My side of the story

Conclusion

2012-01-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

So you might think, that after reading these last few posts that I just hold on to too much crap from the past, but that's just simply not true. When I left home I started fresh and decided that I was going to let go of everything. I figured that holding onto it was just going to slow me down and I just had too much to do.

It wasn't until I had started trying to reconnect with family members that I realized that they were the ones who weren't able to let go of things. And since they were actually holding on to false things; judging me for things that I hadn't done and not even giving me a chance to explain, that I decided to revisit the past in order to tell my side of it.

Being accused to being the wrongdoer when you were really actually the victim is a really, really hard thing to have to deal with. It's sort of like being raped and then later getting accused of somehow causing that rape by the clothes that you were wearing, or being accused of lying about it. It's very, very hard, especially when I was willing to just let it all be water under the bridge.

Do I forgive them? Absolutely. If there was ever some sort of trial were I was able to witness to a court against any of them in order to convict I wouldn't accuse them of anything. I forgive my brothers, my father, my sister and my mother. They are all just as much victims in this messy world as I am.

After Christ was crucified and resurrected, when he came to Mary and to the Nephites, he still had the scars from the nails on his hands, and it became a witness of his sacrifice. Am I no better then him? I too have scars. Having scars and pain from those scars doesn't mean that you haven't forgiven someone.

My scars are mine now. They are with me always and to tell you the truth I'm sort of grateful for them. They are a constant reminder to me of what not to do to someone. They remind me that children are sweet and precious and they deserve kindness and compassion. They remind me to not be to quick to judge people sometimes and that everybody has their reasons for doing the things that they do. They remind me to let people be who they are and to love them despite it all.

They also remind me to be careful and to not put myself into situations where I can be hurt too easily. And they also give me strength to stand up for what I believe in. I'm not afraid of the beating that I might get from it because I've gotten that beating before and to be honest...it wasn't that bad and was way worth it.

Christ

2011-12-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

As with all things that have to potential to be good there is usually an equal potential for those things, if done improperly, to be really, really bad. Families are one of those things.

One thing that people might not realize about Mormon’s is just how separate families are from the actual church. There is the Church and the teachings of the Church but within many families, because of the Churches belief in the sanctity of family, there are sometimes wrong teachings and beliefs that stem from a parent that has wrong motivations and intentions. The result of this is very, very bad.

The actual teachings of the Church have a foundation in Jesus Christ and never deviate from his teachings. My parents talked of Jesus Christ all of the time; they prayed in his name and read scriptures that referred to him but I never saw him truly taught in practice in my home.

My home life was very much a law of Moses “eye for and eye” environment. Even the smallest mistakes resulted in the “consequence” of a spanking. There was no compassion and absolutely no love; only justice and punishment.

I remember my mother talking to me about repentance. The bible dictionary explains repentance as a change of heart and a constant desire to try to do the right thing. But my mother told me that in your prayers at night, if you didn’t remember every single bad thing that you did during the day that you were in danger of that thing still being written on…I don’t know…the book I guess.

This is completely false, and it absolutely does not line up with what the Church believes but it is what I was taught nonetheless. This small false teaching has ruined my life. I realized early on that I could never be perfect and I could never remember all of the bad things that I had done during the day so I might as well not try at all. And it didn’t help that I got such harsh punishments for small mistakes like not cleaning my room good enough; if my parent figures were that harsh then I guess God was just as harsh. I didn't really want to obey a God that was as harsh as my parents.

I can’t explain the joy that I felt when I realized that those teachings were not true. That Christ has paid the price for me and that all was needed was a broken heart and a DESIRE to do right. And if you could live your life with this broken heart and desire to do good that you then have a change of heart and good things come out of it naturally. Such freedom, such joy.

The Feminist

2011-12-27T09:54:00.000-08:00

So, yea, I’m a feminist. But hear me out for a second. It’s not as bad as it sounds and it doesn’t mean that I hate men. It just means that I feel that the world needs more of the feminine voice to balance out the masculine voice.

It has a lot to do with my upbringing. Ya see, I have five brothers, 3 older and two younger. The male perspective was very strong in my family and it didn’t help that my mother and sister had both betrayed their feminine self’s and had joined in with the male voice. I can see why they did it, it’s easier, men and boys like you better when you do. But the result of not raising you’re feminine voice is that there is a lot of violence. You see, women are usually more compassionate and nurturing then men and they are usually the ones, if their voice is strong enough, that prevent harm from coming to their children by letting the men know that they need to chill out on the violent mindset. (I mean, dude, we aren’t at war)

I don’t know why I felt the need to stay true to my feminine voice but I did and I was beaten and made fun of most of my childhood life because of it. My brothers and father hated it. Any signs of emotion was interpreted as “drama” and to this day I am referred to as the “drama queen”…They all remember me as the trouble maker, the one who was always trying to take a stand for something or the other. I was a little brat because I spoke up against their mind set and had the nerve to try and insert a different one and not back down from it.

And it's no different in my adulthood. They all still see me as being a trouble maker for having feelings and expressing them. I'm sure that if I just went along with their perspectives that everything would start to be a lot easier for me.

The world is very much like my home while growing up. If women don't use their true feminine voices, if they don’t raise them and insert them into the male dominated conversations; if we don’t join together and support each other then we will never have any compassion or peace in the world. The most violent societies that exist in the world today are ones in which the female voice has been completely shut out.

Crazy

2011-12-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

“I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind”

I remember when I lost my mind. It was about a year before I left home. We were living in a town called Playas New Mexico. It was a strange little mining town that was built for the people who worked at the mine to live. We were living there because my father was the cop.

I had spent most of my childhood going from town to town because my father was always taking new cop jobs and moving us around. He always took jobs in really small towns and this one wasn’t any different from the rest of the places that we’d lived.

Some of the towns that we lived in I did well in as far as popularity and friends go. This town I did particularly well in. Everybody liked me. And then one day I sort of woke up and looked around me and realized that I had been feeling accepted and important because a very small group of people said so, because I was playing by all of their rules. I was dressing how they said I was supposed to dress, acting the way that they thought was acceptable…and I starting thinking that sure, I might be have a social status in this town but in another town, I’m nothing. And then it dawned on me that the fact that I was being what people wanted me to be, instead of who I really was, was really messed up.

And so I started, at first doing anything and everything to let people know that I wasn’t a part of their made up little social structures. I wanted to prove that I didn’t have to live by their rules and so I started behaving in a way that I knew that they would see as being weird. Which really meant that I made up my own dress codes and that I started speaking up about various things. These little changes in me were enough to get EVERYONE, and I mean everyone to not want to talk to me anymore. I went from being popular to no one even wanting to sit next to be at lunch time. It was strangely fascinating. And strangely empowering.

“Does that make me crazy? Does that make me crazy? Does that make me crazy?
Probably…”

The reason

2011-12-26T10:28:00.001-08:00

When I was around 16 I left home. I wont get into the details of it but suffice to say my home was not a safe place for me to be; I had a very violent father who didn’t think that women should be allowed to speak…and I was willing to put up with a good beating for the satisfaction of speaking. Not very safe for me so I left.

My father didn’t like this. He didn’t like how it looked. He didn’t like how it might make him look. So he started talking. Mostly to family members, telling them all sorts of things about me and how bad that I am and was. So, even though none of it was true and my younger sibling no longer talk to my father, the seeds of hate that he said about me are still in them and they wont have anything to do with me.

After I left home one of my brothers came home from his mission and heard from my father about all of my wicked deeds and this set him on a road from then on to be against me. So between him and my father constantly saying bad things about me, I am pretty much unredeemable in my family’s eyes.

And to make matters worse, I have somehow gotten the blame for all of the problems that my family has ever had. Me. My brother and father have joined forces and have decided to tell everyone that it is because of me that no one talks to each other anymore. Me! Who no one even talks to to begin with? My original act of defiance against my father, my leaving because I didn’t want to get beaten anymore for opening my mouth is the reason my family isn’t together?

I’ve been watching all of the protests going on in Russia. Putin reminds me of my father. I love that he has tried to lesson the sincerity of their protests by accusing them of only doing it because “Americans” are paying them to. As if they could never have been motivated to rise up against him unless there was greed involved.

Putin reminds me of my father. He accuses me in the same way. Always trying to keep me from speaking my mind. He can’t physically beat me anymore so he abuses me by the things that he says about me.

New me new Blog

2011-12-26T09:45:00.000-08:00

I used to have this theory that if I was a good person, that the truth about me would be revealed and that I didn’t need to explain my side of things to people. I think I even thought that explaining myself would actually weaken my case…but it turns out that in this world, with all the talking, talking, talking that everyone does, if you are going to get heard and understood; if you’re point of view is going to have a platform…you have to talk too. You have to insert your voice into the conversation, even if it’s hard. And even if it means that you might be putting your self in a situation where you could be easily criticized.

So, I’m starting a new blog. It’s an extension of my old one but it’s new because I now know how important it is that I get my true opinions out there; my true point of view.

Love: The Higher Law

2011-06-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I’m trying to put something together that has been bouncing around in my mind for awhile and it has to do with love and how it fits into our restored Latter-Day Church. Poets, story writers, songwriters, hippies and all kinds of people have known something about the magic of love for awhile. It seems to be something of a higher law, something that if you have enough of it, despite any other physical law; takes over and makes everything alright.

In the Disney film Beauty and The Beast, the beast was dead and because Bell said “I love you” and she meant it because one of her love tears drops on the beast; the beast is resurrected from the dead. U2 sings about love being a temple, “Love, the higher law”. I won’t bore anyone by more examples of this in popular fiction and literature because there are really too many examples to name. People in a lot of other religions and backgrounds all have the same strong faith in the power of love.

So how about us, the Mormons? What exactly do we think about love? Well, we believe in Jesus Christ, or at least we all claim to. Every Sunday when we take the sacrament, we promise to take upon ourselves his name and actually be him. So, we are supposed to be being like him. On one of Christ’s last night’s he gave his disciples a NEW commandment and it was simply to love one another. A new commandment? To love? How is that new and why would they need to be commanded to do it?

Up until then the Jews had been living the law of Moses which was a lower law that was given. A law that was “an eye for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” meaning that if someone got you, you got to get them back. But now in this new law that Jesus was proposing, if someone gets you, you were supposed to forgive them and love them and if you did that that in the end, God would be easy on you as well.

So, do we live this law? Well, obviously no. I’m mean, everybody toys with the idea but most of us still depend on a justice system. If someone robs your house, you call the cops and hope for the bad guys to get caught so that they can go to jail. Justice. Most of us probably think that it’s impossible to live the higher law of love and so don’t even attempt to try.

My question is can we do it? Is it possible? One scripture that keeps playing over and over in my mind on this subject is in Mosiah 5 after king Benjamin had been talking to his people, that they all shouted that, “The Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually….

And we are willing to enter into a covenant with our God to do his will, and to be obedient to his commandments in all things that he shall command us, all the remainder of our days…

And now, because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name; therefore, ye are born of him and have become his sons and his daughters.

And under this head ye are made free, and there is no other head whereby ye can be made free. There is no other name given whereby salvation cometh; therefore, I would that ye should take upon you the name of Christ, all you that have entered into the covenant with God that ye should be obedient unto the end of your lives.”

What the heck? This does not sound to me like any covenant that I’ve ever made. It’s similar but not the same. This sounds to me like there needs to be some sort of change that comes over you before you can actually live the higher law of love. So how do I get this mighty change of heart like the people of Benjamin had?

I certainly don’t think that it’s something that is just given as a gift, like the gift of the Holy Ghost. It seems like something that has to be sought out, something that you have to pray for.

“we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually” now that sounds really nice. Are we praying for this? I am. Still waiting.

Mormons: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

2011-06-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

When a child grows up getting beaten by his parents every time he is “bad” he grows up with a “things are only black or white” type of mentality and he even begins to develop a loyalty to the ones who abused him; having lost contact with the memory of the beatings yet retaining the painful feelings that those beatings caused.

I see the Mormon people as a race of people who are like a man who got the crap beaten out of him when he was little.

Many American Mormons have a very strange devotion to their country. Some it even seems would put aside their religious beliefs in order to sustain and defend America and they see nothing wrong with this; in fact they see it as being the most honorable thing that they could do. Also, many, many, Mormons feel very strongly that our country should go back to the way it used to be, back when the country had less government involvement.

So my question is why this devotion? Why do they want to go back to the good old days? Why have they so quickly forgotten what happened to them? THEY GOT CHASED OUT OF THE COUNTRY! They were kicked out! And when they were finally a little bit settled, the US government came back and forced them to join them again and made them fight in their wars!

