Now that it's over, I can easily see that this winter (and early spring) was a long stretch of Badness. Bad as in Depression. I'm glad it's over. I will be taking meds as necessary in the upcoming winter to help to avert such a precipitous slide, but I think I also need to figure out how to knock out the "shoulds."

The "shoulds" are insidious and will kill me.

A hint that brought me right up to the whole situation is that I haven't finished a book since around May 6. Normally, I read 5-8 books per month. Guess I won't be making that record-breaking year this year.... Today I worked on three of the four currently 'in-progress' books I've had laying around the house. I haven't updated my book blog, but I'll get to it when I have time.

Or not. It's my blog. It can go on hiatus if I want it to, right?

It also helped today...

...that the sermon was on one of my favorite gospel passages (Mark 4:35-41*)
...that our guest preacher picked up on the "pillow" part of the story
...that it was precisely the sermon I needed to hear (about trusting when it's "obvious" that faith was misplaced)
...that one of the songs sung today was of the words of Psalm 46:10^
...that the good friend here who is moving North will be living near my best college friend (Hi, Jen! I'm referring to Beth--remember her from scrapping?)
...that I got our bathroom cupboards completely cleaned out and organized for the first time since moving into this house nearly 3 years ago!

A good day.

I've had entirely too much processed sugar this weekend, and tomorrow the hammer is coming back down on that.

Here's my list for this week, keeping in mind that Beast will be out of town all week again:

• take Sparky to church for VBS in the morning and spend those three hours getting all the Clerk of Session membership records updated for 2006; if there's time, I might even type up the minutes for the last two meetings (today's was a 4-minute, kind-of emergency meeting)
• clean and reorganize the pantry (which ditto the cupboards above)
• continue to catch up on cataloging at work (I'm back down to "just" two large, full carts)
• continue the inventory at work
• call my mom (my sister-the-caretaker is out of town this week); maybe I'll even call TWICE!
• call my brother (to whom I haven't spoken in months)
• call my friend who had surgery a couple of weeks ago

Not a terribly frantic week.

Right now, Buddy is running around my lap and the couch in general. Here's a note from him:

;;;;;;;;;;333333333333333333333333333333;;;;;;;........................444445555555555

There ya go.

Oh, and there's a new memey thing....but I'll explain that in the morning.
_______________________

* 36Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. 37A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?"

39He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

40He said to his disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?"

41They were terrified and asked each other, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"

^ The lyrics:

Be still, and know that I am God.
Be still, and know that I AM.
Be still.