les reves

I ate a lot of food in Casper this past weekend. It was all absolutely delicious. My body punished me by waking me up at 5 this morning to barf my guts out. Lovely, huh. No more delicious food for me. And no work today, either. So a little while ago I sat on the couch and watched the only thing worth watching on the network stations in the middle of the day. Martha Stewart. Note, her competition was the news (which was scratchy and hard to hear), some educational children's show on PBS (mildly tempting), or a soap opera (I'd rather stare at the ceiling and hum to myself). The show was okay I guess. She did make a trip to Paris- where she used to be a model, which seemed a little strange to me. I mean, when she showed up on some agency's doorstep at the age of 19, didn't they say "Mais non! Tu es Martha Stewart! You make ze cookies, and ze holiday doilies!" I guess Martha Stewart wasn't such a "buzz" name back in the 60's.

But she toured a few "ateliers" in the beautiful city of Paris, which are the shops where seamstresses work on the elegant and extravagant pieces of clothing that are worn in the haute couture fashion shows of Le France. And I wondered to myself if I could ever enjoy/find my way into such a job. Mike and I love to throw around the idea of living abroad, and one option is France, where he could teach at the Orthodox institute there. I always characterize our future children as products of whatever place we may end up- in England, they will be pushed in a pram, and they will call me "mummy". In France, they would say "mais oui" a lot, and would prance around town in little jumpers, much like the title character of the Eloise books. But I truly love to wonder what such a life would be like, and imagining myself as a trendy seamstress, putting my work into gorgeous gowns made by top designers, is certainly a fantastic dream. My love for crochet and for trying different creations (even though my products now are FAR from those designs seen on the runways- I don't think they wear many wool hats with stripes in them) makes that dream a little closer to possible. I hope I never give up on dreams.

brown bagging it

Work is slow enough today that I can take my lunch break, and print out a few online crossword puzzles to amuse myself for an hour. Nothing could make me happier right now, except maybe my couch, a blanket, and the movie Babe. For some odd reason I really enjoy a talking pig and his talking animal friends- especially the singing mice.

I think I'll go eat my lunch and do my crossword puzzle, but first I just have to make some small comments about the news of the weekend.

Ted Haggard- what a sad turn of events, for so many reasons. Is it possible to remain humble and true to yourself when you have thousands of followers and a fairly strong tie to the White House and politics in general? There has to be a better way to deal with these kinds of issues- they are rampant in the churches- pornography, secret homosexual lives, etc. Sexuality in general seems to be a massive problem. And it's not a bad thing in its essence. I wish I knew what had to be done, or how we could approach this without the stigma. I know that there are some Orthodox writings on all of this, and I intend to seek them out. Mr. Haggard started a church that was fairly instrumental in my becoming a Christian, and regardless how little of a connection that I have to it now, I am sad for this church. This is not the first spiritual leader I have seen experiencing such a downfall, and the last one was much closer to me. It's hard, but really not surprising in some ways.

Saddam Hussein- yeah, he's done some pretty crappy stuff. And I'm not one to try and compare numbers when it comes to death tolls, but there are some much bigger fish that we could be putting our money and energy into. Some of those bigger fish get our money and energy in the form of support, and that's no good.

Enough of this, time to work on something that I can solve.