California for Stefani

Well, it’s Saturday and tomorrow is Halloween.  I have always loved Halloween… i like the dressing up (as a kid) and love all the candy.  As I got older I loved the fact you could get Halloween lights and now our house is fully decorated for the season.  I tend to stick to the mellow parts… pumpkins, Casper type ghosts and the occasional bat.  I am not a fan of the scary parts of Halloween, so I stay away from that.   As a Christian, I have never had a problem with this day and with trick or treating.  Why can’t we make the day what we want to make it?  I think Christians tend to take things too seriously.  Call it Harvest day, or whatever you want, but it’s still Halloween in my eyes.   I did put up my first winter lights… they are LED Snowmen, so they aren’t Christmas lights… they are winter lights.

We just got back from a great weekend with my parents.  We went to 6 wineries in Yakima, Washington.  I gave a list of various ones to Doug and told him to figure out which ones he wanted to do, and I would be the designated driver.  We wanted to take the Mustang, but 4 adults and many bottles of wine just didn’t make sense, so we took my parents Aerostar.  It was a good drive, but I missed my car.  Thankfully the Aerostar does pretty good on the hills, so that was much better than the Tercel we used to have LOL.  We stayed at a Best Western in Yakima and shared hotel room.  We always manage pretty good in that regards.  Nobody snores or farts too much HA HA HA!!  Between the 4 of us, we brought back 11 bottles of wine.  Thankfully the border guard was ok with that.  Oh wait… he was only told about 8 of them {giggle}.  We even did a winery tour of Kestrel Vintners… we were supposed to pay $25/person for the VIP treatment, but he waived the fee if we bought some wine.  

So we have driven with the top down a bit in the last week.  The weather has been cold, but if it isn’t raining we tend to drive around.  We have scarves, toques and jackets in the back of the car to keep us warm.  Too bad we don’t have heated seats, but beggars can’t be choosers… so we live without heated seats LOL.  It is amazing how often we look at our car and just grin.  This piece of metal with a vinyl roof makes us so very happy.  It actually brings us a little piece in our fairly unpeaceful (emotional) life…. which segues (spelt correctly) into some of my thoughts these days.

We still feel a little unsettled.  We love where we live and we love living so close to my parents… but sometimes we just feel so unsettled.  We booked our flights to LA for April and are very excited to be going back to California.  We love it there, but I think it is a matter of the grass being greener in another country (HA HA HA).   We have to learn to like it here because what if this is where we will be for a long time?  Thankfully White Rock is as close to California as we can get without moving out of Canada.  We can just say we are on our way!!

The root of our issues though needs to be dealt with… why do we feel so unsettled in such a beautiful city and with such a decent life?  I probably know the reason, but it probably is best to not get too much into it on a public forum.  I just have to get over our disappointments in people and move forward.  I was looking through my photo albums and that didn’t make it any better.  So many pictures of great parties we used to have… and none of those people are friends any more (except for my amazing parents).   I can’t even look at those pictures because it doesn’t bring me good memories, but all the sad reasons they are gone out of our lives.   Some reasons are because of church ( we aren’t Christian enough I guess), some reasons are because we weren’t the mover’s and shakers of the church and so being friends with us wasn’t good enough anymore (and yes, this is not a perception, but reality) and some are because our views on life didn’t mesh with theirs, and so “agreeing to disagree” wasn’t an option.  Of course some aren’t friends because people change (ourselves included) and you don’t have things in common anymore. 

How does one get over these disappointments when they stare you in the face every day?  Moving to Mexico was going to be a new start in life… with a clean slate on the “friendship” blackboard… now that board is only partially erased and we need to rewrite it instead of starting over.  I want to start over… live in a new place… make new memories… meet new people… people with no preconceived ideas of who we are, etc.  But that isn’t an option right now… so what do we do?  We hold our head high, forget the past, look to the future and rely on God to light our path into the unknown.   (This rambling is not any reflection of how wonderful my parents are as friends though).

