Overwhelmed and Over-Blessed

Confession time: I haven't posted in a LONG time. I even left a cliff hanger blog post and promised I would update in a couple of days and then I failed. The fact that I failed is no surprise. Thank goodness that I am forgiven by a Savior that picks me up after I fail Every. Single. Time. because I do it often. But I digress...I'm here to sort of explain my failure and even more than that send a shout out to my best friends.

These past couple of weeks have overwhelmed me beyond belief. I began studying for the CPA exam a couple of weeks ago, but no matter how hard I tried to get everything together and stay on track with my studying I just fell more and more behind. We traveled on the weekends or I had things going on in the afternoons/nights and couldn't seem to fit it all in. Last weekend it came to a breaking point. I pretty much stayed in all weekend and studied non-stop to catch up. The worst part of it is that it is some of the most overwhelming and hardest stuff I have ever had to study. It is like taking a test a test on an entire textbook of material but only having a month to study the whole text book. Well if all I was doing was studying for the CPA it might not be so bad, but I also have to study for my classes in school which aren't altogether difficult but dfinitely time consuming. Writing papers and reading textbooks and doing online discussion boards just takes time that I don't exactly have. Meanwhile we are still pretty busy at work trying to get 10/15 returns out the door. I'm also supposed to be training for a marathon and I'm desperately trying to cling to some intimacy with God. Oh and lets not forget my poor husband who defintely gets the slighlty disyfunctional peice of me that is left at the end of the day while we are trying to make a pretty big decision ourselves right now.

I tell you all that not to throw a pity party for myself because as busy as I am right now I try to take a step back and think of how busy I will be one day when I have a full-time job, kids, and numerous other responsibilities to wrap my head around. I do tell you this to give a slight reasoning behind my absence from the blog and from anyone and everyone's lives right now.

I also want to say thank you to all my friends who have made the effort to keep up with me recently . I'm truly not the best at keeping up with people. I live more in the right now and the future and I'm just all around bad at making sure I'm intentionally with keeping up with the people most important in my life. I am truly blessed by friends that understand this and don't let me slip by the wayside when I haven't called to chat in awhile. I have had several friends who have texted just to chat and I'm the absolute worst at texting. If I'm at work and I'm in my zone I won't look over at my phone or if  I do I will just say I will text later and then later never comes. The same is true when I get home at night I often put my phone away and don't look at it again until the morning, which is also an effort not to spend my whole night on the phone and instead to enjoy time with Jamey. But the Lord has blessed me with friends who don't disappear when I take 8 hours to text back or when I forget altogether to text back, I really do appreciate each and everyone of you and I am more than blessed to call you my best friends. I hope this public display of affection is not irritating to everyone else reading my blog, but I wanted to share a little of my blessings with everyone!

I hope you all have dear friends like I do and I hope one day I can pay them back with a fraction of the love they show me all the time. My heart really is to be more intentional with everyone in my life, but I don't always succeed in those areas. LOVE TO ALL the friends in my life and a special thank you for being so understanding of my crazy life and making the special effort to keep in touch.

J&M: The Beginning of the End

Well we left off last time at the day Jamey and I met. Now we will pick up and tell our versions of the years that led up to our eventual dating. Oh and this post is quite long, but we have both already basically written the next post and I promise it isn't as long!! Bear with me through this one and I'll post the next one in a day or two! 

My Version:

Of course since Jamey is the story teller in our family I am sure his will be MUCH better than mine so I will try to keep this short so you can just move onto his version!

 Like I said in the last post the next few years flew by with us each having our own friends and sometimes our friends intermingling, but never anything serious. I guess I should pick up in more detail about freshmen year of high school. I think high school was about the time I began to take a little more notice of Jamey. We went to a small school, so of course everyone knew each other and were friends, but outside our small circles we didn’t hang out with everyone outside of school. Freshmen year our classes began to get smaller, and we had classes more with our friends than ever before. (Our school did advanced tracks and everyone that was in our friend group took the advanced classes so we all had them together, where as in middle school we were all a little bit more spread out.) One person that kept popping up in a large majority of my classes was Jamey. It was around this year though, that I began to discover that Jamey wasn’t just an unbelievable nerd, but actually a really smart and interesting guy. Of course if you know anything about me I was dating someone at the time, and I thought this guy was perfect. He was older and didn’t go to our school and was a little different than the other boys that I knew, so I was sold on him hook, line, and sinker, but somehow Jamey still stood out to me in a way a couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time. 

My best friend and I at the time began looking into going to a boarding school in Mobile and Jamey was looking into it also, so we all talked a lot about going to school there and if our parents were going to let us and all that, but alas my friend and Jamey went off to boarding school and my parents decided I would be better suited at home. So just as quickly as I had begun to notice Jamey he was gone and I thought that was that.

Sophomore year was just typical sophomore year, my boyfriend changed, I got my license, and at some point I learned that Jamey was coming back to school at Demopolis. Junior year began and once again Jamey was back into my life. He was dating someone from his boarding school and I was dating a football/ baseball player. That was the year that I noticed how much Jamey had grown up into a very smart and witty and handsome boy and not just the nerdy boy that would make fun of me in middle school. I’m pretty sure we flirted mercilessly throughout Junior year, and on more than one occasion I had to promise my boyfriend there was absolutely nothing going on. Although we snuck away everyday to have study hall together and did all our school projects together I was still in denial about the whole thing. I think the whole school knew better than we did that it wouldn’t be long before we were together. 

