oh pinterest

I will fully admit I am addicted to pinterest.

Where else can I find fun recipes (fruit salsa and baked cinnamon chips, anyone?)



fashion ideas



my Harry Potter fix



fun art project ideas



and things that make me laugh







all in one place?

introducing...

Lappy!


Yeah! I finally got my new laptop yesterday. I luff it. Let me share why:

* It's smaller than my last one (I took the picture with my water bottle next to it for comparison)

* It's so light

* It's all sleek-looking

* The fan doesn't automatically begin when it starts up and sound like I've turned a hairdryer on

* In fact, it is silent

* The speakers work! (they were broken on my last one)

* It has an HD web camera for Skype

* It is so fast! I have been running through the internet like a BOSS.

I am going to have so much fun blogging on this bad boy.

life

My poor blog has been getting NO love from me. This is for a few reasons.

1) I have been sick for a week. And I'm still sick. 8 days and going strong.

2) My laptop died. I took it in to get fixed and the guy looked at me and said, "Well, we could put a couple hundred dollars into this and make it work again, but it's old and not really worth it. I think you should look at buying a new one." So without planning on it, and in between lots of coughing and nose blowing, I bought a new laptop. (Thank you, tax return.) It's nothing fancy. Just a plain ol' PC. I asked if they could transfer all my data (pictures, music, documents, etc) from my old laptop to my new one and they said yes but it would take 5-7 days. Are you serious? Yes, they were. So not only have I been sick this week, I've been computerless. I feel a bit disconnected from the world, but that's okay for now. What did we do before the internet?

3) I went to the midnight showing of the Hunger Games movie Thursday night. Standing out in the cold for 4 hours with my college students and then staying up till 3 in the morning when you're sick? I'm still trying to decide if it was worth it. But I have been looking forward to this movie for too long, so I went for it.

I have lots more to share but I'm on my roomate's computer so I think I'll stop for now. When I get my new lappy, I'll blog every day for a week to make up for not blogging much the past few weeks.

Till then, my friends. *cough cough* Farewell.

And may the odds be ever in your favor.

trampolines, in-n-out, and pranks

Intern Scott has been out of town and I have been busy at work and when I get home all I went to do is lay down and watch Downton Abbey (go "instant watch" season 1 on netflix). So I haven't been blogging much.

But there was some fun to be had this weekend. Friday night was our annual Ladies Sleepover/Guys Manover. We do this every year. We go out together and do something fun, and then the genders split to different houses for an overnighter.

Last year we went to this building filled with trampolines and we had so much fun we went back this year. They have three main areas: the big jumping spot with a ton of trampolines all together, a dodge ball court, and a foam pit! So fun!






Our favorite part of the evening was doing Ellen's Dance Dare. Ellen DeGeneres has presented a challenge to America - dance behind someone who has no idea you're doing it. Videotape it and upload it to youtube. She takes people's videos and shows them on her show. We were doing it all night! It was so hilarious. Here is one of 7 we did during the evening:



After all the jumping we were starving so we went to In-N-Out. Yum! While we were there, we saw a prom proposal within a bunch of high schoolers. It was adorbs.

Then, we split up. All the guys went to one house, all the ladies to another. We hung out for an hour and then it was PRANK TIME.


We got in our black and camo and loaded up with silly string and saran wrap. We went to the boys' house and were going to silly string our names in the driveway but they were waiting for us! They hid in the bushes and jumped out with the water hose. We fled back to our cars and drove away. But we weren't done. We secretly drove back to their house and began saran-wrapping the bridge that leads to the guys' house.

My highlight was when we thought we heard footsteps in the darkness. There were ladies stuck on one side of all the saran wrap and couldn't run through. So they all fell to their hands and knees and did soldier crawls under all the wrapping to get out. We were trying so hard not to let them hear our laughter.


We congratulated ourselves for winning and drove back to the house. Little did we know, they knew which house we were staying at (I don't know how! No one told them where we were staying!) and came at 4 in the morning. They vaselined all the car door handles of our cars and sadly one girl left her car unlocked. They opened it and filled the ENTIRE front seat with shaved paper.

Punks.

Disclaimer: I know I'm 34 but this stuff is so fun sometimes.

fundraising for Arizona

The week after Easter, Intern Scott and I are taking 17 college students to a Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona. There is a missionary we will be assisting, doing work projects. The past two weekends we have done fundraisers to make some money toward the trip - for people who can't raise enough money in time (and also to help pay for gas, which is currently 1 million dollars a gallon).




From both fundraisers, we made $1,262. Yeah!

marriage and kids

All my friends are married. And most of my friends are married with kids. And I feel like every conversation I've had with them lately has left me feeling very depressed.

"Sarah, marriage is hard work. It is so hard."

"Sarah, having kids is so hard. I don't sleep. It is SO hard."

I can't take it anymore.

It's all I am hearing lately.

Someone, please tell me. Please tell me the good outweighs the bad. All I hear is the bad. I need to hear some good. Please.

Dear Woman in the Photo

This letter was featured on my new favorite website: The Good Women Project. This whole month, they will be featuring open letters from men to women. I am posting today's letter because this is a huge issue whether you are single or married, male or female, Christian or not. I appreciate this man's honesty and apology.


Dear Woman in the Photo,

You don’t know me. I’m a guy who found pictures of you online and masturbated while looking at them. That sure is a creepy opening line for a letter, but please do read on.

