The Rough Stuff

I just found out that a very good family friend of ours lost his job today. The family is feeling very overwhelmed and uncertain at this point. I just got off the phone with my sister after discussing the situation. Unfortunately, they have no back-up plan. Our friend never went to college, despite at one point having a full-ride scholarship, and neither did his wife. He has been working at the same job as a foreman for the last 20 years and was fired for lack of computer skills. He has nothing to fall back on and is, understandably, concerned about what lies ahead. His wife has been a stay-at-home mom their whole marriage but now plans to go try to find some work. But here's the problem: she has no education and no marketable skills. She doesn't even type or know how to open a document on a computer. These are both extremely giving, wonderful people and my heart aches for them right now and I wish there was something I could do but I'm not sure what. Any ideas?

This makes me suddenly extremely grateful that I had the opportunity to get a good education and that I've been taught to never stop learning. I'm grateful that my husband has a very stable job right now and even if he were to lose it, he has several things to fall back on. The feeling of security I get from this gives me great comfort. And I am grateful that I, as well as my friend, have the love and support of a Heavenly Father who does a very good job of getting us through the rough stuff.

Please include this family in your prayers as they absolutely could use the comfort and support of that right now.

Remembering

So since August of 2004 I have been keeping my journal on my laptop. It all started when I moved to NYC for graduate school. So now 4 years later I finally decided it might be a good idea to print it in case my computer ever crashes. Then at least I've salvaged something right? I printed it out and have been putting it in plastic sheet protectors and having been enjoying the memories that have come flooding back. I found a couple entries that I wanted to share:

5/5/05
There was construction where I normally walk so I crossed the street. I approached the house from the other side. It was remarkable how different the scene was from just the other side of the street. I arrived at work just the same, walked up the same gray steps to go into my same office but the journey had been very different. There was a small tree just beginning to bloom with white blossoms. It was situated near a delicate wooden fence that had been scraped free of it’s once pale blue paint. It felt like a foreign neighborhood and I mused over the simplicity of ‘just the other side of the street.’ I, of course, immediately had to draw the obvious parallels of this experience to that of real life. When a problem is looming, when it seems that it is immense with no sign of dissipating, how different might it look if we just cross the street, if it is simply looked at from a new angle, a new perspective?

6/7/05
Have you ever had one of those experiences where, for a brief second, it seems as if the stars align and everything connects and you realize you’re standing in a moment of perfection? I had one of those tonight. I had just come off the subway, experiencing a mini-high after being able to give up my seat to an elderly woman. I was walking down the street and looked up and it suddenly hit me. The block was lined with trees. The streetlamps were glowing dimly, creating a hazy fog of light. The temperature outside was at that level that makes you feel like Baby Bear’s porridge…not too hot, not too cold but just right with a breeze blowing ever so slightly to rustle the leaves. And the moment I took two more steps, it was gone. But while it was there, and I was standing in it, it was magnificent.

When I read these again tonight they just made me ponder and think a little so I thought I'd share.

All those hotties

So, I have a fairly technology-literate grandmother who has been emailing me back and forth for the past eight years or so. I recently decided it would be cool to print out all the emails back and forth between her and I and get them made into a book here or at another one of these type of sites. I thought it would be a cool thing to have when she's not around anymore for my kids to be able to read and feel like they knew her a little bit since she is pretty amazing as I've previously pointed out.

Well when I was checking very very old email accounts to try to find all the emails, I came across one that had emails between my high school best friend and I from..........................1998! Isn't that crazy? I read one to my husband where she said something like "So that awards thing I had to go to tonight was fine I guess. There were a LOT of hotties there!" His response was "Nobody talks like that." Well, 18 year old high school girls do, I promise. I was laughing so hard reading through them that I had to call her. I don't talk to her as often as I should, probably only 4 times a year but I called her last night, even though it was 10 pm at her house and we giggled for over an hour at the silly things we had written and the memories they brought flooding back. It was one of the most fun hours I've had in awhile. And afterward I was thinking, it has probably been 4 months at least since the last time I talked to her on the phone and yet it was so easy when she picked up the phone for me to say "Hey, what are you doing? I'm about to pee my pants over some emails we wrote" without any how are you doing, what have you been up to, etc. (For the record, she couldn't believe that we even had email back in 1998!) That's the beauty of "old friends" as one of my favorite bloggers mentioned in a post a few days ago. (Go ahead and go read it, you'll agree)

I've long noticed that the good friends I've had in high school have something different than any other friends I've met along the way. Somehow time never seems to pass with these friends. Even if it was two years ago that you last talked to them, you can call them up and it feels like it was yesterday. And I swear they love you more, because they thought you were cool even back when you were the typical overly self-conscious high school girl, who wore a bit too much makeup to cover those acne breakouts, and said and did much sillier crazier stupider (is that even a word) things than you do now. So even though I don't keep in touch as well as she deserves (see above), it's sure nice to know that when I do, things haven't really changed that much. I mean sure, we both have husbands now, different jobs, a few kids under our belt (okay her two, me one) but at the end of the day, we still laugh at the same stuff. You know, like all the hotties that were there!