life. faithful.

I burnt the toast Saturday morning., and it made me smile. Some the oddest memories link us to people we love, and burnt toast is one of those for me. According to my Great Grandma Hoffman, you make toast by burning it and then scraping off the black parts. This weekend falls right in the middle of finals for me, exams wrapping up my first year of grad school. I'm sure there will be lots of current things for me to write about when our grades are posted for the semester, but for now my burnt toast has triggered a trip down memory lane...so here are a few of the ones that make me smile! ~I can remember a time in elementary school when I was walking home with Pop. One of us had a candy bar, though I can't remember whose it was, and offered the last bite to the other. We ended up passing a tiny bit of chocolate back and forth, each of us biting off a tiny bit so as not to take the last bite. I'm pretty sure it got down to about a 1mm in diameter dot of chocolate! ~M...

I've been working on a "memories" post, but that's gonna have to wait a while. Instead, I have to rant a little... It started this morning when I opened the coat closet to get Raiden's pink crocheted capelet for her to wear to school. It was in the mid 50's here this morning, so she didn't really need a coat and she loves wearing the capelets I've made her, so it was a no-brainer. I thought so, anyways, until Raiden told me that her teacher said she can't wear those to school anymore. If her teacher had a valid reason, I would understand, but there isn't one. She didn't say it goes against the school dress code or anything like that--her reason was that it is too hard for Raiden to play in on the playground. I asked if that was true, and Raiden said no. She tried telling her teacher that, saying, "Thank you for being worried, but it isn't hard to play in." Her teacher also told her it was too hard for Raiden to put her ...

Have you ever wanted something so bad you could taste it? I've felt that way a few times in my life, probably few enough that I could count those wants on one hand. I want to write, and I've known that for a while. It wasn't something I grew up wanting--I always wrote, whether it was a journal or a story, but writing wasn't something I thought I would want to do. Partly because writing isn't the steady, dependable, respectable job I figured I would have. It is flighty...artsy...basically everything my analytical mind told me was a bad choice for a career. Here I am, though, getting ever closer to what is definitely a good career choice, and more and more I find myself wanting to write. I write during my lunch break, tucking myself away in a corner with a good cup of coffee, a pen, and my notebook (yes, the paper kind. For some reason I'm still not a computer person for the most part), and I forget about the real world and lose myself in a dream world of...

Raiden's school had a 2-hour delay this morning (something I really don't get--wouldn't it make more sense to send a bunch of rowdy kids home 2 hours early instead of having them come to school 2 hours late?) and surprisingly we got around early today. So after we dropped Conan off at daycare, we had a few minutes before I could drop Raiden off at school at 10:45. I thought it would be nice to take Raiden through the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru to get her a doughnut. Because nothing beats a fresh doughnut before school. She thought it was a great suggestion. Whe had black uniform pants and a crochet capelet with a black background, so she didn't want anything messy. No problem--a plain glazed doughnut would be the perfect choice, right? Wrong, apparently. She immediately started complaining that that wasn't the kind of doughnut she wanted, which led to me pulling out of the drive-thru line (actually backing out, much to the surprise of the man in the vehicle beh...

Yesterday was one of those days. You know, one that had me questioning what I'm doing trying to survive in this insanely rational and analytical world of physics... a world so different from any I would have ever pictured myself in... a world light-years away from where I thought I would be... and most of all, a world not really conducive to this dream of writing that still tugs at my heart on a daily basis. It started when I sat down to write out my Quantum homework problems--and didn't get any further than copying them out of the book because then I just stared at them with no idea how to get started. It went on with Electrodynamics and talk of dielectrics and electric fields, and how when you are trying to find the electric field you need epsilon to be the same in both regions, but the permittivity of a dielectric is definitely not the same as the permittivity of empty space but that's okay because we can simply "imagine" the substitution of a new die...

I mentioned in my last post that I had an Easter post all written out and ready to post...but then got a bit sidetracked by an email I read. Well, since then that Easter post has gotten changed a bit. I wonder how long it's going to take for me to start remembering that God's timing is way better than my own? So, this isn't really the post I meant to write, but maybe it is the one I was meant to write... "What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?" asked the governor. They all answered, "Crucify Him!" "Why? What crime has He committed?" asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify Him!" (Matthew 27: 22 & 23) When Jesus was brought before Pilate, the governor had a decision to make--what would he do with Christ? Pilate had listened to the chief priests and elders question Jesus. He watched as accusations were hurled at this man, a man who "had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothi...

I had a rather delayed yet I thought pretty decent Easter post planned out for today. I had written it out before hand and everything, even spending a couple of days working on it. Then, I checked my emails and came across one from this guy that I actually got a few days ago but hadn't opened up until today while I was putting off school work...but I digress. There was a line towards the end of his email that stuck out for me: "The really hard part isn't stepping off the boat; it's learning how to swim." When I started this blog last year, it was based on the word faithful and the story of Peter stepping out of the boat on faith, doing it just because Jesus told him, "Come." At the time, I was fully convinced that taking that first step out of the boat was the hard part.  After all, when you're standing in the boat  looking out at the waves  and you know that if you just stay there,  safe ,  you won't be in the middle of the storm...