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Update

Since this blogging thing isn’t just going to be about me, we’ve started a family blog about our adventures in the military.  Come on over and follow us there.

 

Our Military Moments

A website about our experiences in the US Military…

Living, Losing, and Loving through it all!

Come Join us!!

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January Books

Everything I read in January

  1. Night Embrace – Sherrilyn Kenyon
    1. I’ve read this wonderful series over and over again.  This time I’m listening to the books on Audible)… I love her characters… even the vampire-ish ones! 🙂  Just a great, not-using-a-lot-of-brain-cells books!
  2.  Good Manners for Nice People – Amy Alcon
    1. This book started out promising, and finished on a positive note, but I was left with feeling like this woman was a busy-body who spent a LOT of her time spying on other people, reporting online about people, and taking it upon herself to point out which “rules” people are breaking.  Some of what she says is spot-on and pretty funny, but some of it is borderline obsessive and at one point she says she enforces a “no cell phone rule” in her favorite coffee shop.  It’s important to say that she’s not employed by this shop, but she takes it as her duty to tell people not to use their cell phones saying she really wanted to “tackle them to the ground” for using their cell phones.  I would think she’d go to the coffee shop to maybe have coffee or maybe write (since she’s an author and a columnist), but I wonder how much she can be enjoying her coffee and time in the shop if all she is doing is watching everyone who walks in the door to see if they are using their cell phone.  I want to tell her to get a life and do something she enjoys.  Then she tells a story of her organizing her friends to set up rotational visits to a single friend of hers who was dying of cancer.  Something completely selfless in the midst of a book filled with things she does that makes me wonder if she does anything other than spy on other people breaking “social rules”.  Anyway… I did finish the book, although twice in the middle I wanted to stop… I finished it and will probably give it 3 out of 5 stars!
  3. The Power of Six – Pittacus Lore
    1. This is a wonderful series!! It’s a YA (young adult) series about 9 teenager aliens.  Okay… that just turned off a bunch of people, but it’s amazing how sucked in I get into this drama… This is the second book in the series, and you need to start from the beginning to know what’s going on.  So, I am Number Four is first… get it and then move on to this one… I can’t wait to read the next one.
    2. Price, my 11 year old boy, LOVES these books… he’s on the 5th one now and about to start the 6th book.  He was really mad about the 4th book because “they said the F word two times… can’t they write without putting that in there?”  So that’s really the only complaint we have… I promised to find him an action/adventure novel with no cussing.
  4. The Tale of Despereaux – Kate D
    1. We read this one as a family.  I really liked it, especially the narrator part.  I love that they talk to us “dear reader” throughout the whole book.  It teaches new vocabulary words as we go along… like empathy and things like that.  We then watched the movie and decided we didn’t like how different it was from the book.  We think the book was better than the movie.  Wesley (9 year old boy) thought that the movie was better because “no one dies”.  The rest of us liked the book better!
  5. For the Love – Jen Hatmaker
    1. Y’all… I cannot express how much I loved this book.  I laughed out loud and read parts of it to anyone who happened to be near me!  I am definitely putting this one back in the rotation to re-read.  If you are married, or have children, or hope to be married or have children then this book is for you.  If you are nearing 40, or over 40, or under 40 then this book is for you.  I immediately put her other books on my wish list and will continue to talk about the things in this book for years… I just know she and I would be great friends!!  So, I’ve also added “Meet Jen Hatmaker and make her feel very uncomfortable (since she’s an introvert) by gushing over how good friends we already are because of the conversations I’ve had with her in my head”.  This book is for you… for the love!
  6. St Thomas Aquinas – G.K. Chesterton
    1. This book was so far over my head that I probably only understood about 1/4 of it.  It was like reading C.S. Lewis to me.  His books take me forever to read because I have to go back and re-read the sentences over and over to understand what he’s saying.  Chesterton was the same, or maybe it was just Thomas Aquinas who was so hard to understand.  My favorite thing I did get from it though was the idea that philosophers weren’t always the way I think of philosophers.  Aquinas was definitely a philosopher who was also a Christian and had no problem working those two things together.  It dawned on me that most Christian theologians are, at their essence, philosophers.  They are all putting their own interpretation of scriptures, and spreading their ideas about it.  When a lot of them agree on one interpretation, it becomes a denomination and it becomes the basis of their belief system.  Aquinas was alive when science was just beginning… it was the beginning of science the way we view it.  With an idea, a hypothesis, experiments, and conclusions… aka the Scientific Method.  Aquinas believed that the bible was so vast and that humans were really able to understand everything it says and everything it means.  Because of this, we take the scriptures and “guess” at what it means… Interpret it in the way we feel is best.  Not to further our cause, or to prove that we are right, but just interpret what it says in the BEST way we can.  THEN, if science is used to prove there is another meaning for something in the bible, something that might go against the way we have interpreted it, we change the interpretation.  With this theory in place, he was able to use science in conjunction with his faith instead of opposed to his faith.  He took the “heretics” of his age and really tried to understand where they were coming from, so he could show them where they went wrong in their beliefs.  I would LOVE to see how he would act and what he would think if he were alive now.  He was a great thinker, and apparently it’s important to note that he was a really big man.  🙂  I love the way Chesterton speaks in his writing, and I am adding more of his books to my list.  Now off for something MUCH lighter than this!! 🙂

