Christmas is coming...

Christmas is coming. How do I know that? Because yesterday I found myself in the car at five-something a.m. driving in the freezing cold down 80-East towards long lines without any hope of coffee, but with the expectant promise of 15-50% off!!! No, I was NOT one of those people who trampled that poor man in the Wal Mart in Long Island.

Who am I to complain? I got a 10.3 mp Kodak digital camera for eighty bucks (the 5 mp Canon one I bought a little while back was $120, so I think I made a steal), and...

A NEW GUITAR!

It's a gorgeous Fender Dreadnought--and I'm in love! The action's easy as butter.

It was $150 all together, with a two-year immediate-replacement no-questions-asked warrantee. Originally $150, it was down to $130 because of the sale, and the warrantee was twenty bucks. Come to think of it it was stupid of me to buy the warantee--this thing's not going to get a SCRATCH in the next two years, let alone get damaged beyond repair--the Rolling Stones I am not. But whatever--none of that matters, for I have found my new soul mate.

I'm selling Horatio. Cruel of me, I know, but I need money for a hard shell to keep...well, I haven't decided on his name yet, but to keep whoever-he-is safe.

Oh, yes, Christmas is also coming because we've taken...[*Beethoven's Fifth*] the dreaded Christmas Picture!

We literally had to take about forty pictures, between the dog jumping up and running away, people not looking at the camera, the baby crying and the little ones moving and making blurs...but we finally got a halfway decent one.

The final product:

Being Unfashionable

I just read this awesome Spurgeon quote on Josh Harris's blog, about being "unfashionable":

"The great guide of the world is fashion and it's god is respectability--two phantoms at which brave men laugh! How many of you look around on society to know what to do? You watch the general current and then float upon it! You study the popular breeze and shift your sails to suit it. True men do not so! You ask, "Is it fashionable? If it is fashionable, it must be done." Fashion is the law of multitudes, but it is nothing more than the common consent of fools."

How true this is.

If the shoe fits

Last night I was out partying hard until one in the morning...

No. Actually, I was out at a fellowship/Bible study until one in the morning. Whatever. At any rate I was determined to sleep in 'till at least ten today.

However, at nine thirty this morning, I was rudely awakened by a pounding on my door.
"Murrppgphuuggggg..." I moaned--which the pounder took to mean "Come in", I suppose, because the pounding stopped and my mother stuck her tousled head in the door.

"There's a prince downstairs with a size seven glass slipper asking for Chelsey. I suggest you pull yourself together..."

Grumph.

I threw a pillow at her. Which wasn't smart, because I had to get out of bed to get it so I could go back to sleep, and by then it was all over: I was awake.

I hate non-fairy tale endings... :-P

This darn mortal coil

I'm so angry right now, I could burst.

I cannot wait, cannot wait for the day that Jesus Christ, the God of Peace, crushes Satan's head underneath His feet. Cannot wait until that snivelling creature gets his face ground into the clay that he so polluted over all the years he was given liberty to roam to and fro on the earth. When he gets his dues for twisting and confusing and muddling the minds of weak and strong-willed humans alike.

I'm on the warpath tonight, and you can bet that the devil is going to get a double-dose counter-attack of prayer from myself!

I've just finished talking with a very confused young man about his beliefs; my friend's father said it the best, "He has no beliefs--only opinions." Satan has this boy twisted around his crooked little finger, and the kid doesn't even know it. He doesn't know what he believes, he changed what he said he believed just about heaven at least twice in the 30-minute conversation we had. Satan's best weapon is confusion. Just get them to believe anything--even if it's nothing--other than the truth. And that's really all that this kid believes--nothing.

He claimed to base all of his beliefs on "logic"--yet when shown logic, he shied away from admitting anything definitive in his belief system! For example:

Me: You say you believe that Jesus isn't God, right?
Him: Right.
Me: But you do believe some of the stuff he said was true, right?
Him: Right.
Me: Jesus said He was God. I'm assuming you don't believe that, right?
Him: Right.
Me: So--logically--you're calling Jesus a liar.
Him: Well...uh...well, no...

Um, excuse me?

After all was said and done, I told this young man, "Look, no matter what you decide to believe, just make sure that in the end, you know why you believe what you believe."
"Oh," he responded reassuringly, "I question everything."
"Yes, but the important part," I told him, "is to once you've questioned everything, to come to conclusions."
"Yeah," he admitted, "I kinda have a problem with that..."

