Blessed.

This is the first time I have blogged in many many months. It seems the past few months have drained me, left me needy, and only now am I beginning to feel "myself". More than myself, I guess, blessed. I have been overwhelmed as of late by the power and protection of God. To look at some of the things that have happened, I have to stop and remember how we are taken care of...

* Surviving new job and still loving it
* Moving into a new house with a husband who I am still madly in love with
* Getting to be around my mom, Danny, and Mere a lot (I spent years living away from my family and have missed them)
* God taking care of my mom and Danny moving to Portland- not only taking care of them, rejuvinating them
* My best friend lives in Oregon and is not leaving any time soon
* Having good friends who care for you, despite how you might try and burn the kitchen down
* Momentary glimpses into Heaven- the daily joys of knowing God and seeing him love people
* The huge invention, which I only recently discovered, of the crockpot- amazing
* Trees, hills, mountains, and tons of water
* Belonging to a church where my heart is glad
* Forgiveness and small talk
* Marriages, births, love, and excitement of family and friends
* the Hope of restoration

These are the things in my life that make me blessed. God is good. He sustains, breaks, and heals. For all this, I am blessed.

Katie

Labels: Blessed.

"you were told to glow majestically...
and love until your hands bleed" Page France, Junkyard

I love Thursday nights. Somehow, it usually ends up being the quiet night of the week. We didn't get to hang out for Valentine's, so we hit up the culinary goodness of P.F. Chang's and came home to cook brownies for Katie's teacher in-service day potluck (now you know what they do...).

Tomorrow I've got a half day, then I hit the road for a short elder retreat at the coast. I've gotta say I'm really looking forward to getting some concentrated time to pray for the community and city that we love so much. I don't mean it to sound hyper-spiritual. There's just something good for the soul about getting out and asking God what He's up to. And I love the Oregon coast this time of year. There's something comforting about standing on a windy, rocky shoreline and staring out into a cloud-scattered, overcast horizon. It's simply beautiful.

Keys to Productivity

Ahhh...Friday's. Gotta love 'em. Usually the period on the end of the aimless run-on sentence that is the work week. Or the ellipses...mainly because the weekend is just a pause in a never-ending attempt to get more stuff done than humanly possible.

But not today! Today was actually an exceptionally productive day. I got most of the stuff done on my "to do" list as well as knocked out a few things I actually wanted to do. To what do I attribute this surge in activity? One word: Pandora.

If you consider yourself wired at all, you probably heard about this little gem of a site well over a year ago. You type in a band or artist that you're fond of and, through the genius of the Music Genome Project, it identifies a few key traits of the musician's work and generates a playlist of similar artists. It's really pretty groovy. A few friends turned me onto it sometime last year. I always saw it as a way to find new bands that I hadn't heard of, but today, I found it to be worth it's weight in gold.

What the heck am I talking about and how does this relate to getting stuff done? I'll try to explain: I usually bring my iPod to work and plug in for a few hours while I'm doing whatever is I happen to be doing that day. The trouble is, I have so much music that I've loaded on over the past few months due to recommendations from friends that I end up listening a little too intently, which drives down output dramatically. Not good. People start to notice when you're hunched over your player like a Gameboy instead of compiling those TPS reports for the Bob's. So, to recap: New groovy music = imminent unemployment.

What's a guy to do? Give up music and listen to the background office chatter? Not gonna happen.

Pandora is the answer. Just open the site, plug in your favorite band from high school, and let the nostalgic goodness shower you with joy. My drug of choice: The Toadies. My subsequent playlist included the greatness of: Smashing Pumpkins, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Bush, the Presidents of the United States of America, Live, etc. I was humming right along, knew the words to every song and before I knew it, I'd done more work in four hours than I had in four days. Conclusion: Crappy music = imminent raise?

That might be going a bit far, but we'll see...