Author: christy

YIKES! In Oct. I decided it was time to go back to school. I’ve chosen Walden University which has online programs. My Master’s will be in Mental Health Counseling.

I figured Oct. was a good time to apply. Get the application process over with, enjoy the holidays, and start school in Jan. That would seem normal, right? RIGHT?

So I got accepted and class started on Dec. 4th. Yeah, before the holidays. –heavy sigh. So as if I wasn’t busy before with home improvements and holiday preparations, I’m a full fledged student now! I’m finding it’s a lot like last time I was a college student…I’m not getting much sleep these days.

Next comes figuring out how to pay for it. So why do graduate programs cost so darn much? I think they figure you’ll be making more money with your degree so they’ll charge you more to get the degree.

Now if only I didn’t have to wait my turn to use the computer to do homework. (hehehe) Santa might be bringing me something small and white with an apple on the back of it!

I graduated from college 10 years ago this May. While it doesn’t seem all that long ago, we have been paying on that student loan for the duration of our marriage…

Until yesterday. It’s finally paid off. Hurray!

Santa Claus just paid us a visit. I don’t know how he fit those huge bean bag sacks into his sleigh. They’ve suddenly taken over our basement! For lack of furniture not destroyed by little children, that’s the best option we could come up with.

We’ve spent two days with family and friends celebrating the birth of Christ as well as the love that we share with each other, exchanging gifts and eating about a ton of food. Despite all the commercialization of the holiday, today we celebrate “the reason for the season.” I’m not sure who coined that phrase. Anyway, for those believers who are barnson.org readers, Merry Christmas!!! For those who don’t believe, I’m pretty sure you’re exchanging gifts anyway. Be sure to share your love one with another, as that is the meaning of giving the gifts!

I hope you all have a great day. Travel safely and watch out for the Fog’n’drunks!

Emil, welcome to Barnson.org. It’s exciting that we know you personally and that you’re so interested in reading past blogs and joining in discussions. Unfortunately, you don’t know the unspoken rules around here, most of which are in place because of me.

I enjoy the discussions on this blog, including the religious ones. However I have asked Matt to make sure that nothing goes too far, that nothing is truly offensive or down right rude. This is a family website. Someday my children will read it. Many of my personal friends and family read it on a regular basis. I believe that is why Matt suggested creating another blog site, one that would not be so limited by me. Though that saddens me, I can understand. But my family name is on this site.

With that in mind, this is not a battle ground. I thank you so very much for your concern for Matt and his beliefs and your desire to convert him back. Your “rules” seem fair, but we will not be debating which church is the true church and debating LDS doctrine. You did mention that you did not serve a mission. There’s one thing that you missed out on learning (know that I did not serve a mission either). No one converts to God or Christ when it’s pushed on them. Debate won’t bring in the spirit of God and no one wants religion shoved down their throat. I don’t mind “discussing” a doctrinal point on occasion, but no one here is interested in having the LDS religion forced on them.

You seem to have the heart of a missionary. That is awesome! There are plenty of believers on barnson.org that might enjoy discussing Christianism. I do want to tell you that you are welcome to my home anytime and we can discuss in more details some reasons why I feel this way and some personal background that I won’t discuss on this blog.

As for the rest of you, for the most part I have enjoyed the discussion concerning the existance of God. Many parts are sad to me and I will address those. I have pondered your comments a lot while I’ve been running around my house busy with sick children and Christmas preparations.

As an LDS Christian, I am sorry that so many Christians have been rude to many of you “nonbelievers”. I personally believe that there are lots of good people in this world, whether of another faith than my own or don’t believe in God at all. I appreciate that these people know who they are or are working on who they want to become in life by setting personal standards, whatever they may be. My religion teaches tolerance to all kinds. With that, I am so grateful to live in a country where we can each choose our own beliefs. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to live in a place where the religious culture is shoved down your throat by the government. I have many friends from other religions as well as those who don’t believe and I try hard to treat them all the same and love them all. I am sorry if you have been treated differently for your personal beliefs.

