An Anniversary

Tomorrow will be the six-year anniversary of my marriage to Stephen. As corny as it might sound, he is the best thing that has ever happened to me. In the 8+ years we've been together, both before and after our wedding, we've been through a great deal of trials and God has somehow always pulled us through, not worse for the wear but stronger and happier and more complete. Of all the gifts I have been given in life, he is by far the best. We argue and have our bad days, like any couple, but I believe with every piece of me that he is the other half of my soul.

In celebration of our anniversary, we normally take a trip to Ann Arbor for an extended weekend, as we got married over Labor Day weekend. This year we didn't have the funds for the mini-vacation, so instead we're doing a one-day trip and taking the kids with us this year so they can experience the Michigan Campus and we can spend the day as a family. Hopefully, no one will kill anyone else during the 2.5 hours there and back in the car...

I've finished a couple of books in the last few days. The first was a novella by Stephen King, "Stationary Bike", which I checked out on audio book earlier in the week from the library. It was pretty good, actually. I'm enjoying his shorter works lately. The narrator was quite good, and I was digging the story. It's about an overweight guy about to enter his forties, and the doctor says he needs to get his cholesterol down, so he gets a stationary bike and starts working at it each day. He becomes somewhat obsessive -- he's also a painter, and he paints something to go along with this and puts it in front of him -- then it becomes a dream, then a waking nightmare.

The next book, which I just finished a few minutes ago, was "Never Say Diet" by Chantel Hobbs. It started off well, basically explaining how diets never work because people tend to fall off the wagon and not get back on, so you have to change your brain and reprogram yourself to desire healthy options, stop looking at food as a reward system or as entertainment and see it instead as fuel, etc. The woman has lost somewhere around 200 pounds, and looks absolutely fantastic. The last third of the book was a lot of mumbo-jumbo (who uses that phrase anymore!?) delineating which exercises affected which parts of your body, but it hadn't previously gone into any explanation of what these parts of your body were or did, or anything. Granted, I know quite a bit about weight loss and the internal workings of musculature and such, but anyone unfamiliar with these things would've tossed the book right out the window and given up. It's meant to be read over 16 weeks while you're doing all of the work to keep up with the program, but I wasn't about to do that. Reading 100 books this year is quite enough challenge for me, thank you. If I wanna strengthen my core, I'll buy one of those big bouncy balls and do it, but I'm not going to take 16 weeks to read this book! Here's the kicker: right near the end of the book, she mentioned how "we should all be happy with the body that God gave us, but God did not intend for her to balloon up to 350 lbs...." so after all the weight loss, she had some plastic surgery to fix the problems that were left over. And the plastic surgery she had to fix things? No, not a tummy tuck. No, not body sculpting to get rid of the excess skin... she had a breast augmentation. Any credibility she might have gained with me, she lost in that particular sentence. Glad I didn't waste 16 weeks reading it, then I would've been REALLY angry when I read that. I'm not saying she doesn't have the right to a boob job, just don't call it something it's not and don't preface it with the whole "... should be happy with the body God gave us..." thing. Please.

We had a pretty good day today! Slept in until about 10:45, then got caught up on all kinds of reading and devotional studies, did a load of laundry, took a short nap, the parents stopped over on their way back from picking up a cabinet in Middlebury and Savannah hung out with us a little bit while they went to the archery shop in Shipshewana. Then they went home and we went over to Galen and Linda's down the street to watch the Michigan-UConn game and the ND-Purdue game simultaneously on their ridiculously large televisions. Ahhh, bliss! I love college football. And I'm glad both UM and ND won, because it makes next week's game that much more exciting! We ate prime rib, and I made some roasted redskin potatoes with cheddar and bleu cheese while I was there. Some goddess named Cindy made a fantastic chocolate cake of happiness, and I was very close to smuggling the rest of it out of the house in my belly, but I thought perhaps I would never be invited back if I did so. Then this evening, I played Boggle and some other random made-up word games with Aria and read some more.

And now it's time to say goodnight. I'm meeting my friend Danny at some point tomorrow and getting a laptop! Hooray! (That's for both Danny and the laptop...) and I can't WAIT to see if we can get into the stadium so that I can make the kids run it! Zzzzz...

GO BLUE!

SJS