Essentially, the old American government kicked the crap out of the Mormon people when they were young. Yea, old America didn’t have as many taxes but…they used to have human slaves and they murdered Indians and chased them out of their lands. Not very good, in fact; very, very bad! So, is it possible that this early abuse is what has caused many Mormons to have an almost dysfunctional loyalty to America? Are we a race that is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder?

If so, we’ve got some checking ourselves to do. You see, when a child has been battered, he has to somehow revisit the pain of the beatings in their true light and reconnect the painful feelings that he has with the true memories. He has to have knowledge and understanding of what really happened if there is ever to be forgiveness. And forgiveness is a MUST if he is ever going to get better and live a normal life; a life free of drugs and alcohol and other self destructive things.

I don’t think that we’ve forgiven our country for what they did to us. Why else would we go on and on and on and on about the pioneers and all of their hardships. We go on and on about it but never make the connection of it being the fault of the US government. The “Old” government…the one that they all want to go back to so badly.

2011-05-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

Okay so, I’m in BYU film school now and here are some of the things that I’ve done in my first semester:

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/7/m_ZKRsL8pV0

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/5/JHN3JtvJnfo

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/1/FPiX8xxs6qc

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/2/h28fXSs7nis

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/3/4iKmf75Daio

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/4/Hyy0WJKO0lM

http://www.youtube.com/user/rhondagray75#p/u/6/kPZfD5DCWhk

2011-03-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

"When I was about eight I had a dream about the war in heaven—the war where Michael and his angels cast out Satan. It was obviously a byproduct of some Sunday school lesson, except, in my dream, it wasn’t so much a war as it was a baseball game. No swords or guns or broken beer bottles—not even a Fantasia-like exchange of colored lightning bolts. It was an outdoor baseball game and I was the catcher. I had the mask, the pads and the funny-looking catcher’s mitt. Satan, who other than being abnormally tall seemed like a perfectly normal guy, was up to bat. What I remember from my dream begins with Satan tapping the dirt out of his spikes, and me starting to shake. I remember I was terrified.

The thing was, I wasn’t scared because Satan was three feet away from me holding a baseball bat. I was frightened because on the mound God was pitching. I knew I was supposed to catch the ball when he pitched, and I just knew that he was going to knock my head off. Even as an eight year old I was sure that I did not want to get in the way of God’s fast ball.

I started to cry, positive I was going to die. A timeout was called and God motioned me to the pitcher’s mound. In the infield Jesus, as shortstop, gave me a thumbs up. When I got to the mound, God crouched down, put his arm around me and told me not to worry about the pitch. All I was supposed to do, he said, was keep my left hand open and he would land that ball in my mitt, real sweet and gentle..." Anna Lewis

2010-11-30T17:06:00.001-08:00

"All we can do is live…we’ll live through a long row of days…and through the endless evenings…and we’ll bear up…under the trials fate has sent to us…we’ll constantly toil for others…now and for the rest of our days…and when we come to die, we’ll die submissively…beyond the grave, we will testify that we’ve suffered…that we’ve wept, that we’ve known bitterness…and God will take pity on us…and we’ll look down and we’ll see evil…all the evil in the world and all of our sufferings bathed in a perfect mercy."--Vanya on 42nd Street

Husky Hot Chocolate

2010-11-08T21:21:00.000-08:00

Do not underestimate the power of this stuff! It is like manna!

Washington Husky famous night before the big game Hot Chocolate

5 cups of whole milk

1 ¼ cup of heavy whipping cream

1 ¼ cup half and half

1 cup Hershey chocolate syrup

1 cup Swiss miss hot chocolate mix

2 Hershey chocolate bars

Dump all ingredients into a large pot, set on stove top and set the temp to medium. Stir frequently and bring to simmer. Simmer and stir for about 30 to 45 minutes. Drink with lots of whip cream.

2010-06-15T12:44:00.001-07:00

"And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?"-talking heads

Human

2010-06-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

Well, a lot of things going on. Crazy busy. Pondering this crazy life and how I can be a better human. Been thinking about blindness. I mean being blind to things that are important and not knowing it. What do you do when you realize that all that time that you thought that you were 100% open minded and forgiving and accepting that you weren’t at 100%, that maybe you were at about 50%. It is a bit of a blow to the ego I think, yea, that ego that you thought that you didn’t have. And then I wonder, is this what happens when you get old? That you never really knew anything into the first place? And that you can never really say anything about anything because you don’t know anything? And If you do end up looking like an idiot. But ya know I’m a bit torn. I don’t want to go through life with my tail through my legs, I want to stand tall. I don’t want this world to beat me. Is there any way that you can be completely aware of all of your faults and weaknesses and still love yourself? Is there a way to forgive and forget all of your own sins?

2010-06-08T01:02:00.000-07:00

"How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?"

2010-05-20T03:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like my soul just might burst out of my body I’m so full, like my silhouette might stretch from sunrise to sunset. Who am I but a speck in the vast eternity of things? And yet I am so bold as to not bow before my maker and give thanks…however big or little I am given. The thought that I am able to have this experience, that I was given the chance to love, to watch my children come into this world, to hold them in my arms as they took their first breath of air, that I was able to hurt…I got to hurt and in doing so I was able to feel true joy…something that is impossible without the other. However many more days that I have left on this earth…I am oh so small; I pray to God and the gods and whomever will hear me…thank you. Thank you for breaking my heart; I would not trade it in for the world.

2010-03-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

You are so content with the ideas that you have been conditioned to have. Why is there no one willing to go out of their box of thinking; if not for just a minute, put yourselves in the shoes of others and have original ideas? Did it ever occur to you that Al-Qaeda might be just as patriotic as you? You talk of your blessed country and forefathers as if they were you, as if you would have done the same if given the chance. Did it not occur to you that some thought of your fathers as terrests? I do not try to tell you something at this time and have you believe it. I only ask that you think. Think. Put aside your beliefs and prejudices. Isn’t that all that we ask of others when we want them to consider our religion? How is it that we can ask this of the world and not do it ourselves?

Why I am A Democrat

2010-03-10T19:14:00.001-08:00

I was talking to a family member on the phone the other day and she had just finished listening to Glenn Beck and man was she on fire! Not only did she seem extremely angry but she was also not willing to let me get a word in edgewise in our conversation. Now, let me tell you a little bit about this family member; she’s sweet, kind, loving (unconditionally) and giving. She has always been a Christ like example to me so naturally after seeing the way that she was acting I got a little worried. I decided to investigate this phenomenon a bit further by talking to other people who I know listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I was a bit of a brat about it actually and expressed sentiments that differentiated me from those who are politically “right” saying things like, “I love our president” and “I completely support health care reform.” I was expecting to get a reaction but I did not expect there to be so much anger and hate in their reactions. I was puzzled. The people that I asked were all LDS and I was curious as to whether their strong angry views were something that was justified or not. I was going to go to the book of Mormon to try and find references as to how people should act when political weather is stormy but instead I decided to narrow it down even further. I decided to figure out how Jesus Christ would act if he were here. When Jesus Christ walked the earth, he was living in a period of time where the political climate was extremely hot and how did he respond to it? When the people asked Jesus if it was lawful to pay taxes Jesus said, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be Gods.” (Luke 20:25) He also say’s to “Judge not”, don’t be angry with your brother, “agree with thine adversary quickly”, “swear not at all”, “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” If you get sewed, and they “take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also”, “ And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain” and the most important, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints is the only true church and more importantly, I believe that we have a true prophet. If the prophet stood up tomorrow and said that we need to start to fighting to protect our rights and freedoms; I would do it, but unless I missed something, he hasn’t done that. And until I hear otherwise, I will continue to pray for, and support our government because how in the world does slandering them do any good? I have no doubt that there is corruption within our government but how does being hateful and hotheaded help any situation? If we the people expect to get heard; we need to learn the proper way of going about it. Coming across as being obnoxious and irreverent just makes a person look like an idiot. If we want to get heard as a people we need to start off by having love and a prayer in our hearts. If we are feeling angry or hateful thoughts to those in which we oppose, it will always show through. We must have a genuine love for our brothers and sisters with different political views if we are ever to get our points across. “Behold, verily, verily, I say unto you, ye must watch and pray always lest ye enter into temptation; for Satan desireth to have you, that he may sift you as wheat.”(3: Nephi 18) I think that in this day and age we, especially Latter-Day-Saints need to constantly be checking ourselves that we do not fall into the many snares that are waiting for us; but I am confident that if we pray always, read the scriptures; especially the ones that describe to us how to be like Christ, and follow the leaders of the church that we will be able to act like people who have truly taken on themselves the name of Christ.

2010-02-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

EHHHHHH! What’s going on here! Where am I? What happened? People are so different up here. These kids act like they know stuff. What do they know besides the scriptures and how to make toast! Nothing. Well my goodness gracious let me tell you the news, don’t look at me with that know it all frown smile and act like you know something just because you just spent two years in some town in South America, where your mommy sent you a cookie care package every week and your mission president made you eat yucky stuff! And dude it isn’t a booty call when you call a girl over to your crappy apartment at 9:45 on a week night to come over and sit next to you while you watch a raunchy PG-13 flick! “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Is this wisdom that I see or fools wisdom?” Sometimes I wonder if I am the sheep or if I am the wolves. I’ve always tried to follow my heart. When something felt wrong, it was usually wrong and if something felt right, it’s usually right, when I follow my heart that is. Something is not right here. The spirit is always implied but never declared. I wonder if they have ever even felt the spirit. Have I? These are things that I want to get to the bottom of.

The real question here is it necessary to get bitten to know that bites hurt? How do I teach my children how to not be like this without letting them experience pain? Is it possible for someone to go to boot camp and truly be prepared for the war when you get there or can nothing really prepare you for that? Should you completely shield your child from the battle field if you are certain that they must surely taste the bitterness anyway? Maybe they will need a memory of peace and freeness that is not mingled with pain, maybe it will be the only thing that they will have to hold onto. Like Frodo and the other shirelings. The memory of the peace of the Shire is what drives them to do their task, it is what keeps them alive. I don’t have all of the answers yet. But I am sure that, like always it will come, if I can have eyes to see and ears to hear maybe. And I pray…

the Silent hero

2010-01-03T00:33:00.000-08:00

Why isn’t there any middle ground anymore? Only, hot or cold; black or white, True and false.

Why has Silence become the new hero to this story?

“If you cannot think of anything appropriate to say you will please restrict your remarks to the weather.” Says Mrs. Dashwood when her daughters were not acting proper by talking too much.

I was 30 when I went back to school and most of the students that I started with were all about 18 or 19.

I was fortunate enough to have been given insight into this strange new generation that is now coming into age…

And they are Silent.

No use for words.

Texting does just fine.

Look me in the eye DAMN IT!

I’m right here!

Lift up your pampered head and look at me.

Say something to me.

2010-01-01T06:41:00.001-08:00

Lord, this year,

Help me, to help others;

To help myself

Prepare me for what is to come

And please let those things come soon

I pray that I will understand

Give me eyes that I may see;

Ears, that I may hear

Please give me more strength, to endure ALL things

In his name

Amen

A new year, a new day

2009-12-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

Well, it’s December 28, 2009 and in just a few days it will be a new year. For about five years now I’ve told myself, “this will be the year that everything goes just perfectly!” I don’t hope for perfection anymore because I don’t believe that perfection exists, at least on this earth. Heavenly father has seen fit to make it so that I have had to accept myself for who I am, the extra 30 pounds, the blinding black temper that I hold deep down inside of me, yea, the one that makes me swear worse than a sailor, everything. So why do I feel so good about everything? Why do I feel so strong? Why do I feel so hopeful?

For those of you that read my blog, you may have detected some negativity as of late. I haven’t come out and plainly talked about my troubles but I’ve had some…when I had the miscarriage almost one month ago I was having a lot of self blame. I thought it was my fault somehow. It’s amazing how much permission that we give Satan with our minds and our self dialogue. It had gotten to the point where I would just let him come into my mind whenever he felt like it; I thought I deserved to have him there. And then the craziest thing happened the other day. I just got sick of him and I told him to go away. No more…no more. And he did. I refuse to spend my days, using my grief as a cloak, in darkness, allowing the devil to have freedom with me. I told myself that I may or may not be guilty but I would let God be the judge of it, not Satan; and while I still have breath on this earth I will keep striving to serve the lord. And that was that.

So, I invite Gods will to happen to me this year, whatever that might be and I would like to openly make a promise to myself; that I will try harder. I will try harder.

2009-12-23T13:18:00.000-08:00

December 6th, 2009 is when we lost our Viola. December 6th is when we will get our Christmas tree to commemorate her.

“Hide a terrible broken heart…"-SO "No more grieving for those whose time has come…”LOTR

2009-12-21T22:35:00.001-08:00

I used to be a very silly girl…or was I? That seems to be the girl that everyone remembers and liked more. Before I chose to be silly, I was very serious and thoughtful…so, what to do, what to do…be the way that people want me to me or be the way that I am. Make everyone happy, well, except for me.

