http://grabshelldude.wordpress.com
This blog (Life, Lessons, and Laughs) is no longer in use.
Go to the above address for new blog posts.
For quite a while I’ve been writing on this blog. It’s been fun. I’ve tried different stuff throughout, shared a lot of thoughts and things I’ve learned.
I’ve enjoyed the comments that you guys have written. I’ve enjoyed blogging thouroughly, and I want to keep blogging throughout my life.
But . . .
My life is changing. Everything about it is changing. I’m going to move from the same house I’ve lived in since I was five. I’m going to stop going to school, something I’ve also done since I was five. I’m going to get married.
And I’ve been feeling that I need a change in my blogging.
So.
Here it is. This blog is going to end.
This doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop blogging. Because I love blogging. I’m just going to get a new blog.
One that is slightly different from this one.
So it’s not really goodbye. It’s just like I’m changing my outfit.
(http://grabshelldude.wordpress.com)
That is my new blog. So make sure you change your feed readers.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Dillon’s Facebook status:
I am still engaged to Heather and she is planning like the wedding is tomorrow. That is fine, then I get to look important and do very little.
That’s about right. I’ve been planning, planning, planning (with the help of my mom). Because I want to have it done, ready, and out of my mind. I am not a procrastinator.
I feel on top of things now. Maybe a little bit to on top of the wedding plans and not enough on top of the homework. But I only have three more papers to write! Three! And seven more days of class! Six after today!
I have been slightly stressed at times, but overall, I am loving life. I only wish that Dillon could be around.
That’s Dillon Hoyt in that picture there, and he asked me to marry him yesterday. I said yes.
So a new stage of life is coming. I am so excited for the life I will have with him–and even beyond death. We are planning on getting married in the temple, where families can be sealed together for eternity.
The past few months, since I have been dating him, I have been the happiest I ever have in my life. I have smiled more, laughed more, and enjoyed the moments I have. And I look forward to my life I will have–not alone now, but with someone.
Now on to a story. So he proposed on a hike, which is really what I wanted. We were happy coming down, and then the trail branched off towards the end of our hike, and we went different directions expecting to meet up with each other. Except for we didn’t meet up with each other again. My trail sort of fizzled out and died, and I wandered around a little bit lost for a while. Then I finally found the car and waited.
And waited.
For a half hour, maybe longer, I waited for Dillon until finally I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have cell phone service, and I knew he did, so I decided to take his car and drive off with it to try to get so I could call him.
I drove off, and started crying, and then after driving for about five minutes, I decided to turn around and go back. He was waiting for me when I got back. And all was well. He had just gotten quite lost and had taken a while to get back.
So that was my story. Lots of planning to do now, and all sorts of exciting things.
Life is wonderful.
Life=happy. Future=exciting.
Now, I very, very rarely just blow off class. But today, I am skipping class. (In Utah, we call it sluffing, by the way, but I don’t know why.) There is a good reason I am skipping class. It’s because we’re planning to watch a movie, and that movie is not something I like to watch.
This stems from religious beliefs. I have been counseled by church leaders to seek after good things.. So, I made a commitment to myself to not watch rated R movies. In addition, I further decided that I did not need to watch most PG-13 movies as well.
It’s a choice I’ve made. And it’s been a good choice. I don’t hear swearing that often. I don’t see any images that I would later want to forget. I don’t expose myself to vulgar things.
It makes easier to focus on good things–uplifting things. There is really so much good in the world that I don’t have time for the bad. There is so much good I want to feel my mind with that I don’t have room for the bad.
So that’s why I’m skipping class. It’s fun.
Life keeps going on. And it’s great.
It was actually warm enough to go outside now. After weeks of unexpected snowfall, I’m hoping for snow.
So today I went to work for my grandparents, except they were gone and I was locked out of their house. I had forgotten my key, but it was nice outside. I started to weed.
They have a row of raspberries that have some grass that doesn’t need to be there anymore. So I weeded raspberries.
My grandma came out and helped me. For a while, we were mostly just sitting there thinking. And I realized that I was worrying about worrying, and I started laughing at myself. You don’t get rid of worry by worrying about it.
We talked about life, about worry and getting rid of it, about lots of different things. I love my grandma and I’ve gotten to know her a lot better.
That right there, talking to my grandma in the garden, is a perfect moment.
So I’m visiting my boyfriend and at his parent’s house. He grew up in a little town, and I have to say that I have quite enjoyed it here.
Yesterday I ended up playing with Dillon’s nieces and nephews, and talking, and finishing the second season of Robin Hood. It was really quite a good day.
And now we’re going to watch general conference in just a little while. (For those of you who do not know, general conference is a time when the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints speak to their members. There are four two-hour sessions, two on Saturday, and two again on Sunday.)
I am happy. And that’s all there is to it. There are so many good things in life, those small moments that are easily forgotten. And yet, even if we do forgot them, there are more to come.