As for the spiritual aspect, I have trouble putting my feelings into words. Obviously touches on personal emotions. Though I feel that it is very different from previous description. I consider myself a spiritual person. I thrive on spiritual experiences. I live my life not in fear of the wrath of God, but because my lifestyle allows me to be in tune with having such experiences. For me, a spiritual experience is something that I feel or something that happens that I did not create myself. It is a gift to me. I don’t believe that through my own emotions I can create spiritual experiences. I know that for you non believers this makes no sense. It’s not logical. It’s not meant to be. I don’t have to explain them to you scientifically to know that I have had a spiritual experience. Though you will argue and condemn these personal thoughts and beliefs of mine, you cannot tell me that I did not have the experience. I don’t expect you to agree with me and that’s fine.

As for science versus religion, I believe that they are very tightly knit together. You cannot have one without the other. If God uses the elements of nature to make things happen, He has to follow the laws of science and the laws of the universe. Each year we learn more and more about science and how our earth works. We’re constantly discovering new things that we didn’t know before. Each tidbit is a piece of the grand puzzle. Eventually we will have the whole puzzle put together and have a greater understanding of not only science, but how God fits into it all.

For those of you who have changed beliefs, that is fine, you have the right to choose what you want to believe. As Matt mentioned, please be respectful of others in their beliefs. I hope Matt doesn’t mind me saying that when he first left the church, he was very bitter and quite rude. I reminded him a couple times that if he expects me to respect his new beliefs, he needs to be respectful of my beliefs as well. That has really helped to keep the peace in our home.

For the most part, I enjoy all of your thoughts and comments on the blog. Thank you for not bashing. Thank you for keeping this site family friendly. I feel that we have created our own little community.

With all of that said, Merry Christmas to those who believe in Christ. To those who don’t, Happy Holidays. May you all enjoy your traditions in whatever you’re celebrating.

Ours is real fake. For safety reasons (I prefer not to risk burning the house down during the holidays) and I don’t have to buy a tree every year at $70 or more a pop for a nice one, we prefer the fake tree.

For the first half of our marriage, our yearly fight was about who got to put the lights on the tree. Matt hated doing it so he would throw them on as fast as he could (well, almost) and I hated doing it because I would spend hours putting them on very nicely. So once the cat destroyed the first ($5 after Christmas sale) tree, we bought a really nice big one with lights already on it.

I think this is year four, maybe five with this particular tree. I can’t quite remember. But last year it took a leap from a high location, which knocked out most of the lights. So, I spent many hours replacing hundreds of bulbs and got all but one strand to work. We also had a couple broken limbs.

This year several limbs are broken, fluffing it takes forever because the tree is so big and only 4 of the 15 strands of lights are working. Talk about frustrating. Something has got to give. As beautiful as that tree is, it’s done for after this Christmas. I’ll be vying for position the day after Christmas to get a new tree on clearance…with lights and smaller around in hopes that it will last a bit longer than this one did.

Oh, the things we go through for the sake of tradition! Do you have any tree stories?

Matt came home from work this morning (he works nights) quite wound up. He couldn’t sleep for anything. After much frustration, he figured out what was bugging him…a million and a half homeless flood victims sitting around tent cities and in stadiums with little food and nowhere comfortable to sleep. And here we sit comfortably in our homes grateful it didn’t happen here.

Then the dilemma once he figured that out was what can he do about it? He stewed over that for hours and finally called our dear friend Paul with an idea. Paul had been stewing over the same thing and decided to do something about it. So here’s the scoop: www.homeflood.org. Help Flood Victims.

Matt has spent all day creating a site where people may offer housing or transportation to flood victims. There are three options: invite victims into your home to help them until they can get back on their feet, offer assistance transporting victims to homes (not working yet), and registering as a relief worker in order to peruse the database and determine if the victim with you is a suitable match for the family offering assistance.

We need your help, too. Paul sent out press releases, and is busy calling news stations to air the story. Getting the word out will help a lot. If people natonwide can see that in a little way, they can help someone, the victims can be well taken care of. We also want it to spread across the internet fast; New Orleans will take 9-10 weeks to pump out, and the sooner we can help, the better. If you have a blog or know someone with a blog, please link this article to your blog. Once www.homeflood.org is linked to about 25 blogs with the same text — “Help Flood Victims” — it’ll come up higher in the Google rankings and more people will be helped by Matt and Paul’s efforts. Please spread the word to all your friends and neighbors and tell them they can find a way to help.