2009-12-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

I have no words of my own. I can only quote right now. There are a lot of great quotes out there. Sometimes, even the worst book in the world will have a phrase or a sentence that explains eternity to me. I don’t find those very often but that is why I keep reading, for that little nugget of gold that I just might find among the mud and earth.

2009-12-09T08:49:00.000-08:00

I dreamt that an evil spirit was trying to get into our home last night…and I was confident that if I just commanded it to leave in the name of Jesus Christ that it would leave, so I started saying it over and over again but it wasn’t working…and then Tom showed up and held my hand and at that the spirit fled immediately.

“You are the only good thing that I have done…we will walk until my blood runs out…until my heart is burned…” to you Tom, my Rock…I don’t know what I would do without you…

2009-12-08T04:02:00.000-08:00

The Lord is my shepherd

I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul

he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil for thou art with me

thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies

thou anointest my head with oil

my cup runneth over.

Surely agoodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

2009-11-03T05:49:00.000-08:00

I’m pregnant and am basically bedridden, not because of doctors orders but because I’m just too sick to really go and do anything. When you are sick, and you know that you’ll most likely be sick for awhile, it really makes you remember how nice it was to feel normal. I mean I’m almost a little bit mad at myself because I didn’t do more when I was feeling healthy. I think that when I feel good again I am going to do a lot of things, soooo many things because being exhausted because of a long day of activities is much better than being exhausted for no reason. It makes me so mad that I can’t even keep my house in order, my house is disgusting right now and Tom is doing everything that he can to help but he’s taking some pretty hard classes this semester so it hasn’t been easy for him. Gosh he’s wonderful. I may be the only one that get’s to see that but I don’t care. It used to bother me that people didn’t see him in the same light as I did but now I could care less. I have learned to love him more deeply than I ever thought possible. I never knew that this kind of love existed. How do you explain the type of love that a husband and wife experience for each other. We have been through many trials together and have come out of them alive and wiser and stronger. And to top it all off, we are eternal; we will be together throughout eternity, he is mine forever. I cannot put into words how happy that that makes me. And my children…oh my children, what can I say about them, I love them so much that sometimes it hurts. They have been with us through all of our trials and have to come out of them refined and polished. They are so kind and caring and sweet and they have helped me so much with this pregnancy. Meshach has taken it upon his self, without being asked, to help get the other kids up in the morning for school. He sets his alarm for 5:00 am and he does everything to get the others ready. All we have been having to do is get up for about five minutes to make sure everybody looks halfway decent and say a prayer with them before they leave. Amazing!

So, I have been accepted into BYU Prove and BYU Idaho. I really have wanted to go to Provo but they haven’t offered me a financial aid package or anything yet. BYU Idaho has offered me a financial aid package already, they have a program that I am really interested in and they’ve sent me letters to encourage me with getting started and they e-mail reminders about things almost on a daily basis. Provo has done none of that, so I’m confused now and have no idea what to do. I still seem to feel lead to go to Provo but I really just need to learn to be more paitent and wait awhile, I know that everything will be fine. I don’t want to make a mistake though and I want what’s best for my family in the long run. I’m trying to keep an open heart and mind for whatever the Lord wants us to do even if that means us staying here. I hope that we don’t have to stay here though, not that it is bad here but I just don’t think that it is the best place for our family right now. We shall see shant we. For now, I just want to feel better; I’m hoping that I will start feeling better in about another month, that’s how my other pregnancies have been. And of course there is the issue of money. So far we are fine with money but I fear that if we wait another couple of months, we will be low on funds and you have to have a lot of money to move.

My troubles are so minimal, I know, I should really be more grateful. When it comes down to it, as long as my family is safe and taken care of, I am perfectly content. Before I close, I just want to take a minute to bear my testimony. I am so grateful for the restored gospel. I am so grateful to be a part of it. I sustain Thomas S. Monsen as a true prophet. I know that he leads us through divine inspiration. I am so thankful for him. I also know that Joseph Smith was a true Prophet and that he was called by God to restore this great Church. He translated the Book of Mormon and it is now the only true book on the face of this planet. I love my Savior Jesus Christ and I know that my soul depends on his atonement. He paid the price for me and I am eternally grateful. I know that ANYTHING is possible if I have faith in him and put my trust in him.

2009-10-07T16:22:00.001-07:00

A choice was made
Hearts were changed
The Adversary’s moves were already laid

Full of faith, she set her first pace
Off to the west, to a better place

She worried not of what was to come
She had seen the valley of joy and peace in her dreams
A smile lights her face, she feels like she could run

She walks and walks and her faith is strong
She has no doubts, though the road begins to get long

She is starting to feel, the blisters on her feet
And it’s been a few days since she has had anything to eat

The numbness sets in and she has no smile
And she hasn’t had time to hope in awhile

Her baby will come soon and she thinks in her heart
That this time, she won’t be able to play her part

As her baby comes in the freezing night
Who knows the fear she feels?
And who can ever understand her sorrow?
At the moment, there is no sun tomorrow.

She pleads with God to spare her child,
She pleads with God to give her strength,
She pleads with God to let this cup pass,
Nevertheless, “Thy will be done.”

“Thy will be done.” She utters under her breath
As they lower her baby into a cold grave, after his death

The adversary laughs, and is sure he has won
This move works every time, he is having fun

So much for her faith, her spirit is broke
This will follow her like an oxen yoke

About the yoke he was correct
But then something happened that he did not expect

The yoke was heavy, but then her strength grew strong
And it now helped her to carry more burdens, on that road that was long

So she continues on, one step at a time
Here faith still there but now it is fine

Just like a jewel that’s been cut by an expert hand
And it’s strong and it shines and is extremely grand

No adversary can touch her and of death there is no fright
She is not afraid of that last mysterious flight

On and on and on she pushes
Until that sweet morning, through the stones and the bushes

She stands above Gods great land
And glimpses for the first time the work of his hand

She’d made it, she’d done it, she is home
Never again will she have to roam

This is a woman from whom I descend
Her strength was passed to me
I will not pretend

My path is different, my trials not the same
But they are just as trying and bring me much pain

Sometimes I feel, like I cannot make it
Sometimes I feel like giving up
Sometimes I feel like it’s just too hard

And I feel like my flowing tears, just might drown me this time

And then I think of her and what she did
I raise my face that for too long has been hid

I see her there standing above me
A very beautiful lovely sight is she

“Lift up your heart daughter of Zion.” she says
“Move forward my child and stop your crying.”

“Where you are now, I too have been.”
“Lift up your head, don’t droop in sin”

“Your yoke will make you strong”
“Your journey will soon not seem so long”

And so I move on, one step at a time
Waiting for that day when my own strength is strong
And my faith is fine

And no Adversary can touch me for I’m hard as a jewel
And in the master’s hand, I will be a tool.

War

2009-08-14T21:46:00.001-07:00

I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie or anything but I do long for the day when we no longer have to deal with war and hate and prejudice and jealousy and did I mention hate. The day when we all stack up our weapons of war in a heap because there is no longer any need for them. I do understand that war is necessary; it has always been throughout history and before that. The defenders of freedom and justice have had no other choice then to defend their families when they were threatened by reckless hate. But I do think that there have been prophecies that say that there will soon be a time of peace, where men will no longer have the desire to make war with their brother. Were the “arts” of war will no longer be studied and practiced; where it will be known throughout the land that “"Here wisdom, knowledge and truth are blended! Here mercy reigns and war is ended! Here on these grounds all nations enter; but here a tyrant dare not venture!"

2009-05-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

Most don’t know it but this has been a really, really hard year for me. I won’t go on and on about all of my struggles but I can say this, the Lord has been with me every step of the way. This year I have learned to put complete trust and faith in God. He has never failed me, not once. He has always answered my prayers, not always as fast as I wanted him to but he did none the less. I have also learned that to live in the world that we live in now; I cannot survive unless I have the full armor of God upon me, from head to toe, to protect me in the battle against evil. There are no more gray areas. The time has come for those who are on the Lords side, to openly choose it; there is no other side, except darkness and misery.

I feel myself getting stronger each day. I feel like I am coming out of a long deep fitful sleep, I’m a bit groggy, but I know that I will eventually come out of it and be myself again. I am starting to remember who I am and why I am here. I am starting to realize my purpose and most of all; I am more humble than I have ever been. I know that without my heavenly father…I am literally nothing, I really am lower than dust. And so the fact that he loves us so much, as lowly and fallen as we are, astounds me. What astounds me the most is the potential that he sees’s in us all. He actually, believes in us and thinks that we will make it. And oh! When we do…I long for that moment, to be embraced in my heavenly fathers arms once more…

2009-03-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

I guess that the time has come for me to write on my online journal once again. Once again I will try to dig deep inside of myself and try to pull something decent out. Ya know, something that I have had on my mind all week is something that my drama instructor told me the other day. We were talking about play writers and how certain play writers such as Tennessee Williams, have only written one good play and he spent most of his life trying to perfect that play until he finally gave us “The Glass Menagerie”. She came to the conclusion that maybe, possibly everyone has just one story that is in them, one story that is just waiting to come out, and then she asked, what is your story? She also pointed out that there are some play writers that have had a lot of success with many play’s such as Shakespeare but…when you really examine his work…some could argue that it is the same story, only told from a different angle or point of view each time. So, what is my story? I’ll have to think on that, but I’m pretty sure that I would want it to be a positive one. It most likely wouldn’t start out positive, but it would end up positive. I think that it would be about a character that was able to work through all of the negative things in her and turn those negative things into positive things that work for her and not against her. Maybe I would show that miracles do happen but only after you’ve been through hell, never before. I would definitely want to show that people can be happy in this life, truly happy, I’m pretty sure that some people believe that that isn’t possible. So there you have it, these are the thoughts of my heart on this beautiful day of March 13, 2009.

2009-03-06T22:22:00.000-08:00

This is a story I got from http://www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page2973.html?theme=light

On March 1, 2009 my two kids of 4yrs and 1yr, my wife and me were headed to Florida on I-95 from Raleigh NC. The weather was awful with rain and wind. Somewhere near Walterboro, SC we hydroplaned off of the road and hit a tree going about 65mph. The Chevy Tahoe we were in was destroyed, and we all walked away with no injuries...none. The first responders were in as much shock as we were b/c they had never responded to an accident like this one where no one needed to go to the ER. They had to call their superiors to figure out what to do with us. We were transported in the ambulance to a hotel (with our luggage that they helped us recover before we left the scene), and my father drove from Raleigh to come pick us up and carry us home. I pray every day that God will send angels to protect my family, and we say a prayer before we hit the road on long trips. You never know how or when your prayers will be answered but I do know that God had his hands on us on March 1, 2009. Check out the pics of my car and remember there were 4 of us in the car, and 0 injuries during this wreck. --Matt Huff huff0113@bellsouth.net

2009-03-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

What do you think is the number one reason that people do dishonest things? I know that there are all sorts of reasons why people do dishonest things, but I personally think that the number one reason that they do them is out of desperation. Desperation… ? Think about that word for a second. Have you ever been desperate? If your child was dying and you knew that the only way to get the cure for his sickness was to break into a building and steal it would you do it? Of course you would. I could come up with many more examples like that but I think you get the picture. So that is a worthy desperation act, what about desperation acts that our society deems Unworthy? A young teenage girl thinks that she will never be popular if she doesn’t wear the nicest clothes. To be popular is extremely important to her, she is desperate, and it’s real to her. So she shoplifts. If you asked 100 people if what she did was wrong I would be willing to bet that all 100 of them would say that it was wrong. Maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong but can we judge them?

“Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?” Gandolf from The Lord or The Rings.

In John 8:7, after a woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery, Jesus (being tested) is asked what to do with the woman. Jesus responds by saying, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” Why is it that we have 20/20 vision when looking at the sins of others but we are completely blind when looking at our own?
The great Bob Marley sings a song about judgment and my favorite line in his song is “The road of life is rocky, and you may stumble too, so while you talk about me, someone else is judging you.

God loves us and he knows that we are here on this earth to learn. I have learned that every time that I have been too close minded to understand other people’s sins and I judged them, that every single time I was eventually faced with doing the same thing that I was judging that person for.

So, suffice to say, I try really, really hard not to judge people. Not because I’m so good and I’m just a natural “non-judger” but because I’m terrified of having to experience doing the thing that I was judging the person for.

It sucks so bad when you screw up and you know that you screwed up and you’re sorry, really, really sorry but nobody will even begin to try to have compassion or understanding or forgiveness for you. One thing that always brings me peace when I am in a situation such as this is knowing with a surety that the people who are judging me will someday have to go through something similar to what I went through and then they will understand.