So when I began majoring in philosophy, I knew that I was taking a bit of a risk. Partly because philosophy is the study of the wisdom of men, and many times it conflicts with religion, which is the wisdom of God.
True religion is most important in my life. Philosophy is something I do just for fun, not because I’m looking for answers.
But one of the results of studying philosophy is that I have learned how to convolute things. I can take a simple concept and form really complicated arguments around it. I can use large words and talk about certain things so that only a fellow philosophy major would understand.
I’ve realized that I have lost simplicity. Simple religious principles sometimes no longer seem so simple. And why the knowledge I have gained can help me understand things better, I have to remember that simplicity is the most important.
Sometimes, you feel you’re at the end of your rope.
And that’s when you suddenly find out that you have a lot more rope to go on.
I’m smiling again.
So today, I felt exhausted, and tired, and sad for a while. Things were just HARD–too hard, and I didn’t want to keep going. I sat and cried for a while, and then I prayed. Life has its uncertainties, and I have had so much worry lately. I know I needed to stop worrying–and still do–but it did not seem as if it were in my power to do so.
So I prayed, and then I read my scriptures, and then prayed again. Comfort came into my heart, and while life doesn’t seem easy, I have more strength to go on.
I can be brave, and find courage to keep going. I don’t have to fear the future, no matter how uncertain it may seem. I can be grateful for the blessings I have now, and immerse myself in work and service. I can keep going.
I feel sort of bad because there is nothing that should be really hard in my life, nothing that is wrong. But sometimes we just feel down, and that’s okay. It happens, and it’s still real when we feel sad for no reason at all. The best thing is, the Lord understands us, and He will help us get through everything.
I had lots to do, and I was motivated at the beginning, and then I got distracted. For pretty much the whole day.
And in the course of my distractions, I made this:
This is sad. That’s actually a picture of me, and then I went to an online makeover thing, and put new hair and makeup on my picture, and then copied into my picture editing software and had a lot of fun.
Was it fun? Waste of time, more likely . . .
This is really a companion post to the one below.
I recently decided to give up on the second novel I had written. I needed to go through and edit it again, and actually had some really good ideas for rewrites, but what I had written wasn’t compelling to me anymore.
And after realizing that my book tastes had changed, I realized what I wanted to write was a little different as well.
So I’ve begun to edit my fourth novel, and I started reading it and get through about 100 pages and about fell asleep. It was so boring!
I’ve been outlining changes, and making increasingly drastic alteration to character, plot, and setting. Deleting a main character here; changing people’s relation to each other; completely switching the plot around. Oh, and switching it to first person instead of third. I will have to change about every single word now.
It’s actually quite enjoyable to make such huge alterations. It’s almost freeing.
But as I look to what I want to write, it’s a lot different than it was before. The first novel I started when I was 16, and I would never, ever write it again. I see the world a bit differently now.
So I’ll keep trying to discover myself, and figure out what I want to write.
The Memory Book, by Penelope J. Stokes: A book review and a little more.
If you look at the books I have read so far this year, which haven’t been that many, I have read exactly 2 fantasy books this year, and only 1 young adult fantasy book. Now, young adult fantasy has been my love over the years. I have enjoyed it immensely. I still enjoy a lot of it.
Especially for the last few years of high school and first few years of college, the genre was my main reading, my favorite.
And then something changed.
Really, life changed. And I changed a little bit–I sort of grew up in certain ways. Different things happened to me, and I learned.
So a few weeks ago, I started to read a young adult fantasy book, and I couldn’t finish it. The writing was actually compelling and there was nothing wrong with it, but it wasn’t me.
I wanted to read a Penelope Stokes book instead.
She is a Christian writer, and writes inspirational fiction, but her characters and situations are very real, very touching, and what I wanted to read right now. The main character of The Memory Book, though she was slightly older, seemed to be in a similar time of life as I am, and was learning many of the same things.
I needed that. I needed something real and current and more my age. Something that related strong to my life.
I still don’t think there is anything at all wrong with reading any sort of genre, but I realized today that my tastes have shifted and changed. I care about characters more, and relationships, and interaction with ideas and morals more than I care about plot, adventure, and world like I used to.
I never thought that my tastes would change, but they have quite recently. And that’s okay. I’ll go out and seek new books, new experiences in the world of fiction. I’ll embrace it, because there are new paths to discover.
I really would like to continue to relieve my amazing week last week . . . but instead, I am back to work and back to homework. I am starting my job search in earnest. This job search is really my career search, since I’ll be graduating and I want a full-time, permanent position.
And I again remember today that job searchs are simply hard. So far, I’ve been hitting the online job boards, and I’ve been searching, searching, searching. The perfect job should be out there, and I have a month and a half to find it. Okay, I actually have longer than that–I have four to five months to find it. But I would like to get one sooner than later.
When you have an English and philosophy degree, you aren’t really pointed in a certain direction for your job search. However, since I’m not looking for anything in particular, there are more jobs that I can apply to.
But overall, it is slightly stressful. This is why people stay in school their whole lives.
