The Writer Bee

Greetings and salutations all.  I have not written much lately because, well, I’ve just really lacked the time.  Not that this is any sort of valid excuse, I realize, but there it is.

As far as WHY I’ve been so busy - too busy to write even a snippet - suffice it to say that work has been absolutely crazy lately - so crazy we’ve all but entered butterfly-net territory.  No joke.  So with working like a fiend, it’s about all I can do to just get myself home and get dinner made…not to mention there are a couple of side-jobs I have going right now which have eaten up much of what spare time I have been able to find.  Sigh.

Mind you, I’m not complaining.  Honest.  I’d rather be insanely busy than bored.  By far.  But all of this recent craziness has caused me to take off this Friday and next Monday in order to give myself a much-needed break.

So quickly because I don’t have much time, all is going well.  Work is good, there has been not hide nor hair of “Ralph”, Chena is awesome, budget is great, church is better, I’m losing weight on WW still (yay), and really have nothing further to report at this time.

Sorry for the quick (and insanely dull) entry, but essentially just wanted to make sure everyone knew I was still alive!

I found my new church!!!!  Yes, that’s right - after over 2 years of looking and feeling frustrated and pretty much convinced that I’d never find anything as great as what I had going in NYC, I think I have finally found my new church home.

It’s called The Well (http://www.thewellpa.com) and it is very artsy and young and similar in “feel” to The Haven.  They meet in a warehouse that they bought and refinished.

How did this happen?  Well, in a fit of Providence, I heard about it through someone who was a part of that Meetup.com group I had started.  I had decided to cancel the Meetup as it hadn’t yielded much and I didn’t feel like paying for another year to keep the group going.  So instead anyone who was interested was added to a new Google Group I created so we could still send out messages for events and things without the cost of the Meetup.  After I sent out a message to the Google Group as an intro, I got a message back from someone who turned out to be one of the pastors at The Well saying that he thought I sounded like I might like it and should come check it out.

That was about 3 weeks ago.  Unfortunately, I had just started the Dave Ramsey class at another church from 8:30-10:30 on Sunday mornings (The Well’s service starts at 10:30) so I didn’t go to visit until just yesterday because I didn’t think I’d have time to do both.

So over the last few weeks I instead floated around on their website, listened to a couple of the sermons, and had pretty much decided that I loved it - all that was left was to visit.  If I liked it in person as much as I thought I would, I knew that my search would be over.  I couldn’t stand the thought of having to wait another 10 weeks to go in person (which is how much longer the Financial Peace University class will last) so I instead ducked out of my class a few minutes early yesterday and drove over to The Well - turns out it’s only a couple of miles down the road.

I loved it.  Clearly.  One of the things I really saw on the website and in the sermons I heard online (and yesterday) was the emphasis on community - building it, living it, serving it.  As a single chick in the suburbs, community becomes not just important, but essential - a lifeline, if you will.  Not to mention that their being so community-minded echos also what Redeemer and The Haven, for that matter, were all about.

So I’m thrilled.  I can’t wait to find out more about it and start getting involved.  Praise God for such a direct answer to prayer!  Wahoo!

Just thought I’d do a quick check-in since it’s been awhile since I wrote.  Not much has been happening which is part of the reason…and this, I might add, is a good thing since it translates into “no bad news” and also “no ‘Ralph’”!

So all is well.  Work is busy.  Diet is fine.  Budget is great.

I guess the most exciting thing to happen since my birthday is the release of Janelle’s wedding photos.  Yay!  For anyone who’s interested, here’s a link to a slideshow of selected shots (there were a TON of pictures, so this way you can just look at some of the best):

http://jkhphoto.com/darkroom/share/?n=1223-janelle-sean

Enjoy!

This’ll be short, but I just wanted to jot a short post and throw out a big “howdy-do” from New England!

I have this week off from work which is just as fabulous as it sounds.  Most of the week I’m actually spending up here in Beverly, Mass. - a small town on the North Shore (just outside Boston) where Esther lives.  Les is out of town on business so I’m chilling w/Es and the girls.  Today’s Riley’s first birthday (yay!) and since Es has Wednesday morning activities, I’m spending a few hours online at a nearby Panera Bread.  What can I say…I’m a sucker for free wireless.

So Chena and I drove up Monday afternoon and arrived around 9pm.  Yesterday we spent just sorta hangin’.  We drove to a park so Chena could run free for a bit.  After nap time we left Chena at home and drove over to a playground to meet up with a couple of Es’s mommy-friends and their little energy balls.  I managed to practically give myself a concussion by standing up under a steel beam on the jungle gym (clearly I don’t have the necessary mom-sonar).  When we got home, discovered that Chena had managed to get out of the blockaded kitchen and somehow got herself locked into the baby’s room upstairs.  That’s my dog.