On another note… for those out there who forget to take their marriages seriously… please make sure you take time for yourselves.  It’s one of the reasons we do these weekend things and just do stuff… we change up the routine so that life doesn’t get mundane.   Drive a different way to work (or back home) to see the world differently.  Do things spontaneously… get out there and enjoy life together.  Marriage is serious stuff and it takes work.   Your partner should be your best friend and best friends should get out and have fun.  Doug and I still fight even on our road trips (just ask Doug about Googling Target), but we work it out and plan the next one.  We need to mix it up to stop the routine getting us down.  We take our marriage seriously and want to make it work (helps that we both want the same thing).  I can’t believe it’s been 22 1/2 years already.  Sure glad I have Doug to enjoy life with.  Here is to many many more.

Less than 2 months until Christmas… YIPEEE (my favourite time of year)

Time for a little lighter blog.  I will try to not get to serious in this one, but I may slip every so often.  I figured I would make note of a few things that make me fun and not so normal (what is normal anyway).

  1.  I carry around a stuffed Mickey Mouse that I got in fall of 2005 when we visited Disneyland with my parents (yes I took my parents to their first trip to Disneyland).  Mickey Mouse travels with me everywhere.  He is like the traveling gnome from Travelocity.  I take pictures of him in every major photo stop that we go to.   He also sits in the back seat of our Mustang strapped in with the seatbelt (so he doesn’t fly out when driving with the top down).  I decided to even start a facebook page for him (oops… he started it himself, but I am just helping LOL).  It’s kinda fun to have him travel with us.  We get questions all the time, but everyone seems to like the idea and thinks it’s fun. 

2.  My hair is bright red… at least it is most of the time.  I love going as bright red as possible.   It helps me feel a little more fun and I feel less dull with it.  I used to have long, curly hair, but when Doug had his stroke, I decided I needed a change… so I cut my hair.  Soon my hair was really short and then one day I decided to get blond streaks.  I did the blond thing for awhile, and started dabbling with the reds and finally found a way to get it nice and bright red. 

3.  I hate silver… it seems so “normal” and dull.  So when we got our Mustang and found out it was silver (our Escape was silver too)… we quickly decided that it needed to be changed.  Of course I couldn’t change the colour, but we added some “touches of us” to it.  We put a strip down the car and put the word Mustang on either side of the car.  It cost us a little bit of money, but it was worth it to make the car seem less “common”.  I also hate “common” LOL

4.  I love the “dorm room” look in our place… or at least that is what I was told our place looked like by an old friend (not a friend anymore), so I hope it wasn’t an insult about our place.  I hate blank spaces on my wall and try to fill it up with many things.  Our bedroom even has a Disney theme to it… I love all things Disney and I think that makes me feel young and happy.  I tend to lean more to Mickey Mouse, but I do love Disney as a whole. 

5.  I love lights… lots and lots of lights.  Halloween lights, Christmas lights or any other kind of lights.  Currently my Halloween lights are up, but soon the Christmas lights will go up.  I think it just makes me feel bright and shiny (happy, shiny people??? LOL).  There is something about coloured lights that just make me happy.  I also love all the comments I get from people about all my lights.  Maybe one day an airplane will mistake our place for a landing strip and we will have a plane land in our back yard LOL

6.  I LOVE LOVE LOVE to travel.  Not sure if that makes me specifically fun… but it’s a part of who I am. 

7.  I love driving down the road with the convertible top down… and for no reason at all, just throw up my hands and yell YIPEE!!  What a feeling it is to drive with the wind in the your hair and the ability to put up your arms and the top of the car isn’t there… it’s so freeing.

8.  I love it when we (both Doug and I) totally mess with peoples perception of us.  I think when people first meet us, they think we are a certain type of person, and soon find that we are not like that.  I love the looks on people’s faces when I say something that they don’t expect… yup… that is a lot of fun.

