He is

So I'm feeling a little down. Nothing to be concerned about, just not my jolly self. Tonight as I was driving home I called out to the Lord. Fill me, help me, God. He answered with two words, HE IS. The Lord filled in the blank in so many ways.
He is ____________.
So when I got home I began to go through the Psalms and here are some things that HE IS to me.

on my side - Psalm 124:1
surrounding me - 125:2
just - 125:4-5
forgiving - 130:3-4
my hope - 130:5
my vindicator - 135:14
exalted above all things - 138:2
all-knowing - 139:2-4
always there - 139:7
my creator - 139:13
my rescuer - 140:1
my refuge - 141:8
my road map - 143:8
so powerful - 145:6
worthy of praise - 150

I mean, what else could I ask for?? :)
I just share this as encouragement...if there's something you need, HE IS!

The long-awaited weekend update

I know all 2 of you reading out there are very excited about reading of my weekend activities! So here goes!

Saturday I went to Michael and Jill's house for a fun dinner. They are a sweet couple from church and they invited a bunch of people over to their house Saturday night. I took this Oreo and Fudge Ice Cream Cake that I found on AllRecipes. Now, I don't like to cook or bake, and this cake didn't really require cooking or baking. It was more like putting ingredients together. That's right up my alley. I actually had fun making it.

After dinner we played one of the funniest games I have ever played. I laughed and cried all of my mascara off, and my cheeks actually hurt from smiling so much. I'm thinking of buying this game because it is something my family would have so much fun playing at our annual beach weekend.

Sunday after church I went to my Grandma's house for lunch and we chatted while we waited for the rest of the fam to come over for my birthday party. One of the best things about birthdays in my family is that it brings us all together. (duh!) I have 3 little sisters and we could not be more different but we have such a good time when we get together. One is a restaurant manager, one is a cardiac perfusion student, the youngest is going to be a sophomore in high school and then there's me, an elementary school teacher. So you can see just by our choice in profession how different we are. Seriously, though, when we get together I just love it and I love to drive all of them crazy by taking copious amounts of pictures. (Girls, did you appreciate the lack of photos I took on Sunday?)

Anyway, we had a delicious dinner and I got to open my presents!! Money (yay!) and bath stuff, along with a gift from Kristen and Kelly that is a bit too long of a story to go into at this point. (haha Kristen)

Monday (I know that really isn't part of the weekend but we'll be ok!) was my birthday and I went to my mom's house for dinner. I got presents there too: a iPod Nano (it is SOOO cute!), an ottoman (the kind that the top comes off and you can store stuff inside), and a mini-refrigerator for my classroom (and will store lots of Diet Pepsi Wild Cherry that helps me maintain my sanity during the school day).

It was a great weekend and a great birthday! One more thing that was very cool was I got a bunch of phone calls from people at my church. Even my pastor called me! I thought that was so nice...I LOVE my church.

Now I am off to continue the tedious job of converting wav files to mp3 files for my church's website! Don't worry, I only have to do all the sermons since January! :)

It's my birthday and I'll clean if I want to

Yep, you read that right...I have been on my hands and knees scrubbing bathroom floors, tubs, and floorboards. Vacuumed the crack between the wall and the carpet. Done loads of laundry. Got a pile of stuff ready for goodwill. Cut Toby's hair and gave him a bath. Clean clean clean.

I have no idea why I'm in this obsessive compulsive mood, but I might as well take advantage of it!

I have so much to post on but I think I will catch up later on today. (OK, maybe tomorrow!)

Happy birthday to me!

Wordle

In case you haven't heard about it yet, Wordle is the coolest site I've come across lately. This site creates "word clouds" from text that you enter. The words that are repeated the most often are the words that are larger. The picture above is a word cloud of Philippians 3.

I entered my blog, and this is the word cloud it came up with. Its funny to see the words I use a lot!

It takes a lot to get me to cry...

But this did...

By far my favorite bloggy couple, Carlos and Heather Whittaker...