Our 11^th grade history teacher got us to sign up for a summer program at Ole Miss and that gave us even more reason to talk and keep in touch, but I was still dating said guy, and I was distraught about having to end the relationship. The last real time that year Jamey and I talked I’m pretty sure we talked about the eventual end of my relationship, but then school was out and my boyfriend and I were off to Europe with other friends from school, and just like that Jamey was out of my life for the second time…

Jamey's Version:

The first few years of high school in regards to our relationship are fairly uneventful. However, I’ll share a few snapshots will help give you an idea of how we were before we started dating, to set the stage for our relationship, so to speak.

During my freshman year of high school, I was still a member of the “not-so-cool” kids. Morgan, in my memory, sometimes hung out in the not-so-cool group, but she was a full-fledged member of the cool kids. Queue up stereotypes of the guy, eating snack on the wrong side of the hallway, and the girl from Coach Sprinkle’s cool-kid homeroom falling for his Converses, etc. I do have one fond memory of us eating snack one day (if you could not tell, snack-eating was the crux of our high-school social makeup).

You see, Morgan has a tendency to stand very close to someone when she gets excited, way too close for American standards (she might fit in well in a European dialogue, however). One day at snack, she was talking to me and she was, I mean, close. Way too close for even Morgan’s European heated-conversation standards; we are face-to-face and she is filling-up-my-frame-of-vision close. That’s when it hit me. I wonder if she likes me…?

Well, not too long after said incident, I went off to ASMS for my sophomore year of schooling. I don’t know if I ever told Morgan (for fear of freaking her out when we first started dating) about how often I thought of her while I was at ASMS… But I found out sometime that year that she had another boyfriend, and that they were “kinda-serious.” So I resigned myself to not dating her.

I came back to DHS the following year and she was still dating said serious-relationship guy. Something had to be done. The attraction between the two of us was palpable. It could not be ignored, by any member of this high-school not-quite-so-licentious ménage-a-trois.

I was a library aide for third period that year, meaning I would sit in the library and do nothing for that period. She was taking a “study hall” in a class beside the library. There would be no harm in us studying for our AP class together during that time, now would there? After all, we were a very studious pair, and she would attend the library during third period almost without fail for the duration of our Junior year.

During these library study sessions, Morgan would giggle ceaselessly at my ceaseless quick wit, and we would pretend to not stare longingly into each others’ eyes while we talked about US history and the like. And in that same US history class, I chose a seat on one side of the room during the appointed hour for choosing seats, one with a vacant spot in front of me. You’ll never guess where Morgan began to sit…

You’re right: precisely in the seat in front of me.

The relational tension was mounting. People began to talk. During one of her trips to the bathroom, a US history classmate looked over at me and said, “You know she really likes you, don’t you?” “I do, but what about him?” He was taking note as well. My scheme was working. Our talks became as much about the evaporation of their relationship, and I was able to demonstrate my sensitivity – possibly even parting a few wise worlds to my distraught Morgan. It had begun to work, or so I thought.

I ended my Junior year with some dismay. They were still together, and to beat that, they were going to Europe with an elite group of “cool kids.” I thought I had failed… but…

You’ll have to wait until the next post to hear what happened next…

So there you have it! Sorry to leave you in suspense! Check back in a day or two and I will have the story of how we started dating up! 

Color Run 2012!

Happy Labor Day everyone! We had a bit of a rainy labor day here in Birmingham, but I wanted to show you pictures of the adventure we had even in the rain! We ran the Color Run here in Birmingham. Most of you probably know what that is, but if you don't it is basically a fun 5K run where you get blasted with color! Don't worry the color is just colored cornstarch, but every kilometer people throw the powder on you until you are covered in all different colors! Then at the end there is a big color party where you have your own colored powder tho throw. Jamey, Mallory, Jennie and Annie all did it just for fun and we had a blast! It rained the ENTIRE time we were there for the race, but we didn't let it damper our fun. Everyone just ran in the rain! We probably weren't as colorful as we would have been had it not rained, but I think we had just as much fun. One thing we weren't expecting though was the HILLS! The race was on the Barber Motor sports race track and we thought since it was a race track it would be flat the entire way. Boy were we wrong! It was practically hills the whole time, or at least it felt that way when you were running!! Mallory's and my goal was just to run the whole 5K and finish it and we succeeded! Jamey was of course the speedy one that clocked in at around 21 or 22 minutes. He probably could have ran faster, but there were thousands of people that ran the race so there was a lot of congestion and sometimes you couldn't go as fast as you would like. Well enough chatter here are the pictures!

Before the race

Right after the race, but before the Color Party

Showing off our tiny tats

He ran too fast for them to get him with color! 

Chest Bumps after the race

Color Party! 

I promise those aren't my panties just the shorts under my skirt!

Oh and here is what we have been doing on our night off at the Hurst household......

HAIRCUT!!!!