Ignorant Historian

I know the chances of someone reading this today are slim, but I had to post today. No, I’m not taking away time from my family to do this. Really, blogging isn’t a big deal compared to God and family, is it?

That’s exactly the theme of this post, my 500th post. Yes, my 500th post falls exactly on Christmas. When I first realized it would fall on this day back in November, I tried to figure out whether or not I’d want my 500th post to fall before or after Christmas. Did I need to squeeze in some extra posts? Did I need to hold up on some of those busy, busy days and not post at all?

Then I realized something: the only reason why I wanted my 500th post to fall on a different day was because I wanted it to be all about me. I wanted your praise, congratulations, and exclamations.

Once I realized my less-than-pure motives, I knew what I had to do. I had to post exactly as I could plan so that my 500th post would fall on Christmas. This way, I could not make it about me, but could make it about Him, the One whose birth we celebrate.

Christmas isn’t about how many presents I can get or how many peanut clusters and olives I can stuff in my mouth. It’s not particularly about family, though they are important. It’s about Christ. It’s about the God who took on human flesh to walk among us. He certainly didn’t do this because He thought it was fun; He did it because it was the only way to save us from our sins.

God became man, lived a perfect life, took on our sin, and died for you and I that we may be raised from the dead with Him. That’s what today’s about.

Merry Christmas!

My ruby slippers malfunctioned on today’s trip to Kansas, and I’m stuck in Chicago. Reminiscent of last year’s Arkansas/Atlanta detour.

Despite the fact that I’m now booked on a flight Christmas morning, I’m in high spirits. I was able to get a reasonably priced hotel with good service, dinner, football to watch, and Internet to surf. Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading back to O’Hare to try to get on standby on any of tomorrow’s 3 flights. If not, I for sure have a ticket on the first flight on Christmas, in time to celebrate with my family.

And I got flirted with at the hotel. Good times, good times. I’m sure there are more awkward places to flirt, but for someone who is decidedly chaste ’til marriage, I can’t think of one right now. Can you?

Right about this hour, I’m leaving mild North Carolina for wintery Kansas. Brrr! I hope I remembered to pack my gloves and scarf; I tend to forget them.

If you think about it, pray that I’ll make it to my destination, and if they’re delays, for patience.  I’m traveling through O’Hare and it’s supposed to be less than pleasant weather.  Last year I wasn’t expecting to be delayed a day and my bag another 2 days though I was, but this year I am.  Guess I’ll do lots of reading and writing in the airport!

In completely unrelated news, I looked out the window and noticed that there is a pine tree with hundreds of pine cones on it in its highest branches, 40-50 feet off the ground (I’m pre-writing this a week ahead of time). I wonder how bad it would hurt if one of those were to hit you on the head? What about two or three? How many bumps on the head from pine cones traveling 40 feet would it take to knock someone out? How far up the tree would you have to crawl to shake them out?

With those bits of randomness, Merry Christmas! Talk to you on the other side!

To me, it’s important to challenge myself to read. Though I love to read, if I don’t take some time to sit down and balance my reading, I’ll find that I’m reading a whole lot more novels than non-fiction books and that I’m reading a lot of books from the same author. That’s what these quarterly sit-downs are all about for me.

Part of balancing my reading is a reading a book from each of the following categories each month. This works for me. It basically entails me reading 10 pages of each of 5 books each night, though I often read more of at least one of them, usually a novel.

Here are my categories:

Recent novels
Classic novels
Biographies
Spiritual growth/theology
Culture/History/Politics

And here is what I want to read before March 20th, 2009, sorted by category:

Recent novels:
Waiting by Ha Jin
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (hey, it was published in 1957, that’s “recent,” right?)
A couple of other selections from my book club

Classic novels:
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac

Biographies:
A Chance to Die (Amy Carmichael) by Elisabeth Eliot
My Heart is in His Hands (Ann Judson) by Sharon James
Between Two Worlds by Zainab Salbi

Spiritual growth/theology:
The God Who is There by Francis Shaeffer
Radical Womanhood by Carolyn McCulley
Life Together by Deitrich Bonhoeffer

Culture/History/Politics:
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell
Worlds at War by Anthony Pagden

I’m sure my actually-read list will look much different, but this gives me a jumping off point. I just don’t know what my first semester not keeping track of semesters will look like!

