I cannot stop eating them

Stupid yogurt pretzels. I cannot stop eating them.
I get sick from all the sugar but I just keep eating and eating.

My imaginary green thumb

So, once again I have gone and purchased a plant. Here is a picture of it - a bell pepper plant that I put into a galvanized tub in our backyard. You know, those bell peppers are expensive at the store, even at the Farmer's Market and I would like to be able to grow my own. Nevermind that I have bought pre-grown herbs every year in spring and somehow killed them all. I've also grown herbs from seeds and killed those too. Once I even killed a cactus. Also an aloe vera plant. Those are supposed to be indestructible but I proved that theory wrong when I watched its roots somehow dissolved mysteriously, it died from starvation or something. Right now I am also helplessly watching the second of three bamboo shoots perish.

But somehow I am convinced I can keep this bell pepper plant alive. I think I have this delusion because I have 2 out of 3 healthy basil plants right now. Sure, the last one looks like it might not make it, and originally there were 5. But still.

San Francisco, here we come!

Yesterday we booked the airfare for our trip to San Francisco in August!

I am so excited, because this will be my first real vacation ever, where I have taken more than 3 days PTO for nothing but fun. There have been 2 other times I have been gone from work more than 3 business days in my life:

1. Our honeymoon - we planned this so that it fell during the week the National Center (where I work) is closed between Christmas and New Year's so that I wasn't gone on any business days.

2. Mission trip to the Dominican Republic - this happened right after I went from Consultant to Full Time Employee here in 2005, so I actually didn't get paid for the 5 days I missed. I wouldn't necessarily call this a vacation since it was 100+ degrees, more than 100% humidity, no A/C, no hot water, and we were doing manual labor the entire time. I tried coming back the Monday after we returned and had to go home due to heat exhaustion and nausea.

Due to the nature of my job, if I've tried to take a day off in the past, there was no one to provide the service for my customers and they could not handle not having any projects completed for a week (we typically do 6 a day - this would be a loss of around 30+ jobs across the entire organization). So I would just take 1 or 2 days before or after a weekend and either work ahead before I left or work while I was on PTO. But now I have someone here helping me and I can actually leave for a week! This is so exciting!!!

So, if anyone has been to San Francisco and has any great tips for places to go and things to see, let me know! I am making a huge list of things we will do. I think that God has really provided for us because some friends of ours might be able to let us use their time share which would save a whole lot on lodging!

Page loading...

Lest you think that all I do during the day is post on my blog and check other people's blogs, I just wanted to say that I do actually work.

The thing is, I work with a web-based system that can take a very long time to process what I am doing. Like right now, this newsletter I am assembling. It has about 5 pictures in it. Each time I upload a picture, I will hit "Upload" and then it will freeze up the screen and process the uploading for about 5 full minutes. I can't use the screen, I can't do anything. So I flip over to another browser and do something to keep me busy. If I have emails from people here at work, I answer those.

But right now I don't. It's slow here because it is summer and gobs of people are on vacation. So here I am, sitting in my cube waiting for things to load.

After building this newsletter, I am going to do some reporting that will require me processing data, one screen at a time, around 110 times or more. Yesterday when I did it, each screen took around 7 minutes to load. Good times.

Zzzzzz....

A great quote

Last night we went to another Dallas Museum of Art Late Night event and got to see the new Societe Anonyme exhibit. There was a quote by Francis Picabia in the description of one of the paintings: He said "Art is useless, and impossible to justify", and went right on doing it.

Christian pointed out that the sentence also makes sense as:
"Web development is useless, and impossible to justify"
or, in my case,
"Email marketing is useless, and impossible to justify"

I think mine makes the most sense :-)

This is exactly how I feel pretty much every day (link)

Our weekend away

We had a fun time this weekend in Kansas City seeing Millie and Danny and we got to meet some new people too. OK, one is not "new" because we have been following each other on Xanga blogs for like 3 years. Is that weird?

Christian is still uploading the pictures, but last night he uploaded the ones we took at the Nelson-Atkins museum opening of the new Bloch building. That was a fun time, we love museums. We also go to walk some places, which we always enjoy doing also. It's just fun to hang out with Millie and Danny.

Not much going on this week except the usual Community Group tonight and CR. Also, check out new pics of my niece on her mommy's blog!

Is it too much to ask...ok I guess it is

Is it too much to ask that people think for 5 seconds about what they are asking me to do - long enough to realize that they are fully capable of figuring this out themselves??? I know I tend to rant about work. And I realize it might sound like I am exaggerating sometimes. I would like to illustrate my reality by listing 3 things that I was asked today and their answers, which seem fairly obvious to me:

1) Q: How many records are in this spreadsheet?
A: If you open the spreadsheet and scroll to the bottom, you can look at the number on the left side and that will tell you how many records are in the spreadsheet.

2) Q: You sent me the report for May, but I need the report for the month previous to this month.
A: I sent this report yesterday, which was June 5. The month before June is May so you actually do have the report from the month previous to this month.

3) Q: Can you please make some changes to this?
A: Yes, I can do that. However, I will need you to actually tell me what changes you need me to make in order for me to make them.

I am not making any of those up. Some of those are verbatim.

Serenity Prayer

Not much to say today because I have such horrible allergies. Tonight at CR I get to do the Serenity Prayer, which is one of my favorite (and shortest, and easiest to remember...) CR traditions:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is;
not as I would have it;
trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to your will;
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.
AMEN

- Reinhold Niebuhr -