School Overwhelment!

I know that’s not a word, but I think I’m going to be the first to say it needs to be added to the dictionary! Because it’s exactly the emotion I’m feeling!

I’m part excited, part overwhelmed, part panicked, part thinking I’m too stupid to be doing what I’m doing! Yeah… I’m sure we’ve all felt that way in some shape or form at some point in our life…

But seriously… sometimes I wonder if I’ll be able to handle it. This coding stuff is freaking me out! There’s just SOOO many rules and procedures and regulations to follow. I completely understand now why that anatomy and physiology class was so hard… guess they really needed me to understand all that so I wouldn’t be completely lost for all of this! haah And the pressure’s on with this class because this is what I’ll be doing for a living! Kinda need to “get it”.

On the other hand… it’s a LOT of fun! It’s kinda like being a little private investigator!

Funny how…

God can orchestrate things! As I mentioned earlier this week, Daniel preached Saturday night. He was finishing up the Drowned series that Jay had started a few weeks ago. The weird thing is Daniel knew exactly what he was going to talk about approximately 2 months ago, he didn’t really know what Jay was going to talk about until about 2-3 weeks ago, and yet somehow Daniel’s message fit perfectly with what Jay was talking about. Guess God had a message to get out and He didn’t care who did it!

Even the music fit perfectly! God was seriously using a team to bring it this week!

Weekend Update

• Worked ALLLLLL day Friday on schoolwork! Boo!! I got a lot done but not near as much as I thought I should have. It’s going to be a rough class!
• Had a last minute call to go do Nalley inventory Friday night! Can’t turn that down… easiest year ever! We literally counted nasty truck parts for maybe 3 hours top and made $160!! YAY Still Crystal and I got a good deal! We didn’t have anything too terribly bad to count! Only problem is I can’t manage to stop touching my face so I had grease marks everywhere. Woops! I probably looked like I’d been sweeping chimneys!
• Saturday worked on schoolwork AGAIN and Daniel worked on his sermon. Since it’s race weekend we moved church to Saturday night. Daniel did an EXCELLENT job and was definitely something I needed to hear. Was disappointed that more people weren’t there to be encouraged by what he had to say. I’m so proud of him!! I’ll post more on that later this week…
• Sunday we drove up to Buckhead Church since this might be the last Sunday morning we don’t have church YAY!! Only one problem – Buckhead Church is a satellite campus of NorthPoint Church. They pretty much are on a delay kinda and hear the same sermons that NorthPoint does just a few weeks later… Daniel had already listened to this sermon’s podcast from NorthPoint. Woops! So he got to hear it twice!
• BUT on a sidenote… they have a chick there, Meghan Coffee, I might have completely mispelled her name… she has an absolutely amazing voice! Almost bought her cd… think I’m going to try to find her on itunes or something…
• Went and walked around Lenox Mall for awhile, can’t afford too much of anything there but still fun to walk around and look! I think we were both just happy not to be studying for a change and were content to stare at stuff we couldn’t afford! Speaking of… stared at a Maserati for awhile that’s worth about as much as my house!
• Then went home, watched football and then Mr. Brooks… kinda weird movie. Wasn’t really happy about the ending… I hate movies where you don’t get closure! Then I had to watch about 15 minutes of “happy stuff” from SNL before off to dreamland!

I’m Tiffany Mead and that was your weekend update!

Update on Camping Trip

I was reminded that we had another love connection on our youth camping trip (see comment on “a few random details” post)

Someone SERIOUSLY fell in love with Anthony. This girl was hanging all over him and no one could figure out how to save him! haha She even tracked him down on myspace (with only his first name)… that’s a lot of hours of searching through “Anthony’s” on myspace… must be a SERIOUS love!!

Back in the saddle again

Yeap… I started my classes again Monday! Errr… I have such a love/hate relationship with being in school. I love it until the stress overwhelms me and then I hate it. My books are at least 7 inches tall for one class which unnerves me just a little! haha

I’m hoping to be finished up by August of next year. But that means I have to finish up this class in two months, and then take three classes at a time next year until I finish! I don’t think I’ll be doing much more than eating, sleeping, and studying for the next year!

A few random details

about our camping trip…

• It POURED down rain pretty much all day Friday! The best part was trying to shove $200 worth of groceries into the Explorer that was already piled full of stuff during a torrential downpour.
• We were still able to get our tents up and light a fire Friday night at 11 pm after it rained all day!
• The weather the rest of the weekend was absolutely GORGEOUS! I guess you have to take the bad with the good.
• Ryan has some wild-butt kids! I only thought our kids were wild, but up against Ryan’s ours look like there in a coma! haha His group was SOO much fun though!
• One girl from Ryan’s group got saved Saturday night!!!
• Our groups pretty much stayed segregated until the last 20 minutes. Right as Ryan was trying to corral his kids into their vehicles to leave Saturday night all of the students realized that they all secretly loved each other and needed long drawn-out goodbye times
• Speaking of loving each other, one of Ryan’s guys fell in love with Courtney. He even called his girlfriend and broke up with her so he could go after Courtney! haha
• How many people can say that they have layed in the middle of a road in the middle of the night and told ghost stories?!? Good times!
• The FUTON was definitely the BEST idea EVER!! Slept like a baby pretty much both nights!
• It never ceases to amaze me just how much teenagers can eat, especially boys!!