It’s funny to me to think that this is the last day of fall. In my mind, fall ended weeks ago. Regardless, this is the last day of the Fall Into Reading challenge on Callapidder Days.

I ended up reading a whole lot more this fall than I expected to. I blew my list out of the water! Specifically, these are the books that I read that were on my challenge list. All the links are to my reviews.

1. East of Eden – John Steinbeck
2. The Mystery of Breathing – Perri Klass
3. Pavilion of Women – Pearl Buck
4. Rush Home Road – Lori Lansens
5. By George – Wesley Stace
6. Booth’s Sister – Jane Singer
7. Lady Susan – Jane Austen
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
9. Dream in Color – Loretta and Linda Sanchez
10. Glass Castle – Jeannette Wells
11. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
12. Running Scared – Ed Welch
13. Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life – Don Whitney
14. Trusting God – Jerry Bridges
15. Greater Than You Think – Thomas D. Williams

There were two books on my list that I did not read:

1. The Observation – Jane Harris – We ended up canceling the discussion of this book this month.
2. They Were Single Too – David Hoffeditz – I’m almost done with it, though.

These were greatly outnumbered by the books that weren’t on my list that I read:

1. Art of Personal Evangelism – Will McRaney
2. Introduction to Personal Evangelism – Alan Reid
3. Suffering and the Sovereignty of God – John Piper and Justin Taylor
4. Dark Pursuit – Brandilyn Collins
5. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
6. Complete Evangelism Guidebook – Scott Dawson
7. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
8. My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Piccoult
9. Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
10. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
11. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
12. Queen of the Big Time – Adriana Trigiani
13. The Unseen – T. L. Hines

This is my journal entry from last night:

I’ve had a downright awful attitude today. I’ve been incredibly testy and out-of-sorts. It’s possible that there’s some PMS involved, but I’ve never been this bad before.

The real problem? I’ve strayed from God. I’ve allowed good things: school work, graduation, blogging, friends, fun, and celebration to get in the way of spending regular time with God. It’s not that this time is a secret happy button, but it is a firm foundation to rest the entirety of my day upon. It tells me what’s up and down, orienting me to God and His Kingdom purposes.

Lord, help me to reset my priorities, desires, and thoughts to the defaults that you have set up for optimum performance. guide my steps, moment by moment, that I may be ever walking closer to you. Wrap me in Your love that I may not seek the empty pleasures found elsewhere. Be my light and my hope, my ever-present help in times of temptation.

Help me to live a life according to Your truth by the guidance of Your Holy Spirit. May your light shine through me, and cleanse me from any sin that dampers it.

“But I have trusted in your lovingkindness,
My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the LORD,
Because He has dealt bountifully with me.”
- Psalm 13:5-6

Yes, Lord, You have dealt bountifully with me. Here I am complaining about the smallest things, when You have provided me for not only my needs, but also for so many of my wants and desires. When I look around at all you’ve blessed me with materially, I am reminded of all the other ways You bless me too: with Your very presence in my life, with friends and family, with a church to minister and grow alongside. How can I take all this for granted?

Thanks for the help yesterday. I have finally decided what to do and gone for it. Be looking for a post after Christmas with my new blog address!

One thing that I have wanted to do for some time is write a novel. I don’t want to write to be famous or rich, though I suppose those wouldn’t be bad if they came. I don’t want to write because I think that I’m an amazing writer or would be able to make a career out of it, because I believe my writing and creativity are nothing spectacular. I want to write because I love to write.

In the last year, I have fallen in love with writing for this blog. I truly enjoy it, and not just because of the friends I’ve made here. I enjoy writing in this style. I enjoy writing humorous posts to get you chuckling; I enjoy writing serious posts about topics near to my heart. I also feel that I have grown in my writing, like these daily posts are daily exercises of my writing muscles.

After I received my laptop last week, one of the first things I did was download novel-writing software (yWriter). I haven’t done much with it, but it’s there and I’ve started a novel to play around with it, the idea that was the freshest in my mind.

