I spent most of this month traveling.  I loved it.  I got to see my Grandma, aunts and uncles, cousin, Melissa, Derek and Ethan (well, inside Melissa anyway), Julie, Mike, Xander, Graham and Landon (well sonogram photos anyway) and Charis.   I had Sonic, and Chick-fil-a, Hobby Lobby, Wal-Mart, good TexMex, amusing kid stories.  I did lots of other fun stuff, but I will write about that some other time.

I am glad to be home.  I missed my own bed.

I once told him that I would never use algebra and didn’t understand why we had to learn it.

Real nice.

I know.  And you thought I was a brown-noser.

So, I used some algebra just the other day and now feel repentant.  I have over the course of my adult life used algebra on a fairly regular basis.

So, do I seek him out?  Leave it to chance–if I see him the next time that I am home I tell him?

There are, of course, more important conundrums to ponder.  Perhaps I will ponder them for a little while.

1. Why is the runaway truck lane on a 7% grade mountain at the top of the road and not in the middle where the runawayness is likely to happen?
2. If your last name is Goodlatte and you don’t like coffee what do you do?  (from a campaign sign in Maryland)
3. If you are not a funeral crasher, why would you go to a funeral of a person you don’t know?  (a man showed up at my grandma’s funeral that no one in my family knows and when asked his connection to the family, i.e. did you know her, he tried to claim a relationship with one of my uncle, who didn’t know him.  He was polite, didn’t give to excessive crying, he just came, talked to a couple of my aunts and uncles, sat, listened, left).
4. How did I, who can’t sing, get roped into singing at my Momma’s funeral?  (I sang with two of my cousins and my mom—I think I was successfully drowned out!).
5. Why did I have to drive back on a Sunday?  (I really wanted to eat at Chick fil a since we don’t have one near by me.  I saw one, was hungry, pulled off the interstate, went to the drive thru, waited . . . waited . . . no one asked to take my order, greeted me . . . then I realized that they are closed on Sundays!)
6. How did I get a rental car with MN plates when I rented my car in MA?  (I grew up in MN and think it is a little ironic that I ended up with a car from MN when my parents, who drove from MN ended up with a car from OK)
7. Who knew I could get tired of my own voice?  (I updated my iTouch and got a free new application, voice memo.  I had a test the Tuesday I returned and was going to waste 12 hours on way back not studying, which cause me some degree of stress.  I recorded all my notes and terms from the book on my iTouch and listened to them over and over and over again.  I was so tired of hearing myself I must confess I was glad my battery died!) *update* got my test back and I got an A—yippee from iTouch Voice Memo!
8. Why does it cost $8 to cross the George Washington Bridge?  And why didn’t Google tell me?  (on an annoyed side note, I spent an hour waiting to pay my stupid toll and cross that silly bridge.  I have never been so happy to see a bridge in my life, since I spent a good 45 mins around the bend and couldn’t see it.  Of course on a positive note, I got to talk to my grandma for an hour).
9. How do you know you have reached the south?  Trucks have stickers/tags/window vinyl of guns/hunting/animals, there are Christian radio stations, there are Cracker Barrels at every other exit, the lady at the gas station calls you “honey,” and rivers have names like Cowpasture River.
10. Why do people give flowers to you when someone dies?  I mean, it’s just something else to die.  Ok, I guess if you have a green thumb their fate is not so morbidly set, but still.  *looked it up, “From time immemorial flowers were used to control the offensive and obnoxiousness of body decomposition.”  That makes a lot of sense to me and it kind of makes me laugh, obnoxious indeed.

I pondered other questions, but they were of a more serious nature and not so easily answered.

$125.50 & 149.25.

Used.

I about had a heart attack.

So, I just went on Amazon and found them used for 21.04 & 26.01.

I would like to take this time to thank Jesus for Amazon.

Not so much.

I did buy a bookbag and really kind of feel like a kid to be carrying it around.  I mean, I am going to turn 29 this year.  I thought I was past the bookbag carrying around stage.

Guess not.

Here’s to bookbag carrying-class taking-degree earning-hard work!

At any rate, my roommate and I broke ground and planted on our garden.  My first garden!  (not hers).  We planted green beans, carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, cantaloupe and lettuce.

Before:

After:

and some from in between–when else do I get to wield a pickax?

A little planting action (which actually after clearing away so much ground with the pickax, then digging in with a shovel didn’t really feel very much like “action”):

I prayed a little blessing over my garden–hopefully it will grow . . .

But there you go.

You can read it here.

So, I decided I wanted to put them in iTunes so I could put them on my iPod.  I imported them and iTunes, which usually doesn’t fail me in the classification front decided my Spiritual Exercises were:

Blues.

Yes, the Blues.  Described on Wikipedia as:

the name given to both a musical form and a music genre created primarily within the African-American communities in the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.^[1]

I guess I might be able to see it.  Ok, not so much.

It made me chuckle.

Now for some more bazaar bizarreness:

Mosaic Lamb, anyone?

This is disturbing, but I couldn’t pass it by without a snapshot.

This takes princess to a whole new level:

Sorry that it has a glare, I was getting dirty looks as I snapped it, so I shot and ran!