wednesday the seventeenth.

today, people everywhere will drink themselves into oblivion in honor of St Patrick's Day, or as the Irish like to call it: Wednesday.

heard this on the radio this morning and laughed out loud :)

i think i might have something here.

i think i have a sneaking suspicion... but is there any other type of suspicion to have? can i have a skulking one, or perhaps a creeping one? are there less ominous sounding types of suspicions? really i'm trying very hard not to let this (insert appropriate adjective here) suspicion get the best of me. if i voice it does that no longer make it a suspicion? what would it become? i kind of like having a suspicion, of whatever variety it may be. it would be a shame to take away its title of suspicion before i even figured out what type it was...

i will continue to keep it to myself.

serendipitous.

i bought a new car in November, the weekend after Thanksgiving. I named her Sophie. (she was gonna be Sadie until i found out that my boyfriend used to know a girl named Sadie who had a huge crush on him.) two weeks later, some debris on the highway flew up and hit Sophie, nicking the grill and taking a small chunk of paint off the front end of the hood. i went to the shop that my dealer suggested to get an estimate on fixing what my uncle deemed to be a 'scratch' but that i still preferred to call a 'chunk.' they told me it would cost me roughly $400 to fix it. since i am not the idiot girl they apparently assumed me to be, i knew that was not entirely true. so i ignored them. we made it through the winter just fine. when i went to get my oil changed, Ismael and Jose reminded me that the chunk was there and that i should do something about it so it wouldnt start to rust. so i went back to the same place to ask them for a less expensive estimate. the man who looked at it said 'let me see if i have some paint mixed up in that color.' he came back about two minutes later with some touchup paint, took care of the chunk, gave me a little bottle of paint, and i was good to go. i knew it could be done for less than $400.
similarly - my parents bought me a laptop when i went to college. i named her Vanilley. (counterpart to Milley who belongs to my BFITW) last week she decided to stop making noise on friday. not only was all my music on itunes rendered useless, but this was the day right after i had missed my thursday shows which meant that i would not be able to catch up with them online. to make matters worse, i missed my monday shows too. i restarted my computer yesterday. today, the sound is back. this makes no sense to me but hey i'll take it over having to buy a new computer.
Life is Good.

bovine ballroom?

i was blessed to have grown up in a family that loved music. my two sisters and i took piano lessons with our mom, we all played instruments in the band, and it was not uncommon for one or all of us to burst out into random song at any given moment.
i was also blessed to have grown up in a family that taped movies off tv. they were some of my favorites - from the Brave Little Toaster to the sing-a-long musicals. we had Bye Bye Birdie, Singin in the Rain, and Oklahoma. i spent countless hours watching these musicals - wishing i could sing and dance like that, trying to sing without my top lip moving, and working desperately to keep up with the words running along the bottom of the screen. but try as i might, there were just some times that they went way too fast for me and i missed a word or two.
one of those songs that i missed a lot from was in Oklahoma - the one from the box social where the farmer and the cowman should be friends, so apparently the cowboys danced with the farmers' daughters and the farmers dance with the rancher's cows. it always seemed to me that the farmer's were getting gipped in this friendship if they gave up their daughters and all they got in return were cows to dance with. how would you even dance with a cow? they just dont seem like they would be very light on their feet.
i had an epiphany (and/or a moment of clear hearing) last night in the Elizabethtown High School auditorium, watching their performance of Oklahoma with my aunt and cousin - the farmers were dancing with the ranchers' gals. that makes SO much more sense!!
i love musicals :)

i love march.

Top Ten things i love about the month of March - in (pretty much) reverse chronological order.

- sometimes Easter (cuz i like rabbits. and jellybeans.)
- MY BIRTHDAY
- Spring!
- Lissa's wedding!
          (ok so it doesnt happen EVERY march but its still uber exciting)
- St. Patricks Day
          (aka 'wear green day' of spirit week at Forest Hills Elementary School)
- Abi's Birthday
          (its kind of interesting that its also the ides of march...)
- Girl Scout Cookies.
            (i am a firm believer that ThinMints are to be eaten by the sleeve)
- Reese's peanut butter eggs.
- Julie's Birthday!!!!
- Shamrock Shakes!!!

you will note that March Madness is not on my list. i couldn't care less about basketball. although there was that one year (tenth grade i do believe) that i correctly guessed that Syracuse would win it all. their uniforms were orange. what can i say i am my mothers child :)

things i can not comprehend.

so as a part of the reading plan that i have started this year for Lent (and beyond) i have been making my way through the book of Job. up until now, i thought i understood this story: Job is a good guy. Satan gets permission from God to torture Job. Job loses everything. His wife says 'curse God and die.' Job remains faithful and God blesses him. the end. what i never knew was that all this happens within 39 verses. (the first 32 and the last 7 if you wanted to know) who knew that the book of Job was 42 chapters long? not me. the whole rest of the book is conversation between Job and his 3 friends who came to comfort him. this is where i start to lose the story. i really have trouble understanding what everyone here is saying. apparently the friends aren't doing so good a job of being comforting, because Job keeps having to respond to everything they say. it seems like they're arguing, but as i read it, they all seem to be saying the same things in general. whats with the disagreement? i must be missing something. or maybe everyone else is missing something. maybe i just have the extended version of Job in my Bible and everyone else's is only 39 verses long.
for a long time in my life, i avoided the book of Job like the plague. it was suggested to me that i should read it during a really low point in my life, but i thought that just seemed a little cliche, and besides that i already knew the 39 verse version of the story, so i just never read it. now that i've started, it seems to have brought up more questions than it has answered for me. why DO bad things happen to good people? does the Devil hand-pick ALL the people that seem to be going through Hell on earth? Why does God just sit back and let us suffer and give Satan the power to bring us to our knees and lower? how would i react to the loss of everyone i most loved? and what in the world are Job's friends talking about?
maybe its not for me to know the reasons why. maybe all i need to know is that the same God who allows pain and devastation into our lives is the same one who will, in His great love, pick us up and put us back together again.
my thoughts and prayers and love go out to my sister's sister-in-law and her family. by God's grace may you have the strength to praise God through this storm.

billable work.

i spent two and a half hours of my day today printing, copying, and counting 550 pages of calculations which left me with one question:

who decided that 'a buttload' is not a billable amount?

i would like to find them and just point out that their logic is flawed and i have the papercuts to prove it.