We had a great time celebrating Christmas with our friends & families. I (Beth) was able to have 2 reunions with my college roomies before Christmas & we spent the week of Christmas with my parents & grandma in St. Louis. One of the highlights for me was that my mom pulled out my dollhouse & set it up. My grandparents gave this to me when I was younger, and I have lots of good memories playing with it. It was fun to look through everything again!  Here are some pictures:

The bathroom is one of my favorite rooms. I even put beads from an old necklace in the tub to look like bubbles.

Before Christmas we had a Christmas Feast with our Community Group. It was Who-Themed, like from the Grinch. We made rounded roasted wheat (rolls) & mashed corn bake (corn casserole). It was so fun!

Now we’re in Telluride, CO with some friends. It’s beautiful! More pics to come….

Here is the view out our window this morning:

Thank you Ally for an impromptu trip to Colorado!

I (i being ben…) started a twitter feed for myself. so follow me if you want: http://twitter.com/poolhouseblack Partly i just want to start learning how to really use twitter as a tool for camp, but i also thought it would be fun. im going to use it to share stuff i run across that i think is interesting, focusing on photography and uses of photography (interior design, etc). It will be a good reason for me to keep looking for inspiration.

Some days you have really great days. Everything falls into place, things go as planned, good surprises come your way. And some days are just days…you go through your meetings, taks, nothing special. Not good, not bad. And then there are those days. Those days that nothing really seems to go as planned, and you just keep getting more & more frustrated with each new “catastrophe.” Today was one of those days. A little snapshot for you:

-The copier prints fuzzy black lines through all the pages, making some things impossible to read, and other things too unprofessional to use, rendering it’s services utterly useless until it gets fixed.

-The postage machine has been saying it needs new ink for about a month now. I checked a month ago when the warning first came up & determined that we had new postage ink & that I’d just let it run out as much as I could (no need to replace it when we can still get use out of the old one!). Well, today the old one finally ran out. But we did not have new cartridges. Just 2 old cartridges that were never thrown out. This is not only frustrating b/c we didn’t have what we needed to print postage, but doubly frustrating b/c multiple people are trying to send out their newsletters right now, in time for Christmas.

-The roads were covered with a nice sheet of ice today, and being in the front of the office, that just makes things a little hectic (more phone calls, people asking about the roads, people calling in). Plus, Ben was headed to Oklahoma City today (a 6 hour round trip) in the bad weather. (That stressed me out a little all by itself.)

-The Christmas promo needed to be mailed out to campers today. But we couldn’t put postage on anything b/c we didn’t have postage ink. So I spent the morning assembling the packages, wrapping the gifts, but couldn’t get them in the mail.

-I had to go home at lunch to get things ready for a Christmas Party this afternoon at our house.

Now, none of these things by themselves would have been terrible. It was just one thing on top of the other, on top of a hard morning. So, my remedy: Sweatpants + sweatshirt + a dinner of popcorn, an apple & some cheese. Now we’re off to a friend’s house for some dessert/coffee. I’m looking forward to it….some relaxing time by a warm fire.  And I’m looking forward to starting over tomorrow.

I got the latest issue of The New Life News from the printer last night. We changed things up a lot, which is exciting. It will be mailing next week, but if you just can’t wait here it is.

There is a google street view of the house a grew up in. weird.

5 water bottles on my desk, none that i am willing to drink out of.

I’ve been feeling a little strange lately…I’m not sure what to call it…”down…blue…annoyed…” I think part of it is because we’ve been going non-stop for the past few months.  Everything has been good & fun, but for an introvert too much going-going-going leads to a depleted source of energy & excitement about another activity on the calendar. Unless that activity entails time at home, sitting around in sweatpants by the cozy fire with a good book & some good, strong coffee. (Well, that’s what I’ve been wanting anyway.)  I’ve felt this “unrest” building & building the past few weeks.

Yesterday was the worst. And I was thinking through things, trying not to be selfish, trying to get over “what I want” & be more accommodating to those around me (namely, my gracious & understanding husband). And I know that my personality leads me to certain desires, tendencies, etc…but that it doesn’t define me or what I should do.  Sometimes you need to do things, even though you don’t want to. And I put worth in personality types, I really do…but I think they’re more for understanding why you react/think/feel the way you do sometimes, not necessarily to use as an excuse.

And then I read something this morning that reaffirmed what I was thinking yesterday. It’s from “Today is Your Best Day” by Roy Lessin. “Joy is the highest level of delight that a person can experience. Human happiness is dependent upon the experiences and circumstances of life, while joy is dependent upon God alone. God, not your personality type, is the source of your joy. Today, joy flows from His heart to yours like a fountain that will never run dry.”

This encouraged me today. And I’m going to try really hard today to not let my circumstances determine my joy. (And hope that my alone time by the fire & in my sweatpants will come soon.)

I used to think i wanted to be a programmer, but really, i don’t. But, i have been working a lot on my photoblog and its been kind of fun being able to get into the code a bit and figure things out, make some things work that didnt work (i even figured out how to change my password in the sql database using a md5 hasher…which is not nearly as complicated as it sounds), stuff like that. i still don’t want to be a programmer (ill leave that to the smart people like my dad), but its still fun to see how stuff works sometimes, and be able to shape it a little into what i want.

that said, im still not going to do to much to the real code on newliferanch.com. its to important. if my silly little photblog breaks, no big deal. if i destroy nlr.com its kind of bad.

As promised, here are some Casserole Crawl pictures:

This is the most we have had for The Crawl yet. Next year the horses are going.

We also went camping this weekend…

It was cold, but we had fun, we hiked a bit, hung out around the fire, and slept in a cold tent (with lots and lots of blankets to stay warm).

we ended up not having any tent stakes, so we had to improvise a bit…

It rained and snowed…really see the snowflake? Actually it rained and snowed a lot.

I have been taking these pictures of foggy/misty landscapes and turning them blue, i kind of like the look.

Just adding to the thousands of Hawksbill pictures.