The World Keeps Turning…

Sorry for all the silence lately; May 2013 was one of those months where I had noteworthy stuff going on but no time to write about it.  I now have a few minutes to tell you about one of the more recent developments:

DH and I have been contemplating moving closer to his family for years.  (They live about 700 miles away from us.)  Last week, a job opened up in his parents’ town that seems to match my skill set.  After a quick discussion, I sent in an application.  I haven’t heard anything yet (not surprising since they’re still accepting applications).

I could be happy if I got the job.  I could be happy if I didn’t.  That’s in God’s hands, and that’s not what I’d like you all to pray for.

Instead, I’d like you to pray that I don’t let my overactive imagination run amok imagining all the ways that this potential move – or even going out there for an interview – would be difficult.  I can’t drive myself crazy before I even get an interview!

Chreasters…

Simcha Fisher’s post on C&E Catholics reminded me of my reversion story and the fact that I’ve never posted it here.  Since it happened at Easter, I suppose now would be a good time to do so.  (Warning: this just might be the lamest reversion story ever.)

Five years ago, I was in graduate school and our spring break fell on Holy Week.  At the time I hadn’t been to church in about four years (and I had been married for about four years).  Scandals, disagreement with the Church on contraception, and just generally being a know-it-all were part of the reason I stopped attending Mass, but most of it was just no longer feeling the presence of God.

Anyway, my parents and sister decided to spend Holy Week with my grandparents that year, and since I figured I should spend time with my grandparents while I still could, I went along.  We didn’t go to the Holy Thursday or Good Friday liturgies (I forget why), but we did go to Mass on Easter morning, and I knew there was no way I’d get out of it.

That Easter Mass changed my life.

I took Communion and felt God in a powerful way; even now it’s difficult to put it into words.  The only thing I can compare it to is the first time DH held my hand and I thought, “This the start of something big.”

After I got home, I had my doubts.  What if it was just a fluke?  What if I’m just imagining things?

So the following Sunday, I went to Mass at the Newman Center at my university, which is very different from the church my grandparents attended.  My grandparents went to a huge, ostentatious suburban church; the Newman center is small and austere.

And I felt the presence of God again.  And again.  And again, and again.  Then I did what any real nerd would do:  I read.  I read books like What’s So Great About Christianity by Dinesh D’Souza, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.  I read blogs like Conversion Diary and Jimmy Akin and The American Papist.

DH, of course, didn’t come along for the ride.  Maybe someday he will… but for now, I am content to pray, hope, and not worry.

The Wedding Picture

One of my favorite pictures of our wedding is the picture of DH’s and my first kiss.  DH is a foot taller than I am; he’s stooping to meet my lips and I’m on tiptoe to meet his.

I love that picture because it says everything.

DH is a neatnik; I’m on the slobby side.  Over the years, I’ve learned that if DH has had a rough day at work, returning home to a messy house just makes it worse.  I make sure the house is clean when he gets home – his definition of clean, not mine.

I used to be terrified of flying; DH loves it.  He never quite understood why I was so scared.  (Neither do I, honey.  It’s a phobia.  Phobias are not supposed to be rational.)  But he held my hand anyway and let me squeeze it so hard I’m surprised I didn’t break his bones.

Often we’ll be performing a task together (the most recent example was bagging groceries) and we’ll start out getting in each other’s way.  After a few minutes, often without even discussing it, we fall into line.  We figure out who does what and the job gets done efficiently.

I stretch.  He bends.  It works.

Why My Husband is Wonderful, Part 3

DH and I took a long road trip the other day.  Along the way, things got dull (as they usually do when you’re driving through a large land mass), and DH started doing one of my favorite things that nobody else does with me…

Oh for Pete’s sake, get your mind out of the gutter!  We played a word game.

Many of you may be familiar with the expressions “bros before hos” and “chicks before dicks.”  If you don’t live in a college town, allow me to enlighten you.  ”Chicks before dicks” is an expression often used by college-age women to signify that their female friends should come before their boyfriends; “bros before hos” is an analogous expression used by college-age men.  Our game was to come up with new wordings for this expression and try to get the other to guess what we were thinking of.

DH: OK, so what if you were a guy who couldn’t spend time with his girl because he was tending his prize-winning flowers?

Me: Rose before hos?

DH: Yes!

Me: What if you were a lady magician who couldn’t spend time with her man because she was practicing her act?

DH: Tricks before dicks!

