A Gem from Agatha Christie

Nemesis, p. 158

speaker: archdeacon brabazon, a minor character

"I know when a couple are really in love with each other. And by that I do not just mean sexually attracted. There is too much talk about sex, too much attention is paid to it. I do not mean that anything about sex is wrong. That is nonsense. But sex cannot take the place of love, it goes with love, but it cannot succeed by itself. To love means the words of the marriage service. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. That is what you take on if you love and wish to marry. Those two loved each other. To love and to cherish till death do us part."

I can't believe I'm such a slacker

it's been AGES since i last posted!

well, let's see, what have you missed?

i have read a lot of books.

i have hung out with a lot of students.

i have made serious progress on my Pauline epistles class

i have attended a derek webb tweet-up - with about 250 other twitter fans.

i have gotten sick. and gotten better. several times. (they say your immune system gets stronger after a while. i'm hoping it's been a while.)

(it was never swine flu.)

i have to a taylor swift concert with my brother and his friend ryan in dallas.

i have been rained on a lot.

good stuff, right?

a bit of excitement

so a few days ago my poor car nearly missed being taken out by a toyota. so did the house. thank you, random rock in the yard.

not so lucky: a tree.

some poor girl who a) is new to the country, b) is living away from her family, c) had just recently lost her brother, and d) had only gotten her license to drive a week ago wound up getting herself into quite a crash in the yard of the house i am staying at.

i feel dreadful for the poor girl, but am very grateful that shelly is still in one piece.

i'm on my way, just set me free, home sweet home

so the summer has been positively loco, but not in a bad way. just in a crazy way. i am kinda ready for it to be over, and to be in one city for more than a month!

RUF staff training was last week, and it was most excellent. i really enjoyed getting to catch up with the other folks in my intern class and learned some extremely helpful things in the sessions. i also got to meet a bunch of other interns and campus ministers and got to spend some great time with billy and ashley, my new campus minister and his wife. they are pretty much fantastic.

next week (on the 12th, to be precise) i will be moving to houston!!!!!! freshmen show up on the 16th. here we go - i can hardly wait! i even got a necklace with an owl on it to get into "rice mode."

i am so excited to be moving to a ginormous city with fantastic food and old trees and an awesome home church that is so close to home. i know, i know - 4 hours isn't exactly around the corner, but it beats 17 any day!

we had this crazy adventure when we moved my stuff out of charlotte and to dallas that i will have to tell you about later. suffice it to say, none of the four of us (mom, dad, me, and kj) got a complete REM cycle in that night.

in other news, i seem to have entered a new life stage. a few years ago, it seemed like my facebook newsfeed was full of weddings. now it's full of babies.

sorry it's been so long! now that my life will be normalizing some, i expect i will be posting much more regularly.

My Parents' Printer Makes Weird Noises

it sounds like it needs some oil in the wheels. it makes such distressed noises and works so hard. unfortunately, it totally screws up at the whole printing-labels thing more often than not, and that is a trifle annoying when you need return address stickers to save your hand from FALLING OFF because you have already addressed more than 100 postcards!!!!!!!

the point is, the printer is weird. and i am raising support. and it is hot in texas.

Irony

my used copy of the glorious body of Christ smells of smoke. and by "smells" i mean "reeks to high heaven."

can you count the ways?

I LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so, after sheer insanity, i finally am emerging from radio silence and giving you some pictures from my life for the last few weeks. they aren't very exciting. ;)

my sister came to visit in the middle of my paper writing. we had fun, despite the fact that i was working like a dog quite a bit of the time and sick as a dog for more of the time.

not sure which roommate brought home these flowers, but they are beautiful, aren't they?

ruf support letters! lots of them!

studying is hard work! old exams help.


katie and i went out for a fancy seafood dinner. :)

we have had LOADS of storms and rain and craziness. beautiful, isn't it?

paper writing - this one was on the reasons for the differences between the blessings of the 12 tribes in genesis 49 and deuteronomy 33. sounds like it wouldn't be fascinating, but it so was.

went to visit friends at wake. this advert for the lilting banshees comedy troupe made me laugh and brought back memories from times gone by.

this is what my bed looked like an awful lot during the past few weeks. lots and lots of books. can you tell facebook is up and there's an agatha christie book in the back? a girl's gotta have some breaks or her brain will fry.

hi!

it's crazy paper-writing time, so i'm snapping pics and will add them sometime, probably after i write another 40 pages but before i take four exams, two of which are supposed to be the hardest of my life. we'll see which one makes me cry first. ;)

just wanted to say hi. i know i've left unfinished business - like an argument for the authority and inerrancy of Scripture - but i'm working like a mad woman.

i'll be back.

Today Was Excellent!

i spent relatively little time here today:



i went on a walk, i went to the pool and laid out with a friend, i did homework, i got sun, i felt great. yay!

(disclaimer: i am actually sitting there now, despite what the picture would have you think. working on a paper. :)

New Template

i'm trying it out... what do you think?

props to bloggertricks for the gorgeousness.

Photo of the Day

i love this stuff. let's face it - i am truly a texas girl. :) when i used to want to be a professor of scottish history in scotland (which is kinda a weird thing to want to do for an american, admittedly - who is going to hire an american to teach scottish history in scotland?!?), i had it all planned that i would have dr pepper shipped to me regularly. cause i was a strange child like that.