Alrighty… I’m sure I’ll think of more fun stories to tell from our camping trip!

God Hates Sinners

About a week ago we took the students to Tribulation Trail. Just in case you don’t know what that is… several churches around our area have gotten together and set up a mile long walk through the woods where different scenes of the end times are reenacted. You walk through the scenes, some are scary and some just make you think.

While waiting in line for this little shindig we kept seeing a kid wearing a t-shirt that said “God Hates You Sinner” and “Turn or Burn” on the back. We thought for awhile that maybe this kid was part of the production. Finally he walked by and I asked him some random question about the trail, then asked if he was part of the production. He said no. I asked him what his t-shirt said and he quoted off some random Bible verse in Psalms and then walked off.

As you can imagine, our teenagers (and adults) were a little put-off by this kid’s shirt. This is a huge event aimed specifically at people who need Jesus and yet this kid’s saying… “hey I know you’re scared out of your mind about the crazy tribulation junk you just saw and might be strongly considering seeking Jesus to stay out of that mess, BUT by the way… God hates you and actually everyone else for that matter since we’re all sinners!”

Our students were ready to ambush the poor kid so Daniel intervened and proceeded to nicely ask the kid to elaborate on his shirt. In a nutshell his group believes that you have to speak in tongues to be saved and some other weird stuff… works works works…

Great opportunity to see our students get righteously angry and have to think about how to defend their beliefs. It was also great timing since Daniel had just talked about the crazy people who stand on street corners yelling “turn or burn” and how ineffective a method that is!

Sometimes you just have to wonder what the heck people are thinking!?!

Camping Trip!!

By the time this posts, I will probably be scurrying around trying to get together a humongous list of stuff to take on our camping trip with the students.

Our camping trip is probably my second-most favorite thing we do all year with the students. SUCH a fun time! I know Daniel has a few fun things up his sleeves so should be a LOT of fun. AND we have a pretty nasty game planned :) that I’ll share more details on later (after the trip in case any students are reading this)!!!

And before you hear it from someone else… Crystal and I ARE attempting to bring a futon mattress with us which should be a pretty funny site to see! That thing weighs like 700 pounds! haha We figured it’s better for everyone involved if we get a good night’s sleep

I’ll post some pics and a few stories next week

Change

Do you ever just need a change? You might think me insane but I HAVE to move our furniture around at least once a year. It’s not that I want to move it around… it’s I HAVE to. There’s just something about mixing it up that makes me happy

So I convinced Daniel that it was time! We had found some SUPER cheap, humongously tall, very nice bookcases at a yard sale up the street. So last week we took an entire night and completely rearranged our bedroom. We took out a bunch of furniture and brought in those bookcases. I’m SOO pleased and Daniel was pleasantly surprised how it all turned out too. I even let Daniel install the surround sound system in there… Now our bedroom definitely feels like our own little sanctuary.

MICE no more!!

Can’t remember if I’ve mentioned on here or not, but we’ve had a little bit of a mice problem. Several months ago we knew we had some in our garage. Daniel put out some traps and our cat and we killed off a couple. Then did a serious cleaning of our garage and blocked the supposed entry/exits. We knew blocking the exits might cause a little harm as we would have effectively trapped any mice already in the house from leaving. So yeap… it was a risk we took… that backfired on us

I started hearing scratching in the walls of our bathroom. Of course Daniel thought I was paranoid because every time I would drag him out of bed in the middle of the night to hear them, the little mice would decide to play mean little tricks on me and make me look delusional!

Then one day I went sauntering through the kitchen and saw a mouse fly across the top of my counter tops down behind the oven. Way too much excitement for me to handle! Daniel put out traps in the kitchen and we caught one or two.

Then one day we decided to bake some cookies and realized that there was a nasty stench coming from the oven. It seriously smelled so bad we assumed that we had fried one of the stupid things. Daniel proceeded to take the entire oven apart looking for the corpse. Never found one, but did find all kinds of evidence that mice had been enjoying the insulation around the oven! NASTY!!

So we lined pretty much the entire kitchen with glue traps! And I tried to imagine that they were cute adorable little mice like the ones off of Cinderella or maybe Ratatouille. This only worked enough to help me sleep through the night sometimes.  

Well… we caught a few more and bought one of those things you plug in the wall that is the equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard to mice. I think that took care of the problem. It’s been 4 days with no more signs of mice… they haven’t been eating the little trail of oatmeal we’ve been leaving out or anything.

Aaahhh sweet victory!!