Return

My oh my. It has been a long time since last I blogged. Wow. Now I suddenly feel all this pressure to post something really grand and clever as my return to the wonderful world of blogger. My dear, faithful [few] readers deserve a work of art, a post of epic proportions as well as length. Good thing I rarely give in to peer pressure [especially peer pressure from myself]. As I am still pretty busy in many areas of my life, this is probably going to be neither grand, clever, nor of any epic length. Yeah. Too. Bad. :P

I really feel like a lot has happened in my life the past few weeks. These green eyes have viewed a lot. I will try to give a quick recap of the highlights:

Address Change
I moved. That's right. I MOVED!!! I made the big move from Chickendale all the way over to Ecoville [the next town over]. I now live in a 2 story dup. in a really neat neighborhood. I am blessed to have a really AWESOME roommate. I am absolutely loving it. I have been rediscovering all the neat stuff I have that has been in storage the last three years [namely kitchen gadgets]. I felt like a true Ecoville resident yesterday when I went grocery shopping and asked for paper instead of plastic so I could recycle [I also bought a lot of organic food, but that is a different story for another time...]. All in all: Thumbs up.

Gal Pal Pow Wow
Shelli and I visited our friend Hollis [aka Bubblewrap Girl from my Things That Go Bump in the Night blog series] in Stillwater, OK one weekend [the same weekend as moving weekend--yeah, no stress!]. I had a BLAST. It was SOOOO good seeing Holly, eating Ted's [yum, yum], reminiscing, poking about in shops, and generally having some really good girl time with the girls. :)

8FMD
The following weekend was a long-planned-for-and-greatly-anticipated 80s Fantasy Movie Day with a group of great friends. The Master Plan included required 80s fashion and 7 or 8 classic 80s Fantasy Flicks. The reality of the day was that my roomie and I [oh, and my faithful pooch, Jasper] were the only ones to dress up [boo hissy on everyone else ;)!!!]. And instead of watching a whole day's worth of movies, we only actually watched one, yes one, movie all the way through. But it was a good one: The NeverEnding Story. Oh yeah. CLASSIC. NES is a great movie. We put the subtitles on at the end of the movie in an attempt to finally discover what name Bastian gave the Child-like Empress. That was a question I had since childhood. So, I was greatly disappointed when the subtitles didn't reveal the secret. Sigh. I shall call her.....Sylvia. However, I did learn that the dog/dragon's name is Falkor, NOT Valkor as I always thought. I almost gave my dog the wrong name..... All in all, though, it was a VERY fun day.

Blessing Baskets
The day I anticipate all year, my biggest annual project at work, arrived on November 21. This was the main reason I have not blogged the past few weeks. Our Blessing Baskets ministry is probably the biggest thing for the Community my office does every year. We were prepared to bless 2,000 NWA families with a variety of Thanksgiving-type foods. It was a VERY long day [7 am to 9:30 pm], stressful, crazy, hairy there for a while, but a LOT of fun and very successful. 1,767 families were blessed with food, and we had over 3,000 in attendance for our 2 distribution times. There were many grateful people who now were able to have a Thanksgiving meal for their family. I was worn out and tired at the end of the day, but VERY happy and blessed. I love helping and serving others.

Thanksgiving
I celebrated Thanksgiving at my Granny's house with my mom's side of the family. They are the 'fun' side of my family tree [although, with all my cousins getting older on my dad's side, that branch of the tree is getting pretty fun as well]. I am not one of those that are 'all about' Thanksgiving food, so I was good and really didn't gorge myself as some are apt to do on Turkey Day. And speaking of turkey, we had 3 turkeys at the shindig. YES. THREE. And, just so you know, that was 2 more than we usually have. I am not talking about small turkeys, either. I think we usually have one really large turkey that feeds the whole family, plus a ham. But my uncle and my cousin's husband decided they wanted to fry turkeys this year, so Granny did her normal baked bird and ham, and the boys set up their pots outside and fried up 2 birds. This resulted in WAY TOO MUCH MEAT. Although I have to admit, I was a fan of the Cajun-flavor-injected fried turkey my uncle did. It was my first time to have turkey that way, and I was impressed. Yum. I mostly ate sweet potato casserole and deviled eggs. Oh, and my aunt's famous dirt cake. HEAVEN.

Vacation
Due to the holidays, I had a WONDERFUL 3 days off of work. It was much needed. I did a little shopping [NOT on the day after Thanksgiving] for needed house items, unpacked a lot of my room, had above mentioned Turkey Day family time, and just vegged and enjoyed not having to do anything. The only damper was not being able to sleep in anymore. Since I get up consistently at around the same time every day, my body simply won't allow me to sleep past 8.....8:30 at the latest. But still....very nice

Okay, so this became a post of length after all. I am probably forgetting a couple of things, but I think I covered all the big points. I also have some really cool things going on in my life that are "in the works" that I can't really disclose "publically" right now. But maybe soon?

So....This is my return to blogging semi consistently. I am back. :P