2009-02-22T17:44:00.000-08:00

I have been a waitress/Server for most of my adult life. I’m going to school now so that I will get to be in charge of Servers rather than be one myself. So, having been in the food serving industry for so long, I cannot say enough about tipping. For instance, do people know that when a Server get’s a bad tip, they go to the back of the house and tell everyone, and then every employee, on the sly, I’m not kidding, will walk by your table and check out the people who left the really bad tip. Server’s never forget a face, so if that bad tipper goes back to that restaurant, more than likely someone will remember them and alert the whole staff that the bad tipper is there and everyone will argue and fight about who get’ s to take them, it usually ends up being someone who is new and a terrible server. On the flip side of that, if you leave a good tip! OM Gosh! That server will go into the back of the house and brag about their great tip and everyone will do the same thing and try to get a good look at the good tippers and they will remember them and fight over them the next time that they come to the restaurant.
So, if you really want to make a server’s night, week and even month…give them a good tip for crying out loud, who cares if they did a bad job just give them a good tip. I remember one time I was at a restaurant and the server was doing a terrible job, she was kind of rude and everything was going bad. The check ended up being about 40 dollars and I was tempted to give her a bad tip but something inside of me said that maybe that was a bad idea so rather than giving her a bad tip I did the opposite and gave her like a $25.00 tip, on a 40 dollar ticket, that was pretty good, considering that she did such a crappy job. So I left her the tip, we got up and were walking out to our car and the waitress chases us out the door and with emotion in her voice she says, “Thank you, so much, thank you for the good tip.” She didn’t have to say anything more because at that moment I know that that girl had had a really crappy day and that tip had just 180’d it.

2009-02-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

This last week was so busy. Do you ever feel like you are running through life? That was how I felt last week, it was just go, go, go…and I still couldn’t make it to everything that I was supposed to. DO you want to know how I deal with it? Do you want to know how I maintain my sanity? Well, I’ll tell ya. Usually about once a month, I declare a “Rhonda doesn’t have to do anything day” and I literally don’t do anything. I usually will either read a good book or watch one of my favorite really long movies like the extended versions of The Lord of the Rings or I’ll watch the BBC Pride and Prejudice. This last one that I had (which was on Saturday by the way), I watched all of Season one of Damages, which was quite good, not as good as Lost or Fringe but pretty darn good. So there you have it, my secret is out. Usually after my “Rhonda doesn’t have to do anything days” I’m good to go, ready to face life again. I love life.

Lord of the Rings

Damages, Fringe, LOST and Pride and Prejudice.

2009-02-11T09:46:00.001-08:00

Do things happen for a reason? Our car broke down today, on a day where there are a bunch of things that we have to get done. I actually was scheduled to have an MRI done and now I will have to postpone it until Friday which sucks because I was really hoping to just get it over with. Anyway, I can’t help but think that when things like this happen if it isn’t a blessing in disguise. The Lord does work in mysterious ways.

Here is another random picture. Yea, its 3 bears stuck in a tree. I don’t know if it’s real or not but it’s funny.

2009-02-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

Sorry, things have been kind of slow lately, I can’t really think of anything meaningful to say, I mean I could say a lot but I think that it would be a bit too negative and I’m trying not to be so negative on my blog because I feel like I’m giving everyone the wrong impression of me. Anyway, I used to have one of those invisible trackers on this blog but I took it off because I find that I feel uncomfortable when I’m on someone else’s blog, someone that I don’t know all that well anyway, and they are able to know somehow that I’ve visited their site, it just makes me uncomfortable so I figured that I would take mine off. So, anybody could visit and I would have no idea, pretty cool huh? Here is a random picture for your entertainment.

I actually stole it from somebody else’s blog, is that allowed? Baby high hills, how cute is that?

2009-01-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

I’ll never forget the first time that I had a panic attack. I had heard of them before and I guess that I just always thought that those only happened to the weenies or the mellow dramatic people of the world. I was having a hard time breathing that whole evening, it felt like there was a brick on my chest but what finally ended up happening is that my body gave off every sign of having a heart attack, only, when I went into the Emergency room and they hooked me up to all of the heart monitoring thingeys, apparently I was perfectly fine. “So are you saying that I just made this all up?” I said to the doctor, “no, what happened to you was perfectly real, it just wasn’t a heart attack, it was your body trying to tell you that you’re stressed out and that you need to slow down.” Slow down? I was already coming up short when compared to the Jones’, how was I going to slow down? This was a beginning to a very long journey that I have been on with trying to control the stress that comes in and out of my life and yes, you can control it, I eventually found out.

My only wish is that others wouldn’t judge me. Maybe they aren’t, but I feel like they are sometimes. Did sister “so & so” think that I was a total lazy slob when she came over and my house was a disgusting mess. Was my lesson not good enough this Sunday, did I say anything to offend anybody during it? Did people think that we were slobs because the boy’s shirts weren’t ironed and they had stains all over them? Does the whole entire school that my kids go to think of me as the slacker parent, one who must not give a darn about her children because she forgets to sign their reading logs and never volunteers to go on field trips? Those are the nagging thoughts that are always in the back of a mothers head but I think that the worst one of all is the, “are my kids going to grow up thinking that I was a sucky parent” one. That one is the worst, that’s the one that will put you in a Hospital, hooked up to all kinds of heart monitoring thingeys when there was nothing wrong with you except stress. Relax ladies, your kids are going to think that you did just fine as long as you loved them and they knew that you did for sure, they’ll remember good things about us, I’m sure of it…

2009-01-24T15:29:00.001-08:00

Ok, up until now, I have been very quiet about this issue because it is such a sensitive one but I feel like I can no longer be quiet. I consider myself an open-minded person. I don’t just accept things/issues because people tell me to, I study them, I pray about them, I think about them and then I listen. I listen to that still small voice that is within me, the voice that tells me what’s right and what is wrong. The scriptures prophesy about a time when people will call evil good, and good evil; put darkness for light, and light for darkness; put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Since when, has it ever been ok to murder? How is it ok to terminate a life that is not your own? I believe that adults should be allowed to do what they want as long as they are not hurting anyone else. If an adult wants to chop off one of their hands, it’s their hand, let them do it! If an adult wants to change their nose their boobs anything on their body let them do it, it’s their body. If an adult wants to have sex, let them do it, it’s their choice. It is not someone’s choice to terminate another person’s life, even if that life is living in their own body. Science has shown us that a fetus can be saved, if delivered early, as early as 3 months, 3 months! Am I missing something? Is there something that someone is not telling me about this issue? Why is it that a dog get’s more compassion and rights than a human fetus?
I do not blame women who have had abortions because 99% of the time, they were heavily influenced to do it by their parents, boyfriends, boyfriends family and trusted adults because THEY don't want the responsibility of having to help with raising a child. I have known many women who have had abortions who cry every night before they go to bed because in their hearts, they know. They know.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

2009-01-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

I don’t know whether to be scared or happy with our recent change in government. Have you ever known a public servant to be so celebrated? It’s just weird that’s all. I hope that he is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It was almost impossible to find a picture of Obama on the internet that looked even slightly confrontational. Weird.

2009-01-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

I was in Wal-Mart when the inauguration started…they were showing it on all of the TV’s and playing it over the intercom. Everyone in the store, including the cashiers stopped what they were doing and listened, some were crying.

2009-01-19T19:59:00.000-08:00

I know that this might be hard to believe but we just got our first digital camera, never had one before. You are witnessing the very fist picts. I feel so futuristic.

Yes, that's Willoughby on the toilet.

2009-01-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

I guess that you could say that we are pretty nontraditional, we don’t seem to do anything the way that most people do and we never have. I guess that it all started when we were married. Our marriage wasn’t planned, we didn’t set a date, we weren’t pregnant or anything, we just thought that it would be funny to go over to the courthouse and get married. We were both sort of just joking around and waiting for the other person to give in first and back out. I guess that we didn’t think that the process would go through so fast cause before we knew it; we were both standing in a little room the size of a bathroom being asked by a priest if we would be willing to put up with each other for life. “Sure, why not “we both said and that was that. We didn’t have a reception or a honey moon and we didn’t take any pictures. Nobody gave us any presents or even sent us any “sure glad you got married” cards but for some reason, despite the lack of all of those things, we’ve managed to be married for 12 years. When I became pregnant with Meshach, I didn’t go to pre-birthing classes, I didn’t read “what to expect when you are expecting”, I skateboarded until I was 6 months along but… I gave birth to him just the same. When each of my children entered kindergarten, let’s just say that they didn’t already know how to read but by the end of kindergarten they were always up to par with the rest of the kids who already knew everything before they got there. So, we’re not traditional and so far it’s worked out for us ok and maybe I’ve actually always been kind of proud of myself for being that way but I must say that the older that I get, the more I crave tradition. I was thinking the other day about what it would have been like if Tom and I had had a traditional wedding. How would it have been decorated? Who would have come? Would we have gotten a lot of presents? Would it have given our marriage a better foundation? I guess that I will never know.

2008-12-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

I am so thankful for my blessings. I have such an abundant life. The Lord has blessed me with four beautiful, intelligent children and a wonderful husband. My thoughts are drawn to Sarah, wife of Abraham from the Old Testament. Oh how she wanted just one child. I am aware of many who are praying for children, many who would be willing to pay any price for children. It’s funny, or not, how the lord chooses to bless his children. We have never had very much money or material things but we do have a loving family. Some have many material things but don’t have a family. Some have neither but the Lord is fair isn’t he? He’s fair with the trials that he gives us and the blessings that he gives us. He knows what we want but more importantly what we need. Why did God make Sarah wait all of those years, until she was an old woman, to finally have a Son? That is a good question, and possibly, the only question. Why does God make us wait? Why is patience such an important thing in the eyes of God? And why is it that when we have been praying and waiting for things, they only come to us when we have given up or in . When we accept that we might possibly not get the thing that we have desired in our heart for so long, that’s usually when we get it.

I am sitting in a conference room, right now. It’s a college success conference. I am sitting at a table all by myself. I’m not embarrassed to be alone. I’m people watching. There are many other’s who are sitting alone and looking very uncomfortable and there are tables that are packed with people, people who know each other and are laughing and enjoying them selves. As I am sitting alone looking out at all of these people, I’m wondering, what silent struggles they are going through, cause everyone has them. What is in their hearts? Is it anger, hate, love, nothing…fear, hope? We keep these things so deep inside of us and we put on our faces, what ever that face may be. I don’t think that it’s bad that we do that, but as a human, I think that it’s important to realize that other people are human too. If we just remember that that girl over there is probably struggling just as much as me than maybe we can relate to them better, maybe we can even love them, as we love ourselves.

2008-11-30T22:36:00.000-08:00

This thanksgiving is going to go on the records as being one of the best. We were invited by our good friends the Fanoga’s to join them at the church for a sort of “misfits” thanksgiving. Ya see, brother Fanoga is one of the coaches for the NMSU football team and he had a lot of boy’s from Hawaii who didn’t have anywhere to go for thanksgiving so we had a potluck/party at the Idaho chapel. After we all feasted on turkey and ham and the whole nine yards, we all went into the gym for a “friendly” game of volleyball. FRIENDLY my arse! I don’t know if any of you have ever been in a room full of Polynesians that are “playing”. If you have you know why I keep “”’ing everything. If you haven’t, I’ll just say that it’s the funniest/scariest thing that you will ever experience. I have never seen so much energy in one room in my entire life, it was great and this was AFTER everyone had already eaten a huge meal. So after hours and hours of playing and laughing and eating and playing and laughing and eating, it was time to go home. I’m not sure if a lot of you know this but it is a Polynesian custom to hug and kiss everyone on the cheek when it is time to part so I’ll just say that I got my fair share of bear hugs and kisses from these amazing kids. What a wonderful time, for as long as I live I will never forget the thanksgiving that I spent with the NMSU football players!

