So,

I said, "Sure, I'd love to ..." to about sixteen hundred different people and next thing you know, I don't have a single spare minute.

I've spent a whole lotta time on my butt in front of the computer doing things and stuff while the weeds grow wildly 10 feet away from where I sit. And it doesn't look like it's going to let up. The weeds or the time spent on my rear.

One of the really fun things I've been doing is preparing the slide show for Drew's grade 7 grad evening. So far I've uploaded 437 photos from an assortment of sources onto slides. Every picture has required me to invest about one minute of time for editing. Are you doing the math?

I've also been to a few planning meetings for the evening and have gotten all caught up in the theme: "an evening at the beach". I've made arrangements for my brother to bring my dad's new dune buggy to the school, where we'll set up a fun picture op area in one of the corners.

Do you remember the list I generated last year on my birthday? It was a wish list of sorts... of the 101 things I wanted to do in the following 1,001 days. I'll look for it and repost it tomorrow, maybe. Wait. Oh, I probably won't. It's my final Pre-Hi Event of the year (Capture the Flag and a weiner roast.) Is anyone else finding June to be a horrific month? How many things can a person cram into 30 days? I'll tell you. With good scheduling and unrealistic time management, a person can have well over 100 things she needs to do this month.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, that list. Of 101 things. Well, I did one tonight. Well, two actually. One of them was "Make a New Friend" (and to be honest, I think I made 3 new friends this year. How lucky am I?) and even though Carolyn and I didn't become friends tonight, it was the first time we've done something together. What did you do, you might ask? Well, we drove for 2 hours and talked the entire time about deep things. Verrry deep. That's because we are not frivolous, airheady, ditzy women concerned only with gel-tipped nails or pet poodles. Oh no we're not. We have brains. That are mostly still firing with at least half of their cylinders.

And where did we go? We went to Regent College. To hear a free lecture. Given by Rikki Watts. Oh, yes we did. We were there, with the cultured, the intelligent, the academic, the learned, the ...
Here is a sampling of what I wrote in my notepad: "He is saying many, many words in a row that mean absolutely nothing to me despite my single-minded focus on staring at his face, desperately wanting to understand the noise coming out of his mouth."

And "the balding, greying, nodding heads around me are making me very aware that my own head, buried under a waterfall of bleached blonde hair, is clearly out of its league in this place."

This was all very disappointing to me. I thought I was smarter than this.

Thank goodness, at the end, like in the final 10 minutes, when he finally got around to the point and used some examples from the Bible, I got it. Well, maybe not all of it. But enough of it to justify my presence there. He talked about metaphors and the power of storytelling and it was like he was speaking my language after 40 minutes of gaelic.

We're going to go back. And slay that dragon. Next time we'll pick a lecture given by a woman.

Three things I'm thankful for:
1. New friends.
2. New experiences.
3. Old pajamas.

Shalom,