I’m writing because I need you to know I’m sorry, and I would like to ask your forgiveness.

Maybe I’m doing this more for my own benefit – to remind myself that you are a real person – someone’s daughter, sister, girlfriend, mother maybe. An aspiring actress, a hockey fan, a secret poet… I’m not doing this out of some kind of pressured guilt; I just need to say this.

I want to tell you that you are far too valuable for me to use your body like that, even as an image, and for that I am so sorry. I don’t know how much you got paid for those photos, if anything, but however much it was, you are worth more. More than any amount of money anyone could ever pay. More than any image could ever convey.

I used that image of you to get what I wanted without having to give anything, and I now realize that is unhealthy for me as a man. Here’s why:

You are worth more than any man could ever give, which is why when you give yourself to a man it is a gift he should spend the rest of his life even trying to match with his love, understanding, support, and anything else you might need.

As a man, I believe the very highest life I can lead is to live in gratitude for what I have been given and to really give something to the world. I believe I was born to make a difference, to care for people, and to be the best father, brother, son, friend, husband, and colleague that I can be to the people in my life. When it comes to sex, pornography allows me to act out my desires and get what I want without giving anything.

Everyone knows sex is powerful, and I don’t want that power to be harnessed toward my getting what I want like a spoiled brat. I want the emotional, spiritual, physiological, and physical power of sex to be an expression of my desire to give – that very real desire in me to love one woman with total commitment and without conditions. I don’t want to enjoy any woman’s body until I have first given her my heart, as to do so is to deny my highest purpose and to lower a woman’s value to that of an object to be used and thrown away.

I want to give sex the place of intimacy and respect I’m convinced it needs.

I’m sorry I used your image to attempt to satisfy my desires. I’m deeply sorry that guys like me create a demand for pictures of girls like you, and I need you to know that you have a purpose and a destiny so much bigger than how outwardly attractive you are. I don’t know why you posed for those photos – maybe you needed the money, maybe you were forced, maybe you enjoyed it – really, it doesn’t matter.

Just please believe me when I tell you that you were made to be cherished, protected and loved; that kind of love really does exist no matter how dark this world seems at times. I’m working toward living out that kind of love, and I hope somehow this letter can help both of us discover more of it in some small way.

In my heart of hearts I apologize to you – you unfortunately being just one of many unique expressions of beauty I have reduced to a thrilling image and a one-time experience.

You are worth more. I am worth more. Let’s never settle for less.

Yours sincerely,

my first hockey game

Wednesday afternoon, I popped into the main office at my church. The office manager, Val, saw me and walked over with an envelope.

"Sarah, what are you doing tomorrow night?"

"Um, nothing. That I know of."

"Good. Then here." And she handed me an envelope.

I opened it and inside were 4 tickets to a Sharks hockey game! I have never been to a hockey game before but always thought it would be fun. A lot of friends and co-workers are HUGE Sharks fans and they talk about it a lot.

I looked closer at the tickets and saw they were $112 each! Whaaaaat? I complain when I pay $30 for a Giants ticket. And now I was holding $448 worth of Sharks tickets in my hand.

Holla.

I immediately went to find Intern Scott. He enjoys hockey, especially the Pittsburgh Penguins (he grew up in a part of Ohio near Pittsburgh, PA). He said he could go and then we invited one of our students who helps us at college group with all the slides and A/V stuff and thought this would be a fun way to say thank you to him. And he brought his girlfriend, who is one of our student leaders in the group. Let's DO this!


We had such a great time. First off, as you can see from the above picture, our seats were fantastic. 5 rows up from the ice and in eye-line of the goalie. The arena was sold out - 17,000 people in their teal and black. Right before the game started, a huge shark head lowered from the ceiling. The lights went down, fog started coming out of the head, the eyes flashed red, and "Seek & Destroy" by Metallica started pounding out of the speakers. One by one the players skated out of the mouth and we all went bat-poop crazy. We were on our feet, jumping, screaming, shouting, fists in the air!!


For this game, the Sharks were playing the Buffalo Sabres.

[Random: Am I the only one who thinks of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy sketch whenever I hear the word "sabre"?

"I'll take 'Swords' for 400, Alex." -Sean Connery

"That's not 'Swords'. It's 'S-words'. These are words that begin with S. All right, the answer is..."Popeye is this sort of man."

*ding*

"What is a 'sabre'?" -Sean Connery]

Back to the Sharks game.

The game was super fun. My favorite part was "The Chomp". Anytime the Sharks go on the power play, the Jaws theme song is played while the fans do "The Chomp" - extending their arms in front and moving them up and down to form a chomping jaw. I took a little video of one time we did it:



The game lasts three periods. Each period is 20 minutes long. In between the first and second period, 3 of my students (who were sitting in another section) came over to say hi.


The Sharks sadly lost the game, but I didn't care. I just loved being there. I LOVED being so close to the glass. The players were always throwing each other up against the glass and we got great views of smashed faces, trying to get to the puck.

P.S. At one point during the game, I yelled at the top of my lungs, "FLYING V!!!" A cute reference to the Mighty Ducks movies with Emilio Estevez. However, I was the only one who thought it was cute. Everyone around me gave me weird looks. Whatevs.

Thanks for the tickets, Val!