Category Archives: Daily Life

On Love

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I re-post this almost every year.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
–1 Corinthians 13 (NIV)

The Simple Woman’s Daybook: February 12, 2018

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For Today… February 12, 2018

Simple Woman's Daybook

Looking out my window… dark. Temps were in the mid 40’s today and sunny.

I am thinking… about the Excel final I’m trying to finish by tomorrow night.

I am thankful… to FINALLY be done with the Payroll project that’s due in 2 hours. We got a bad check figure this week, leading the majority of us to be swearing and ripping our hair out this weekend.

One of my favorite things… my payroll balancing. 🙂

I am wearing… jammies. Clothes today were a blue-green long-sleeved shirt and jeans.

I am creating… Excel formulas. Woo.

I am listening to… Donovan’s music. I was watching the Olympics earlier and saw Chloe Kim decimate the competition in the Women’s Halfpipe. USA! USA!

I am hoping… I can get a lot of work done tomorrow in between classes. I have one Excel assessment left on the final and then I need to go through my work with the rubric and make sure I have everything correct.

I am learning… building table structures in Access.

In my kitchen… I’ve been surviving on Subway. It’s not great but it works for right now.

In the school room… Daniel is apparently being cuter than usual and his people are smitten with him. We also have a triennial IEP this year so I’m sure I’ll be given reports to send back to school in a few weeks.

Post Script… some printables for Valentine’s Day treats.

Shared Quote…

Take a walk today!

A moment from my day… My current earworm. (You’re welcome!)

Hosted by The Simple Woman.

7 Quick Takes: Sticks with Spinning Plates Edition

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7 Quick Takes

I told one of my instructors that I feel like I’m en pointe on one foot while holding sticks on which plates are spinning… and I’m trying to keep them from crashing. She laughed. Somehow, I’ve made it through my week.

— 1 —

Lenten devotional update. I’ve got the sucker compiled and edited. My priest suggested helpfully that we make this a “print your own devotional” deal because it would have cost far more to print a copy for everyone than we have in our budget at the moment. (Those who do not have Internet access will get a printed copy, but those are also our shut-ins.)

Now to just get the web version up! (It’s a lot of cut and paste.) If anyone wants the PDF, contact me.

— 2 —

Payroll project. We’re done with book work in my Payroll class so now we have a project for the rest of the quarter where we actually DO payroll. It’s a fictitious manufacturing company and the employees are all named after people from The Office. I’m looking forward to working on it this weekend.

— 3 —

Access is starting. We’re working on our Excel final projects right now so we started working on Access in class. The first chapter is database structure and building databases from scratch so I am pretty jazzed. Now to just power through my final projects for Excel so I can have some database fun.

— 4 —

Valentines for Ash Wednesday. Kelly decided to be helpful and come up with some Valentines for Ash Wednesday. I am TOTALLY printing them out and using them for Daniel’s class!

— 5 —

#TacoTrucksAtEveryMosque It’s totally a thing and I totally love it.

— 6 —

Special intention. If y’all could pray for a special intention, I would greatly appreciate it.

— 7 —

Recipe love. Some people came up with a collection of recipes for food to eat while watching the Olympics in South Korea. It looks AMAZING!

For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.

7 Quick Takes: Court Edition

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Travel. All of my flights went well other than my flight from Bellingham to Seattle being late on Monday and my flight to Bellingham on Tuesday involving horrible turbulence because of a weather system over the Whatcom County line. (I’m not a nervous flyer at all and even I was white-knuckling this one.) My hotel room was lovely and my rental car was great. I got to patronize the Qdoba in the Central Terminal off the C concourse both days even though I had a tight connection on Monday. (I was sitting next to the flight attendants for my San Jose flight who were deadheading from Bellingham. They told me I had time to grab food even though it was a tight connection and they’d make sure I got on my plane. They were right.)

