Hello!!  Welcome to my new look!  I noticed that they created a new background that allows you to do a custom header, so I jumped at the chance.  This particular one is one of a trip my husband and I (in the middle) took to California last spring to watch some mutual friends of all of ours get married.  It was such a great trip!!!  I thought the background of the ocean fit in perfectly with this page.

The running is coming along.  My friend and I haven’t run together yet, we’re still trying to work out our schedules.  But I have gone ahead and started gettin back in shape on my own, and it’s going pretty well.  I ran on Sunday, and it was great.  I felt wonderful afterwards.  My friend suggested I print out a schedule on RunnersWorld.com, so that’s what I did.  I’m looking forward to it.  It’s going to be a great way to get back into shape and feel good about myself in that capacity.  I’m calling the contact about the half-marathan this week to find out about signing up for the race.  Once that’s done, we’ll be officially commited.  :)  This is going to be so much fun!

Around here, John and I have been painting….again.  Well, I should say I’VE been painting again.  John wants nothing to do with it, “he hates painting”.  I say “Whiner….” but whatever.  There are those things I don’t enjoy doing either.  Anyway, back to the painting.  This is the third time we’ve painted these areas, our living room, dining room (which are connected) and the entryway leading upstairs/downstairs.  It’s a split-level house.  Anyway, I got it painted one color two weekends ago, and HATED it.  I thought it was going to look so good, but they didn’t get it matched quite right to the swatch I had given them.  So…back to square one, picking out a color.  Got that done, got that color on the walls, looks pretty good.  Got the color on the hallway, which looked great…until it was dark and we had to turn the lights on.  Then we pretty much felt like we were being blinded by the sun it was so yellow!!!!  I’m always afraid to do the light colors though b/c I feel like they won’t show up enough, like you’ll just barely be able to tell that there’s a yellow tint to it.  I want it yellow.  Or green.  (Pastels of course).  Anyway, so that will be done next weekend probably.  There is some major remodeling that John and I would like to do (that involves taking down the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room/dining room…we want more space and continuity between the two rooms.  Anyway, it’s a high priority on the list of remodeling we’d like to do, but lower on the list of all the other things we’d like to take care of…i.e…college tuition, our mortgage.  Fun stuff. 

I just realized at the end of this week we will have lived here for officially two years.  I think we moved in Apr 1, 2005.  Wow.  Right after our wedding, honeymoon.  John got out of the military in August 2005.  God really blessed us that year.  He continues to bless us, don’t get me wrong, but there have been some real God-sightings in our relationship that can’t be explained by our human sense of how things should happen.

 For instance, I’ve recently re-connected with an old friend of mine from John’s military days.  Both her and her husband are military, and her husband was the one that showed John around Wichita when he first moved here (I moved down about a month or so later.)  Anyway, they kind of took him under their wing, showing him the base, squadron, the city, and we ended up getting an apartment in the same building that they lived in, so we all four of us became really good friends.  They ended up standing up for us as witnesses when we got married at the justice of the peace.  Then when we had a church ceremony a year and a half later, they came up for that too, and brought their daughter to be my flower girl.  They really felt like family with as much time as we spent together.  Without getting into the details of the situation, we ended up having a falling-out, and we hadn’t spoken to each other since the fall of 2005 I think.  It was a messy, hurtful, bitter-filled falling out that I wish was handled differently, but at the time didn’t have the coping skills to get over my hurt and bitterness over the whole thing.  Anyway, she and I re-connected last week, and we got together for lunch.  It was really good.  It was really nice to sit across from someone I used to refer to as one of my best friends; probably the best friend I had in Wichita.  We laughed and talked and got somewhat caught up on what’s been going on with each other the last 2 years or so.  So that was nice.  If you read my last couple of blogs on friendship… I wrote the first blog on friendship at a time where I was really missing this friend.  I haven’t had a friend since this one that matched the same level that this one was at, and I dearly missed it.  When we ‘went our separate ways’, I felt devastated.  I missed her a lot.  So lunch was good.  And then she called on Saturday right away to see what I was up to, and so I told her that I was free next weekend if she wanted to get together, so we are.  I’m really excited, but at the same time I’m cautious about things.  I don’t want to get hurt again.  I’m really nervous to see her girls, b/c I wonder if they ever wondered what happened to me, and how they explained that?  So I want to be excited about getting my friend back, but on the other hand I want to protect myself from getting hurt again, so I hold back on that emotion somewhat.  Anyway, I could use some prayer on this situation, that’s for sure.  But it’s definitely a blessing, this relationship meant a lot to me, so I’m thankful that we’re in touch again.

OK, well I was going to post some pictures from our trip to Cali last year to end the blog, but I’m not figuring out how to do that.  Strange b/c I’ve navigated both myspace and facebook to do it!!!    Maybe someone who knows how to do this could let me know!  Thanks!!  Thanks for the prayer also by the way!