Sometimes all you can do is pray.

My uncle Gordon passed away this morning. It was a freak thing. If what I've been told is true, he was playing racquetball and suffered a massive heart attack and died right there. So here I sit with my heart in my hand, watching it wimper out the beats. Sometimes when I look at it and it is so sad I wonder if it will ever be all the way happy again. Gordon was so young. They just met their first grandbaby a few weeks ago. His wife Rosemary is one of the world's perfect people. She is fun, sweet, knowledgeable, generous and good. She has tremendous faith and I know she can get through this but at the same time I think, "just because she can, doesn't mean she should have to!" She shouldn't have to. My heart is broken for her. My heart aches for their kids who will now wish every day for a dad to be able to hold their babies and watch them grow. It is too sad. I love you guys so much.

I am far away and of no use. I hope to get on a plane and at least be able to hug people soon. Until then, all I can do is pray. I hope my prayers are little threads in that blanket of peace that they will be using. Keep them in your prayers, too.

come on baby wreck my fire

A gas fireplace is something of a marvel. It is so much more complex than it appears. At the bottom, there is a layer of fine sand. Then there is a mix of insulation/lint-type stuff with a smattering of what looks like fool's gold. Then there are various shapes and sizes of black lava rock. When it's all put together, it looks very realistic. The lint lights up like hot coals. The fool's gold glitters and shines. When it is all taken apart and strewn all over your living room, it doesn't have the same effect. I would have never known the trouble someone went through to make my fire look so darn great. Thank you, Preslie. Thank you for helping me to not take that for granted again. And thank you Camryn for spending a couple hours with me cleaning it up. Camryn said, "I think this is one of my talents! Picking out tiny rocks. It's like my running talent. Anybody can run, but I can run faster. Anybody can pick up little rocks, but I'm probably the fastest." Let her never hide that one under a bushel.

She is a fast runner. We found that out when we did our Rock Springs Park 5k (our third year!!) this weekend and Camryn stayed by my side the entire time. She was talking and laughing and I was huffing and crying. She took second place in the the 15 and under girls. (I also took silver, but there were few runners in my division.) It is a fun tradition. I can't believe my kids love doing it so much. I have never been an athlete (I'm still not) and I would not have enjoyed a run when I was young, much less paid my own way for the opportunity. Sienna was only a couple minutes behind us. She won a $25 gift certificate to a running store. I'll take that, thank you very much. I have about six weeks until my first (and only ) half-marathon. I am not ready at all and feeling like I shouldn't have ever signed up. I thought at the time,"I have five months to train. I can do it. It'll be a great way to once again tell cancer to stick it." Too bad in September I couldn't run much due to that radiation garbage. I'm still not back to where I was in the beginning of August and I have only ever jogged 7.3 miles. Will I be able to do thirteen by December? Any tips for me? Should I fake an injury? What kind of injury? Should it happen now or should I wait until I am there and have eaten the delicious pasta dinner? What kind of injury would get me out of the race but not out of the massage? There are no books with these kind of answers.

Ahhh, I feel justified

Left-justified, that is. I couldn't bear the sight of my centered-text site. That's why I haven't been around. It's not like I haven't been on the web, remember I've been to the end of the internet. I just have issues with the fact that I'm a designer and yet I haven't "designed" my own blog. I don't know how. There. I said it. I'm getting old in my field. I am a print designer and print is dying. I'm getting help, though. Not for my dying media, but for my blog. It will be a masterpiece. And I'll shout out my front door,"HEY ELDER UCHTDORF! LOOK WHAT I CREATED!!!"

(Today I ripped out all the dead stems out of my hostas and made a four foot tall ghost out of them. It is scary - but not in a Halloween way. I didn't even whisper to Elder U about that one.)

So while I haven't been on my blog, I have been ghost-writing a couple others as well as hitting "next blog" a few times just to see what the bloggods wanted me to see. I saw a blog about a guy in Argentina who has never been cared about and who was plotting his revenge. The Care Bear inside me forced me to write a comment about how I cared about him and maybe he could forgive and puppies and butterflies and hearts ... luckily, in the nick of time (what does that mean?) my inner-scrooge had concocted an entire scenario for me in which a bitter Argentinian followed my comment back to my left-justified blog and found a way to add me to his list. So I didn't post it. The next blog I saw was kept by a Japanese girl. She put "LOL" in between words, after all sentences and pretty much anywhere there was text. My first thought was that she didn't know what that TLA (three-letter acronym) meant only that it was "American" and maybe on her Hannah Montana notebook. Upon further investigation I noted the site was covered in pictures of the Jonas Brothers and using my time in Japan as a guide, she probably was LOLing the whole time - even if it was more like a tiny giggle with her hand over her mouth. That made me LOL in a similar fashion.

These girls look like they are on their way to Creative Escape 09.

It's because a favorite blog i read begins each entry with "it's because"...

Sometimes I get feeling guilty when I haven't written in a while. I get feeling sad when I don't have new comments to look forward to. But what can I do? My life can be pretty boring and that is good. Drama = yucky most of the time. I did get a ticket a couple weeks ago but I didn't have some cheeky way of getting out of it. I just agreed with the guy. I was speeding. I'll probably do it again. I didn't learn any great lesson. It was an unblogworthy ticket.

Hooray for October. It's almost Halloween. What's not to love? Halloween is the perfect holiday. You can do as little or as much as you want. No guilt. If you want to make yourself into a clothes dryer with a window so people can see the clothes moving around - GREAT! (Although hypothetically speaking, you'll only want to carry that giant box around for about a block and a half. You'll eventually go home and put on an old cheerleading costume to increase your aerodynamics and candy-getting ablilities.) If you'd rather put a "Hi my name is___" sticker on and write a name that is not your own - ALSO GREAT. And there's candy. You take your kids to strangers' houses, force them to tell you how cute they are and then they give you candy for your troubles.  I cannot get enough candy or kid-compliments. Hip! Hip! 

So far only Jaymeson knows for sure what he wants to be. He has been growing a bushy thick mustachio for some time now. Mason thinks he probably wants to be a pirate. I asked him why and he said,"they get to wipe the floors and clean the boat." Seriously. What is up with him? I told he could go as a maid. They get to clean everything all day long. "They don't get swords, though." When he's right, he's right. Right?

Then this is the part where I talk about conference. Ours didn't come through on tv and we had to go to the church. I loved it much but missed the jammies and the food and the nail-painting and the sending the kids to another room when they get obnoxious. (Did you know conference is a podcast? Sweet.) I think overall my impression was, "BUCKLE UP!" I think we have some tough roads ahead and that we will need hope and faith to get us through. I have been on food storage patrol ever since we moved into this house. It's tricky. Wheat berries don't look like berries at all! I think our friend Bruce Tieman had it right when he said,"I'm just going to get a bunch of Peanut M&Ms. People will get to a point where they'll trade anything for peanut m&ms." I have a large supply if you guys decide you're sick of wheat berries. We caught some fish our of our petite lake on saturday. I figure there's probably a thousand in there and they count towards our year-supply. Along with our 5 deer and one rockchuck. I sold my couches on craig's list and bought a wheat grinder. What I really want is a rug, but I'm sure if we were hungry a big, soft rug would bring little comfort. You can't eat a rug. You can't eat a kitchen table. You can't eat all the things I want for this house. That's why I gotta get that stuff first. I hate being disciplined. Isn't that the hardest part of life? (typed shelby while shoving gummy bears into her face)