your home, and then relock your door on their way out. but I haven't really kept up with the news that well lately.

I wouldn't put it past my new apartment managers though.
they probably found out that i hate coming home to a place where the air is stale and hot. they are so rude.
they act like they've been here forever and i just moved in and don't know how things work. when the case actually is that I've lived here over a year and they came in and changed everything without notifying everybody - and then they act all put out and snobby when you come in with a question about why your name is not in the gate's key pad system anymore and why your own key card doesn't work.

ugh.
listen, kimberly or kristen or krystal - whatever your name is.
I live here. you're the apartment manager. your job is to manage the apartments. one of which is mine. i am paying you lots of money to do the things you day you will do - like have the ants that are marching away with my kitchen and swimming in my contact lense case taken care of.
but they have actually continued to multiply and i think they left an eviction notice for me on my bathroom mirror.
I would at least expect for you to notify them that this is not their apartment until they pay rent. unless you did tell them and you've been collecting double rent for the past month - oooo no you didunt.
all i am saying is - i don't want to live with an entire colony of ants. not in my bathroom. not in my closet and most certainly not in my cake holder where i want to keep my muffins and cupcakes...
and while we're at it - i don't know why my counter that is made of particle board covered in faux granite laminent has swollen to twice its normal size in random places, but i do know you said you'd have it fixed.

a month ago.

i'm not complaining. i just want to let you know that the people before you did an outstanding job and so far you have a lot of catching up to do if you intend on getting best apartment manager ever award.

3 hours and 15 minutes

tomorrow is the day of the big race. it is really hard to believe that it has been nearly seven months sice we decided to do this. i think i "trained" for about four months all together - but not consecutively. and mostly before the new year.
so anyways. there is a lot about this trip to look forward to. which is fortunate - because if it were only to go run, i may just have to throw myself down the stairwell here at the office and try to injure something to put myself out of the race.

..I will get to spend time with both of my beautiful sisters. just the three of us for the first time in a long long time
..I will get to see Kelsey W. whom I have not seen in years. YEARS!
..I will get to meet Cassie for real
..I will get to be in Nashville Tennessee. a place I have never gone, but have always wanted to go
..I may get a t-shirt that claims I ran in the Country Music Marathon of 07
..I'll get to hear a different country band every mile or so
..We are planning on eating at a raved-about pancake house
..I get to fly. an activity which never ceases to thrill me
..I'm sure there's a ton more, but that's it for now.


I have another hour before it's time to head to the airport. I better go ahead and stare at the clock. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY! I can't wait!



"Ride it like you stole it."
-my boss

life is sweet.
you know the end of Amelie when there is happy accordian music and the narrator is making simple observations and the world just seems right?

i feel like that is the season i am currently in.

i wanted to tell you more about the Bull but everytime i try and write out these funny stories about him they seem to just come off as rude.
basically he still cannot control the volume of his voice. only today it lead to me overhearing his implications of my incompetence. among various other odd statements. he still bounces his bull-leg and shakes the entire floor. today a lady in another cubicle said, 'do y'all feel that? is the floor shaking? my chair is shaking...'

so it's not just me being over-dramatic.


i think i will start giving you a new saying that my new boss says in every post.
today i will leave you with:
"there's so many you can't swing a dead cat with out hittin' one"

hey hey it's the UK

so ellen and i skipped over the pond for the weekend to visit our dearest maria jourdan.
i can't even describe how wonderful a trip this was. every moment was sweet and fun and perfect.
there's not even a thought of havinf missed something or not seen enough or what have you. it was just right. i wish we could have stayed longer. but as it was - was just right.

i posted a bunch of pictures, but they are only a fraction of the batch of over 1100 images that ellen and i took.
i am so pumped to print them and put them in and actual album - you know, like the olden days before online albums and photo buckets.

anyways.

back to the grind.
I praise God for that little adventure and brief escape from the drudge.

speaking of escape. it turns out that my sister may be moving to hawaii.

bye now.

oh deer!

well. i hit a deer.
actually the deer sort of hit me. if you want to get technical.

there i was just traveling along. minding my own business.
i was passing another car. the deer just sauntered out in front of their car and stopped. i saw it all happen in slow motion. they swirved to the right a little and smacked right into the deer. the angle at which they hit it caused a flurry of fur and legs and guts to project backwards to my car. agh!
i just yelled really loudly and mowed down the corpse with my right front bumper and tire.
i pulled over to make sure it didn't pop a tire. the other car was about 50 yards behind me. i was waiting thinking they would pull up to make sure my car was okay. nope. they just drove off. for all they know i could have been stranded with two flat tires! jerks. the world is full of them.
anyways. the car was fine. so i drove on home.
i was totally wired and wide awake the remaining 2.5 hours.

