Sunday, November 28, 2010

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.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Turkey!!!!!!!!!

Hope Everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!!!!

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

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

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!!

Monday, November 22, 2010

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!

Sunday, November 21, 2010

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.