I’ve said it before, but the main thing that holds me back from being a novel writer is that I don’t think that my writing will live up to my own standards. I’m not being modest; I’m being truthful. Very few modern authors are truly worth reading, in my opinion, and I’m not egotistical enough to think that I could ever count myself among them.

Instead of seeking to be the best, I’m merely seeking to do my best, even if no one else were to read it. I think that’s a worthy cause in itself.

So, with my first 173 words, I now can call myself a novel-writer.

This is actually the post I was planning to post tomorrow, but I can’t wait. I want help now!

I’m itching to change blogs. I need someone to discuss this with, and since I don’t have any RL blogger friends that are close by, I would like to bounce this off you.

Here are my reasons for wanting to switch:

1. I find Blogger annoying sometimes. (I also feel like I’m cheating on it by writing this in a blogger post.) I’ve had issues with the comments, especially. While I love the embedded comment box, it doesn’t always work. That bums me out, and probably bums you out, too.

2. I want to change the blog title. “Kansas girl” is not an adequate description anymore. If I’m going to grow out of the title, now’s the time to do it. I don’t expect to quit blogging anytime soon, so it makes sense to make a clean break for it and shed the outgrown name.

3. Though I’ve known #1 and #2 for a while, I really want to move now because I’ve finally found a name that I love. I won’t share it here as I don’t know if I’ll use it or not and would like to keep it to myself for future use if I don’t. It’s from a Jane Austen quote that I enjoy, and feel like it’s a good fit for me and unique yet not difficult to remember. If you’re a bloggy buddy of mine and are dying to know, email me (or just comment if I have your email) and I’ll let you know what it is. In fact, please do. Before I do this, I want a few “Yes, I love that idea!” first. I don’t want to unwittingly end up with a confusing name.

4. I want a WordPress blog. I like that they have pages. I like that they have 3-column designs. I like their comment boxes better. If I’m going to change my name, I’m changing to WordPress (unless you have a better idea).

Here’s why I’m hesitating:

1. So many of you use blogger. If you use WordPress, do you have a problem with people coming back to you blog since it’s not listed in your blogger account? I know they have a “my webpage” feature thing, but I’ll also have the Book Nook still which will show up under “my blogs.” Will that make it hard for new people to visit me? Or would that be solved if I used my wordpress account to comment, instead?

2. I’m bound to lose people in the move. That would bug me. People that know me as “Kansas girl” will not be able to find me anymore. If you’ve made a similar name change, how’d it go? I’ve made a name for myself (in hopefully an un-Babel way) and don’t want to lose that.

3. Do I go with a regular blog hosted by WordPress, or do I get my own domain name? In all my searching, I haven’t really found any reason why I shouldn’t just let WordPress host it, at least not any that’s worth the cost and the hassle. Do you know any different?

4. As much as I love the potential name, it has a small problem. It’s two words, and the first ends in “t” and the second starts with “h.” That always makes it hard to read when you smoosh the two words together. Should I put a hyphen between: “*******t-h********” ?

5. Do I import old posts? I would love to, but I know that there are often issues with internal links (which I do a lot) and pictures (which I do much less frequently). If you’ve done this, I’d love your insight!

6. WordPress blogs kinda all look alike. There’s little customization. Can I handle that?

Any and all advice on this issue would be greatly appreciated! If all goes well, I’ll switch to WordPress near the beginning of next year!

So many of you mentioned that I’m good at guessing the info for the 4 questions on my birthday post. It makes me realize how psychics operate.

1. Get one thing right that they never would expect, and that’ll keep them from thinking about what you got wrong.

2. Be vague and/or use words with double meanings. They’ll automatically take it whichever way makes more sense to them.

3. Study, study, study! There are all sorts of clues everywhere. I had to pick up my clues from your blogs, but the principle still stands. Often i chose what I assumed to be your favorite color as the color you would dye your hair, and I figured out what your favorite color was by what colors you used on the blog.

4. Get them laughing. Once again, this is a distracting point.

Not that I’m condoning visiting a psychic or any other fortune teller or the like, but I had to share what I learned.

Thanks for playing along!