On Our Way To Crazy

Why I Am Excited About Our New House

1. It is like two minutes from the highway. As opposed to fifteen. Which may seem like a short distance to some of you, but believe me, it is not. I feel like it takes forever to get everywhere from our house.

2. It has a real yard. With tall trees.

3. It is one-story. No more trying to figure out how to keep the upstairs cool without turning the downtairs into the Antartic. No more getting downstairs only to realize you’ve left Miles’ collar in the bedroom.

4. All the doors have cool cutouts in them.

5. We don’t have to share walls with anyone.

6. The kitchen. With a new counter and bright green walls (and less dirty dishes and jugs of bleach), it will be the kitchen I have always wanted.

7. The neighborhood. It’s fantastic. Full of 50′s ranch houses set back on big lots with great trees. And our location within the neighborhood couldn’t be better – we’re right in the middle, near the elementary school. It’s perfect.

8. The floors. Original and awesome.

9. That with the addition of another bedroom and bathroom and a den, it is going to be our dream house in our dream location. I am so excited to live in it as is, and I can’t wait to make some changes at the same time.

10. The swing.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Today I am thankful for small victories.

Saturday afternoon Aaron took the guys in our youth group to play paintball. I was nervous about that for two reasons: 1) I don’t know anything about paintball and was afraid the place I was sending them to was lame; and 2) we don’t have a lot of guys in our group, and I didn’t know if anyone would show and if they did, if they would get along and have a good time.

Aaron, as per usual, rocked it. They had about ten players total and I got rave reviews from all of them. (Ten people showing up at a guys-only event? A miracle.) They had a blast and want to make paintball a regular event. I really want the guys in our group to build relationships with each other, and Saturday was a great start.

Saturday night we had a sleepover at our house for the girls in our group. All told, with leaders and everything, there were 20 people sleeping in our house. Our house is not very big. But they squeezed in and it was great. I had some games and stuff planned, but the evening turned into a Mafia-marathon finished with a movie and pedicures at two in the morning. We had a lot of new girls show up for the sleepover, and our older girls were really great about including them and making them feel like a part of the group.

One of the struggles I’ve had with this particular group is that I feel like I have to entertain them. Well, not so much that I have to… I don’t see that as my job. But they have that ‘entertain me’ attitude, and it is draining on me. Events make me nervous because they are so quick to label something as stupid and lame. It’s not so much that I don’t want them to think I am stupid and lame but that I don’t want that to be their attitude toward church. Because they come whether they like it or not, and that negativity rubs off on everyone. So that we had two really successful events this weekend is a victory for me. I am energized.

Coming off of a big Saturday, Sunday morning service was one of the best we’ve had. Every week the kids get more comfortable with the worship time and with singing where people can actually hear them. Our worship leaders have their feet under them and are really connecting with the group. We had a few new kids in the high school class who are talkers, and I got more positive feedback from that class than I’ve ever had. And I had a good, long, pleasant conversation with one of the kids who has been a big issue for me in these past few weeks.

Things are looking up.

Hi! It’s me.

Now, I know that when you clicked over to this website or saw a new post on your bloglines you thought, “Hey! A new post from Brandi! I was wondering where she was. I hope she didn’t write some well thought out and cohesive post that is both funny and poignant and makes me see my life in a bright new way. No, what I want is a random list of stuff that’s been going on with her and weird stuff she thinks up off the top of her head. That would be great.”

Guess what, people. Today is your lucky day.

I have been busy busy busy, and when I’m not busy, I’m at home where we don’t have the internet. Technically there are some unprotected wireless networks (scandalous!) but for some reason my network card doesn’t pick them up. So my access to both free time and the internet in the same moment is severly limited. In fact, right now I am staying late at the office to post this instead of going home and making dinner for Aaron. I choose you, internet!

Do you have any idea just how frequently John Mellencamp songs are played on the radio? My CD player in my car is broken, so I have been listening to a ridiculous amount of radio, mostly using the scan button. John Mellencamp is on the radio ALL THE TIME, y’all. They play him on easy listening, oldies, classic rock, mix stations, EVERYWHERE. It is killing me. I can only take so much Johnny Cougar.

Youth stuff is going pretty good these days. We’ve been doing a pretty basic study series on Sunday mornings, and it has been really eye-opening for me to see how much (or little) the kids know and what kinds of crazy things they believe. We have a lot of big plans for the summer that I think will be good for building relationships within the group. That is something we really need. We move into a new office in a couple of weeks where I will finally have a desk that is all my own and will be able to stop living out of my car, so that will be nice. My car is tired.

So You Think You Can Dance starts next week! I am crazy excited. Some of the youth girls and I will be having a weekly SYTYCD get together. I have to spread the word to the younger generations, you know.

We move into our new house a week from tomorrow. I cannot believe it’s already time. We have not yet sold our townhouse. Know anyone who’s interested in a supercute townhouse in Nashville? I can make them a deal!

Right now I’m listening to Shai. Remember them from your seventh-grade dance? I loved them. I had my second-ever slow dance to “If I Ever Fall In Love”. (I can’t believe I remember this.) My first slow dance was to “Don’t Take the Girl” by Tim McGraw. I remember that because it was the first time I’d ever heard that song, and the guy I was dancing with said something like “Oh wow this song is really sad” when it started but I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then Shai came on and I got really excited but he didn’t know the song. That’s when I knew we weren’t meant to be.

And now I have to stop throwing my thoughts at you because The Office comes on in 30 minutes and I have to get home. And order a pizza, apparently. Sorry, Aaron!

When we were growing up, my sister and I lived down the street from our elementary school. In between our house and the school lived a lady named Pam, and we stayed with her after school until our mom came home.

Pam’s house was the best. She had Little Debbies and Kool-Aid, lots of games, and a big backyard. But that’s not why we loved it there. Pam had a daughter who was a few years older than us (she was in high school!), and we idolized her. She was a cheerleader, she had the biggest bangs we had ever seen, and she let us watch her movies. She was awesome.

One thing I learned later in life was that Pam didn’t want us to see parts of certain movies. I was in high school before I knew that Beaches didn’t start with them as kids. We weren’t allowed to watch the New Year’s Eve scene in Can’t Buy Me Love. And for the longest time, I had no idea there was a sex scene or… well, dirty dancing in Dirty Dancing.

It’s funny how much different the movies you watched as a kid look when you’re an adult. I probably hadn’t watched Dirty Dancing in its entirety since high school. But I saw the whole thing, dirty dancing, sex scene, abortion storyline and all, on the BIG SCREEN last night. And it was glorious.

After seeing the ad on TV, I gathered up a bunch of friends and we headed to the movies last night for the 20th anniversary showing of Dirty Dancing. The theater was packed out, and almost everyone there was a girl in her mid-twenties to late-thirties. We had all grown up watching this movie, and you could feel how excited everyone was to watch it in that atmosphere.

I had hoped it would be kind of a Rocky Horror experience, and I was not disappointed. The crowd was singing along, whistling at a shirtless Patrick Swayze, and saying the lines out loud. We yelled out in unison all the best lines: “I carried a watermelon?”, “Go back to your playpen, baby.” and, of course, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” We cheered when Johnny beat up Robby in the field and when he jumped off the stage to dance with his friends. We laughed at the cheesy lines and sang along with “I’ve Had The Time of My Life”.

It was so. much. fun.