Onward and Upward!

WHEW! Boy, am I glad to be done with that! I can now say that all of the entries that I wanted to transfer from my old blog site have now been successfully transferred. I do have to say that it was really interesting to go back through them and see what all was going on in my life over the last two years. Wow, has it ever been a time of change!! (Especially considering that most of the changes weren't covered in blog entries.) :-)

So, from here on out everything will be current events - no more looking back, let's look ahead! I expect that my entries here will be as random as the thoughts in my head, since the two are pretty connected. ;-) Who knows, I might post more crafty stuff, thoughts on faith, updates on life, and stuff like that. Whatever floats my little boat!! Hope you are well tonight!

Rewind #12: Oh, Just So You Know....

Original air date: 8Feb2010

Unless there is some crazy, REALLY
embarrassing typo or error,  I am not going
to go back to through old posts and correct
anything. If I did that as a rule of thumb,
I could easily find myself tinkering them
to death which would mean I’d never
actually be finished with ANY of the
posts, and if you went back and read
something it wouldn’t be an “authentic”
post ... at least in my opinion. Oh, and hey - it’s my blog!
So I guess my opinion counts. :-P

OK, done with the editor’s note. Goodnight.

Rewind#2: Name, Rank & Serial Number

(Original air date: 25Jan10) The basics. Some would call that the “who, what, when, where and how” of a situation. Other times it’s called the jist. Some people simply say it’s an introduction.

But you’re reading my blog. Surely you’re not a stranger to me, right? I guess this IS posted on the “world wide web” ... but some random web surfer in Russia is NOT my target audience. This is geared towards my family and my friends ... so why would I be introducing myself? There’s several reasons .... for one, I just feel it’s a good starting place for this blog ... but more so, I guess it’s because we often take for granted how much we really know about our friends. A little while ago a line of quizzes went around Facebook that people made about themselves, and were called, “How well do you know ____ [insert your name here]?” Each person would make 5 or maybe 10 trivia questions about themselves that they considered to be basic info ... so why were so many of the average scores by even close friends less than 50%? Because what we think of as “basic info” about ourselves really hardly ever comes up in casual conversation. How many of you know where I went to college? What about what my major was? My favorite pet? Some people might know this, but most of you probably don’t. So here goes .... what I consider the basic cliff notes of “ME” .... what someone in the military might understand as just my “name, rank and serial number” - (which is what a soldier is trained to say when captured.)

I was born September 24, 1978 in Reno, NV. I lived in that same house til I moved away to college ... my parents still live there. I graduated from Galena High School in Reno in '96, and from there I went on to graduate from Boise State University with a bachelor's in Metal and Ceramics. I worked for several years as a goldsmith, and loved every minute of it! Up til that point in my life, I had always been an atheist and lived truly for the moment. A year after graduating, I then lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and was in the middle of my second divorce. My life was crumbling, and everything in my life was up for re-evaluation. For the first time ever, I decided to look into all the “hype” about God and the Bible - which I had always denounced fiercely, yet never actually read. Once I opened the pages of the Word, my life immediately came into clear view and I realized what I needed to do. On March 16, 2003, I was baptized into Christ and began an entirely new life, raised as a new creature. Praise God! I was then (& still now) living in Yuba City, CA, where I worked as a goldsmith an had a nice little life with my own apartment and being very active with the church. Well, God had better plans for me, and soon introduced me to the man who is now my husband - Danny - a Master Sergeant in the Air Force - and we were married on Jan 8, 2005. Well, another big surprise was brewing, and soon I was diagnosed with Behcet's Disease. Within a couple short years I was forced to quit working due to my health struggles. (We never can plan our lives, can we??) Danny retired from the AF in early 2008, and started his own photography business - McNeal Photography.

Now we spend all of our time together, working our best for the Lord and simply enjoying life. My most recent "adventure" is having been diagnosed with Endometriosis, and so now we are pursuing the treatments for it. These are big decisions that are literally going to affect the rest of my life. Right now much of my focus is on trying to decide which way to go -- which are some big factors that aren’t easy to weigh ... but there will be much more on that in other posts, I’m sure. 

So, I guess that's me in a nutshell! Now you at least know the cliff notes. :)

Rewind#1: Getting Set Up

(Original air date: 23Jan10) Well here I am, certainly no jet-setter ... I am joining the world of online blogging at a point when many people literally have years of entries in their archive! Choosing to start a blog at this point is, as I believe most things in life are, at just the right time. This is an outlet I need and a connection I desire, which will hopefully carve out a niche much deeper than Facebook, different than email, but certainly no replacement for all those deep conversations that happen over a great cup of coffee at wee hours of the night. Blogging is an adventure and a style of communication all its own .... and here we go! I have some hopes and some thoughts and even a few plans of what I’d like to include in this blog ... but mostly I look forward to the identity that is created along the way. I want this blog to have the freedom to morph from one identity to the next ... which I guess will meet the needs from one situation to the next. I will pay close attention to my grammar and spelling and punctuation (trying always to remember if the question mark goes inside or outside the quotes, and when to use “effect” and when to use “affect”,) but the bottom line is, this is not intended to be a discourse about English composition! I hope that you can bear with me as all the days I skipped English class to go hang out in the Metals or Ceramics studios become quite clear ...... so to my readers who excel FAR more than me at those topics (you know who you are!) - I apologize in advance and ask for your patience. :)

Since this blog will follow and document certain parts of life, it’s natural to assume that we will cover all kinds of topics! This blog will likely reflect the areas that are most important in my life, which all center around relationships: first and foremost is my relationship with Christ. How the day He entered my life forever changed everything about me, and why I will NEVER be the same; my relationship with my husband -- why a man who knows he is “second-best” in his wife’s eyes knows that is the best place he can be ... why he desires to have a wife who will always put God above her husband; and also my relationships with my two families -- my family by my parents’ blood, and my family by the blood of Christ. I am SO grateful for the love and support that both of these families has given me over the years. And I have to admit that it is only in recent years that I have REALLY grabbed ahold of those relationships. My family has always been there for me ... giving me much more help & support than I had ever returned with gratitude ... yet it has been a recent chapter in my life where I have wholeheartedly embraced that. Why? Well, the selfishness of youth is the best reason I can give. I don’t think my experiences and feelings were any special phenomenon among teens & early 20-ers, but I am not using that as an excuse. I simply took these people for granted for too many years. For way too long I saw relationships as tools in a tool belt - they sat there patiently waiting for you to realize they were useful at a particular time, and then I’d pull them out of the bag, apply them to the problem at hand, and when the crisis was resolved I would clean them off and put them back in storage until the next crisis would surface. I now realize how selfish an outlet like that is, and I pray that I am now seeing myself as a tool in THEIR bag, trying to be useful in their live (for a change) ... basically embracing the mutual nature of any relationship that is built to last.

So here we go, you and me - off into the wild blue of the world of blogging! Get a fresh mug of coffee, pull up a comfy chair, and let’s go solve the world’s problems together!! :) God bless!  

Here We Go 'Round

What exactly is a mulberry bush, and who goes around it?? Well, regardless of that piece of trivia .... I'm back! Due to a bunch of technical stuff you probably don't care about, I'm moving my blog from being hosted by Apple to being hosted here. So pardon my construction mess for a while - it might take me a little bit to get settled in to my new digs. Glad you're here!


And may the randomness begin. :o)