2008-11-24T11:08:00.000-08:00

When I was around 19 or so, I had a job working for a ski resort on Mt. Baker in Washington State. It was a really fun time for me. The owners of the ski resort actually provided free housing for all of its employee’s and they also gave each of their employee’s free season passes for the ski resort. So I worked in the ski shop where we would sell ski equipment and rent out ski’s and snowboards. Everyday each employee would get a three hour break so that we could all get a chance to hit the slopes. Mt. Baker is kind of a legendary mountain, a lot of people don’t know this but it’s where snowboarding got its start, it was one of the only mountains that allowed snowboarding at first so it attracted hardcore snowboarders from all over the world. Baker has the most intense terrain and extreme conditions of any other mountain in the country, which was another reason that it attracted hardcore boarders. There was a saying there that if you could snowboard at baker, you could snowboard anywhere. People up there actually would make fun of the people who boarded in Utah and Colorado calling them pansy’s because the conditions at those places are so perfect. So baker was and is like the wild west of snowboarding. While working there I actually got to see snowboarding legends everyday like Craig Kelly, Mike Ranquet, Commins, Tex…

So, yes, that time was most definitely the best time of my life. I lived in a town called Glacier which was the nearest town to the resort and it was an icy windey 30 minute ride everyday to work. After driving on that road everyday, I started to stop trying to drive careful, along with a lot of other people who drove on that rode everyday. You were supposed to only go about 30 mph max but most of us would go about 60 mph. So the worst thing that could happen to a lot of the locals was to get behind someone who was driving really slow because it was impossible to pass people because the roads were just too busy and the chances of running into someone head on were just too high so if you got stuck behind someone going slow, you were just stuck and there was nothing that you could do about it. So, I found myself in that situation one day and I just happened to have one of my laid back hippy friends in the car with me. I was freaking out! Yelling at person in front of me, honking my horn and basically just throwing a hissy fit. So I look over at my hippy friend and he is just laughing at me and then he said, “duuuuude, you just need to chill out. You want to know what I do when I get stuck behind someone who is going slow? I kick it into second gear, back way off of the person and enjoy the ride. It gives me a chance to actually look around at how beautiful it is up here.” So, I took his advice and he was right! I backed way off of the slow guy in front of me and relaxed and looked around me and I saw that I was surrounded by beauty, beauty that I had been missing out on because I was in such a hurry.

That advice from my hippy friend changed my life and I have used it many times since then. I have found myself in frustrating situations since then where I was just stuck with no options, no where to run, no way out, and instead of cursing my situation and jumping up and down and throwing a fit, I just switch it into second gear and back way off. I now see those situations not as a curse but as an opportunity to take in the scenery, to smell the roses, to play with my children and get to know them better, to walk out of my front door and take a look at those beautiful mountains that are shooting up towards the sky, so as to salute the heavens, to look at my many, many blessings and thank my Father in Heaven for giving them to me so abundantly.

I haven’t seen or heard from that hippy guy that gave me that advice. I wish that I could tell him thank you for getting me through a lot of really, really tough times in my life. Thanks Aaron!

2008-11-21T23:31:00.001-08:00

I am so excited because I just finished the rest of my Gosh forsaken accounting and I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I hope I pass all of my classes but this has been such a sucky semester that I'm just going to be glad to have it over with, I’ll be happy with all C’s. So one thing that I am super excited about is our little Christmas Vacation that we are going to take. We haven’t gotten out of here in awhile so I’m really looking forward to it. We will be taking the train to visit Tom’s family in Chicago! Tom’s family rocks! I mean they are just so awesome. They are so loving and thoughtful and forgiving and kind and fun and the best. I really love them and am really looking forward to spending 3 weeks with all of them. Tom’s mom (Pam) is a fantastic woman and a fantastic cook. She will most likely be cooking delicious meals the whole time and I will be gladly eating them! Oh, and did I mention that there is about a 90% chance of there being snow! I just can’t wait. You see, I can be positive on these blogs sometimes (LOL).

Carolyn: Have I told you lately how awesome that I think that you are? And thanks so much again for lending us your computer tower, I wouldn’t be writing this if you hadn’t and…it’s really not that slow, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth right! I will see you tomorrow at the much anticipated Twilight movie, it should be a great GNO, and maybe we might even have time to egg the bishop’s house on the way home!

2008-11-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

Ok, that last blog was a bit dark but hey, I calls um as I sees um. I know, I know, blogs are supposed to be all, “look at my fantastic life!” and “See how blessed I am!” and seriously, I AM EXTREMELY blessed, but I tell ya, it is very therapeutic to blog about the negative things that you are feeling sometimes, you should try it. So don’t get the wrong idea and think that I’m this really depressed person who always thinks that the glass is half empty. I’m really a pretty positive and happy person.

*Twilight Spoiler*
Having said that, I would like to talk about Twilight. Ok, I remember someone first telling me about it and telling me that it was the best book that they had ever, ever, ever read! So I was like WOW, I’ve got to read it and experience its greatness! So, I started reading it and it seemed like it was going to lead me to new uncharted territory, I was really excited. I kept reading and waiting for something to happen cause the way it is written, you are always on the edge thinking something crazy is going to happen but…nothing ever happened. So, I read the next book thinking, ok, this time, something amazing is going to happen, I know it, but…it never did. Then I read the third one, and nothing happened with that one either. Now, the funny thing about that is that the majority of the people who read the Twilight books love the first three but don’t really like the forth one, the one where awesome stuff actually happens! I LOVED the fourth book! It was like the reword for all of my patience, it was the whipped cream and the cherry on top of the Sunday, it was, it was great! I don’t understand why everyone was so offended by the fact that Bella gets married and gets to have wild vampire sex, what’s so wrong with that? And what’s the big deal about giving birth to a half vampire half human? I think that that’s way cool. What did everyone want for crying out loud? Did they want to go through another 100,000 pages of hearing Bella talk about how beautiful she thinks Edward is and how she likes Jacob but ONLY AS A FRIEND, “I mean sheesh Jacob, just get over me already! I want to spend all of my time with you but you can’t get the wrong idea and think that you can have a romantic relationship with me cause I love beautiful Edward who loves me too, but also wants to hurt me/feed off of me.”

2008-11-19T13:08:00.000-08:00

I have such a fear of disappointing people. That fear is so strong that I have sometimes felt that it is better that I didn’t get to close to someone because if I never get close to them than I will never disappoint them. Another of my fears is that someone will get so mad at me that they would never talk to me again. Giving me the silent treatment or the “I’m just going to pretend that you don’t exist” treatment is to me the worst, most meanest thing that anyone could ever do to me. My fears are not fantasy fears; they are actually things that have happened to me. I have disappointed people in the past and they decided that they would just stop talking to me and I just have to say that that really sucks. I really don’t understand why people have such high expectations of other’s in the first place. Don’t they understand that no single person on this planet is perfect and that everyone makes mistakes? What ever happened to forgiveness and second chances? Why is it that even though you genuinely apologize to people that they are still unable to forgive. Haven’t they ever made a mistake before?

So yes, getting to know people, letting them in, is a dangerous thing. Nobody wants to be open to getting judged by someone. I think that we are living in a world where there are a lot of hurt and broken hearted people. I DON’T WANT TO GIVE IN TO THAT! I refuse to give in to that. Somehow, it is wrong. So, I will go out there and expose myself. I will show the world my heart for them to examine and judge. I will let people in. Having known someone, even though they hurt you, has got to be better than never knowing anyone at all.

2008-11-06T23:45:00.000-08:00

Well, well, well…it has been awhile since I’ve written anything, um…I’m not really sure that anybody even reads my blogs so I’m sure that nobody has been sitting around waiting for me to post something new. Anywho, so we have a new Prez now, I’m not going to give my opinion on that so as to give everyone the impression that I am completely neutral when it comes to politics ( it makes me seem like I have no backbone but it also keeps me out of trouble). Life has been fairly uneventful lately, just one month left of school so I really need to get on the ball. We are supper excited about Christmas this year because we will be taking a train to Chicago to visit Tom’s family. It’s going to be weird because I don’t think that the kids will be getting a lot of presents because it would be too hard to bring them all back on the train but surprisingly, the kids don’t seem to mind, apparently, going to Chicago to see the fam is present enough for them so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe after this Christmas, we can make it a tradition to not stress about getting a lot of presents; we usually tend to overdue it.

One thing that has been on my mind a lot lately is humility, meekness, being forgiving and displaying unconditional love. These are all things that Jesus Christ mentions over and over in his earthly ministry but for some reason, I have tended to not take them as seriously as I should. But, they must be really important for the Savior to speak of them them so much right? So I have recently had my eye’s opened to how extremely important these attributes are. See, it turns out that when you are humble, meek and forgiving, God sends down an abundance of his spirit to be with you, it’s a really beautiful thing. I am going to try harder to be better about doing those things.

2008-10-18T09:18:00.001-07:00

So, it’s 10:00 in the AM, Saturday and I am stuck sitting in my accounting class BORED out of my mind!! Accounts Receivable, Accounts payable, debit, credit…if I hear one more of those words I think that I’ll faint. I could never do this for a living, but I have to take this class because it is necessary for my Hospitality degree. Anywho, in the mean time, Tom and the kids are going to the church so that they can practice for the primary program tomorrow. The Aggies are playing a football game tonight that I plan on attending with the fam, got to support the Aggies + bro Fanoga is one of the coaches and Soana is his wife and I Lurve them both so I’m definitely going. Oh, oh, no! I think that my teacher is coming this way, she’s going to find out that I’m not paying attention to a thing that she’s saying! I got to go!

Washington Husky famous night before the big game Hot Chocolate

2008-10-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

5 cups of whole milk

1 ¼ cup of heavy whipping cream

1 ¼ cup half and half

1 cup Hershey chocolate syrup

1 cup Swiss miss hot chocolate mix

2 Hershey chocolate bars

Dump all ingredients into a large pot, set on stove top and set the temp to medium. Stir frequently and bring to simmer. Simmer and stir for about 30 to 45 minutes. Drink with lots of whip cream.

I smell a rat

2008-10-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

My side of the story:

So I’m at Enrichment, trying to socialize with the ladies, you know, be polite, talk to everyone, having a pleasant evening until “L” comes up to me on the DL and is like, “hey Rhonda, we’re gonna TP someone’s house tonight, are you in?” So I think about it and I’m like, “I don’t know, I have a lot of homework to do but sure, what the heck, we’ll go over to someone’s house, throw a couple of rolls of TP on a tree, we’ll all laugh a little and feel young again, why not, no harm done let’s do this!” So all seven of us cram into “C's” mini van, head to W mart, grab ourselves a 20 pack (of TP, not beer) and head over to bishops house for a little innocent TPing. So, “B” is Preggers and has got to pee really bad and so does “L” so we park on the side of the road right in front of bishops driveway and “B” and “L” pop squats. So when they were finished, I get out of the car and walk ahead in order to scope it out and make sure that the coast is clear. So I’m walking quietly beside the car as we are going down bishops long drive way and all of a sudden, I look over to the right and there is a little boy running towards me and the next thing I know, I’m getting a water balloon thrown towards my face. Ok, so how in the world is this happening right now? Does the bishop just automatically keep little boy’s with water balloons on his property for security purposes, or have we been ratted out? So I start screaming “let me in! Let me in! We’ve been caught!” I finally get into the car, “C” pulles us closer to the house and the war is on! Only, our weapons were soft and fluffy toilet paper and their weapons were water balloons and PAINT GUNS! All of a sudden “L” screams out in pain and is like ”I’ve been hit! Ouch, Ouch, Ouch!” Her painful screams were convincing enough for us to load up and get the heck out of Dodge.

SO now the biggest question that we had on our mind was “who the heck ratted us out?” Well, it turns out it was a HUSBAND! Yea that’s right! And to make things worse, when I came home and told my husband, he told me that he totally would have ratted us out as well! What up with that?!

All I have to say is look out boy’s, cause you have no idea who you are messing with. You’re dealing with girls who have given birth to babies, don’t underestimate us. We’ll have you begging for mercy!!!

The new happy

2008-10-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

So when I was about 8 or so, I got chubby. My mom took me aside one day and with a really serious look on her face she said, “Rhonda, sit down, we have to talk.” I thought that she was going to tell me that something terrible had just happened like my grandparents had died or something, she had such a serous concerned look on her face. “Rhonda,” she said, “I’ve noticed that you have been gaining weight. You know, if you don’t start paying attention to your weight now, it’s going to be a problem for the rest of you life!” Bam! So that’s when it started, my obsession with wanting to be thin. So after my Mom talked to me about my chubby problem, I went on a diet and lost most of my chub and boy was my Mom, and everyone for that matter happy with me. So in my young mind, I now knew, that to be happy and accepted by my family and the world, I had to be thin. So my question is this. Is thin, the new happy?

When I was a chubby little girl, I didn’t even know that I was chubby until someone told me I was. I didn’t know that I was supposed to be unhappy with the way that I looked until someone told me that I was. I often wonder that if everyone would have just left me alone about it, if I would have just naturally cycled out of my chubbiness.

Ok, once again, I don’t blame my mom for what she did because she was only doing what was done to her by her mother and my Grandmother was only doing what had been done to her by her mother. I am hopping to be able to break the cycle through my children. Hopefully, my children will be able to learn to love themselves the way that they are, and if they can do that, maybe healthy bodies will follow. Or not. But if it’s not, then I’d rather them be happy and chubby then depressed and chubby.