I hate to brag, but I think I had the best one…

Me: What if you were a girl who just came back from a camping trip and couldn’t hang out with your guy…

DH: Oh no!  TICKS before dicks!!! Yuck!

I love my husband because even driving across the plains with him is fun and an opportunity to be cute.  :)

7 Quick Takes Friday – Just Another Day In Paradise

1.  Thank you to everyone who prayed for Father B.  He’s on the mend but not completely healed yet.  Any and all prayers for him are appreciated!

2. Speaking of prayer, I finally have the chance to reveal who prayed for me this Lent!  It was Laura at Watts Up in the Tundra?!? Thanks for your prayers, Laura!  They were a huge help to me.

3.  April and May are going to be the longest months ever.  As far as work is concerned, anyway.  The other day I was stuck at work with one pregnant lady and two guys whose wives are pregnant and guess what they talked about for the Entire. Freaking. Afternoon?  To top it all off, someone asked me when I was going to have a kid.  It was all I could do not to say “The next [expletive] that asks me when I’m having an [expletive] baby is getting pistol-whipped!”  Two more coworkers have babies due in May, and then maybe everybody will shut up about the baby stuff for awhile.  I think I can…

4.  I saw this in my backyard and I knew I had to post it.

A little nest, which two robins lovingly built and laid their eggs in, blown down by some strong winds.   I feel like this picture sums up my life… the nest is perfect but the eggs are broken.

5. I had hoped to finish The Secret Diary of Elisabeth Leseur before Easter, but didn’t.  Hopefully I’ll get done with it soon and can post a review.  Elisabeth was very wise and very close to God, and reading her book feels like getting advice from a big sister.

6.  There are a lot of reasons why I love gardening, but one of the big ones is that it’s a lot easier to make dinner when you can just make a salad from stuff in your backyard.  Man, I can’t wait for my plants to get bigger.   

7.  We must have a song for Friday!  This Friday’s song is the theme song from Today’s Special.  Anybody else like that show when they were a kid?  Just me?  OK.

For more Quick Takes, go here!

7 Quick Takes Friday – Seeds, Scattered and Sown

1.  Can’t get away from the orphans!  No Greater Joy Mom  (Adeye) and her husband Anthony are trying to spring little Faith from the Pleven orphanage, one of the most disgusting, awful places on Earth.  Poor little Faith is 14 years old and weighs only 14 pounds… yes, 14 pounds due to severe malnutrition.   And yet, hearing Adeye talk about how she and Anthony are called to rescue this little one, how they already love her despite all her health problems and the multitude of challenges she’ll face… it fills my heart with joy.  If you have some extra cash, they’d definitely appreciate a donation.

2.  Some of the seeds I planted actually came up!  It’s an Easter miracle!  You guys have to understand, I’m a gardening newbie (this being my 2nd year of having a garden) and I totally suck at getting seeds to sprout.  Precious few of my carrots have sprouted.  The grass seed I put down only came up sporadically.  I gave up on my Swiss Chard seeds coming up and bought transplants from the nursery.  My lettuce and spinach didn’t come up  at all, but that’s probably because I used last year’s seeds.  Hopefully I’ll have better luck with the new seeds I ordered.

3.  The title of this post comes from a hymn.  You may think it’s one of my favorite hymns or that it has some special meaning for me.  In reality, I  think it’s kind of annoying; however, it ALWAYS gets stuck in my head when I’m planting seeds!

4. I suppose the title of this post could also be a metaphor for my life in a mixed marriage.  I’m always trying to plant seeds of faith in my husband.  Don’t get me wrong, I do love him as he is; I pray for his conversion because I think he’s missing out on something wonderful.  Let’s hope the seeds I plant in DH’s heart germinate better than the ones in my garden.

5.  When you live in the town where you went to college, occasionally you run into your old professors.  Sometimes that’s nice.  Sometimes you just hope and pray that they don’t recognize you.  Mercifully, the prof I had freshman year didn’t recognize me outside the grocery store yesterday (or if he did, he was too busy shouting into his cell phone to say so).   I thought he taught a pretty worthless subject and essentially told him so in class one day; luckily that was [cough] years ago so maybe he’s forgotten me.  Why did I tell him that, you ask?  Well, at the time my rationale was  that the guy was a blowhard and he had it coming.  Most people’s stories of dumb things they did in undergrad involve partying too hard; mine usually involve telling off the wrong person.

