My little bowhead

I got to spend some sweet time with my Goddaughter this weekend. She's just starting to get enough hair to put bows in, but her mom never does...so I took the liberty of doing so! She kept looking up at the ceiling trying to figure out what I was doing. She's so sweet. She'll be 10 months old August 12th.


Keep her family in your prayers. Her mom's grandmother is probably not going to make it much longer. She's been fighting cancer for the past few months. Laura went down here last week for a day or so, and she's just waiting for a phone call now. She's very close to her, and I hate to see her hurting.

It's 4:30am

and I'm awake. I had to write this tonight because I knew if I waited until morning I would lose that heat-of-the-moment feeling.

I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. But I suppose like moms have that 6th sense of hearing their children utter "momma" when they can be 600 miles away, I have something like that I like to call a "bug detector".

So I got in bed tonight, read for a little bit, turned out the light and went to nightnight land. All was well in nightnight land. But because of a gene I inherited from my father, I sleep with one arm over my eyes and my elbow pointed to the ceiling. Imagine my shock and horror when I wake up to SOMETHING CRAWLING ON MY ARM. Without any clue what it was, I flung my arm over toward the other side of the bed, hopefully launching whatever it was off. Then I sit up, heart pounding. Granted it's pitch black, but my eyes are adjusting, but I don't have my glasses on so I can't see JACK...and frankly I don't want to see what I just flung across the room. If you know me, you know my deathly fear of spiders (all bugs really). So I finally am able to see my floor enough from the moonlight coming in the window to walk across and turn on the big light. What do I see? The mother of all mother of ROACHES crawling across my end table next to the bed. So I grab a flip flop, not sure why they don't pack much of a punch, and proceed to swat at it, only causing it to jump ONTO MY BED. I'm sufficiently freaked out now, fully awake, and ready for battle.

To make an even longer story not quite so long, I still don't know that little blankety blank thing is. Last I saw of it, it had crawled into a bookbag laying on my floor next to my old computer desk. I had decided last night that I'd go back to work tomorrow (err, today?) since I was feeling better, but I'm starting to think I need to stay home and clean. I have plans all day Saturday and don't want to put it off until Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, I'm not done. Are you still with me?

I decide to spend the remainder of the night on the couch in the living room. Normally I'd go get in the bed in the guest room, aka Laura's old room, but no one's slept in there in quite a while I'd I'd be almost certain to have some guests in that bed. Anyway. I walk into the living room, turn the light on to make sure the couch is cleaned off, and SOMETHING CRAWLS ACROSS THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF ME. It's not black, not crunchy from what I can tell, but resembles NOTHING of his brother, cousin, whatever they got to play in the commercial. That's right folks. A gecko. I couldn't make this stuff up.

So I know they're not harmful and everything, and I'd just love to catch that bad boy to put him outside to stop my pounding heart, but he's very startled and runs behind the TV cabinet and I've yet to see him again. But then again, he's a gecko, and for all I know he's disguising himself as a living room couch at this very moment. If you see no new posts from me in a while, you'll know he got me. Or the roach did. Or I had a heart attack.

And the even funnier thing is, one of the blogs I read recently had this post, and I laughed at her because I had never even heard of one of those things before. See if I laugh at a bug situation again.

Oh, did I mention I had been sleeping with my mouth open?

98 days

That's how long it's been since I was last sick. Three weeks and 1 day after my sinus surgery I caught a cold and had to get some drugs to kick it. Since then, it's been pretty smooth sailing--which beats getting sick every single 3 weeks.

The week before vacation I started getting a sore throat. I loaded up on some Vitamin C and OTC Zyrtec and it seemed to do the trick for the duration of vacation (hey--that rhymes!). But yesterday I started getting another sore throat at work. I called my ENT but the soonest they could see me was Monday morning. I figured I'd tough it out at work, but I'm pretty pitiful when I'm sick, and about 8:30 last night I left work 2 hours shy of when I was supposed to get off. Came home, had fever close to 101. Went straight to bed with God's greatest invention--the heating pad.

Got up this morning and went to the clinic. After some drama regarding my insurance (how come no one tells newly graduated people that your deductible starts OVER July 1st?? I never knew that when I was on mom and dad's..), and a wait for over 2 hours, they finally diagnosed me with an upper respiratory infection and probable sinus infection. He said he wasn't completely sure it was a sinus infection, but given my history he'd be willing to bet it was--especially with the fever. Oh, and wouldn't you know...my temperature was 98.4 when they took it. Figures.

Soo, I got a shot in my bahonkus, 2 Rx's, and was sent on my merry way. The good thing is that the Strep test came back negative (woohoo!), and my throat isn't really that sore anymore. I'm still pretty stuffy and my head feels about THIS big (imagine my hands stretched out as far as they can go). BUT, I think a day of resting was what I needed. Dad picked up my meds a few minutes ago, so I've started on them. I'll go back to work tomorrow, although it is Friday and I do have a doctors' excuse...hmm..

