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Naisiai
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Name: Kristen
Country: United States
State: Texas
Gender: Female
Interests: Sketching and painting, nature, traveling, political science, photography, UNESCO, Africa, food.
Expertise: Getting lost. Staring into space.
Occupation: Writer & Creative Wanderer
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
1/26/2004
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| Just a Quick UpdateMichelle and I have taken up sailing lessons the past month in honor of our dad. For years my dad would tell us of his love for the water and his desire to sail around the world on his own boat. Sailing lessons would have been his first step, but that step was never taken by that busy dad taking care of his his daughters and sending them on their own adventures. I've learned many micro-life lessons from this.
If you have a dream, do something today that will get you closer to it.
Hobbies can be work, but the satisfaction is so energizing that the work feels good.
Being a servant and an encourager is what really impacts people.
Faith is never wasted, even if the answers aren't tangible.
I've been leading a more quiet and private life, but I've been learning things about myself and my life. I like the quiet an calm. I enjoy nurturing those few extremely important people in my life. Before I had so many extraneous friendships that I put my energy into, I barely knew how to take care of myself.
I've been spending more time putting good foods into my body, surrounding myself with healthy couples (with John) and learning things from each of them. By spending time with new people I'm learning a lot of new hobbies like growing organic vegetables, playing the beautifully made German board games, and searching for treasure locally by Geocaching. I've developed a love for bowling in my very own pink bowling shoes, swimming laps in my pool, berry picking when the patch is open, and breaking in my new "tough girl" gloves by rigging sailboats to take out on the water.
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| The Life of a Grocery Store BankerThe past four months I've spent my waking hours in a grocery store, an over-lit yellow and green one on the wrong side of town. Let me tell you, the people that walk across my sight line 8 hours a day are more than a little interesting. The word interesting is open to interpretation here. To give you a glimpse of my daily horror show, a large woman once walked by that had no clothing waist down, only t-shirt just barely long enough. As she walked away I saw definite cheekage. Yes. It was that bad.
Then there are my coworkers, each owning a little crazy of their own. Oddly enough, the craziest off-kilter stress-case is my favorite coworker. I love her drama for some reason. I don't know why. She's entertaining.
But I'm afraid my entertaining, well-paying job, has a shelf-life. Office politics and mismanagement are tiring to be around 40 hours a week. I had a nice chat with my insurance agent (auto and home) after hours this evening cell phone to cell phone. He said I'm hard to get ahold of and asked if I hired myself out as an indentured servant. Sometimes it really feels like it. Those 40 hours of crazy a week take another 40 just to recoup from.
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| There Hasn't Been MuchA lot has happened in the past few months, but it's hard to find anything that I feel moved to share. I'm not sure what I'd call this stage of my life--maybe an outer reflective period where I just sit and observe everyone else living life. I'd call it inner reflection, except I haven't really been absorbing any outside knowledge and figuring out how it applies to me.
When someone close to you dies, you'd think you'd want to re-evaluate your life and try to make sense of the heartbreak. But that seems too painful an option. Instead, I'm keeping pace with life and waiting for the right time to jump into the flow of meaningful purposeful deep-thinking living. I liken it to jumping rope. When two people skip a jump-rope to a set beat, you stand aside and watch the rope whir by, slapping the ground, until your entire body gets a sense of the right time to hop into the beat. Right now I'm just kind of watching the reality of life, trying not to dwell on the reality of death, feeling the rhythm again, waiting to jump in with both feet.
And so my blog has been likewise dormant. | | |
| 24 Moments for my 24th YearWhile I wrote this and meant to post it on my 24th birthday, it had a few holes that I haven't had time to fill in until today. I was tempted to write something interesting from each of the 24 hours of my 24th birthday, but seeing as I was asleep for the first 9 of them, it would have been a really dull post. Instead, here are 24 Moments from my 24th year.
Six Firsts in Spring
1. I bought my first "house". It is a one bedroom condo that I have thoroughly enjoyed nesting.
2. This was the first year in 20 years that I wasn't a full-time student. I've decided I really miss being a student and often wonder why college preps you as a freshman for college life, but it rarely gives you any real prepping for life after college. Getting a job is not as easy as showing off your degree.
3. I was all packed to move to Korea to teach English for a year, but somehow my papers got "stuck" in the mail. They showed up just after my school dropped my contract. It all turned out to be a good thing later in the year as I was needed at home.