6.   Finally, here’s a question for anyone who wants to answer: is it OK to attend an ex-boyfriend’s wedding?  My college boyfriend invited me and DH to his wedding reception the other day.  He and his fiancé live about 1000 miles away; they are having a small ceremony where they live and later on, a party here in the college town. I haven’t yet given him an answer.  On the one hand, that was ancient history, I’m happily married now and I wish the two of them well. On the other hand, I’ve never met his fiancé and would hate to make her feel awkward.  Thoughts?

7. It’s Friday, so we need a song!  This Friday’s song is “Weapon of Choice” by Fatboy Slim.  I’ve always wanted to dance around a hotel lobby like Christopher Walken does in this video.

For more Quick Takes, go here!

Perspective

Last year at Easter, we went to visit my family.  I recall that DH was grossed out by a smell at my parents’ house¹, barely slept, and was annoyed by my special-needs-having sister².  This year, my folks came to visit us.  (Sister doesn’t like to travel so she stayed at her group home.)  My parents chattered nonstop, which is tiring for DH since he’s from a very laconic family.  We had to spend a great deal of time entertaining them, again, tiring for DH the introvert.  And on Holy Saturday, we got home from Easter Vigil at 11:30 PM and stayed up till almost 1 AM talking a little too loudly.  DH was not amused, having already been in bed by the time we got home.  Did I mention that DH also spent his day off cleaning the house in preparation for my family’s arrival?

I was mulling this over today and decided that I had achieved Epic Wife Fail and I’d better a) apologize and b) do something different next Easter.   And at dinner tonight, I told DH that I was sorry my grandiose plans had wrecked his last two Easters.  His response kind of startled me.

“Uh… what did we even do last Easter?”

“I dragged you to visit my family, remember?”

“You didn’t drag me.  That’s what I signed up for when I married you.”

Oh. Right.

Clearly, this man can teach me a few things about how not to hold a grudge.  And clearly that’s something I need to learn, since I was actually holding a grudge against myself.

<sup>1. He’s a lot more sensitive to smells than I am; I noticed it but not as much.
2. To be fair, she annoyed me too. She’s my little sister, it’s her job to annoy me.</sup>

Why My Husband is Wonderful, Part 2

I though the Feast of St. Joseph would be a good day to post this.  :)

I had a hellish time at work this weekend, and I was bummed that I had to work on St. Patrick’s Day.  (Don’t worry, I’m not relapsing on workaholism; my job requires the occasional weekend in exchange for time off during the week.)  On Saturday, I worked too hard all day with annoying coworkers and was so tired I nearly dozed off during Mass.  Then I drove home on a nearly-flat tire and an almost-empty gas tank and found:

1. Dinner in the oven.
2. The cats fed and litterboxes cleaned.
3. The fridge, which had been empty when I left, was full.

Then I mentioned the tire to DH and he promptly went out with a can of Fix-A-Flat, repaired the tire, drove around the block to make sure it was really fixed, and stopped to fill up my gas tank.

I love that man so much!

Why My Husband is Wonderful…

This weekend my clean freak husband neglected his projects to help me build raised garden beds, came up with a way to make the raised beds sturdier, and hauled thirteen 40-lb bags of dirt into our backyard.  (I think I carried a grand total of three such bags.)  And he did all this with a smile on his face.

Life is good!

Adventures in a Mixed Marriage

As a kid, my DH very rarely attended church, and when he did it was never a Catholic church.  I grew up in a very Catholic family  and sometimes forget that much of Catholic culture which is very routine to me is very foreign to him.  The following is a funny example of that.

Several years ago, DH and I attended a wedding where the happy couple were both devout Catholics and chose to have a Nuptial Mass.  We were seated towards the back and shortly after Communion, DH looked at the altar and then looked at me with a horrified expression on his face.  I was behind a bunch of tall people and couldn’t see the altar, so I told him to ask me about it later.

In the car on the way to the reception, DH said, “That priest guy drank everything in the cup that everybody else had been drinking out of!!!  That’s so gross!!”

I replied, “Um… yeah, he’s supposed to do that.”

“YUCK!  He was just chugging away like a frat boy and there was all that backwash!“

“It’s OK, the alcohol will kill the germs,”  I said, trying to suppress a smile.  It’s hilarious when DH gets grossed out… to me, anyway.  ”Besides, they wipe off the cup between users.”

“Oh, that’s totally going to remove all the germs!”

Somehow, I doubt DH ever passed around a bottle of liquor when he was younger…