What does everyone have planned for this weekend?

aww

This made me sad! Poor Sophia...we'll miss you!

to be loved

We might not know if it has a name
We might call it circumstance
We might try to look the other way
We might think it’s accident

It’s a wound--it’s a sting
It’s a finger with a string
It’s a song with no words that we know
It’s a mist--it’s a dream
It’s a faded memory
And we want it bad
We want it bad

Chorus:
To be here
To be now
To be open to the truth
To be held
To be seen
To be heard
To be faith
To be hope
And greatest gift of all--
To be loved--all we really want is
To be loved

We might call it the price of growing up
We might think it’s fairytale
We might try to medicate the ache
We might think we’re all alone

It’s a name we can’t speak
It’s a stranger on the street
It’s a hope in the things not seen
It’s a peace that we crave
It’s the thing for which we’re made
And we want it bad
We want it bad

We find no rest until we rest in You
We cling to our stubbornness
We let go of what we never had
To find our way to You

'Cause we hurt and we bleed
In our brokenness and need
And we're scared to come in too close
But Your love has a way
Of invading every space
And we want it bad
We want it bad

Slide shows

Here's some slide shows with all the pics from vacation. You can click each one to take you to the page with them all on there if you don't want to wait through each slideshow...

the long post...

(I apologize for the length of this post. there were several hundred pictures I wanted to share with everyone, so I had to sift through them!)

So, I'm home. I don't want to be. I walked out of the airplane in Little Rock to 97 degree weather and probably the same percentage of humidity. Drove back to West Monroe and it was 100 degrees. I think the absolute hottest it got in Washington/Oregon was around 79. It was absolutely PERFECT weather. Cold, even.

Sooo, the run down of our trip...

Laura and I flew into Seattle on Monday. We got there about noon their time, 2 our time. Wasn't too much of jetlag as far as the time change was concerned, but we hadn't slept but maybe 2 hours in the past 24 hours at that point. (She didn't get off work until 11 the night before, and our flight left at 6am...and she hadn't packed.) So mom and dad picked us up at the airport, and we went straight to the Space Needle.





Pretty cool, huh.

After that, we drove out to the little town where we were going whale watching the next morning. We got a hotel and then went down to the marina and walked around and looked at all the fancy yachts. I really want one! There was a pretty part of the pier that you could see the mountain in the distance. It truly is quite pretty out there. It was so hard to capture the mountains in the distance. It's very hazy up there, so they don't turn out very well. And honestly, pictures don't do them any justice.







The next day, of course, was the whale watching trip! They took us out pretty far in Puget Sound and we think they even crossed into Canadian waters. I don't have a passport, so we joked that I illegally crossed the border. Anyway, we got some awesome shots of the whales. They really performed for us! I have a 35mm camera that I used in addition to my digital one, and I still have to drop that off to get developed. I'm curious how those turned out. I'll probably dedicate a whole post to those pictures, so stayed tuned :)


(can you tell we were freezing?)


(click this one to zoom and see that big fella)

After the whale watching tour, we caught a ferry across the Puget Sound and started driving towards the coast. Laura and I really wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, and I REALLY wanted to see the waves crashing against the rocks. We went to the first beach area, and it was COLD!! Like maybe 50 degrees? Pretty chilly. There wasn't a rocky coast, but we found tons of sand dollars. You can't hardly find any that aren't broken at the southern beaches, and the tide was really low and the whole beach was covered in them!





Then we went to some of the area lighthouses. I love lighthouses. I think they are so neat looking. I had to get some pictures of the ones we saw...especially after hiking 2 miles one way to see them!








Isn't that like amazingly gorgeous?! I literally could've stayed out there all day. I mean, I don't see how people can see that and still think there isn't a God. What?

After that, we went to my 2nd favorite place of the trip (first being the whales). Mount St. Helen! I didn't really know the entire history of the place, so mom read her little book she had bought on the drive up there. Lemme tell ya...that's not an easy drive either! Not for the faint at heart. There were several places along the side of the mountain road that had no guard rail and a shear drop off on the side. Every time dad rounded a curve we would holler...and that just made him drive faster!! Anyway, it was VERY impressive. Especially because the explosion happened in like 1980, and the destruction path is still completely bare. There are patches of grass and stuff, but for the most part it's just dried up lava. Pumice perhaps? Anyway, the pictures didn't come out that great, it didn't show up all that well, but here ya go..








See the path of destruction? This is what it used to look like before the blast.

Anyway, that's just a taste of the pictures. We took a TON of them. I'll have to go through and edit some of them to repost. Hope this didn't bore anyone! We really had a great time! Our flight left this morning (Thursday) at 7:55, so we left the hotel around 5:30 to get there, and we actually should've gotten there earlier. Seattle at 5:30 is busy! Anyway, we got to Atlanta around 3:45, and our connecting flight didn't leave until 6:40 so we had a pretty good layover. We ate lunch and shopped a little. Got back to Little Rock around 7:15 and Laura's boyfriend picked us up and took us back to her place. I left not long after that cause I had a 3 hour drive and wanted to get back before it got too late. Now it's 1:40am and I'm headed to bed. Been up almost 24 hours again! Gotta be back to work tomorrow at 2.

The honeymoon's over...:)