Ay, there's the rub.

Satan is a lot of words, most of them four-letter rather un-nice ones that I won't soil my blog with here. But above all, he's a deceiver, and the father of lies.

And I cannot wait until the day that he is bound and thrown into the lake of fire forever.

That's mostly the problem with being alive, and living with this darn mortal coil. My complaint at the moment, unlike Hamlet's, however, is that while I am alive I cannot have the satisfaction of physically seeing retribution doled out to the evil one.

For right now, I must try to remember that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God, to the pulling down of strongholds. My mother used to tell me that, "Satan trembles when he sees the smallest Christian on his knees." I've always cherished that thought.

When I pray, it's like I'm grinding my heel in his face. :-D

Adventures in the Life of a Dunkin' Donuts Peon

I've discoverd that there's not much in life that's more humiliating than sitting on your butt under a table in a coffee joint and scraping other people's hardened gum off the underneath with a plastic spork.

...And this is what they pay me for???

Truth be told, we'd never thought about the gum before, but an inspector came in yesterday, and I think he had a conniption about it. The manager was on the verge of tears when he left--but heck, the rest of us wanted to jump for joy, so long as he was gone.

He had a conniption about a lot of things, actually--that the donuts in the trays were stacked five across instead of six, that we pre-ground the coffee, and other extremely important things like that. And, yes, this is what they pay this man for.

So now we're counting donuts, and don't even think about pre-grinding those beans! Even if there's a long line of impatient customers, they have to sit there and wait for that coffee to grind...

This is so not worth $7.50 an hour...

...But bills don't pay themselves.

The Question of the Turtle

So. My question of the month: What is the most awkward situation you've been in in recent history?

Keep it PG, people... :-P

[I'm making the awkward turtle symbol right now...]

I FOUND US!!!

I'm so excited! I found a video of our homeschool chorale singing Witness at Lincoln Center!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5nEsTgz9Ug

This is one of my favorite songs we sang all year... Man do I miss those people, and singing. Why did highschool have to end?

Here's another one of us doing Exultate Justi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0yvPgH90BA

It's so cool what you find when you youtube "NJHSA"!

I really miss hard-core singing. I'm in a choir now (well, two, actually--I'd forgotten about my Handel's Messiah choir), but we're doing three pieces: the Braham's Requiem, Vivaldi's Gloria, and a Hammerschmidt piece. We meet once a week for an hour and a half. Yahoo. What can you hope to accomplish in an hour and a half?! I'm used to knowing about forty pieces of music (and having thirty of them memorized), and meeting for three and a half hours every week. My breath control is terrible now, and, horror of horrors, I think I'm losing my lower range!!!! I think I'm becoming...the dreaded second soprano!!! NO! NO! Say it' ain't so!!!

I guess my days of priding myself on being able to hit a bass C are over. :0( *Sigh.*

Religion, Politics, & the Great Pumpkin

I was pondering today...why do people get so uptight when they talk about politics? Really--we are opinionated about other things--whether the greenhouse effect is real, freewill vs. predestination, even PCs vs. Macs...but why do people become so angry when someone doesn't agree with their politics? Even one of my best friends and myself, though we have only slightly different political philosophies, come away from political conversations a tad annoyed at each other.

I asked my father about this, and I liked his response. He said, "It's because it's a subject that complete idiots can have their say in, and no one can call them an idiot because it's all a matter of opinion."

True that. And I'm not saying everyone who disagrees with my political ideas is an idiot--just some people... ;0)

I've discovered something that has become my maxim, especially among people with opinions that differ strongly from mine; in the words of the ever-wise Peanuts character Linus van Pelt, "Never discuss politics, religion, or the Great Pumpkin!"

Wise words indeed...

My favorite day of the year

I woke up at 8:30 this morning.

"Oh Snap!" I sat bolt upright. "I only have to be at church in fifteen minutes!" Why didn't mom wake me up?!

I bailed out of the top bunk, and my feet hit the floor, hard.



Oh.

Daylight savings.

I had even read Josh Harris's post on it last night, last thing before I went to bed... I sheepishly climbed back into bed, changed my clock, and pulled the covers over my head.

Another hour.

Beautiful.

Do Not Meddle In The Affairs Of Wizards...For They Are Quick To Anger

I am a wizard.

Back off, people.

(...................okay, maybe I'm wound a little tight tonight...)