RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) Finally!  I keep wanting to sit down and write, but I never seem to have the time.  I had no idea I'd be so busy at work that I couldn't do this, and that stinks because I can think of a thousand things to talk about while I'm at work.  When I get home, I can't remember anything.  That is not an exaggeration.  I think I'm getting old.  :(

2) So, speaking of work, it's still going well, albeit I'm very, very busy.  I honestly didn't think I'd be doing so much stuff, but the pastor keeps finding new things for me to do.  Ditto for the youth pastor, who has apparently realized I have a hard time saying no, even when I really, really don't want to do something.  At least I've managed to convince him that I will not, under any circumstances, travel with his youth group.  If I wanted to be responsible for children, I'd give birth to some.  Plus, I would be the most terrible chaperone ever because I'm really not very mature and I have very little patience!  Don't get me wrong, I really like and respect all the men I work with at the church, but I do find myself wanting to hide from them sometimes!

One of the things I've been doing for the church is editing the videos of the Sunday morning sermons so that they can be distributed to our home-bound members on DVDs. That is one of my favorite things, because it seems to mean so much to those people who can't actually make it to church.  It gives me a warm fuzzy, so I'm glad the women's group came up with the idea!  I also edit the videos to be put on YouTube, and I'm learning that copyright laws are a bitch-kitty.  We've been hit with several infringement "cases", which have mostly been redacted, because whomever views our videos probably understands that we - as a church- aren't trying to make money or actually infringe on anything.  By all means, we should fall under "Fair Use" because the music is just a part of our services, and we also have a CCLI license that should cover our butts for almost everything, but the scouts on YouTube are hyper-vigilant about making sure we know we have music in our services that someone else wrote.  I wouldn't care a bit, but if the claims aren't redacted (which they mostly have been) our channel can be taken down.  The weirdest thing, is that most of the larger publishing houses have removed their claims, which allow us to keep the songs in our videos for free, but the smaller, Christian-based companies actually want us to pay them.  I don't think that's what Jesus would do, guys!

3)  So I went to the dentist the other day, and everything was going fine until the dental hygienist grabs this...thing.  It looked like a regular, pointy, scraper thing, but when she put it in my mouth it actually sent a bolt of vibration through my head.  It scared me to death, which made the lady start to laugh.  I have very, very sensitive teeth (and she didn't know that) so she was using a "Sonic Scaler" on my teeth.  That is not a Doctor Who joke, it is a real and terrible thing.  If you are unaware of what this is, imagine that horrible, pointy thing that dentists use to scrape on your teeth, and then add intense vibrations that shoot through your head via bone-conduction.  It sounded like a drill.  It also caused my teeth to spark so much pain that I almost fainted.  Luckily she put the danged thing away when she realized she was torturing me. 

Other than that, the only incident of note was that they found a cavity.  I have no idea how I could get a cavity because I'm super weird about making sure I brush and floss, but Dr. Knight did say my tooth had been on his "Watch List" like it was some kind of enamel terrorist.  He said I have an old filling that was coming loose and right next to that was the tooth they'd been watching, so I imagine that it had been damaged by the old silver filling, which in turn caused a cavity.  He asked me if I'd had any pain, or sensitivity (UM, HELLO!) with that tooth, and I had.  In fact, I made a special appointment with them MONTHS ago because I thought I'd cracked that same tooth because it hurt when I bit down on stuff.  They acted like I was some kind of hypochondriac because I didn't want to chance another root canal by catching any problems early.  So for all I know, they could have fixed whatever was going on back then, but they decided to wait until now to make sure my terrorist tooth went into full jihad mode.  Boo.  So now I get to go back in two weeks and get stuck with needles and have a drill in my grill.  Joy.

4) My house is still a wreck, but not for lack of trying to fix things. Well, that's not 100% accurate.  I've been too tired and busy to go on a full scale assault of the guest room to clear it out, but I have made some efforts.  Plus, we still haven't found a place for the stuff we had to move when we redid the kitchen and since we still haven't been able to find the right kind of base boards, we can't move everything in the kitchen back into it's proper place.  I am so grateful to have a home, and I love where I live, but I'd love it even more if I could move around without knocking things over or tripping over something.  I realize we sound like candidates for an episode of Hoarders, but trust me, we just have very little room to store our normal things. The closets are tiny, the attic has no floor, and our garage is not temperature controlled, so finding space to keep things out of the way is hard.  This house was probably built for nudists who didn't have furniture or any other possessions.