This year I added a new page on this here blog called “Good Things In 2008″. It’s my own cheesy way of remembering all the fun little stuff that happens this year. Here’s the list so far. I’m not sure what is says about me that 20% of them are shopping related.

JANUARY

Jan 1 - The movie Juno added the word “shenanigans” to my vocabulary.
Jan 2 - I beat several kids in Wii tennis.
Jan 3 - My boss told me I am a leader and have the ability to inspire people.
Jan 4 - I got to go to Chuck E. Cheese.
Jan 5 - I dyed my hair dark brown and got some flippin’ sweet bangs.
Jan 6 - We implemented our plan of taking a bunch of kids to lunch every week.
Jan 7 - I got our Christmas thank you notes out, even coming up with something to say about the horse.
Jan 8 - I made a meal full of things Aaron thinks he doesn’t like and he loved it.
Jan 9 - I made a midget joke in staff meeting and people laughed.
Jan 10 - I possibly found a new junior high boys sunday school teacher.
Jan 11 - Aaron and I watched Once and ate a ton of Mike & Ike’s.
Jan 12 - I got to meet Ian Miller.
Jan 13 - Our pastor said nice things about me from the pulpit.
Jan 14 - I had a fun night shopping and eating with Erin, something I think we both needed.
Jan 15 - We had dinner and played video games with both of Aaron’s bands.
Jan 16 - Aaron and I had a good talk about life and contentment and where we are vs. where we’ve been.
Jan 17 - I found my favorite blue sweater in black on sale for $15.
Jan 18 - I figured out the format for the Zone 45 lessons.
Jan 19 - We slept way in and did nothing until about 4pm.
Jan 20 - We had a really good ‘real’ care group meeting.
Jan 21 - Fun day of shopping with Becka.
Jan 22 - I bought some sweet red flats with bows on the toes.
Jan 23 - We had our first high school discussion group and it went way better than expected.
Jan 24 - I wore my pajamas all day and got a ton of work done.
Jan 25 - I bought an awesome shirt that was marked down from $89 to $24.
Jan 26 - We had a fun night with the Millers, Stonebergers and Blackburns. And tiny brownies.
Jan 27 - We had some good conversations about some drama in the youth group with the kids.
Jan 28 - Blue cords for $15.
Jan 29 - Delicious new thai beef salad recipe for dinner.
Jan 30 - We spent time with Aaron’s old coworkers, which reaffirmed how much better things are now that he doesn’t work there anymore.
Jan 31 - I had a great lunch with my friend Trisha who I hadn’t seen in a million years. It involved multiple glasses of wine and some excellent tomato soup.

DOG UPDATE!

Animal control came yesterday. I don’t know what they did, but we did see a note on the door yesterday afternoon. And today the dog is not outside.

There was a crate in the backyard that is not there today. So I guess he is now inside the house in a crate. I hope that’s a good thing. He’s not out in the cold and weather, but I hope they don’t leave him in that crate all day, even when they’re home. And I hope he has access to food and water. Short of breaking in (which I am not sure I am above), there’s no way to know.

I called animal control on our neighbors today. It was not fun.

I don’t know a lot about animals. I have only had one pet in my life, and his name is Miles, and he sleeps in our bed and flops all over the sofa owns a football jersey and licks our faces and I would make him three meals a day from scratch if I could. I love that dog so much.

So I will freely admit that I don’t know a lot about what is normal or acceptable care for an animal. I don’t know if it’s considered mean or perfectly ok to have an outside dog. I would never do it, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

But I do know that leaving your dog tied to a tree with no food or water is wrong. Especially when there is no dog house and the rope isn’t long enough to let him get under any shelter when it is pouring down rain outside.

Y’all, I’ve been struggling with this for a while. The dog is outside all day every day, tied to that tree. I think they take him in at night, but I’m not sure about that. They definitely don’t take him in when they get home from work. I’ve never seen him tied to the tree at night, but I’ve never looked either. I just feel so bad for him. I know some of you live where it is -50 degrees outside nine months of the year. But it’s been pretty cold for Nashville over the last couple of weeks. When we let Miles out, instead of sniffing every corner of the yard and checking for rabbits under the shed, he gets his business done and books it for the porch. And all the while that poor little dog is just laying there in the cold with no shelter or food or water.

