Calendars, Books, and Shoes

I really do have fabulous friends.  Today I opened the mailbox and  (with quite a lot of tugging and yanking, remind me to have a chat with our mailman) pulled out this:

The hubby saw it on the coffee table when he got home and said, "books, not shoes?  That's just not right."  The card that came with the gift also indicated that books were not my greatest passion.  I have to say that I write a blog about shoes because they are fun and pretty and silly, but books are, always have been, and always will be my bigger passion.  I love to read.  LOVE IT.  I can pass up shoes, but it is really hard not to buy most of the books I see.

True story!  I can be stubborn about books and will often read something long after I should have given up because it was just not a good fit.  Books are my escape, and if I'm escaping somewhere I hate, why bother?

How perfect are these?  Shoes, a stack of books, and cup of yummy tea?  Sounds like a perfect winter day.  So.  Books and shoes.  Instead of finding pictures online, I decided to create my own tonight.  Here are some of my favorite books and some of my favorite shoes.  You've seen all the shoes already, but you'll just have to deal with it.  Or you know, stop reading.  Utilize your free will.

Harry Potter.  Duh.   I've read the entire series many many times.  If you don't like Harry Potter then I'm just not sure I want to be friends with you.

The Percy Jackson series.  I only included the box set of the first series, but I love the Heroes of Olympus series as well.  Definitely a fan of the fantasy.

2 sets of books from my childhood that I then bought as an adult, Little House on the Prairie and The Chronicles of Narnia.  I was obsessed with Little House, and even dressed up like Laura for Halloween one year.  I didn't read the Narnia books until I was older, then I bought the box set while I was on internship.  I think it was Prince Caspian that I read in its entirety in the bathtub one night.

I first started reading The Hunger Games trilogy a few months after I moved to California the second time.  I was going through a major bout of depression from the transition and initially hated the first book.  It took me forever to get into it.  Then I got completely sucked in on a flight home to Montana and devoured the series.

I have a love/hate with this series.  I discovered it in High School and was obsessed.  I was like a drug dealer and would push it on my friends to get them addicted also.  There's time travel, so fantasy.  There are hot men, so yay.  There are hot SCOTTISH men, so even more yay.  As you can see, the paperbacks are definitely the worse for wear.  The blue one is actually the second copy since I pretty much destroyed the first.  And then the woman kept writing.  The 8th book just came out in June and she's still not done.  If she would stop describing everything in so much freaking detail and just get to the point, there would be half the pages and twice the plot.  There are now way too many character, way too much time between books, way too much everything.  But I keep reading because I eventually want closure.  It's been over 20 years and she's still keeping me dangling.  The BFF and I refer to the author simply as "that damn woman."  I could probably write the length of one of those books about all of my ups and downs with this series, but I won't.  Deep breath.  Moving on.

There are more than 20 books in this series, so I just grabbed a few instead of trying to fit them all into a picture with a shoe.  These books are hilarious and also involve  hot men.  2 of them.  Total love triangle.  They have gotten a bit formulaic in the process, but I still keep tuning in because they are perfect escape reading and I like to fantasize about Ranger.  Mmmmm...Ranger.   Yeah, deep breath.  

I love shoes.  But I looooooove books.  These are such a tiny fraction of the books I've read and loved.  I can't go to sleep unless I read, even if it's only for 5 minutes.  And these are just the fiction ones.  Some of my favorite theological books are currently packed away in the garage.  Maybe there will be another post.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to stop typing and start reading.

God's Work, Our Hands

Today was God's Work, Our Hands Sunday, the day we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the merger that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).  I won't bore you with a bunch of Lutheran history, but there were 2 groups of Lutheran churches that decided to merge into one national body.  I was in 7th grade at the time and didn't realize anything had even happened...  Anyway, as part of the celebration churches all across the country went out into their communities to do service projects as a way of sharing God's love with our neighbors.  We all got to wear these shirts:

 

Every picture I've seen shows the shirt as a different hue of yellow.  I'm not sure what it would actually be called.  Goldenrod, maybe?  They've got more orange in them then it looks like in these pictures.  So I wore my t-shirt for church as well as service projects, which meant I needed to find shoes to go with it (I wore flats for the actual service, I'm not entirely crazy).  It was no easy task.  I could have just gone with black, but where's the fun/challenge in that?

 

 

My first thought was gold.  They don't look too bad, here, but in reality they didn't go at all.

 

 

I didn't think these would be right, and I was correct in that assumption.  Totally wrong yellow.

 

 

Out of desperation I even tried coral.  You can imagine how that went.

 

 

Finally I pulled these out and surprisingly, we had a winner!  The yellow in the shoes is a fairly close match to the shirts, and from a distance I thought it looked pretty good.  I'm guessing no one else in the ELCA had quite such fabulous shoes...



 

 

 

 

Palm Sunday

I almost spaced out posting today...no reason, just didn't do it earlier and then forgot until now.  Today is Palm Sunday, and we always have a parade at church where the kids decorate their bikes or scooters or trikes and then process them through the parking lot and into the sanctuary.  It's a lot of fun and the kids love it.  You've seen these shoes before, but they seemed festive and fun for a celebratory day.

 

 

These are the shoes I wore for our wedding rehearsal and I love how bright and fun they are.  I decided they "sort of" look like palms.  OK, not really, but they are the closest I had.  Use your imagination and humor me.

 

Tonight I am relaxing and watching Singin' in the Rain.  I adore this movie.  I love love love it.  Gene Kelly always makes me smile.  Tonight, though, I'm paying more attention to Debbie Reynolds' and the other dancers' shoes than I usually do.  Wouldn't it be fun if our lives were a musical?  Of course, I couldn't dance in the shoes I normally wear, or I'd break my neck...

 

A Shoe Secret Revealed

"How do you walk in those?  I would break an ankle!"  I get these comments a lot.  Sometimes they follow a statement of love or admiration for whatever shoes I'm wearing that day, sometimes they stand on their own.  Here's the thing:  I'm NOT graceful.  I'm constantly covered in bruises from lacking depth perception or not paying attention to what I'm doing and running into stuff.  If there is something to trip over, chances are good I will find it.  In high school my mom told me I walked like a football coach, and now the hubby likes to tease me about how I'm bow legged, pigeon toed, and "walk weird."  I'm not some graceful woman with the deep, dark secret of how to walk in high heels.  Heck, on tile floors sometimes I feel like I'm definitely going to break my ankle.  Or my neck.  Here's another thing:  I don't actually wear them that much.  I always wear heels on Sunday, but I don't drive to work in them.  I always wear a pair of "running around shoes" until right before service starts, and then I put on the heels.  I take the shoes off during the sermon, whether I'm preaching or the other pastor is preaching.  I frequently don't wear them between services, depending on what's going on.  I see women who wear these kinds of shoes to the office, and I have those same thoughts:  How do they walk in those shoes all day?  I see women wearing heels in the aiport and I think they're crazy!  I like to be a little girly when it comes to shoes, but it turns out I'm a lot more practical than girly when it comes to the heels.