i got the Nintendo from my parents house a couple weeks ago, and i finally had time to open it up and clean it (since it wasn’t working when i brought it home).  when it worked i was SO excited!!! you know when you put in the game and cross your fingers… and then WHOA! so while all my friends are buying iPhones, i am playing the original Nintendo. but hey, this is cutting edge gaming.

it’s really amazing that we have the original 3-in-1 game complete with the gun and “power pad” that all still works. (although Julie swears up and down the blue pads are broken when she loses!)

a tip i learned…

if you have an old school Nintendo and all you are getting is the pink screen of death just wipe the game out with contact solution on a q-tip… works wonders.

pics:

tube:

Mario Brothers
Duck Hunt
Power Pad Action

Who would have thought that I could be so overjoyed about saving 5 cents? I am going to treat myself to an ice cream!

Gas prices went from 3.99 a gallon yesterday to today being 3.94 a gallon. Does this mean there is light at the end of the tunnel does this mean things are going to turn around or is this just some fluke and when I wake up tomorrow it’ll be 4.15 a gallon to make up for the loss of today’s lower prices. I hope that gas only goes down.

talking about budgeting and ways to save money. Jesse and I are also doing the debt snowball thing and we were doing so good only to find out that our American Express card upped our minimum payment I guess because the rules have changed we actually have to start paying off more principal then interest which is great, however why then would you up my min payment by 21 dollars (which is a lot when you have a strict budget envelop system) why don’t you LOWER your interest and you take fall and quit making billions of dollars a year so that us common lower then lower class people can survive normally. okay that was a vent i am not sure if i am more mad at the credit cards companies or myself for falling into their debt trap oh so stupid of us!!!

anyway gas is going down this is a time to celebrate…

saw the eye doctor
and i got contacts today.
first time since college.

very expensive.
i blame it on gas prices.
the light hurts my eyes.

it’s a recipe for disaster. but in a stunning display of superior guardianship… i did not die

here are some tips i gleaned from the experience:

1. set simple rules and clear consequences.
(that way when they scoff at your rules, at least you can look back on a moment when you were convinced of your in-charge-ness)

2. play dress up.

3. feed them.

4. you can always lock yourself in the garage and hum with your fingers plugging your ears.
(not that i actually did that. but it seemed like a practical solution)

………..and you find out your not

I’ve been doing pretty good about the miscarriage until recently, jesse and I went out on a date to Chilli’s, which doesn’t happen much when we do go out we go to Olive Garden or Pinnacle Peak because that’s my two all time favorite places to eat. Well this time at Chilli’s we happened to run into my former MOPS group they were there saying good bye to one of the ladies and there were 6 pregnant women all of which I knew. One was due a week after me and we were all talking having a good time and as more and more of the women arrived with their fat bellies, due date stories, and nice maternity clothes I had to leave and say “Jesse and I are going to go wait out inside”

we finally got to our table and I felt so sad tears in my eyes because I felt so left out and disappointed that I was not going to be having a baby in a few months. Maybe I am just pretending to get over it, but inside it still kind of hurts. Last night I ran into new mom (also in my MOPS group) and she had her 7 week old little boy and I haven’t gotten to see her since my mis carriage news so she was telling me how sorry she was and then I had to look away and fight tears as I was looking at her new baby.

After that Jesse and I talked about it for a whole hour as we drove from Tucson back to our new home in Sierra Vista, each time I talk about i feel better and writing about always seems to help too so that’s why I am blogging. I know that God worked it out but the hurt and disappointment is still there.

i think i found my new favorite coffee house. coffee from heaven. a perfect example of good christian marketing. the best part is, they serve Starbucks©.

yep. that’s David sitting on the couch typing away on a laptop.
i have no idea where he gets it from.

notes on flickr

today i spent much needed “down” time on the net.

down time is wasted time really, adding freinds to facebook. write a tweet. making a youtube video of my latest screen saver. search for people on the dreaded myspace (to no avail!). read up on my feeds, organized my bookmarks, and played with a new freeware app for my mac called “butler”.

Butler was the highlight of my evening. i found myself laughing becasue it was so functional. a tool that actually makes things easier… amazing.

one of the other things i did was begin the long process of manually migrating all our old posts from blogger to wordpress. there is probably a faster way to do it, but i have enjoyed reading our old posts…. from 2004… whoa. and that’s when i switched to blogger from freewebs where i had wrote all my posts in html (anyone remember julieandjesse.happy-couple.com in 2003?)

it is interesting to go back and read the struggles we had 3 and 4 years ago. for instance Julie wrote a post in 2005 entitled “Life is Hard” where she said

Ever since our move to Tucson, my whole spiritual life has been challenged and it seems like the easiest thing to do is just give up. [ … ]where is God???

we have come so far, and grown up so much. we posted some of the craziest stuff. some pretty embarrassing even.

so here’s to realizing we have had a website and blog for over 4 years now. let’s hope we learn how to use it someday.

» the happy couple in 9/1/03
* special thanks to The Way Back Machine for keeping an archive of the internet since 1996 or something like that.

these last two days have been a flash back to bible college for me. Glen Elliott, the lead pastor at Pantano Christian Church, is teaching an “Overview of the Bible” class and i have the opportunity of directing the taping and production of the videos of the teaching. I have filmed classes like this 3 times now since being hired as the media coordinator, and each time my respect for the church leaders grows so much, i feel more privileged to have access to the teaching, and i learn more about the technical aspects of video taping something like this.

this class will be the first that is available in HD, thanks to Phil and the new camera!

I will have an update on this in the future with a link to the teaching online.
interactive notes on picture with flickr… 

I had a great mothers day. Natalie got me a picnic basket filled with goodies that daddy promised she picked out all by herself and I have to believe him. She got me everything I needed to make smores, place mats, and little carrying dishes for the food.

Then Jesse and I got to spend all day Saturday together which hasn’t happened in forever!! We saw the movie “what happens in vegas” i liked it I thought it was funny. Not very crude it made me laugh and I haven’t laughed in a long time.

I thought I’d be really down because of the miscarriage and people asking me about and how I felt but as time is going by the pain is residing and the emotions are getting better to handle. I realize that God did such a great thing by this miscarriage. From the very beginning of this pregancy I have not felt good, both my other pregnancies I was never sick, and so happy I loved being pregnant no matter how “fat” i got. But since we found out about this I was sick, nausea all the time no matter how much I ate, I was so tired, I couldn’t do anything, it just did not feel right and I was pretty stressed out. I think that God knew I could not handle this right now. I know it might sound morbid to think this way but I think God answered a prayer that was not directly spoken.

Don’t get me wrong I would have loved to have another baby I love my kids SO much I would have sacrificed whatever I had to for this baby no matter how sick I got but I think God saw that I just could not handle it. It’s a blessing in disguise and in all honestly the whole experience was much worse then the miscarriage.

I still think every once in a while about how I wish i could have done something different to prevent this from happening. Not working, ate better, took my vitamins, relaxed more, didn’t yell so much, but in all I learn that no matter how hard I try I can’t be in control of every situation in my life. I can never hold the outcome in my hands I can only strive to do my best and God does the rest knowing what is best.

During this whole thing Romans 8:28 came to mind because Andrew Hodges quoted this verse SO often so it helped me get through this ordeal.

Jesse and I are moving on and pressing forward and letting God control the future whatever that may be