4. I was actually paid to write an entire book. I find fiction is easier to produce by leaps and bounds than nonfiction. Research makes the process 5 times longer.
5.I had my first two house-guests in two consecutive weeks, and realized my love for hosting people in my home.
6. Early in spring we had a freak hailstorm that smashed out the back windshield on my corolla. It hit so hard that I'm still finding glass chunks lodged between my dashboard and the FRONT windshield of my car. My floorboards were flooded with water. Although Michelle and Mom risked several cuts to their fingers trying to rescue the books in my backseat, several were lost due to water damage including my favorite The Count of Monte Cristo.
Six Firsts of Summer
7. I adopted a spunky Cocker Spaniel named Sophie. Finding, adopting, and nurturing her as my own really taught me some valuable lessons about God's grace toward me.
8. I spent many hours researching WWII Naval history, and probably will keep a strong loyalty to the Navy from here forward. I kind of bonded with my dad talking about all my research and hearing about his take on the Navy from his experiences in Vietnam.
9. I learned how stubborn Cocker Spaniels can be when housebreaking.
10. Michelle and I took our dad to Kemah to go sailing for a weekend for his 57th birthday. It was a really great trip that I'll never forget.
11. I took up ballroom dancing.
12. I went berry picking for the first time ever. I had more blueberries and blackberries than I knew what to do with.
Firsts of Fall
13. I fell for John Ross VI and his big heart.
14. I took a month of lessons to learn the Foxtrot and loved it!
15. I learned to ride a four-wheeler for the first time, hit a tree, fell off, and jumped back on, barely missing the creek bank.
16. I went to NYC for the first time to visit Kacy. We had some great times shopping for her baby, eating pastries and pizza in Little Italy, having brunch at a teahouse, visiting the met, and hearing the crow of a rooster all hours of the day somewhere below her 12th floor walkup.
17. I decorated my first tree of my own an entire month early out of excitement.
18. Dad passed away from his cancer the night after Thanksgiving (In fact, one month from my birthday.) Everyday I remember things about him that were really special, and I feel so lucky to have had such a close relationship with him.
Six fun holiday moments
19. Mom squashed a bug in the garage with a phonebook. Please note that the bug was outside, and she still squashed it.
20. I caught Sophie licking the magenta colored paint off of the sewing cabinet I had been working on all day for Michelle's Christmas present.
21. Mom gave me a butcher knife in my stocking. I'm not sure what she's trying to tell me.
22. On Christmas Eve I had curry at the Ross house. To abate the spiciness you add sliced bananas on top. It reminded me of Malaysia and was surprisingly good.
23. Also at that same gathering, a gaggle of Ross family members gathered around me to watch (only) me open presents. It was a weird but touching moment.
24. I made a gingerbread house for the first time! John and I make great food architects, however his sister Catherine had something of a "house built on the sand" effect. Her walls fell in and the roof slid off in less than five minutes. It was festive in the sense that it looked like an icing avalanche demolished her little house.
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| Mall Madness A self-reflecting quip on the oddities that fill my life.
The local mall never ceases to provide an adventure of some sort, or at the very least a leisurely mishap. This past week John and I went on a last minute double date--in fact I think we invited ourselves on another couple's date--to dinner and a movie. Somewhere between said dinner and movie, we found ourselves with a huge cushion of time. And what better place to go to whittle away a chunk of time than the teen-infested Mall?
Of course the men of the bunch steered us into Sears. I must admit, using Sears as a portal to the rest of the mall was new for me. I usually aim for Dillard's because it is central and sells pretty much everything I go to the mall to buy. The same is not true for my boyfriend John. Dillard's has no tools...or much of anything that's shiny and functional.
On our way through Sears we paused to take a picture of some manly gadget with John's new phone (another manly gadget in itself). A sales girl paused to talk to us because I guess we were having too much fun not to buy something. In salesperson's mind, enthusiasm by one or both parties must mean a sale. The conversation with the Sears Sales Girl turned to John's phone--which I'm starting to think has a magnet embedded in it. As it turned out Sears Sales Girl used to have the same phone. John lamented the fact that he did not have a charger for his new toy. The conversation ended with Sears Sales Girl handing her phone number to John so he could "call her sometime" and get her old charger for free.
That was the day my boyfriend shamelessly got another girl's number in my presence. It was another one of those moments in my life where a little voice inside my head says, "I'm surprised you're not surprised by this moment." | | |
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