1. Redocorating/Bedroom Shuffle

It started with a list. My roommate and I planned a Thanksgiving Feast (Thing #2 on the list of November happenings) for our group of friends. We sat down to make a list of all the things we wanted/needed to do to get ready for the big event. In the course of making this list we decided that we wanted to turn the extra bedroom into an office and redecorate it. While on the way one day to get things to make this plan happen we decided that my stuff would actually go better in the open bedroom and that my bedroom would make a better office. The room I was in was green and though there are an array of colors in my bedspread, green is not one of them. Moving all of my crap to the new room was now on the already lengthy agenda.

We wanted to put a desk in the office and Amy had seen this desk that she loved that was made out of an old door and 2 file cabinets. My sister had made a desk out of a large piece of glass and two wooden storage cubes she found at Ikea, so we headed to Ikea to see if we could find something we liked. After walking through the whole store finding nothing we could afford we decided to stop into the "As Is" section at the end and we found exactly what we were looking for. It appeared to be a part of a door. It had a white wooden frame, 2 peices of glass and best of all it was $10. We combined that with 2 white cubes from Walmart and below is our masterpiece:

Here are some pictures of the new office..

And of my new bedroom..

We were very pleased with how all of this turned out.

November...An Overview.

The last couple of weeks have been super busy with work things, fun things, holiday things and a lot of eating. I have not been faithful about blogging about these things, mostly because they have all kept me very busy. So here is an overview of all the big happenings of November and individual blog posts will follow:

1. Redecorating/Bedroom Shuffle
2. Thanksgiving Feast 2010
3. Trip to Florida for Pre-Thanksgiving and my Grandfather's Boys and Girl's Club award ceremony
4. Thanksgiving Day Atlanta Half Marathon
5. First Black Friday experience
   
6. Generation Salaam Thanksgiving Feast

a very fun discovery.

Apparently, in Buckhead there is a two story target with a cart escalator! I am not really sure why Target needs two floors, but it is fun none-the-less. You go up one side, while your cart gets its own ride up the middle. Fancy Smancy. I got a cart just for my dog toy and chocolate chips just so I could have the experience! What will they think of next?

crazy tree.

Lauren and I were a little stir crazy today in Florida so we decided to drive down to the beach. On our way we spotted the coolest tree ever and in true Jordan fashion....stopped to climb it. This is a Banyan tree. The tree produces roots that grow from the limbs in the air to the ground and eventually root themselves into the ground and form a new, connected tree.

This is one of the roots that now looks like a connected tree

Not sure what happened here...maybe my finger?

Ridiculous news story.

Airbag saves the life of a man choking on a raisin.

blogging in the car.

I am blogging....not from my work or from the comfort of my own home, but from the car....yep, the car. Don't worry, I am not driving. I may break the law from time to time and text while driving, but I draw the line at blogging on a laptop.....just seems unsafe. Anyway, I am on the way to Venice, Florida, which is located here....
on the gulf of Florida. My granddad is getting a major award for his work with the Boys and Girls club and my family is headed down there to support him and have an early Thanksgiving. All of this is really not the point though.....the point is, we have wifi in the car. That is right, internet. Our car is a moving wifi hotspot, an internet cafe cruising at 75 (sometimes much faster) miles per hour. If you know my brother-in-law, guru of all advances the technological world has to offer, you would not find this surprising. But I just think it is neat and that is all this blog post is really about....nothing important to say...nothing deep and life-changing, just a small moment to marvel at the wonders of technology.

LUG

Though my current job is not one that really makes sense to anyone who knows me well enough to know both my heart and my giftings, I took it because I really believed that God was doing some things at Grace Fellowship Church that are truly unique. Two of those things are kids and students. Below is a picture from the most recent LUG.
LUG is the middle school program that Grace does on Wednesday nights that combines fun, high energy music, dynamic teaching and break-out groups lead by adults and LUG heads (high schoolers discipling down). This program intersects the lives of nearly 1000 middle schoolers every single week. The church is exploding with middle schoolers. This past week they saw 25 students respond to the gospel for the first time.

On days that I do not love exactly what it is that I am currently doing, I remind myself that I am blessed to be a part of a place like Grace...a place that really is reaching the Neighborhoods, Nations and Next Generation.

