New Church

So Kyle and I haven't found a real church home ever since we had a falling out at our previous church here. I went to church service there once or twice since that new minister started but didn't really connect with his message and wasn't really impressed with his sermons. What made matters more difficult was that almost all of the friends I had made there over the last year all left, just like that. They all left for different reasons but I think that the previous pastor leaving severed a hole in the congregation. In less than a month almost all of the young adults left, several of the young families stopped coming and the music director left. It was a really sad situation.

It was hard to leave and part of me wanted to stay there out of principle, (to support the minister, even if I didn't really get a lot out of it) but I wasn't getting as much fulfillment out of it spiritually anymore. Well I stopped going, frankly when you can only go twice a month because of work it's easy to think of excuses to sleep in the few Sundays that you do have off. I also felt uncomfortable starting to go to a new church when Kyle was still deployed. When he came home we went to a larger church in La Jolla for advent and Christmas services but we never really connected there either. I don't know about you other church goers but trying to find a new church home after being raised in one church family primarily for me is like trying to replace a long time boyfriend with one that makes you feel just as good right off the bat. You need to feel the *spark* if you know what I mean.

So we went to this second church for lack of a better option for Easter, then a few scattered Sundays but then stopped going all together for a month. Then one month turned into two and before you know it 6 months had gone by. We were "flailing" as I like to call it. We were both frustrated with our lack of attending church, but neither of us had any drive to start going again.

So finally last week I got sick of my own attitude and started looking for churches on google maps. I found one close to us that looked promising and went to their website. Looked like a church right up my ally; close to home, large congregation and music program (I was really active in the choir at my old church) so I asked Kyle if he wanted to go this Sunday. Today we went to the service.

It was awesome. It has all the benefits of going to a large church (very active in the community, lots of classes and support groups) without really feeling like a large church. The service was impressive, the sermon moving, the choir - amazing. Several times we were welcomed and shown around, introduced to different people and everyone was very warm and kind to us. Finally after almost a year I had felt *sparks*

I have my New Church.

Turkey!!!!!!!!!

Hope Everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

TURKEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BBC Book List

Saw this on another blog and I thought I would participate.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen **reading now!

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (LOVE this book! and the miniseries.)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Results: 23 out of 100....... only 23% I better get reading!!

Run Sara Run!

It's not only the blogging that has been suffering, I have also been neglecting my running - for over two months. I know, it's awful.

I did start again though! I ran 4 times last week; two times outdoors (one with a friend, I love running with a partner!) then it started raining so the next two I had to run inside on the treadmill. Now those of you who don't live in San Diego please don't hate me for having the ability to run outside in shorts in late November (I know it's CRAZY and makes me New England head hurt too). The two days of rain were the first rainy days I have seen here in months! (again don't hate..) I was glad I had the motivation to brave getting soaked to head to the gym, there were several (hundred) times where I didn't want to even bother because I wanted to curl up on my couch and watch TV instead of brave the rain to run.

I did hear somewhere that when you don't run for a week, you lose two weeks of training and I suppose that does ring true to an extent. In late August when I was running 3-4 days every week I could warm up then run 4 miles no problem. Last week when I went on my long run I barely made 3 and that was after stopping a bunch of times to walk. At least I know I'm not worse off then when I started, but it is hard (esp for a hard headed Italian like myself) to cope with not being able to perform as well as I KNOW I can. I guess it's back to training.

I decided I'm making the commitment to run the San Diego Rock 'n' Roll 1/2 Marathon in June. In February my husband is going to run a 5k with me, then maybe I'll try a 10k if I can before I finally run the 1/2.

Wish me luck!

Decision Point

So like most of you have noticed, I haven't been blogging nearly as much (considering this is my first post in November ugh.....) I guess I got into a mood when I really didn't want to blog about anything, then that week turned into two weeks, then I got busy, then life happened. I guess that's just the way it goes.

But the thing is that I missed the outlet. I like having something that chronicles my life. I like to write, I like giving my family and friends back home a way to keep up with all of the mundane, day to day things that make life so wonderful. I miss taking pictures; I haven't even picked up my camera in weeks. Ugh, what has happened to me this fall?

Maybe it's time to rewind a little bit and head back to when I was good at blogging, when I was blogging almost daily and thinking more about posting ahead of time.

It's decision time.