Their relationship is such an inspiration to me.

Go and watch this video. Two things make it special: first, Carlos' desire to make his wife happy, second, the true friendship that Heather and Jacinda share.

I pray that one day my husband will have some of Carlos' creativity and devotion and I will be the kind of wife that reciprocates that love!

Warning, tissues are needed!

My Desktop

Tony Morgan posted his very minimalist desktop and asked, "What does this say about me?" I thought that was an interesting question so I am adding my desktop to the conversation.

I think mine shows the obvious love for my dog as well as my love for clean surfaces and a lack of clutter! And, I have to be honest, I did clean up a little before taking the screen shot. :)

Disney Tips, WFMW

I just spent a long weekend at Disney, and I had researched so much about the trip that my mom and sister teased me the whole time about it (with love, of course!)

It was DEFINITELY WORTH THE WORK! I found some of the best tips on the Internet, and we benefited by waiting in shorter lines, hitting the best places, and finding little known parts of the parks. So, for Works for Me Wednesday, I thought I would share my favorite websites that I referred to frequently in my planning.

• Guide to Disney
• Make sure to check the Park Hours
• Disney's Moms Panel
• Vader's Mom Blog - great tips!
• Also - go to Disney's website to explore the parks and map out the attractions that you want to see and do. My advice - pick about 5 per day that you really want to do, then add a few to your list that you can visit if you have time.

To read about my Disney trip and see some of the cool things we did, click here, here, here, and here!

Visit Rocks in My Dryer for more tips!

Disney, Day 4

Magic Kingdom!

This day was, by far, the most hot and crowded day of them all! I guess (duh) that the Magic Kingdom is the most popular and this was the first day that we had to wait for trams because there were so many people. Thankfully, we had a smart plan! We got to MK at about 9, used Fast Passes, and had a lot of fun on the rides that we really wanted to ride.

My favorite was Thunder Railroad Mountain (or something like that). It was on this ride that I made the discovery that it really is more fun to ride roller coasters with your arms up in the air! :) Then, we went home at about 1. We took naps (or at least I did) and got freshened up.

We went to Planet Hollywood for dinner. It was so cool! They had "artifacts" from all the famous movies. They had the outfit that Leonardi DiCaprio wore in "Titanic" and Dorothy's outfit from the "Wizard of Oz!" They had movie trivia on the screens and did you know that "Titanic" was the #1 Box Office hit of all time?!

But I digress! We went from there back to MK and did some more rides and happened to catch the fireworks. We were all of the mindset of, "seen one, seen 'em all," but we absolutely loved it! It was very "magical" and I even got teary-eyed. Call me CHEESY!

Here is the grand finale that I caught on video. Pardon the bad camera work but I was standing in the middle of the fireworks so I had to keep turning around!

Tell me that doesn't move you?! Haha!

Disney, Day 3

Animal Kingdom!

This is an AWESOME park! The design of the park is so neat...the foliage and the plants and flowers are just beautiful. There are animals everywhere you turn, so it is like a zoo and amusement park in one. I'm a huge animal lover, so this was a great park for me.

The first thing we did was a safari. (This was my favorite experience yet!) You actually go through "Africa" in a jeep! The animals can come right up to the jeep, and we had great luck seeing animals. One thing that my mom and I love is the 3-d shows! We saw the "Bug's Life" show and it was hilarious, if not a little alarming at times because of all the surprises that happened during the show.

(In the first picture with the rocks you can see a lioness stretched out on the second rock. Look for the tiger stretched on her back, and the momma and baby giraffe. The last picture is of a gorilla bachelor!)

All around GREAT day! It was definitely steamy and hot, so we did leave early and, after a shower and a rest, went for shopping and dinner.