This is AWESOME!

concrete belly flop

I had a car full of things I needed to take inside of the church. I loaded my book bag with things and flung it on my back. I placed a large Bible study DVD set in my arms and a full Operation Christmas child box on top of that. In my right hand I had my coffee mug with yummy peppermint mocha creamer in it that I had yet to fill with coffee. I started walking toward the church offices and am not really sure what happened, but suddenly I was falling and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to stop myself. I went toppling over and slammed into the ground with all of that stuff in my arms and on my back. My right knee hit first, the boxes went cascading out of my arms. Then my right hand slammed down with the coffee cup in, shattering the mug and sending creamer flying into the air and into my face and hair. I laid on the ground in pain looking at all of my crap strewn across the parking lot. I rolled over onto my back moaning and really hoping that nobody just saw me because I am sure that from a distance it just looked like I decided to belly flop myself onto the concrete for the heck of it. Everything was throbbing and I didn't want to get up. I had woken up sick already and at this point I just wanted to go back home and start Thursday over again. (Thursday mornings going wrong has been a pattern this fall) This mom and little boy ran over to help me and see if I was okay. The little boy says, "You have milk all over your face," which made me laugh. They helped me pick up my stuff, while I assessed the damage to my hands and my knee and tried to get up.
I have a swollen knee, small cuts on my hand and a slightly bruised ego to show for myself, but all-in-all I am okay....though I cannot say the same for my favorite coffee cup...

...Sad day, I really liked that cup.

dessert fast.

I like sweets. I really, really, really like ice cream and chocolate chip cookies. I could take or leave candy and cake and pie, but ice cream and homemade cookies....I could consume (and have consumed) until I was sick. Lately, I have been eating a great deal of crap. I have been eating healthy meals, but a lot of dessert before and after and around those healthy meals and although I have been running a ton training in the past months, all of the crap I am eating still makes me feel yuck at times. Yesterday I decided that I would ask my roommate Amy if she wanted to keep each other accountable to not eating crap for a week. I figured since we live together and frequently eat these things together that it would be very helpful to invite her into that process. What is funny is that when I asked her about it last night, the second I got the words out of my mouth she shot back, "10 days...I want to do it for 10 days." Apparently, she had also been thinking about the same thing. So, this Friday begins the torturous "no crap fasting detox" until around Thanksgiving. Though I might be slightly cranky those 10 days about giving up some of my favorite things, I do think it is a good practice leading into the holidays to deny yourself those types of pleasures, especially because the holidays are teeming with dessert and junk food and you could easily find yourself in a sugar induced coma by the New Year...not to mention a larger pant size.

how to bake a potato

I am baking potatoes tonight for Bible study and though I was pretty sure you bake them in the oven for an hour, I wanted to be sure. What do you do when you want to be sure about something? You google it. I googled baked potato and I found this very helpful website entitled "How to bake a potato." Who dedicates an entire website to something like this? Who pays for the URL? I mean there aren't even that many steps and they even give you pictures with each step. They tell you to poke holes in it with a fork and then show you a picture demonstrating poking holes in it with a fork as if on your own you would be unable to figure out exactly how that should go. I think this is funny.

a fall back diatribe.

Today is my least favorite day of year. Why? Because tonight when I am on my way to the 5:15 service at Grace, the sun will be setting...and when I get out at 7:00ish it will be pitch black dark outside. I cannot stand this. The days seems so long. At 8pm I feel like its midnight. It seems like you have so much less time to get things done, to be outside, to enjoy anything and everything.

Now, for the sake of not posting something completely negative here are the only 2 good things I can think of that come from this day light savings occurrence:
1. The extra hour of sleep (I often thwart this though by falling back early in my mind and staying up later than I should)
2. It is lighter earlier in the morning....this helps my motivation to get out of bed and get going.

26.2...DONE!

I did it. This past Sunday I finished my first marathon and I didn't die. I really can't believe it. It is by far the most difficult thing I have ever done. 26.2 miles is a VERY long way. I was so nervous. I did not think I would be able to finish at all. I was surrounded by crazy athletes who were WAY more prepared than I was and completely confident in their ability to run the race in times much faster than I could imagine. My friend Amy came up with me and she kept reminding me that I just needed to do it my way and that she knew I could finish...and she was right. I finished in under 5 hours and I managed to run the whole thing without walking. Even though this was a very hard journey with all of the training it took, it was worth it. I had to keep reminding myself that there was a major "why" behind what I was doing. I wasn't just running to say I ran a marathon or to check another thing off my list...I was doing it for my sister, my brother, my dad...to connect with them...for a cure for diabetes.

When I crossed the finish line the first feeling I had was excitement, the second was relief and the third was that everything in my body hurt and I might collapse if I didn't quickly sit down. I was in a great deal of pain for the next 3 days, but feel much better now. It was truly an amazing experience. At this point, I have no "marathon bug." I have no desire to do another one, but it is really neat to be able to say that I have run a marathon. It is really neat to have done it for a cause that is so close to my heart. Thanks to all of you for your support!