Open Line Thursday (So to Speak)

this is pretty much for anyone who wants to talk religion from the 4815162342.com forums.

let's get it on, folks!

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Back from Dallas...

and it really took us a while of looking on both ends to figure it out. but it's pretty certain at this point that someone stole my camera when they were doing the security search of checked baggage at the airport. i've been using my roommate's camera for pictures thus far, but my new baby should be arriving in the mail on tuesday, and until then we are going to have to put the project on hold.

in other news, high school musical 3 apparently promoted a very complementarian view of romantic relationships. i am shocked. shocked, i say.

Toothbrush

i have been known to forget my toothbrush on occasion. for example, almost every time i spent the night at someone's house growing up. in fact, when i went to college and had my first "hall meeting," our RA had us bring our favorite things from home. i brought my bible and my toothbrush, and announced how incredibly glad i was that i had remembered that toothbrush this time i left home.

i flew home to dallas for spring break on sunday and - you guessed it - forgot my toothbrush. my ever-resourceful mother found a fresh one, still packaged, lying around the house somewhere, and now i am using it. apparently it makes my teeth very white (yay!).

that said, it is really strange. there's this bumpy thing on the back of the brush part that rubs against your gums and the inside of your cheek and all that and it feels very weird. invigorating, i suppose, but who needs the inside of their teeth invigorated?

what i'm trying to say is that i have no clue what this thing is supposed to do. i tried scrubbing my tongue with it this morning - it's definitely not intended for that. i mean, it's squeaky! what is the deal?!?

Excellence

Justin Taylor has quoted a fabulous John Updike poem on this, the day of his death, about the resurrection of Christ. Check it out here.

The point made here is excellent: let us not behave condescendingly in considering the Bible's, trying to come up with crazy ways you could possibly say it's true. It either is true, or it is not true.

We are talking about this sort of thing a ton in my apologetics course right now. I will be posting a bit on presuppositionalism (which I want to marry) once the class ends on Friday. Get excited.

no place like home for the doctor's visits...

i am back in dallas. in december i left charlotte for greenville, nashville, dallas, charleston, and greenville. last week i took one of those condensed classes - acts-romans, which was fabulous - and i came back to texas last night for a doctor's appointment today. hopefully this guy will figure out why i have been soooooooooooooo tired.

it's really much funner to go to the doctor's office with your mother, and not just because there are two people to remember everything.

i just finished reading Rhett Butler's People, which was fun, especially since i read Gone with the Wind this summer. as much as i enjoyed them both, i must confess i totally don't get how this is the greatest love story ever. to live a life like scarlett o'hara - or rhett butler, for that matter - would be terribly sad. the one great promise that is offered, at least on some level: there is redemption and healing at every turn of life. that is a somethign we don't hear often enough.

It Would Seem That...

I come across as perky, happy, and full of energy most of the time. Sunday night the topic came up at Life Group in my half of girls (we split up to share prayer requests and pray), and then today the lady at the dry cleaners said, "Are you always this perky and happy?" I said, "Usually."

How weird. I never realized I came off that way, except when I would go visit one of my favorite college profs at office hours - he could only handle about 15 minutes of me, but he liked me a lot. As great as he is, he's not someone whose opinion about people I ever really relied on.... he's kinda odd in a hermit-ish sort of way. Absolutely brilliant, a fabulous lecturer, and really invested in the lives of his students, but not the sort of man you'd guess would be the last of those.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with my newfound power. Hehehe...

HI

so. i am a bad poster. bad bad bad. but the truth is, most of the things that happen in my days these days are not the sort of thing i post, either because they aren't that interesting to read about (like i asked a question in class and other people had been wondering about that too and were glad i asked) or are rather personal in an "i'm not telling everyone in the world about this" sort of way. you know?

my sister did come last week, which was fun, and this weekend my roommate from college/cousin by marriage is coming. it's not like my life isn't interesting, more that it's got enough in it that tons of extraneous thoughts aren't looming, and personal enough that i'm not wanting to blog about it all the time.

but i haven't forgotten you, faithful readers. in fact, i have a little something to tell you about.

it's called fringe, and it's my new love. a brainchild of the great jj abrams, fringe is a delightfully weird combination of x-files and alias, but with a mildly crazy scientist. it is a thing of wit and beauty. just sayin'.

Random Celebrity Post

before we get back to politics (which will probably be a pretty big feature on this blog in coming months), i want to post this thing i ripped out of US Weekly last fall to post and never did. i just thought it was interesting and kinda cool:

"Marsden's Fairy-Tale Marriage
"He may play a fair-tale prince in Disney's Enchanted, but is hunky actor James Marsden a real-life romantic? 'My wife [actress Lisa Linde] thinks I'm romantic if I get up with the crying baby and let her sleep in,' says Marsen, 34, who has two children, Jack, 6, and Mary, 2, with LInde. Fair enough. But what about over-the-top romance? 'Early on in the relationship, there was lots of serenading on the beach and things like that,' he says. 'But once you have kids... romance could be filling her car up with gas or making her coffee.'"

heck, i think that's romantic and i'm no mother.

Fact:

i run faster to "Remember the Name" by Fort Minor than normal songs. yay nba!

i'm taking pastoral counseling, history of philosophy and christian thought (virtually), isaiah-malachi, and systematics I.

so i am swamped.

but being well ROCKS.

and i discovered i like riesling wine.

and expensive maple syrup isn't worth the extra dough....