But today was the breaking point. It has been pouring down rain all day. When I let Miles out this morning that dog had the rope pulled taut, stretching as far as he could to try and get under their swingset. I couldn’t take it. So I called.

I don’t know if it was the right thing to do. We don’t know our neighbors, but they seem like fairly nice people. I don’t want them to have their dog taken away from them. But maybe animal control coming by will be what gets them to take better care of him. Or at least, for the love, buy the dog a house. How hard is that?

Dear Anthropologie,

Why? Why are you so mean? You sell the most beautiful things. Things I not only cannot afford, but have very little use for. I work out of my house 75% of the time. I wear jeans and t-shirts and flats every single day. I do not need your clothes. I cannot afford your clothes. But, oh, how I want your clothes.

It totally makes sense for me to wear these while I sit on my couch, right? Right?

I don’t even wear dresses, even to church. Maybe one day, when going to church just means showing up and doesn’t involve loading trailers and pushing carts and folding tables and stacking chairs. And on that day, I will wear these.

I wish I had a closet full of skirts like these.

Must. Wear. Every. Day.

And the shoes! Oh, the shoes.

I am a sucker for a good bag.

Anthropologie, if you’re reading this, please know that I love you. And if you are sitting there thinking about how you’d like to bestow a complete new wardrobe on a random person who never spends money with you on anything that’s not on sale, please consider me. I promise to do you proud.

Kisses,
Brandi

Congratulations… Juliette!

She correctly guessed that I bought the stone rhinoceros and hippopotamus because of my most favoritest Flight of the Conchords video entitled “Rhymenoceros vs. Hiphopapotamus”.

(In case you missed it the first thousand times I posted it, you can watch it here. It is so much awesome.)

Way to go, Juliette! Y’all should check out her fun blog. She is one of my sister’s closest friends from high school and one of the coolest kids I know. Except that she’s not a kid. In my mind Chelsea and all her friends are still 12. I should maybe work on that.

Juliette wins a mix CD with the theme of her choice, but since she did not specify a theme, I shall choose one for her. I think it will be “Songs With the Names of Large Animals Commonly Found at the Zoo in the Title.” Should be rockin’.

(Also, mini-congratulations to my dad who figured it out before reading the comments, only to find out that ’someone named Juliette’ beat him to it. He will get a CD of songs about coming in second place.)

I went shopping with a friend on Monday. She was looking for furniture. We didn’t buy any furniture, but I did buy some gum, some sweet zebra print flats with red bows, an alarm clock, a couple of throw pillows, and these:

From a basket full of little stone animals, I picked those two. Not the lion, not the elephant, not the alligator. Those two very specific animals.

YOUR CHALLENGE: Tell me why I picked those animals.
THE PRIZE: The first person to correctly guess why I chose them gets a mix CD customized with the theme of their choice. Answer in the comments.

Several months ago we were asked to head up a new care group at our church. I was a little unsure of taking on something else that I had to be in charge of… I didn’t want to just pile another thing on that I had to worry about and that would cause me a bunch of stress with an unknown payoff. I already have a ton of those things in my life.

But, of course, we took it. It’s what we do. If they asked me to teach the senior adults class I would do it. I know nothing about senior adults or their issues or what they want to talk about. But I would do it. Thankfully, they haven’t asked me to do that.

The group was initially intended to be a mixture of college students, single adults, and young married couples (without kids). Most of those people were already in care groups, but they weren’t attending for one reason or another. (We were attending ours, but mostly because we felt like we were supposed to. We were one of two childless couples in a group where kids outnumbered adults by a ratio of about 12:1. It was not the most fun I’ve ever had.) We were looking to try and provide a smaller, more intimate group where people who were just a life stage or two away from each other could get together.

We started out with a Christmas party in December that was attended by five college students and five married couples. Clearly there was a divide. The party was a lot of fun, what with the giant pink underpants and the WWE spinning gold belt and the mile-long eyelash. But we were dealing with two very different groups of people.

The feedback we got was very clear - the college students don’t want to go to a couple’s group. They don’t want to have a discussion group, they just want to hang out with each other and have a good time. The couples (and older singles), on the other hand, want more than just a social meeting time. They want to have discussions and do studies and really dig into some stuff.

When it first came up, I have to admit that I was a little hurt. Here we are, taking on another group of people at the church and trying to figure out how to create a place for them where they’ll be comfortable and can make some connections, and we were brutally rebuffed. I don’t know how to deal with that. I felt like we had good intentions in putting this together, and our plans never even got a chance to get off the ground.