Ode to my family,

2008-10-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed this but Satan has been working very hard to break up family’s lately. I am having a lot of problems with my family and I have talked to so many people who are just having all sorts of problems right now with their families. I think that it has gotten to be the norm that when someone that you love has hurt you, that to get them back you sever any attachments that you have ever had with them. If your husband does something that you don’t like, you divorce him and that’s it, you no longer have to have anything to do with him. If your brother offends you then you just don’t ever speak to him again, problem fixed, pretty simple right? It always seems simple but it never ends up being that simple. When you try to sever your ties with family, it always ends up sneaking up on you and biting you in the arse.

I just think that we have to be extra careful right now as to not be so easily offended when it comes to our family. I think that now is the time that we need to truly forgive and forget and move on because these are the times where we are going to need our families the most.

I think that strong families are the only things that are holding this country together right now. If the families fall, our nation falls.

2008-09-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

So there are a couple of things that I left out about my husband and I before we were married. You see, there were some pretty big issues that we both had with each other and those were that we both belonged to different religions. In some situations that wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but in ours it was. You see, I was a Mormon and was expected to marry another Mormon and he was a nondenominational Christian and was taught to believe that Mormons were well, not so great. Somehow we decided to look past our religious differences and get married anyway, thinking that we would just ignore them and that they would go away. Well, it was obviously a hard thing to deal with in a marriage, not just with us but with our extended family, we always felt like misfits where ever we went. It was fine though and we had eventually gotten to a place where we were comfortable and accepting of each others religious beliefs.
So we were living in Phoenix, AZ and I was working in the evening waiting tables and one night while I was gone working, missionaries from my church came over to our house. Normally Tom would be just like, “you guys just need to go away.” But for some reason, this night, he was feeling kind of charitable so he let them in. While they were visiting with him they started to talk to him about the church and they must have said something that sparked his interest because he invited them over again a couple of nights later. This was all going on without my knowledge, I had no idea that he had been having the missionaries over and that he was starting to get interested in the church. So I guess that initially, he just wanted to prove that the church was bogus, but the more that he started to read the book of Mormon and pray about it, the more he began to be convinced that the Mormon church was the only true church on the face of the earth, and that Joseph Smith truly did see God the father and his Son Jesus Christ and that they truly did instruct him in reorganizing Christ’s church here upon this earth.

I’ll never forget the night that he had to confess to me that he had been taking the missionary discussions and that he was planning to get baptized. It was really hard for him because in admitting to me that he was going to be joining the church was also admitting to me that he had been wrong and it is hard for anyone to admit that they have been wrong. It took him about an hour to spit it out but when he finally did I was shocked, I had no idea. I had already accepted that we were always going to belong to different religions and so this was just really weird for me.

So two weeks after that confession, Tom got baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s funny because I thought that after he got baptized that everything was just going to be easy street from there on out but boy was I wrong. Apparently, the Adversary wasn’t too happy about it and he placed many stumbling blocks in front of us to try and trip us up. Things haven’t been completely easy since then but it has been worth it.

One year later, we had the privilege of going into the San Diego temple to get sealed to each other as well as our children for time and all eternity.

Some of my hero's

2008-09-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

Shout out

2008-09-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

I would just like to give a shout out to all of my peeps in the Rio Grand Las Cruces Ward. You guys are awesome (you know who you are). As you have noticed with my recent blogs, I’ve had a lot of bad emotional stuff going in my life, mostly having to do with my family, and it’s just great to know that I have the awesome people in my ward to give me a lot of the support that I need. It’s great to get together with the ladies in the ward and talk about stuff. We talk about politics, family problems, husband problems (LOL, just kidding guys) and just problems in general. I always come home from our lady talk about stuff meetings feeling much better. Thanks!

Drama

2008-09-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

Ok, so have you ever been “accused” of being a drama queen? I was recently accused of being one and it really hurt my feelings. “A drama queen? I’m not a drama queen, I hate drama, I don’t want to have anything to do with it, I’m just as boring as the next person!” Then I started to think about it and I asked myself, “ Is it bad to be dramatic?” Why does our society frown on those who like to talk with emphasis or those who talk at all. I have noticed that it has started to become socially unacceptable, especially among our youth, to speak out. Speaking out to them means that you are dramatic, and being dramatic is apparently, just not cool.

Now that to me is just scary because when people are unable to communicate properly, they usually end up freaking out, and haven’t we seen that A LOT in our society lately? HMMMMM…I wonder why that guy just blew up one day and stared shooting everybody?

So is it fair for me to say that being dramatic isn’t bad? Is it fair to say that drama is maybe possibly something that is necessary for someone’s well being? I think that it is.

So, I’m just going to keep being me, but maybe I’ll try to be just a little bit more dramatic than I usually am because it’s fun. It’s fun to see other people’s reaction when you are dramatic. They look at you like they can’t even believe that you broke the silent rule that everyone is supposed to be extremely reserved and boring and pretend like they don’t have any feelings. How shocking, people would probably be less shocked if I ran around my neighborhood completely naked.

Fear

2008-09-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

I haven’t chosen a person that I want to vote for yet in this election because I am having a hard time figuring out who is true and who is not. I have so many confusing what ifs. What if all of the Liberals are right and 9. 11 was a conspiracy to start the war over oil? What if the Liberals are wrong and Bush was good all along and fighting an evil so bad and terrible that if we knew about it, we would all freak out and jump off bridges?

I will say this though, each party is equally trying to convince everyone that if they don’t vote for them, that something terrible is going to happen to our country, they are both using fear to try and convince us to vote for them and I don’t like it. I’m sick of it in fact.
When I was growing up, I was very sheltered and I was always told by my parents and grandparents that if I went outside and played by myself too far away from home that something bad might happen. Some bad guy might come and kidnap me or I might accidently fall and hit my head on a rock and kill myself. When I got older it was, “don’t do anything bad or you might go to hell.” Ouch! So I was raised with fear being the major motivator for me doing what my parents told me to. I eventually decided that I didn’t give a crap if I got killed or raped or anything, that I was going to live my life as if those things didn’t even exist, I wasn’t going to let fear keep me from living a normal life.

There are a lot of things that the media is telling us that we need to be afraid of. Be afraid of the economy, be afraid of gas prices, be afraid of terrorism, be afraid of Republicans. Well, just like when I was a kid, frankly, I’m sick of living in fear, I refuse to do it anymore. “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”(Yoda)

My Son Meshach's speech for Vice President!

2008-09-15T00:55:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Meshach Gray, and I am running for vice president. I’m in Mr. Bussell’s class, and I am in 5th grade. I am willing to except the responsibilities of being vice president, even if that means staying in for recess. These responsibilities include having to show trustworthiness, respect, caring, citizenship, and fairness. These responsibilities are the pillars of character, and it is important to for a vice president show them all clearly. So, why should you vote for me? You should vote for me because I have had previous experiences of being a leader. I am the oldest of four children, and I am often given big responsibilities. Such as being a good example, helping my parents with household duties, and watching and caring for my younger siblings. I know what I’m doing, and I can make the right choices for this school. It will be my greatest pleasure to serve you as your vice president. “Vote for Meshach he’ll bring the fun back!”

Updated---he won.

And her heart grew 10 sizes bigger!

2008-09-13T18:55:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried to love someone but they wouldn’t let you? Everything you did in their eyes was wrong, and everything was your fault. I have and I can’t even express how hard it is on me. It has driven me into the depths of despair many times in my life and I’m sure has aged me about ten years. I don’t want to focus on those people though, because I’m tired of focusing on them. Their love is conditional, why should I care about their love when there are so many in my life that are willing to give me their love freely. They love me, just because I was born me! Take my 2 year old, when she takes a nap, I lay down with her and she rubes my ear and just smiles at me off and on as she is falling a sleep. I can see in her eye’s the love that she has for me and it’s such an amazing blessing to be on the receiving end of it. And then there is my husband. Oh, dear heavenly father I swear sometimes that I don’t deserve that man and the unconditional love that he has shown me. A lot of people misunderstand him because he’s not really a charmer so sometimes he comes across as being a bit gruff and abrasive but there couldn’t be a better man than him. He would do anything for me if I asked him to. I love him too with all of my heart. Then there is Meshach, my firstborn. He is the reason that I understand love at all. I didn’t understand the type of love that a parent and child were capable of having until I first set eyes on him. In that instant my ability to love increased ten fold. My heart grew not three but ten sizes bigger. I was at that moment willing to die for that child. Then there was my second born, Willoughby. I was worried about loving him as well because how could I love any other child as much as I loved my firstborn? Would I have to love Meshach less? My gosh the lessons that I have learned in my life, come to find out, having another child didn’t make me love the previous one less, oh no, because the moment that I laid eye’s on him the same miracle happened, my heart stretched out even more and wrapped around him like a blanket. Oh and there is my sweet Nina. So sweet, so…perfect a vision of loveliness, not a mean or hateful bone in her body, always so willing to please everyone. By the time she came, I already knew what would happen when I first saw her and it did. My God what did I do to deserve my family? Thank you Lord God in Heaven for giving them to me.

2 Nephi

2008-09-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

17 Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great goodness of the Lord, in showing me his great and marvelous works, my heart exclaimeth: O wretched woman that I am! Yea, my heart sorroweth because of my flesh; my soul grieveth because of mine iniquities.

18 I am encompassed about, because of the temptations and the sins which do so easily beset me.

19 And when I desire to rejoice, my heart groaneth because of my sins; nevertheless, I know in whom I have trusted.

32 May the gates of hell be shut continually before me, because that my heart is broken and my spirit is contrite!

I want my 50 dollars back!

2008-09-10T23:04:00.000-07:00

So I’m a pretty mellow person, most of the time. Not very many things make me angry but every now and then, about once a month something sets me off and you’d better watch out. My husband never knows what to do when that happens because he's used to me normally being so easy to get along with so he usually just stays out of my way and takes it like a man. The things that usually set me off are customer service situations where I have been treated unfairly or am being cheated out of money. One such situation occurred a couple of day’s ago when we had gone up to visit the Temple in Albuquerque. We got up there late Monday evening and when we got to the hotel and it was time to pay for the night, because we only deal in cash, the Hotel required a 50 dollar deposit because we weren’t paying with a credit card. I was used to that, it just comes with the territory when you are a cash payer so I gave them the 50 dollars, no problem. So, when we go to the temple, my husband and I just usually take turns going in to save the trouble of having to get childcare. So I went first to the early 7:00 session and while I was gone, Tom and the kids swam and enjoyed themselves. While Tom was swimming though, he ended up loosing the safe key at the bottom of the pool and had a hard time finding it because the pool was kind of murky. So he went to the front desk, told them about it and they were like, “it’s no problem; well just get you another one.” So when I got back, we were in kind of a hurry to get out of there because it was time for check out so we got everything together, got everyone in the car and were ready to go, the only thing that was left to do was go the front desk and check out and get my 50 dollar deposit back. So I go up there and I’m like, “I’d like my 5o dollars back.” And the front desk girl was like, “I’m sorry, we can only give you 30 dollars back because you lost the key and that’s what we charge when you lose the safe key because it is really expensive to get them replaced ( totally bogus). Well, there it was, the thing that set me off. So I was like ok, then give me another key to the pool because I’m going to go to the pool and personally find the key for you. I don’t think that she was expecting that I was going to say that because it was just 20 dollars right no big deal but she agreed to give me the key. So I went into the pool room, put my swimming suit on, dove into the pool and searched every square inch of the bottom of the pool until I found the key. Then I got out of the pool, I didn’t dry myself off at all, sloshed myself back up to the front desk all wet and messy, slammed the key on the desk and demanded that they give me my 50 dollar deposit back. Ok, I admit, that’s not what really happened, but that’s what would have happened if the hotel manager wouldn’t have stopped me from diving in just in time, only to inform me that they were going to make and exception and just give me my full deposit. I was actually a little disappointed because I was absolutely going to do the things that I had mentioned above in order to make a bold statement. I love making bold statements. So I got my 50 dollars back and all was well. Tom went to the temple and did the sacred work for a dear friend of his who had passed on a year ago and while me and the kids were waiting, we went to the Albuquerque Aquarium and botanical gardens and had an amazing time! That's all there is...there isn't any...more!

Naked!

2008-09-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

We used to live in a town in the Northwest called Eugene Oregon. Eugene is an extremely unique town, I am certain that there isn’t a town anywhere that could be compared to it. As soon as you drive into the town, you immediately know that something is different. First of all, you find that everyone is either walking or riding a bike. Then you start to notice that everyone is dressed differently than most people in most towns. Fifty percent of the people that you see have dread locks and the other fifty percent just haven’t combed or washed their hair in a month. You won’t find the latest Hollywood fashions in Eugene but Eugene does have its own style and fashion. Some people would call it granola, hippie, trustafarian, or just plain earthy. Most people in Eugene will be voting for Obama (I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing).

Eugene seems to attract people who are different. It’s quite an experience living there, let’s just say that I saw a lot of interesting things while living there and ate a lot of organic food.