— 2 —

Court. The only way I can put it was that it was brutal. The judge who was supposed to hear the case was elevated to the appellate court and we got a judge who had been on the bench for three days. It was really painful to have to sit there and listen to everything that was said about me. Nothing was conclusively decided and the case was continued to March. I had been made to fly down for this hearing, so I’m more than a little irritated at this.

— 3 —

Lenten devotional. I went straight from court to the airport on Tuesday and tried to channel my pain into editing reflections for my parish’s Lenten devotional booklet. I got quite a bit done and reading the reflections was a blessing to me.

— 4 —

My swearing. You know you might swear a little too much when you text your priest about how court went and she tells you to call her while also mentioning that she is looking forward to learning some new swear words. (She has a fouler mouth than I do so I didn’t teach her anything new.)

— 5 —

Daniel. I prepped like mad for this trip with regard to Daniel’s routine and care. My mom got an updated control journal for him and I did things like prep his lunches ahead of time and lay out his clothes so she could get him through the evening, morning, and afternoon I was gone without having to think too much. (I should add that my mom raised twins and backs me up 100% with Daniel’s care, so he was in the most capable hands with her. He also adores her which helps.) I was worried about him not sleeping but she got him to sleep just fine and handled his wake-up at 3 a.m. without a problem. She and my dad took him for “adventures” to Costco, Fred Meyer, and Haggen after school on Tuesday as well, which was fun for him. He was a happy kid while I was gone, but he was definitely relieved to see me.

— 6 —

State of the Uniom. (Yes, the misspelling is intentional. It was a typo on the tickets.) I haven’t watched it yet or read the transcripts. My life is depressing enough without reading about 45’s nonsense.

— 7 —

How I’m doing now. I’m worn out, not sleeping well, still feeling the sting of what Jon’s attorney said about me, and battling depression. Having to attend this hearing rebroke my heart, and the wound from having to file for divorce had the scab ripped off of it. I really want to crawl under the covers and curl up in a fetal position, but I don’t have that option. Instead, I’m dragging myself out of bed for class and doing what I need to do in order to parent Daniel because he needs a functional mama.

I don’t talk a lot about my divorce on here because it isn’t fair to Jon to have our dirty laundry aired, but know that it was not a decision I made lightly. Making it felt like I was being ripped in half.

For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.

The 20-Week Abortion Ban

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I was asked by a couple friends to weigh in on this because I’m one of those people who would qualify for a late-term abortion because of the pregnancy endangering my life.

My take is this: If faced with the decision, I will always decide to save myself first, but I will also argue for them to save the baby if at all possible.

The quote that most accurately reflects my experience is this one from former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop:

Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years of pediatric surgery, I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life. If toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, the doctor will induce labor or perform a Caesarean section. His intention is to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby’s life is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.

The argument for perinatal hospice has also come up on my Facebook wall and if faced with this decision, I would probably choose to carry my baby for as long as I could before it threatened my life. At that point, I would have them deliver the baby and do whatever I had to do in order to have as much time with my kid as possible.

Tommy Tighe of The Catholic Hipster went through this with his son Luke and he blogged about it.

This quote by C. Everett Koop describes my feeling on the whole issue:

The American ideal is not that we all agree with each other, or even like each other, every minute of the day. It is rather that we will respect each other’s rights, especially the right to be different, and that, at the end of the day, we will understand that we are one people, one country, and one community, and that our well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of each and every one of our fellow citizens.

The current pro-life view I see (which really irritates me) is that the mother must carry the child to term and then she’s on her own to raise it because doing otherwise would mean she is a leech on society. If we expect every mother to carry her child, we had better be putting things in place like WIC and early intervention and SSI to allow her to take care of her child once they are born. We need to do things to support the parents of kiddos who are premature and of kiddos who die at birth. To do otherwise is hypocritical.

I also wish people would realize that we’re not talking about an abstract issue. I am a human being as is every woman who faces this decision, so I wish people would stop the Monday morning quarterbacking and stop pretending they know exactly how things should play out. It is horrendously painful to listen to people discuss this who have never faced it and who never will.

