Uuuggghhh!!!

will the car problems never end?! if we have one more car problem, i think my head will explode!

2 out of 3's not bad

the weekend was tons of fun. the preaching was inspiring. the fellowship with the kids and other sponsors was encouraging. the music... not so much. the preacher spoke out of Hebrews 4:12-

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

"living" comes from the word zoe which means life. "active" comes from the word energes which means energy. so, the Word of God is our life and energy. when we neglect it, its like starving yourself. it's good to have reminders occassionally, because i've been forgetting to eat and have been starving.

the kids were so much fun and the other sponsors were too. there were two other women sponsors. they were both moms of a couple of the teens. one of them thought it would be fun for us to ambush the guys with water guns when they got back from basketball. she was so right! we asked the guy at the front desk to call our room when the guys came in so we could be ready... and he DID! how awesome is that!? we soaked them as they came out of the elevator while trying to contain all our giggles and squeals so we wouldn't disturb the people in the room with the "do not disturb" door hanger. all the guys came up except jj and the youth pastor, tim. aparently, jj hurt his leg and so they dropped the guys off and went to walgreens for bandage to wrap it with. so, i called to make sure he was okay... and to find out when they would be back (so we could be ready for them). i'm such a good wife. i had the feeling that they knew what i was up to, so we staked out, not just the elevators, but the stairs too. however we got distracted and all ended up back at the elevator. when we heard it ding, we all got very excited, but i saw tim walk out of the stairwell just in time to tell the girls not to shoot the person that was about to come out of the elevator, who happened to be the guy from the front desk. tim told the guy what we were up to and asked him to tell us that we were disturbing other guests and that if we didn't stop we would be kicked out. we're just a nice little group of pranksters. it's all in love. jj was okay, even though he has a bit of a limp still. a banana helped the cramping a little. we had a blast.

well, the music wasn't really that wonderful. they had a group from nw arkansas lead it. they were youth themselves. some of their issues will work themselves out with maturity, but it was really hard to keep a straight face sometimes. the guitars and drums were fairly good, but the vocals were just... well, the leader guy was probably 15 or so. he had a decent voice and fairly good pitch with the occassional typical teenage boy squeak. but he sang with this awful, obviously fake british accent. i mean, come on kid! you're from rogers. you're not fooling anyone. and then there was the girl. she was 16 and sang about as well as jj. for those of you who don't know what that is like, ask the howling dogs. i did okay about not wincing too much, until tim lost it and laughed a little. that made me laugh. which made jj laugh (he didn't understand what we were laughing about since he was blessed this weekend with tone deafness, but he thought it was funny that we were laughing), which made another guy laugh. fortunately, it was more like giggles all at different times, so we weren't caught.

anyway, we had a great time. i was encouraged and inspired and got to know people. thank you God for bringing me closer to you once more.

let's hit the road...

this weekend, jj and i are going with the church youth group to a conference. i'm kind of excited because, jj said there's going to be great preaching and we don't really get that at our church. there's a lot of good things that are going on at our church, but the preaching isn't one of them. on sunday mornings, i'm usually trying to either stay awake or not laugh out loud b/c jj and the people we sit with are making sarcastic jokes about the poor guy chasing rabbits at the front. it's pretty sad. so, since i've always enjoyed listening to good preaching, i'm looking forward to the weekend. i'm guessing there's going to be some good worship music too (which is another area our church could improve on). another thing i'm looking forward to is the fellowship. i haven't had too many chances to get to know people b/c i work on wednesday nights during the discipleship groups (which is something i really like about our church, but don't get to experience enough). going on a trip is always a good way to get to know people better. please pray that this will be a spiritually encouraging weekend for me and that i will grow closer to God through the sermons, the worship, and the fellowship. i need it right now.

TAXES!!! dun. dun. dunnnn.....

i've always been a procrastinator, and will probably always have that tendency. but since failing out of college for that reason, i've tried to overcome that. i even started talking about doing our taxes as soon as we got our w-2s this year. however, b/c of the percieved complications with marriage, moving, and job changes, jj thought it would be best to wait and have a guy from our church do them. i agreed that it might be helpful, but i didn't mind doing them online, since tax act online pretty much holds your hand the whole way through. well, february went by, then march, and all of a sudden, it's april 8th. we couldn't find one of jj's w-2s or something, so he suggested filing for an extension. i thought we needed to just find that thing. so, we tore up the apartment looking for it. he finally found it two days ago and he wanted to go talk to the guy from our church... are you kidding me? there's no way he's going to be able to do our taxes for us when he has a million and one other people who are paying him to do it. so jj suggested an extension again. i finally did them this morning and it took less than 2 hours, even with all the extra stuff that could have been complicated. i really wish we had done them sooner, because we're going to get a nice refund, but it feels so good to have that off our backs now. now we have the money to fix my car and his motorcycle and pay back our parents for helping us out with all our other car problems that we've had in the past month (which have been more than the allotted amount for an entire year). i vote that we put the rest in savings, after we take a cheap little romantic getaway for a weekend.

i've given in!

so, i've given in and made the switch. i was getting a little bored with xanga and no one was reading my blogs anymore (not that many people read my xanga anyway). a year ago today, JJ called me to see if i wanted to "hang out." i'm excited because april and may are going to be full of anniversaries of "firsts." like, in a few days will be the anniversary of our first kind of date, then later will be our first official date, then later will be when we had our first dtr (define the relationship). anyway, it doesn't feel like it's been a year since he called me. it was so out of the blue, cause i hadn't seen him since february, i was pretty shocked. it was a very exciting night because Sadie was in labor that night too. i wanted to call her so bad because i was so excited, but, she was a little too busy talk. :-) a year ago today was the beginning for us. wow!