While living there, I worked for a very fancy Hotel doing banquets and catering. When you are in that line of work, it is not uncommon for you to get off of work very late at night or early in the morning. One of those really early mornings, I think that it was about 2:00 am; Tom had needed the car which meant that he had to drop me off and then later that night get all the kids up and load them into the car and pick me up from work. After picking me up, we stopped at a gas station to get gas. The gas station happened to be right next to a pretty run down motel. While I was waiting in the car for Tom to go into the gas station and pay them, I noticed that a man had stepped out of his hotel room and he was completely naked! That was shocking but what was more shocking is that his door had closed behind him and when he tried to open it he noticed that it was locked! The man was now locked out of his room and he was naked! When my husband got back to the car, I pointed out to him the naked man who was standing outside of his room. After we had both had a good laugh, we decided that we ought to do something for the poor guy. We searched our car and found that there was a pair of pants in the back, so my husband ran up and gave them to him. What happened next I cant even believe, the man looked at the pants, held them up to him and saw that they were maybe a couple of sizes too big for him and then he just took them and threw them over his shoulder. I guess that he would have rather have been naked than wear pants that were two sizes too big for him. Only in Eugene Oregon.

Geo metro

2008-09-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

In 1994, I bought my first car (thanks Cass & Ann) and it was a brand new Geo metro. That car had four doors, was green and got about 45 miles to the gallon, yes you heard right, 45 miles to the gallon, and only cost me about 8,000 dollars! I drove everywhere in that little car and it was wonderful! Unfortunately, a couple of years latter, I got in an accident and totaled it. Now that gas is so expensive, I have been thinking a lot about that little car and so I did a little bit of research about it and come to find out they no longer make them or the engines that they put in them. Finding this out really surprised me and made me scratch my head a little bit. Why in the world would they discontinue a car that got such good gas mileage, in fact the Geo Metro got better gas mileage than most Hybrids do and we all know how expensive hybrids are.
So while I am on the subject, I’m not sure that a lot of people know this but about ten years ago, GM developed a car called the EV1. The EV1 was a rechargeable electric coupe that could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than eight seconds. The little car would go 140 miles on a charge, but then the leaser had to plug it in and re-charge it over night. Almost 800 drivers signed up for the EV1, GM refused to sell the cars but leased them to the EV1 faithful. For some reason, GM decided to take all of the electric cars back when the leases expired and they crushed them! Every single one of them! Now why would they do something like that when every single one of the people who had leased the vehicles absolutely loved them and were completely willing to buy them? Did GM think that there wasn’t a market for them or was there an even bigger reason for them to want to get rid of them? Sounds like a conspiracy to me. Sounds like there is a lot more money to be made on the remainder of our fossil fuels and the people who own oil don’t want us to stop being dependant on it. What’s up with that?

Eddie Vedder

2008-08-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

Back in the day, back when I used to skateboard, me and some friends(including my husband before we we're married) were skating downtown Seattle one night and I had to go to the bathroom really bad and there wasn’t anywhere to go except at a really fancy Hotel a couple of blocks away from us. So I walked into the hotel to find the bathroom, luckily it was pretty late at night or I would have gotten a lot of funny stares. To get to the bathroom, I had to walk across the hotel foyer, and through the bar lounge and as I was walking through it, I noticed a guy who looked a lot like Eddie Vedder (the lead singer for Pearl Jam) but I was sure that it wasn’t him because he was way too short to be him. So I went to the bathroom and as I was walking out, I decided to be a little bit obnoxious and flirty and go up to the guy that looked like Eddie Vedder and talk to him. So I went up to him and I was like, “Hey, what’s up, like, hey you know, you really look a lot like Eddie Vedder.” So the guy that looked like Eddie Vedder was trying to be silly and he said that he was Eddie Vedder! “No your not!” I said. “Yes, I am.” He says. “No your not.” I say, “Prove it if you are!” So the guy who looked like Eddie Vedder, pulls out his wallet, takes out his bank card, his driver’s license, and a few other cards and on each one of them, the name EDDIE VEDDER was written! He really was Eddie Vedder, boy did I feel stupid! He was so cool about it though and he actually let me sit down with him and his friend and we talked for awhile. If any body ever asks, Eddie Vedder is a very down to earth, cool guy.

2008-08-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

A friend and I have been going to the stadium to workout lately and the other day, my friend brought her 12 year old daughter along to workout with us. Her daughter naturally didn’t want to stay with us the whole time while we were working out so her mom let her go on the other side of the stadium to mess around. So we’re walking and talking and the next thing we know, my friend’s daughter is walking down from the stadium towards us screaming and covering her head. We of course are freaked out and we start running towards her to see what happened and as we get closer, we find that she has a big gouge in her forehead and there’s blood running all over the place and she’s panicking big time. So were freaked out but we also kind of both switch into mommy get the problem taken care of fast mode, so we immediately take her to the car and go to the nearest emergency room. I was kind of given the responsibility of trying to keep her calm while my friend was checking her in. I felt like I was doing a pretty good job, she had already started to calm down a bit because I kept telling her that her head didn’t really look that bad and that she was going to be fine and all of that. She hadn’t seen the injury yet and I didn’t want her to because if she saw it she would probably start panicking again. So we’re sitting in the crowed waiting room and everyone start’s talking to us like nothing is wrong, one guy recognized my friends daughter from a sports league and he starts to talk to her all casually about whether or not she was going to be in the league again this year or not. After awhile everybody started asking her about her injury and how bad it was (it was being covered by a shirt so they couldn’t see it). For some reason, my friends daughter lowered the shirt that was covering her injury and everyone around us got a good look at it and everyone in the waiting room it seems, all at once, in perfect harmony said, “oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!” Great, I had just gotten her to calm down and now she knows how bad her head looks because everyone in the entire waiting room just about threw up! That’s about when my friend came back from checking her in and we sort of both realized that if we stayed there, it wasn’t going to be good for anyone, so we took her to an urgent care place. They got us in sooner than if we would have stayed at the e-room and she ended up getting like 8 stitches but she’s fine now.

The Real Problem

2008-08-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

I think that the real problem with our society is that nobody wants to go outside of their little boxes of believe systems. Mormons, Catholics, Baptists, environmentalists, anthropologist… they are all religions and they all have their own believe systems. Baptists will not listen to anything that the Mormons have to say because they have been told that Mormons are evil so no matter how much their heart is screaming at them to listen to them, they won’t because of what they have been taught through guilt teachings. Mormons aren’t any better sometimes, they have been told by other “respected” Mormons that they need to be “conservative” and to be conservative; you naturally have to be apposed to anything liberal without even thinking about it. Environmentalists and anthropologists are taught that anything spiritual is childish and made up and so they too aren’t willing to listen to anything that religions teach. If people would just be willing to stop and listen to the other side and genuinely consider their thoughts and ideas and have an attitude that if their heart tells them that that thought has merit, that they will at least consider it, I think that we would have a lot less problems in this world. I feel that the most important thing to teach my children is that they need to think for them selves and to never just accept something as truth, just because someone that they respect told them so.We all have the ability to know if something is true or not, it’s just that, no one uses that ability

Venting is very good!

2008-08-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

My father was a very talented horn player and during Vietnam, instead of being put on the battle field like he wanted, my father was instead put on Taps duty. What are the Taps you ask, well when a military person has a funeral, someone plays the taps. During Vietnam, there were a lot of deaths and it was my father’s duty to play the Taps for many funerals. My father told me once about a particular funeral that he was assigned to play at. It was in South Carolina, and the people at this funeral were more mournful than my father had ever seen at any other funeral. My father said that he was moved by the spirit to play especially good for this funeral, so he said a little prayer before he played. The cemetery happened to be in an area that was sort of gorge like and my father was actually on a hill above the funeral. When he started to play the taps, he said that something miraculous happened. The sound bounced off of all the walls of the gorge and made a sound that was mysterious and magical, the sound of his taps turned almost into something physical and it moved everyone deeply. The next thing that happened was amazing, as the sound of the taps came around to touch the ears of the people in the funeral, one by one in order, each person at the funeral drop to their knee’s. My father says that it was like a giant hand had knocked each one of them down to their knees, one by one. My father has had a lot of amazing miraculous things happen to him but this to me is the most amazing and my favorite. I think that when you combine the gift of the spirit with the power of music, amazing things can happen.

2008-08-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

When I was 14, my father accepted a job as the chief of police in Columbus NM, which is a very small boarder town. This town happened to be at the time, the largest drug trafficking border town in the Nation. You would think that with that much drug trafficking, that the state would employ more than one officer in Columbus but my father was the only one that was hired to be there. So he was basically an entire police force in one package. Most people in that sort of circumstance would be able to admit that they were out numbered and that they weren’t going to be able to do much good as far as stopping the drug trafficking and just look the other way, for personal safety reasons. My father is not most people. My father decided that he wouldn’t look the other way and that he wouldn’t accept bribes from the Mexican mafia so it put him and his family in some very dangerous situations. Long story short, he gained a reputation for being a bad ass, and a person who was to be listened to and taken seriously.

Columbus was an hour away from Deming, NM, which is where my siblings and I went to high school. My father naturally worked very close with the Deming Police department seeing as how he always had to call in reinforcements from there to get him out of all the sticky situations that he was always getting himself into. So back to me, I was 14, a teenager, liked boys, wanted to be popular and have friends and have a normal life like any other teenager would. So one night, me and a friend were able to talk our parents into letting us hang out with my friends older sister in Deming for the evening for a little bit of innocent socializing (yea right). The sister obviously had other plans and she took us to a raging drinking party out in the middle of the desert. My friend and I felt very out of place there because we were both younger than everyone else and it was the first time that we had been around a bunch of older drunk teenagers. It was cool though, as long as we were able to get home when we had told our parents, everything would be fine, right? A lot depended on the older sister and she was no where to be found and when we finally did find her, she was totally crapfaced drunk! Ok, so now we were in trouble, we were now stuck at a party in the middle of the dessert with our only ride out of there being a very drunk older sister who obviously couldn’t drive. Then the cops showed up. Have you ever been at a raging party out in the desert with hundreds of kids, and when the cops show up they are calling out your name, looking for you specifically? Yes, when I hadn’t shown up home on time, my father had sent out a county wide message to all of his cop pals that they were to find me and they had. I came up to one of the cops and surrendered. I was very upset about my situation but I was more upset about what my father was going to do when he got a hold of me so between sobs, I explained to the cop how I had ended up there on accident and that it wasn’t my fault and all of that. He must have believed me because he basically had to tackle my father down when he showed up at the police station so that he could explain to him the situation so my dad wouldn’t kill me, I saw the whole thing through the window in one of the offices, I don’t think my dad knows that I saw. I never got a chance to thank that man but I think that he saved my life that night. LOL! I love you dad!

2008-08-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

My daughter Hannah is going to be turning 2 in a couple of months and she is really starting to show it. When she doesn’t get something that she wants or doesn’t get her way, she let’s out a scream that is similar to one of the Nosgal from The Lord of The Rings. If I try to reprimand her for doing something bad, she bow’s her head, covers her face and whimpers a fake cry for about a minute and then out of no where she starts pointing her finger at me and screams no! no! no! and lots of other words that I don’t have a translation for (I’m pretty sure that they’re curse words). She all of a sudden wants to draw on everything! Every time I turn around she has gotten a hold of a marker or a crayon and has drawn all over everything (thank goodness for magic erasers). The other day she came into my room and was covered from head to toe in marker and I should have been angry but it was just so darn cute. It really is a good thing that 2 year olds have enough cuteness to balance out their badness because if they didn’t, I don’t think that the human race would have survived as long as it has.

2008-08-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

So for some mysterious reason, I am awake, and its 6:00 am. I actually woke up at 5, weird. Not too long after I woke up, Hannah, my 2 year old woke up, walked into the kitchen and in her own weird language asked for popcorn. So I popped her some pop corn and now she is sitting in our bed eating popcorn and watching cartoons. I’m thinking that my day has started, no chance for more sleep, plus I’ll be needing to get the kids up for school soon, it’s my turn this morning, Tom did it yesterday…and the day before that. I wish that I had something profound to say this morning but…I don’t… other than don’t do drugs, drink your milk and stay in school. Or is it don’t do school, drink your drugs and stay in milk, I can’t remember, it’s still too early. Have a nice day.

P.S. Don’t tell my daughter but I’m pretty sure that I hate the Jonas Brothers.