The Simple Woman’s Daybook: January 28, 2018

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For Today… January 28, 2018

Simple Woman's Daybook

Looking out my window… cold and windy but not bad overall. We’re supposed to get some rain tonight.

I am thinking… about my trip to San Jose for court. I have everything set up for Daniel care and I have to trust that he’ll be OK with my mom and sleep OK tomorrow night. It’s unnerving to say the least!

I am thankful… for everything falling into place for this trip.

One of my favorite things… a good Reddit thread.

I am wearing… jammies. Church clothes were a berry-colored long-sleeved shirt with black slacks and black flats. I switched the slacks out for black jeans when I got home.

I am creating… this blog post. 🙂 Also random stuff on my hooks.

I am listening to… Shawn Colvin singing “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon”.

I am hoping… court is decided in my favor on Tuesday.

I am learning… FICA tax calculations.

In my kitchen… I’ve been eating a lot of tuna subs from Subway.

In the school room… Daniel is becoming a little parrot so I’m having to start watching my language around him.

Post Script… sharing this infographic on how your cat is plotting to kill you. You’re welcome.

Shared Quote… “How, then, to imagine, the expansive heart of this God—greater than God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God when all God longs for is this solidarity with us. In Spanish, when you speak of your great friend, you describe the union and kinship as being de uña y mugre—our friendship is like the fingernail and the dirt under it. Our image of who God is and what’s on God’s mind is more tiny than it is troubled. It trips more on our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or theological considerations. The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity.”
–Greg Boyle, S.J.

Hosted by The Simple Woman.

5 Quick Takes: Reasons My Quick Takes Are Late Edition

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7 Quick Takes

I’m usually one of the first to post their Quick Takes when they go live on Friday at midnight (9 p.m. PST where I am) and it’s now Saturday without a post from me! Why, do you ask, are my Quick Takes late this week? Well…

— 1 —

My bed broke. At Christmas, the SKORVA beam that goes down the middle of my IKEA bed broke. My brother had experienced something similar with his IKEA bed, so he helped me prop it with books. The new part arrived after New Year’s and I installed it… but there was another problem. The LUROY slats on which the mattress sits are in two pieces, not one and certain slats kept slipping and making part of the mattress sag. My bed will be slept in by someone else while I’m in San Jose so I had to get this fixed. I just duct-taped the two halves together in such a way that Red Green would approve.

Admittedly, I still think that the designers of the SKORVA and LUROY should be trampled by a herd of syphilitic reindeer.

— 2 —

Court. As some of you know, there’s a request for order hearing this coming Tuesday in my divorce case. I was supposed to be able to testify by phone but was informed by my attorney two weeks ago that they were demanding me to be there in person because they couldn’t handle both Jon and me phoning our testimony into the hearing.

[insert me banging my head against the wall]

So… I cleared it with my parents to have them take care of Daniel and made arrangements to fly to San Jose on Monday afternoon, stay overnight, have court in the morning, and fly back to Washington on Tuesday afternoon. I’ll be gone for a little over 24 hours and am having to put everything together for my mom so that all the Daniel care stuff is automatic. While I have things more or less in place already, I’m having to edit the Daniel care journal to update it about medication and stuff like that.

— 3 —

School. I have work for two classes due on Monday and one of those classes is an enormous time suck. I’ve got everything for the first one done and am about to dive into the calculations for the class that is the time suck.

— 4 —

Daniel had no school on Friday. It was an in-service day or something so he was home yesterday, and that makes things a bit more complicated. Thankfully, he’s a good kid and we were able to go do some of the stocking-up for my trip without a problem.

— 5 —

Health. While I’m recovering more from the respiratory crap last week, I’m still not 100% and still not sleeping well because my breathing sucks. There are a large number of naps being taken and sleeping in happening as a result.

For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.