Last night was our first ‘real’ meeting. We haven’t made any changes in the group structure as yet, opting instead to keep the group as is for the first meeting and see what happens. Shockingly, none of the college students showed. We had ten people - five couples. And y’all? It was a great, great meeting. We had a really good discussion and a lot of fun. It was exactly what we needed, not just as care group leaders, but personally and as a couple. It was nice to get to just spend time with people who we weren’t responsible to teach or guide or convince to go to camp.

I don’t begrudge the college students at all. I think sometimes we forget that we’re older than we think we are. At 27, I don’t feel old, but at 19 I felt like 27 was a million miles away. We’ll figure out a plan for them, whether Aaron and I are involved or not. But it was clear last night that there are a lot of people at our church who are in a similar life stage that we’re in, and those people are looking for community. We are those people. And if we can provide that for them and for ourselves, then that’s what we need to be putting our efforts towards.

Even if it means I have to give up control of something I thought I could handle. Yikes.

Here’s the thing.

You eat lunch at lunchtime. Especially if you make an appointment to meet someone in a restaurant at noon. You eat lunch. You do not get there, let the other person order, then say, “Oh, I’m not hungry. I ate a big breakfast/packed my lunch/am an anti-foodite/hate you and want to make you feel uncomfortable. I’ll just have a drink.”

That is mean.

It is especially mean when it is the second time it’s happened to me THIS WEEK. What is up with the universe? I order lunch, the other person does not, and then I spend the rest of the meeting, a meeting that requires a lot of talking to be done BY ME, eating in front of them while they sip their soda or whatever. AWKWARD. If you don’t want to eat lunch, don’t make a lunch appointment. It is not brain surgery. It’s lunch. For me anyway.

As you may have noticed from my flickr page, we got Guitar Hero 3 for Christmas. Well, technically, Aaron did. We’ve played it several times - with our families, at a New Year’s party, with the youth group as part of my plan to turn them into an army of robots. But I’d never played it by myself.

A bit of a primer for those who may not have played before. In career mode, you name your band and play through the songs in order. Every four songs, you get to play an encore. If you succeed at playing the encore (usually a song much harder than the ones you’ve been playing), you move up in the music world - from a backyard party to a club, from shooting a music video to playing in a prison. On each level the songs get harder.

(I realize that the more I talk about this the more lame I sound. I wish I could say I am cooler than I am coming across, but that would be a lie.)

Guitar Hero 3 added a new twist to the career mode. Every few levels you have to battle. It’s like playing against the computer, if the computer is random guys from rock bands. I beat Tom Morello with no issues. He’s a wimp. A weenie. I smoked him with the guitar I bought that’s shaped like a leg.

But y’all? I cannot beat Slash. i just can’t. He’s too good. I hate him. The more I battle him, the worse I get. He is draining all my Guitar Hero powers, and also possibly my will to live.

I fear I will be stuck on this level forever, doomed to replay La Grange to the prison guys over and over for the rest of my life. My flippin’ sweet band, Lechuga, will never make it to the arena shows. There will be no Grammys, no breaking up over creative differences, no VH1 Behind the Music.

Poor Lechuga. Stupid Slash.

Do you listen to David Gray? You should be listening to David Gray.

David Gray is very important to us. I have had not one, but two, David Gray related surprises for Aaron ruined. We’ve seen him in concert several times, including a fantastic show at the Ryman. His live DVD is our go-to background music when people come over or we are cleaning the house.

So. Maybe the music of David Gray does not fill every corner of your house like it does ours. Which is a very very sad thing for you. But you are in luck! Because he just put out a Greatest Hits record. And it is fantastic.

Now, we own every recording he has ever put out. We have stuff we paid exorbitant amount of money to have shipped over from Ireland. The Greatest Hits album has two new tracks that we could have just downloaded from itunes, but we of course had to buy the physical CD. And I am so glad we did. It’s great to have all those songs all in one place. But the real treat is the liner notes. Instead of lyrics, there are blurbs about when the song was written, why they recorded it the way they did, how it all came together. Love it.

If you are a sad sad person who doesn’t know David Gray’s music, this is a perfect way to get initiated. If you are a smarty pants who already loves him, it’s worth it for the two new tracks. I have “You’re the World to Me” in my head constantly. Seriously. All the time. I’m singing it right now.