Oh How Time Flies

It's been awhile since my last blog post. As in, I haven't posted since sometime in November. It's not because there weren't things to write about last month, because there were. And it's not because I didn't feel like writing, because I did. But for whatever reason I just never ended up writing anything that I felt like posting, so this poor blog got neglected for awhile.

I spent the first half of the "school year" attempting to de-clutter my life a bit, mainly by trying to remove some things from my calendar. Now that we're into the new year, I'm thankful for the benefits that come from creating a bit more space in my week. I dropped my weekly Wednesday night commitment and I've enjoyed having the three weeknights in the middle of the week as flexible openings on my calendar.

Part of my decision to de-clutter my schedule was to make it possible for me to handle some of the crazier months of the year, mainly the ones before Summit and sometimes the ones before camp. Now that it's January, I'm in full swing Summit preparation mode. My calendar for the next two months now has, at minimum, two Awana meetings each week, oftentimes three, and on some weeks my team will have four. It makes for a crazy schedule, but I love it. Next month when I'm worn out and tired I'll probably be looking forward to having some more open time on my calendar, but I also know that when March rolls around I'll miss constantly seeing my Awana kids.

One thing that I know is that regardless of how busy or open my schedule is, the one thing that determines how well I weather the ups and downs of life is whether or not I've been getting filled up by God. If you've been a Christian for very long, I know that probably sounds pretty obvious. But taking the time to open up my schedule the last few months has given me an opportunity to realize again that no matter what I do to my calendar, it's still not going to matter if I fail to schedule in the most important part of my day. It's a reminder that I really needed.

In the next two months you're either going to hardly hear from me at all on this blog, or you're going to hear from me a ton. The reason the latter would happen would be that sometimes I get onto writing sprees, particularly when I get busy. Writing can be a bit of a mental release for me sometimes. Only time will tell!

What I'm Loving - November 2012

I'm loving the fact that I finally made it back down to U of A for a visit. I greatly enjoy going down there. I'm not sure why I don't do it more often.

I'm loving my new job. Things have been ramping up slowly with the new team, and things are going to start to get crazy busy within the next month, but I'm excited about this new venture.

I'm loving mashed potatoes (and holiday food in general). Seriously, one of my favorite foods ever. However, I'm sure I'll be sick of them by the time I've healed from my wisdom tooth surgery.

I'm loving decorating for the holidays. I thought I was going to hate this holiday season, but so far I've been getting extra into the spirit of things. Who knew?

I'm loving finding new functionality for my phone that makes my life easier. I've finally converted to using Swype in all of it's amazingness. Hello super easy one handed text input! And thanks to SMS Backup+ I've been able to automatically back up all of my texts to my Gmail account. Score.