purge

How to clean out your closet:

Find yourself some sisters.
Gather them in your closet and display your entire wardrobe.
Hold out each item or try it on so they can see.
For each piece, say something like, "This looks so horrible on me." or, "I look so fat in this." or, "This color makes me look dead."
If there is silence in the room, get rid of the item.
If there is wholehearted agreement with your statement, keep the item. They're probably just saying that because they want your clothes.
If they disagree with you and say you look great, put the item aside and go ask a brother. He'll tell you the real truth.

this is torture

Just wanted to state my anguish over the weather today. It is currently somewhere around 50 degrees outside, 30mph winds, and a thunderstorm coming through. With all of that, it feels more like 3 degrees. Not really my idea of fun, especially when I have to drive in that to get to work today!
Candace said she's happy to be inside her warm house, but since our house is always freezing (thanks to Mom and Beth who are babies about the temp never being higher than 69 inside) I'm really cold! I think I might run over to the Sabo's house. :)
Alright, I'm going to go dig out all 3 sweaters I have. I'll probably be wearing all of them to work in a few minutes.

Since my days at the store are coming to a close, I thought I'd post a few pictures to show you what it looks like now that we've been up and running for close to a year. All these pictures were taking with my phone, so I'm sorry about the blurriness or weird angles. The above pictures are just funny that have happened... Sam likes to come help me by getting all of my toy swords off the wall and lining them up on the floor...Beth doesn't want to hang the mountain of clothes so Emily buys her a drink that we don't have a bottle opener for so she uses the fire extinguisher to open her soda. Customers frequently laugh at our ongoing antics and I think it's why they come back.
The next few pictures are a sort of panoramic view (the best I could do with my camera...) of what you see when you walk in the front door. It was a weird time of day and all the sunlight is coming in from the windows, but you get the idea... Okay, left to right...
In the next few days, I'll try to take some pics of our day-to-day goings on, instead of just how the store looks.

costumes

So...Beth and I have 2 more weeks of work left. We're pretty excited to get to sleep in on Monday the 4th. :)

I'm still making plans for my trip to Virginia in December and looking around for the cheapest ticket. So far, the best one I've found is $254 round trip. If you have any better ideas, let me know. I'm so happy that I get to be there to see Judah!


The next 3 weeks for me will be living hell because someone that I work with decided to take most of my pain meds. 2 bottles that always last exactly 30 days lasted exactly 10 days. I'm already in full-on withdrawal which is really horrible, but the worst part will be after the withdrawal is gone and I'm just left with pain and good ol' Advil. I'm kind of glad that I don't know exactly who took all my medicine, but boy would I like to yell at them. And Beth would like to yell at them, too, because she gets to hear me complain every 3 minutes about how horrible I feel. Please pray that the next 20 days go by really quickly and that I'll be able to handle all the withdrawal and pain until I can get meds again.


On to something a little funnier... If my family celebrated Halloween, here's what Beth and I would look like.


Beth would be Rollie Pollie Ollie.

And I would be Stitch.

we must be awfully small and not as strong as we think we are

As you can probably tell from the lack of serious posting, I've been very busy. My store is getting crazier every day and I drive home like a zombie every night. I have no idea if I've said this already, but my last day at work is going to be November 3. When I finally had a firm date I was so relieved but very sad at the same time. I've put alot of time and energy (well really, ALL my time and energy) into my store and it's hard to leave just when we're beginning to see some of that work pay off. At the same time though, I've worn myself down too much and pushed my body further than it can really handle. I'm looking forward to the break and praying that I will be able to regain the year of lost recovery time.

I'm still trying to decide what to do about school. I will be going to school, I just don't know what I'll be doing yet. My motto is from Steel Magnolias: I can't think about that today, I'll think about that tomorrow!

It looks like Dirk is the most excited about me quitting my job. He has already enlisted me to be the church "secretary", which really means I will do all the things that he has no time to do. I'm excited about doing his phone and computer work so I can stay in my pajamas and burn my makeup. Oh happy day.

As I said, I'm not doing well physically right now. This thing that I have, whatever I have, seems to be somewhat cyclical. It flares up and slows down as it pleases. There is not pattern that I can figure out, but it certainly is vicious. After my last appointment with the doctor that was supposed to be the leading skull-base surgeon in the AF, I gave up on the system once again. I thought I would never see another doctor again and I would just deal with this myself and learn to live with it. To me, it seemed better not to see doctors and not see any progress than to constantly be hoping that THIS doctor would be the one, only to be disappointed after every appointment. But thankfully, I didn't think like that for very long and this week I picked up the phone and scheduled some more appointments. I'm praying for the forcefulness to demand some new doctors and more tests, including a vertical MRI. We'll see...

Tomorrow is Sunday! Be happy!