2008-08-16T20:28:00.001-07:00

So as you could probably tell from my last post, I’ve been a little pissed off at the world and the humans who live in it. I’ve been pretty much convinced that there are no more people in it who are genuinely kind and concerned about anything other then them selves. So I go to target and I don’t look at anyone, I don’t smile or say excuse me or thank you or anything and I’m just convinced that everyone sucks and that I’ve just had it with everything. After I finished my shopping and I had gotten the stuff that I bought put in my car, I decided to be decent and actually return my cart to the cart return place. As I was going to return my cart, there was another woman, a young mother, who was returning her cart as well. I kept my head down of course, I didn’t want to look at her, only to have her look away quickly so as to not have to acknowledge my existence, but as I am hanging my head down, I noticed that she was trying to smile at me! She was trying to get me to look up at her so that she could smile at me, I could feel it. How confused I was at that moment, “NO” I told myself, I won’t look at her and smile back! I won’t, I won’t I won’t!!! So I didn’t. When I walked back to my car, I noticed that there was something still in the cart that the girl had accidentally forgotten, so, I couldn’t just not bring that to her attention. So I called out to her “Hey, excuse me, I think that you forgot something in your cart!” She looks back at me, kind of surprised after how cold that I had just been to her, at that moment I think that some of the ice melted off of my heart and I decided that it was just stupid to stop trying to be nice to people. So I smiled as big as I think that I know how and I came up to her and handed her the thing that she had left in the cart. “Thank you so much”, she said with a big smile, “you’re very welcome” I said with an even bigger smile.

I give up

2008-08-15T15:04:00.001-07:00

Well, I just have to say that after 32 years of living, that I should have a better understanding of my own species but the truth is is that I don’t. I DON’T GET PEOPLE! Why do we hurt each other when we know that it hurts to get hurt? Since we’ve been hurt before, doesn’t it mean that we would try to make it so that no one ever has to hurt like we did? Oh contraire! Quite the opposite! For the most part, people that have been hurt before, for some reason feel like they need to just go around and make sure that everyone get’s to experience the hurt that they feel or have felt, because it’s only fair right? Right? Right?!!!!

I am so tired of trying. I try and I try to be nice to people, to be compassionate, to be loving, I’m not perfect BUT I TRY. Nobody else tries so why should I? What’s the point? I’m just going to stop caring. I’m going to stop smiling at people, because they never smile at me. I’m going to stop saying “thank you” and “excuse me” because nobody ever say’s those things to me. I quit, I give up.

2008-08-05T10:59:00.001-07:00

Well, things are about to change. I love change! School is starting; fall is coming, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas! I’m so glad summer is finally going to be over; I don’t really like summer, especially in the southwest. I’m a winter girl.

We will soon be getting a different President and who knows what changes that will bring, I’m hoping for changes in our country for the better. I don’t know who I will be voting for yet, I’m sort of waiting for the two candidates to choose running mates, that will be the deciding factor for me.

Here is a great picture of my Grandpa Jake in Europe during WW II. I absolutely adore my Grandfather, who is still living by the way!

2008-07-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Ok, back to life, back to reality, enough of the trips down memory lane. Right now we live in Las Cruces NM, as I mentioned before and my husband and I are both going to College. We live on campus in student housing and we both absolutely love it! It’s wonderful. We have never been in a situation where everyone, everywhere around us are in the same exact circumstance as us. Actually some people are around us are in worse circumstances at least financially, than us. There are more than enough single mothers who live in this community who are struggling to do it all on their own. I am so happy for them because they are doing it. They could so easily have just given up and depended on the system to take care of them for the rest of their lives but they have decided to be better than that. Awesome!! And those are all of my neighbors, humble people who have come from humble circumstances. People who are trying to take control of their lives, to make their dreams come true. Magnificent!!!

2008-07-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

So you most likely think that I hate my mother for being so perfect but that is absolutely not true. I think that it is a natural part of life to become disconnected with your parents and then eventually come to terms with them. I have been able to learn from the mistakes that my parents made with me and become a better parent with my children. I feel that the most important thing to do for me as a parent is to show my children that I am not perfect, but that I am trying. Hopefully, they won’t feel like they have to live up to unachievable standards. Hopefully, they will find their own goals and dreams, early on and follow those dreams. Hopefully, I will be able to support them 100% in achieving their goals. As a parent, my number one goal is to give my children the freedom to choose so that when they become adults, making good choices won’t be quite so difficult as they were for me. I love my mother; she did the best, best, best, best that she knew how to in raising me and I love her for it. Oh and by the way, she isn’t perfect, she has faults, she’s probably uncomfortable in me knowing them but what I don’t think that she knows is that I love her more because of them.

2008-07-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

2008-07-26T00:46:00.001-07:00

So when I got to be a teenager, I decided to be as anti-western as I could possibly be. I started dressing crazy, dying my hair lots of weird colors getting piercings. I was athletic, but I never seemed to be able to fit in with the people who played high school team sports so that’s when I started skateboarding and later Snowboarding. I began to really love those sports and to have dreams and goals for them. Skating and snowboarding were now my dream, and they were achievable. I didn’t have to depend on someone to buy me a skate board, I could just save up my money and buy one myself and then just practice a lot to get good. No one could stop me from ridding a skateboard or a snowboard and that was extremely liberating. I felt free for the first time in my life. And of course, I loved the attention that I got, you see, in 1994, when I was into all of those things, there weren’t very many girls who skated or snowboarded so when guy’s saw me doing it they were sort of awestruck. It was always so much fun to walk into a skate park where there were all guys, everyone of them thinking, “oh, there’s another poser girl who is just going to stand on the sidelines and pretend like she can skate but she never will.’ and prove all of them wrong by dropping into a half pipe and start ripping it up and look up to see everyone of those jerks jaws drop. Amazing! Indescribable! Free! Free from stereotypes, free from fear, free to be me, free to love myself.

2008-07-26T00:05:00.001-07:00

When I was little, I idolized my mother. I mean, I really idolized her. I thought that she could do no wrong, I wanted to be just like her, I think that I was a bit obsessed. Anyway, when she was young, she was a cowgirl, the best horse rider in her town. When ever we had family reunions, all of her aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters, mom and dad would talk for hours about my mom and all of her crazy horse adventures. I wanted to be just like her. Unfortunately, my childhood wasn’t quite as charmed hers was. My mom ended up marrying for love and not money so having horses just wasn’t going to happen for her or me. That was all that I wanted though, a horse. I wanted a horse so that I could be a free cowgirl just like my mom. What I think that I really wanted was to be free. You see, my mom and dad had seven beautiful children, five of them were boys, two of them were girls. I was the first girl after a long string of rough and tumble boys and I was to my parents like a piece of fragile glass that could easily be broken so, even if we could afford a horse, they most likely wouldn’t have let me ride it for fear of me getting hurt.

I don’t remember when I stopped praying that I would be able to get a horse. I don’t remember when I gave up hope, but I did. I think that around the same time that I gave up hope for getting a horse was when I stopped idolizing my mother. I sort of began to really, really, dislike her. It wasn’t because I found something out about her that made her less perfect or anything, I think that maybe it was because she didn’t stop being perfect. I could never be that perfect, I could never be her so…I could never ride horses. I’ve had many opportunities to ride horses since I gave up hope of being able to ride them, but I mostly refuse to get on one. Getting on a horse represents many things. It represents unanswered prayers, unachieved goals, dreams never realized. I actually get angry when I think about horses and the reverence that my Mother and Grandfather have for them. Every chance I get, I try to express to them how stupid I think horses are and cowboys and rodeos and all of that. Pretty childish, I know.

When did you stop believing in your dreams, when did you give up hope? And when you think back on that lost dream, do you get angry like me?

2008-07-25T00:46:00.000-07:00

Things that I strongly believe in:

1. Every adult should be allowed the freedom to choose what they want to do, as long as they are not harming anyone, especially children.
2. Spending tons of money on too many materialistic things is to me like committing murder. The money that some people spend on Hummers could actually be used to save thousands of lives in countries where vaccines, medical facilities, and proper nutrition are scarce.
3. No one should be allowed to choose to terminate lives that are not their own.
4. Children should be treated with respect.

That’s all I can think right now.

2008-07-25T00:32:00.000-07:00

Here is one of my most favorite spiritual messages:

"Thus, he did for us, what we could not do for ourselves. He broke the cold grasp of death...
Our Redeemer, took upon Himself, all the sins, pains, infirmities, and sicknesses, of all who have ever lived, and will ever live. No one has ever suffered, in any degree what He did:
He knows our mortal trials by firsthand experience.
Since the Savior has suffered, anything, and everything, that we could ever feel, or experience, He can help the weak to become stronger. He has personally experienced all of it. He understands our pain, and will walk with us even in our darkest hours.
The overwhelming message of the Atonement, is the perfect love the Savior has for each and all of us. It is a love, which is full of mercy, patience, grace, long-suffering, and, above all, forgiveness.
Satan would destroy any hope we have, in overcoming our mistakes. He would have us feel, that we are lost and that there is no hope." (James E. Faust)

2008-07-24T10:31:00.000-07:00

So where did I come from? That is a very good question. I was born in Yuma, AZ. We moved to Wyoming when I was two and stayed there until I was about six. From there we moved back to Yuma, from Yuma to Ehrenberg AZ, from Ehrenberg, AZ to Hatch, NM, from Hatch, NM to Deming NM, from Deming NM, to Columbus, NM, from Columbus, NM to Playas, NM from Playas, NM back To Deming. Fwwweww! I’m out of breath and I’m sure that you are getting lost, sorry, it get’s worse. So I graduated from High school in Deming (suck fest America) and I obviously was sick of living in little crapy one horse towns out in the middle of nowhere in AZ and NM so I moved to Seattle, WA. From there I moved to Bellingham, WA, which is about when I met my Husband. After my husband and I met, after awhile, we decided to move back to Chicago, IL where he is from. So we lived there for a couple of years then decided to move to Eugene, OR. From Eugene we moved to Phoenix, AZ, then to Cincinnati, OH, then to Kentucky, then back to Eugene then back to New Mexico, Las Cruces at least, it’s a bit bigger than the towns that I grew up in now to bad. So as you have noticed, we like to move around, but we are sort of tired of it and are ready to settle somewhere, but somewhere awesome, we haven’t decided yet. We’re going to wait until we get our degrees and get awesome, great paying jobs and then we’ll decide. Time is on our hands :)

2008-07-23T23:53:00.000-07:00

So one day, I woke up and said, “Hey, you know what? I can be whatever I want to be, do whatever I want to do but what did I want to do? Well, I have worked, doing catering and banquets for the past 10 years and I love what I do but I got to a point in my career where I realized that I was never going to be able to move up to bigger and better opportunities if I didn’t have a piece of paper signed by a college saying that I am educated and competent enough to take on bigger responsibilities. So I decided to go back to school and jump through lots of hoops and write lots of papers that people want me to write so that I can get that special piece of paper some call a degree. So that’s what I have been doing for the past 3 years, I have been going to school full time and my husband is too. College is easy. If there is anyone out there who is intimidated about going to college for fear of not being smart enough or it just being to hectic or difficult, well that’s just silly, go to college, because it’s easy, I mean it.

2008-07-23T23:19:00.000-07:00

So the days roll by, children are born, jobs are started, jobs are ended. There are challenges, there are heartaches, and there are disappointments. There are moments of utter amazement of complete happiness and joy. And the world keeps turning, the sun rises and the moon sets and I live. I struggle to be true and to be faithful, so that the Lord can bless me and strengthen me and lead me by the hand. I struggle to be obedient, so that the Lord will bless me abundantly. I struggle to love, to forgive, to have compassion to control my emotions and my passions. Life is great.

2008-07-23T23:08:00.000-07:00

I am a woman who is 32 years old, am married and have four children. I met my husband Thomas in Seattle in 1994 under the space needle at a skate park. Yes you heard right, at a skate park. I used to skateboard and snowboard, back in the day, I was living in Bellingham Washington working for a Ski Resort and I had to go to Seattle to catch a flight to Las Vegas. I missed my flight and had about 24 hours to burn before the next flight came around so I went to the Seattle skate park so that I could skate and unwind. I wasn't looking for a man at that time, in fact, men were the last thing on my mind but isn't that just the way that things work sometimes. So I'm at the Skate Park minding my own business, in my own world, and this guy approaches me and he tells me, "hey, you see that guy over there? He really thinks you're hot and he wants to meet you." I was kind of like, what ever. Well it turned out that the guy went to Tom and said the same thing about me so when the park closed down and everyone was leaving we both sort of felt obligated to at least acknowledge each other and say hello. So he asked me if I wanted to get some coffee with him and I accepted. I was to follow him to the coffee spot but we lost each other in traffic and I thought that I would never see him again but I came to the park again the next day and he was there again and we exchanged phone numbers and that was that. I didn't call him for two weeks and he didn't return my call for two weeks but we eventually ended up getting together. We just sort of melted into each other and became one. He was the missing piece in my life that I didn't even know that I was missing. We have been together ever since. We've had a lot of ups and downs. He makes me madder than anyone on the face of the planet and he also makes me happier than anyone on the face of the planet.