Well, we are back from our vacation. What a great time we had. Here was our itinerary…

Seattle – 1 night

DisneyWorld – 3 nights

Carnival Dream Cruise – 7 night Western Caribbean, ports including Cozumel, Roatan, Belize & Costa Maya

Florida – 4 nights – sights including Kennedy Space Center

Seattle – 1 night

What a great vacation and now we are back home to regular life. I don’t mind that too much because it gives us the opportunity to save up for our next vacation.

We have been struggling with coming back home to the pains of being here. We are trying to figure out how to deal with that. Doug posted on his blog kinda how we feel about it all, and so I won’t try to go over it again. Doug's Blog

Something I thought of today though, and I am going to try to explain it. It all started with reading a blog of a friend of mine who quoted a verse from the Book of Alma… well… I know my Bible a little, and I know there is no such book in the “regular” Bible, so I asked her were it came from and she told me it was from the Book of Mormon. She told me they use this book as a companion to the Bible. That made me think… and so we chatted about it with my parents for awhile and then started to do a bit of research about it. Doug gave us a quick history lesson of what he found out and then we left it alone until our drive home from my parents.

I was having some issues with believing some of how it came about, but then I thought about it a bit more and realized… what does it matter? Does it change my relationship with Jesus on if someone else believes that there are other books written about Jesus? Not a chance! And who am I to say it is true or not? It doesn’t change my Christian views, so why should I worry about it or even put any thought to it? What I see as the “regular” Bible is just a piece of our Christian heritage, and who knows what else is missing from what we were taught. Even the Bible can be interpreted differently and if you don’t believe that, look around and see all the religions that have stemmed from different versions of our “regular” Bible.

Now you ask… why am I mentioning this? Well because the above belief will probably get me in a lot of trouble in the “regular” church who believe solely in the “regular” Bible and have no flexibility in what else is out there. How do we survive in that type of structure? I don’t think we can because in the end someone will always want us to change to their way of thinking and I have no desire for that. I want to have an open mind to all that is out there and the various versions of what a relationship will look like with our Saviour, Jesus Christ. I want my relationship with Jesus to be built on my faith and not what others tell me it should look like. He is excepting of everyone, and so I have to follow that same rule of thinking. So unless church has changed in the last little while, I don’t think we will fit in much. So… what do we do about this? How do we go about surviving here in White Rock with all the bad memories of friends past? How do we go about making new friends that believe in Jesus Christ and not have to succumb to the “regular” church way of thinking? Well… I think we need to have a bit of change of heart… stop looking at what isn’t to be (Mexico) and look at what might be… where do we find this? I was thinking that Doug and I need to find our hearts desire… what makes us tick? Is there an area that we feel God is leading us? If we stay in our cave and hide away from people, we will never show the love of God to people. How do we go about showing what God is all about to the people in our community? How do we show how loving God/Jesus is to everyone, from all walks of life? It won’t be by staying locked up in our house and it won’t be by being pissed off in church all the time… so where do we go? We need to focus on where this might be… no matter how small it is. Do we volunteer somewhere in something that we have a heart for? I know for now it isn’t in church because so far all church has been is a place where they want the members to all think the same. So we need to look outside the box (or church) and find it somewhere. We need people around us… people of all walks of life… we must be needed somewhere… we need to find that place and ask God to guide us in the right direction.

We need to forget about the past and work on the present and future…we need to see where Jesus wants us because he isn’t going to give us this interesting view of thinking and then hide us away in our little condo in White Rock. I am very curious to see where he will guide us, too, because I want to be open to where He thinks we should be. I think it will be small though, because we seem to be good at the little things. I want to look towards this and see what areas we are good at. Maybe work with seniors? Maybe with kids? Homeless people? Single parents? Cooking for others? Teaching computers? Teaching English? Doing some bookkeeping? Playing guitar (that is Doug)… who knows… we have some talent… wonder if they can be used to show how wonderful God/Jesus is and what a great friend he is. I love him with all my heart and I want the world to know that he is amazing and loves everyone no matter what.