Friday, May 27, 2011

Transparent

On occasion, I open up.  Today may be one of those days.  I’m a member of a young professionals group through the chamber of commerce in the city where I work.  I haven’t been super involved in it this year.  Last year, I joined a committee (although I was never extremely active on the committee, but I did show up for a few meetings), and I participated in a mentorship program.  I do still regularly attend the monthly luncheons, however. 
The luncheon for May was this week.  The speaker was the co-offensive coordinator for the football team of my college alma mater.  A former quarterback for the team, who lead them to the last National Championship; he’s a quite successful and intelligent guy.  He spoke about leadership and goals.  Quite fitting for a person of his profession, speaking to the group that he did, isn’t it? He really made me think, though. 
I was talking to my husband about it yesterday evening, and telling him that I had realized just because I feel like a failure doesn’t mean I’ve done all I can do.  After all, I’m not even 30 yet! I said to him, “you know how I often feel like I’ve failed?” His response resonated with me.  He said, “Yes. But, what exactly have you failed at?”  Uhhh… 
I guess I haven’t failed at anything in particular; I just haven’t been as productive or as successful as I had hoped to be, or as I always imagined myself.  And then it occurred to me.  My goals haven’t been very specific in the last couple years, and thus, not very attainable.  It’s hard to reach a goal when you don’t pinpoint what exactly that goal is.  I’ve been too broad, or too vague. 
I’m going to work on changing that.  Stay tuned…

Thursday, May 26, 2011

My New Favorite Thing

I have no grass. 
My yard is currently made up of mostly dirt and sand.  It’s a mess.  It’s a mess that is easy to track into the house. 
I have tile floors.
I hate walking on dirty tile floors.  Yuck.  It feels gross on my feet. 
No grass + tile floors = constant filth.  I clean the floor and by the end of the day they’re dirty again.
I have a baby. 
I have a baby who is becoming ever so mobile.  This is an added complication to my dirty floor dilemma.  I hate dirty floors to begin with, but I definitely don’t want my little dust mop who puts everything in her mouth crawling around on it. 
My cleaning routine has been: sweep with a broom, sweep again with a dust mop, then mop.  It’s exhausting, and then it’s dirty again by the end of the day. 
Enter the Shark Vac then Steam. 
My mother understood my plight, and knew that I wanted one for my birthday.  I cannot thank her enough for this.  It is awesome.  You vacuum the floor, then fill it up with water, clip on the pad, switch to mop and go again.  It cuts way down on my time.  It picks up dirt better than my broom.  It mops really well.  And, it disinfects with steam.  Best of all, it does its job well enough that I don’t have to do it every single day.  I don’t feel so bad when I catch Dinah licking the floor.  It also feels better on my feet. 
It’s definitely worth the money. 
I knew I wanted one, and I emailed Shark to see if I could get a coupon to make it more affordable.  No answer.  But, I bought it anyway, and I love it.  Can I just say that again?  I LOVE it.  It gives me clean floors…and peace of mind. 

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Curses Turned to Blessings- Part II

One morning, almost a week before we went to the Verizon store, we loaded our baby and ourselves into our car to head to church, and…it wouldn’t start. 
After some inspection, a couple phone calls, and much deliberation, we determined the car was dead to us.  It’s been a great car, really.  But, it was old, and in the last couple years we’ve had to put more and more money into it.  At this point, we decided to cut our losses and not put any more money into fixing it when it’s not worth too much anyway. 
So, we were down to one vehicle.  Neither of us have had a car payment in several years, and we wanted to keep it that way.  But, we needed a car, and we didn’t have the money for one.  After hours of looking, and talking, and test driving, and figuring, we brought home our new car.    It is much newer and nicer than I pictured us having, but with a baby we’re not willing to take risks with, we needed something reliable.  We decided there was no way around making payments, so we might as well get something that will last.  And, we could get something older and not as fuel efficient or something newer and more fuel efficient and come out about the same on cost in the end. 
So almost a week after the cell phone incident, we bought this.    
And, my new phone paid for itself that day, by allowing me to look up competitor pricing online while we negotiated on car price.
What a week! So, two situations that seemed a little impossible in the beginning, God turned into two huge blessings.  I love it when that happens! And, it’s a nice refresher from the way things normally go when they all happen at once.    He always provides just what we need, doesn't he?  I need that reminder when I get discouraged.  He is in control, not me. 

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Curses Turned to Blessings- Part I

Do you ever feel like everything goes wrong at once?  It seems like we can never face just one trial at a time.  It gets very discouraging.  But, sometimes, what seems like a curse ends up being a blessing.   That happened to me twice in one week recently. 
First, Dean and I went to the Verizon store to talk to them about our internet.  Our internet device is getting pretty old, and it’s not working too well anymore.  We decided to make a stop at the store and see what our upgrade options were.  As it turns out, internet plans with them are not like phone plans.  You cannot upgrade the device and keep the same plan.  This poses a problem for us when our internet is currently unlimited, but upgrading would put a cap on how much we can use. 
Since we were already there, we decided to look at phones.  Ours were about 3 years old, so we knew an upgrade was likely sometime in our future.  Dean looked at heavy duty phones that would be suitable for his profession.  I looked at feature phones, because I was not going to waste my money on a stupid data plan for a smartphone.  But then, a combination of things happened.  My husband likes to take care of me, and left to his own devices, he would spend more money on me than he does on anything else.  The salesman knew how to do his job.  So, the two of them convinced me to look at smartphones.  In the end, I walked out of the store with a new iPhone.  After talking it over, we ultimately decided that our best option would be to buy one for me now (Happy Mother’s Day to me!) and in a month or two buy one for Dean.  Truth be told, it will be invaluable to him in his job and after purchasing a special case it is rated just as good as most heavy duty phones.  They will take the place of our home internet, and our data plans will cost exactly what we pay now for internet. 


So, welcome to my life iPhone, I think we’ll get along quite nicely.


To Be Continued…