I try to read books from different genres and about a variety of subjects.  I feel like it keeps me from getting bored and constantly generates questions that lead me to research and learn even more things.  Let me know if you’ve read any of these books, or if you have any books that you think I REALLY need to read.

**Also… check out my new goodreads profile (and be my friend!) to see what I’m reading now and what’s on my to-read list!!

Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!

Amanda

 

 

 

To Cry or Not to Cry…

Don’t pass out…

I used to pass out… like… a lot!!  A little bit more history about my childhood.  I have one sibling.  An older brother.  He’s six years older than me.  My mother had secondary infertility.  Meaning that she didn’t have a problem getting pregnant the first time, but when he was three or four and they decided to have another baby, they ended up having to have fertility treatments.  In her case, she took clomid… and got pregnant with me!

So… I’m six years younger than my brother.  I always tried to do whatever he did and go along with anything he would let me do.  I had three cousins who were about the same age as my brother and they were all boys.  I tried everything I could think of to make them like me… especially Boyett, my brother.

I don’t remember how old i was, but I was young… and he had done something mean to me, as most big brothers do!  And I was crying… I remember him telling me that “only babies cry”… and i wanted to be anything but a baby, so this began the period of my life where I would hold my breath to keep from crying… and I’d pass out!

I don’t know the first time this happened, but I remember the last time I did it…

At the house I lived in from age 2-16, we had holly bushes in the front yard across the front of the house.  I passed out one time and fell into those bushes.  There was a really big ditch between our house and our neighbor’s house.  I passed out and fell down that ditch one time.  Maybe there were more times, but I don’t specifically remember those times.  🙂  I do remember the last time, though.

We were at the deer camp.  I hope you all know what that is, but in case you don’t, it’s a camp where you stay when you are hunting deer. 🙂  Okay… it is a piece of land that usually has a place to sleep (sleep shack) and a place to eat (kitchen).  My grandfather and some of his friends leased some land a long time ago to use for hunting and were allowed to put a “camp” on it so that they (usually just the men) could come stay and be able to head out to hunt earlier.

I LOVED the deer camp as a child.  We were there a lot and so were most of my cousins.  We played all kinds of games and could really do whatever we wanted as long as we stayed at the camp and didn’t go into the woods.

This time… the last time I passed out… we were at the deer camp.  We were all running from the kitchen (where the adults were), to the sleep shack (where we would go play cards or other games).  The screen door had a spring on it so it would stay closed and as I was running into the sleep shack behind my cousin, the screen door started to slam closed and I tried to catch it.  I missed and it slammed on my fingers.

I couldn’t go inside because I thought I was about to cry (and i didn’t want anyone to see that), so I turned around and walked around the side of the sleep shack.  I was holding my breath so I would cry, and this time when I passed out, I fell into the side of the sleep shack and busted my head open.  It was actually on my face, near my eyebrow.

I, obviously, don’t remember this next part, but one of the adults left the kitchen for some reason and saw me laying unconscious with blood all over my face.  In case you weren’t aware, head wounds bleed easily and profusely, so my cut probably looked worse than it was.

He picked me up (still unconscious) and brought me into the kitchen.  He laid me on a table, and this is when I woke up.

I remember opening my eyes and everything was really bright and I could see my mother’s back right beside me and she was screaming for everyone to “back up and leave her alone”.  I’m not sure why she wanted this, unless it was so she could examine what was wrong, but that’s what I remember.  Anyway, she says she was completely freaked out and not even sort of in control, but I just remember her yelling for everyone to back up, and then I don’t remember much more than that.  I do know that I decided that crying would probably have been better than what happened.

So now… I just cry it out!! 🙂

Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!

Amanda