how'd it go?

How was your open house, Manda? Did lots of people come?

hilarious

Since I had a picture of me from my haircut I had to upload it to this site My Heritage that Jana told us about. The site does face recognition and tells you what celebrities you look like (and you can do family stuff with it, too). My best matches were Emma Watson (I have no idea who this is) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (and down the line a bit were Anna Nichole-Smith and Rita Hayworth:). It is kind of amusing!

here it is....

Well, most of you have heard about my hair cut so here is a picture....:)

lent reflections

I've been meaning to write about my lent experience lately, but haven't taken the time. The last time that I was in Michigan was right before Lent and I got talking to Jana about giving something up for Lent. I wasn't really planning on doing anything, but then remembered that I had written about how my quest for knowledge is sometimes out of hand and that i use it to escape from life. So, I decided to give up reading some things, but I wasn't always very good at it.

At first I said to myself that I wouldn't read anything unless it was directly personal (email or mail) and that I would read the bible more. The biggest thing for me to give up was some of my email. I was/am subscribed to a bunch of different places (crcjustice, eco-justice, green peace, organicconsumers.org, and many more) that send out at least weekly emails -- some just newsletters, but often they have action alerts where you can email your congresspeople or other political representatives. Well, it was out of hand. I probably got around 5 - 10 emails a day which doesn't seem like that much, but it added up -- having to read them all and then sending emails to political people, etc. So I decided that the world of environmental and social justice could survive without me for a few weeks and it has been nice to just be free of feeling like I have to read every last thing and send emails about all kinds of "urgent" things.

I also tried to keep myself from surfing the internet very much (ie. reading stuff on msn.com after I signed out of hotmail), or even from reading books (fiction and non-fiction alike). Instead I read the bible more (and did taxes:). While I wasn't always very good at it (toward the end I let msn and books and magazines creep in a bit, but it really opened my eyes to the amount of media there is and how much I am drawn to it. Like, even billboards as I am driving -- and they're not even that exciting! (at least most of them). I'm getting better at skimming magazines and other stuff that isn't vital to my existence and I am slowly unsubscribing to the email newsletters and things as I see fit. I think that I'll always be bombarded by words and knowledge, but even just stepping back from it a bit was helpful.

Well, that's about the extent of my thoughts on it....I'm glad that I posted the article a long while back that led to discussion on escaping from things in life!