so there's a cure for drowsey driving. hit something of substantial size.

now i have to go get my car fixed.

new kid on the block

so my bosses and coworkers have all been playing musical chairs over the past couple of months and are at a point where they may stay for a while.
in all of the hustle and bustle there came a few new members to my beloved little team.
i will call him the bull. as in bull-dozer. he is also at times referred to as cry-baby-crypsie.

when bull comes to work, make no mistake that it is he who enters. the floor usually shakes a little when people walk around in the office, but with bull - it's way more than a little shakeage. don't get me wrong. i am in no way saying that he is fat. infact he appears to be in fairly apt physical condition. but his stature is quite substantial. he's just a big guy.
bull suffers from voice imodulation. a condition for which awareness was hieghtened after will ferrell's appearance on SNL. you can hear everything the bull says.

basically his presence is large and in your face even if you are cowering in your cube space avoiding confrontation with him. invariably, though, he will always come by and talk through the beaded curtain that clearly screams "privacy please". and ten times out of ten bull is asking an identical question to what he asked you the day before, or eleven minutes ago. and surprisingly the answer remains the same.

well bull has decided that he belongs in the cube next to mine. after about 20 mintues of opening and closing all the drawers (of which there are only three), and from the sound of it, throwing his body into the cube walls, he is nearly settled.
now it's time for bull to make a lot of personal phone calls. (dude i can hear you. AND it sounds like john's wife doesn't really want to borrow your wife's breast pump. let it go).
he somehow still has excess energy even after all of the moving and shaking he did.
so he proceeds to sit and bounce his knee for the next hour.
how do i know this is what he's doing> because, like i said, the floor is quaking. my computer's monitor is actually bobbing and ratteling from the motion.
dude! stop shaking the entire building!
i'm getting sea sick.
if i yack you better believe i'm aiming over the top of the cube.


seriously. stop.



Will Ferrell - Voice Imodulation - These bloopers are hilarious

for lunch today, we'll be having second hand smoke. hope you're hungry.

My eyes were opened a little today. well spiritually and mentally, because quite frankly it wasn't physically possible for me to keep my actual eyelids ajar.
(can you say ajar in reference to eyelids? is eyelids one word or two?)

anyways.
it all starts with this morning. i woke up at 655 with a vice grip head ache. my alarm had been going off for precisely an hour and ten minutes. i think i realized that i could hear it about 30 minutes into it, but my dream had incorperated it so that turning it off was not an option. so there i lay for over an hour subconciuosly listening to that shrill beeping.
so anyways. i got dressed and ready in the dark and stumbled down the stairs. made it to work on time, but didn't realize til i got there that i had accidentally dressed about 20 years older than my age, and i forgot to brush, comb, touch or even look at my wack head of hair. woops.

so i sat in my cube for appx three hours before having any human contact. my eyes were nearly closed the entire time.

blah blah.
well it was time for lunch and so i went to a coffee shop i had driven by yesterday. it claims to be the 'only wood fired coffee in austin'. not that i really know what that means - but it sounded good. it was a pretty cool little place. i decided to sit outside and write my prayer journal for the day. pleasant time.

well about 5 minutes after i sat down there came a pretty odd ("very austin" as non-austinites would say) couple. it was an older lady and a young guy covered in ink. they chose the table right next to mine. fine. i can handle that. then they both light up. i happen to be directly in the path on which the wind is taking thier smoke. so my tired puffy eyes were forced to even more norrow slits so that i could try and see what i was writing.
the presence of evil was pretty distinct.
this is when my other eyes started to come awake. the couple was talking about their upcoming ritual. apparently someone named raven and another named willow (reeeeeal original) were arguing over which diety was to be paired with the pheonix in the production. yadda yadda yadda. there was multiple profanities and lots of mention of "the magic". it was crazy to listen to them talk and hear that they think that junk is real.

with every word they spoke i got this mental image of a bubble coming out of their mouth and floating up and bursting leaving no trace of its existence.
how empty and self serving.

anyways. they finally got up to leave and as they were walking off it stuck me that they look just like anybody else walking down the street. and then to think of all the people in this city that i see all the time. and how many of them are so deep in these dark pits of sin and hopelessness.

how selfish of me to not be burdened to share the amazing life and truth and fullness i know in GOD.
i hope that as i know GOD more and as i spend more time with HIM, HIS presence consumes me. so that when i sit down at a table next to someone, they don't feel like darkness is near, but the see and feel a warmth and life that can only be rooted in GOD the FATHER.

there's a whole city of lost souls right here. i don't have to go to a third world country to find them. I hope that I can see some people here come to know Christ this year.

are we allowed to make new year's resolutions in April?
yeah?
okay.