Last night we watched Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway.  If you haven’t seen it, you must.

Today, as I said, we are each doing our own things until lunch or so.  Tonight Es & I have a babysitter coming so we can go out to dinner.  I’m not sure exactly what that’s going to look like for me…  We’re going to The Cheesecake Factory which I haven’t been to in AGES, but who doesn’t provide nutritional information for anything from their menu, so the items I have been able to find are WAAAAY over my WW Points balance for the rest of the day, but I may just end up throwing caution to the wind.  My birthday is Friday, after all…

So that’s really it.  Chena & I will head back home on Thursday after the rush hour has more-or-less ended.  Hopefully the trip will go as smoothly as the one up here did!

So it’s been just about a year since I wrote my last entry concerning my ex who keeps turning up like a bad penny - incidentally, does anyone know where that saying came from?  What exactly makes a penny “bad”?  I’ve always wondered that…  Isn’t a penny saved also a penny earned, and isn’t that a good thing?  But I digress.

Anyway, “Ralph” (as I refer to him when writing publicly-accessible blog entries) has been…shall we say…challenging to get rid of.  After dating him for nearly 2 years in Alaska, he had wanted to continue seeing me, but also wanted to see this other girl that he’d met at some bar.  Naturally that was going to fly with me so we broke up.  He married the other chick, they had a kid, and then proceeded to get divorced all within just a few years.  I had continued to hear from Ralph periodically after our break-up (we had, after all, remained “friends”) until just before they separated.  I had been back to Alaska for a visit and had told him in no uncertain terms that I did NOT want to hear from him again.  My request essentially went unacknowledged as I continued to receive regular emails from him.

About a year ago, I wrote back.  I had let 5 years go by without so much as a “howdy-do” from me, yet Ralph had been undeterred.  My thinking was that perhaps it was the challenge of it all for him.  Maybe if I just responded and didn’t give him much more than the time of day, he’d get bored and disappear.  That didn’t work either.

Now one might wonder why I didn’t just block his emails.  Well, a couple of issues with that.  First off, I did block his emails at first, but he would change email addresses periodically so they would continue to slip through.  Then, in an attempt to run away from spam, I changed my primary email address and made sure he never had that.  He also had my work email which had been the same for the last 10 years and there wasn’t much I could do about that - we didn’t have any blocking capabilities there, and I obviously couldn’t change my work email.

But then came the merger.  When my division merged with the new company, my work email changed.  However, the deal was that they would forward anything that came into our previous work email addresses through December 2007.  During that time was when I heard from Ralph again (an email was forwarded through).  This was when I had responded, but I responded through my old personal email account so that he wouldn’t find out what my new work email was - the last thing I wanted him to know was that I had changed companies.  After December, our emails stopped being forwarded, but sending an email to my old work account would return and “undeliverable” response with a message indicating what my new address was.  This month, they turned that feature off as well.

Finally, the time had come and I saw my chance to escape.

Keeping Ralph emailing only to my personal account seemed like the safer thing to do to ensure that he would never find out more about me than I wanted him to know.  To that end, for a year I managed to keep him from ever sending a message to my work.  Now that the forwarding and messaging was no longer being done through our work servers, I went in and closed my old personal email account.

If Ralph emails me at the old address, he’ll get an “undeliverable”.  If he then tries my work address, he’ll get an “undeliverable”.  I’ve cut off his only two known ways of contacting me.  He doesn’t know where I work.  He doesn’t know where I live.  He doesn’t even know what I do.  Granted, he is in law enforcement, so I suppose if he wanted to find another way to hunt me down, he technically could.  I did buy a house, after all, which means my name is listed in public record databases, etc. but I still don’t think it would be that easy.  I’m also on Facebook and MySpace, but my profiles are protected and I don’t think he’s on those sites anyhow.

So this time I may actually have done it.  I may actually have gotten rid of him!  This has been a long time coming…  I’m a little afraid of him tracking me down anyway, but maybe you guys could just pray a circle of protection around me so that, even if he looks, he won’t be able to find me.  Please understand that it’s not as though I hate him or think he’s dangerous in any way.  I don’t.  Nor do I wish him ill.  It’s just at this point I’m so sick and tired of him that I really REALLY want him gone from my life.

My hope and prayer is that he finally is.