Disney, Day 2

Today was absolutely perfect! It was overcast and a bit rainy, so the park wasn't very crowded. The longest we had to wait was 30 minutes! Epcot was a blast! It had a lot of "educational" rides but they were very fun. At about 3, it started to POUR down rain! We didn't want to just sit inside, so we got soaked! It was worth it though. We ended up leaving at about 5 because we were exhausted. We went to Chili's for dinner. Yum!

Some of today's highlights:

• Mission Space where you experience an "intense" space training mission to mars! You are in a little space craft and you take off into space. You actually experience the g-forces. Very cool!
• Spaceship Earth where you get to "see" yourself in the future!

• Soarin' where you feel like you are hang gliding over the country. You dip down over different areas in the country including a river, a lemon orchard (smell lemons), and a desert.
• Living with the Land is a boat ride through a greenhouse. They actually have scientists who are experimenting with growing plants in new ways. There was a tomato tree and a nine pound lemon tree!
  
• Ice Station Cool where you sample Coke from all over the world! I think my favorite was Coke from Costa Rico!
  

We also visited Mexico and Norway! We still have 9 more countries that we hope to check out tomorrow.

Tomorrow we will go to Animal Kingdom in the morning to head out on a safari, and then in the afternoon we will take the monorail back to Epcot to finish it up. There was just too much to see in one day!

Disney, Day 1!

We made it! Thanks to my trusty GPS friend with a British accent, we have arrived in Orlando, FL with no problems. We got here around 4, and after we checked into our hotel we went to Downtown Disney. It is a boardwalk-like place with tons of shops and restaurants. It has such a neat atmosphere, except the shopping gets a little old because every shop has the same merchandise! Disney-everything. (What did I expect?) We ate at the Rainforest Cafe. Here's Karlie at the bar (just posing for the picture!)
And, by the way, this man looked really out of place at this restaurant by himself! Not the typical place for a man to unwind after a long day at work!
Karlie and Brittany posed for a picture with Belle. (Or is that Cinderella?)
This is a dog made entirely out of legos! It looks like a giant Toby!

And, just because I miss him, here's a picture of the real thing.

The plan for tomorrow is to get up early and head to Epcot! From what I've read, I think it might be my favorite park. I'll try to update tomorrow!

Works for me Wednesday

Online Bible Study Tools!

• For years I have been using BibleGateway. This one is great for looking up different topics (do you want to know what God says about heaven or marriage? Just type it in!) Also, you can check out different translations. My favorite is to compare The Message to a traditional version like NIV. It really helps to study the Word.


• I just learned about Study Light. I could jump up and down, it excites me so much! You can do the same things as on Bible Gateway, but more. You can look at the original Hebrew or Greek. You can do word studies like looking up the Hebrew word for "redeemer," reading the Hebrew definition, and then find out other places this word is found. It also has several commentaries that you can check out to further dig into the Word.

There are other tools such as BibleTools and Crosswalk, but I am not very familiar with them. My advice is to go and click around some of these sites. I think you will be amazed at what you will find.

Check out Rocks in My Dryer for more tips!

I'm so athletic

Yesterday a bunch of people from church met to play volleyball on the beach. It was a BEAUTIFUL evening...not too hot with a nice cool breeze. Since I'm so athletic, I decided to sit on the sidelines and take pictures! :)

I'm sure my friends would be just delighted to see their pictures on my blog (um...just kidding), but instead I'll show you some of the glorious sunset.

I love the colors of this sunset!

My exciting life (please note the sarcasm)

2 highlights of my day:

• Kelly called me up and invited me to go to Moe's for lunch! We talked like crazy for an hour and we could have stayed there for several more hours! I thank God for friends like her who I can share my heart with. We have been friends for 9 years now. We were college roommates.
• I found a tick on Toby! Yuck! I didn't even know what is was at first. Then I saw little legs on it. That was one of the most disgusting things I've ever had to deal with. After some consults through phone and internet, I removed it. Toby is fine, never better! He never even knew what all the fuss is about. (I thought Advantix was supposed to keep this from happening!)

Well the day is still young and who knows what other excitement may come my way! :)