(Just no chain letters about it. I hate chain letters! — matt)

Why not sit down with your family and decide what you can do to help? Every little bit counts.

In case your child has not been immunized and gets rubella, there are a couple options. You pretty much do have to treat the symptoms, but there is a marvelous working option that I will tell you about shortly.

The symptoms start two days before the rash: crankiness, fever, not too interested in food. Then the rash comes. I noticed it first on the face and legs, but it soon covers the whole body, in the mouth, etc. As it gets worse, it gets blotchy. The rash typically lasts three days.

Treatment: Ibuprofen to help the crankiness, Benadryl to help the itching and discomfort, as well as bathtime. The magic potion to heal the rash sooner is LIQUID SILVER. It needs to be in a spray bottle. If you can catch it on the first day before the rash gets blotchy, it’ll be almost gone by day two. The liquid silver works as an antibiotic and helps the skin heal quickly. I buy my liquid silver through a company called trilivin. Unless you have some on hand, it’ll do you no good to order it and wait for it to arrive in the mail. You can go to a health store such as GNC and buy coloidal (sp?) silver in a spray bottle. Spraying the rash two or three times a day should be sufficient and it won’t hurt their eyes if ithe spray gets in their eyes, so go ahead and spray the face.

Please note that Rubella is highly contageous so don’t expose it to anyone if possible. It is basically uncomfortable for a normal child, but can cause serious problems for a fetus, the elderly and anyone with a poor immune system. The incubation period is only a couple days, so you’ll know rather quickly if you have exposed others or if your kids have been exposed.

By the way, liquid silver is great for healing anything!

We’ve been in drought here in Utah for about seven years, the entire time we’ve lived in our house. Greatfully the weather patterns have changed this year. We’ve had lots of precipitation. It’s so wonderful.

But the storms coming through have kept the weather rather cool. Please understand, I’m not complaining, I love it! Yesterday was a high of 63 degrees. Normally this time of year we’re in the 90’s and too hot with more dry heat on its way. The one drawback is I’m nervous about camping because it rains all the time now.

What kind of weather patterns have you all had in your corners of our wonderful world? Are you having odd weather? Or is it normal?

The aliens are back in full force. You know how I know? Not because I have seen them. As a matter of fact I would just like to catch one of them in the act.

In my front yard, I have several flower beds. One of them has survived the grubs and has thrived. The beautiful gray/green ground cover has spread and flowers a beautiful little white flower by the hundreds!!!! For my lack of a green thumb, this is completely awesome.

But apparently, those little green men have been aching to do some crop circles….in the middle of the day. I came home to discover one of my three large sections of this particular ground cover had been trampled, in circles, exactly like crop circles.

A few minutes later, I go outside and the middle group of flowers has also been trampled.

Luckily, this particular plant is very hardy and also drought resistant. They started to stand themselves up again. But only a few minutes later, I’m headed somewhere and discover all three of my groups of grand cover have crop circles in them with very flowers left standing.

If I happen to catch any of those little green men (or neighborhood kids for that matter) they will be seen hanging by their toe nails from the pathetic twig of a tree in our front yard.

Who knows? It may be my own three year old. But as Joss Whedon would say, “GRRR ARGH.”

(Read like a WVA hick!) “I bought it special for you babe!” “Oh, thank you I love it!”

This is how our conversation went as Matt finished cutting some plyboard to mount my mother’s day present. (refer to previous blog concerning plywood furniture and know our conversation was sarcastic!)

I recently read somewhere that men don’t read minds, and they typically don’t have any clue what their wife/girlfriend want for gifts. The suggestion was to tell your man exactly what you want so that he’s not left guessing.

So…I told Matt I wanted a Dance Dance Revolution set for Mother’s Day. I think he was a bit surprised, but we had talked about getting one for Christmas and decided against it. He immediately got online and read up on the quality of different types of DDR pads. For the sake of family finances we decided to go with the inexpensive stuff, with the suggestion from other DDR players online to mount the pad to plywood and then cover it with clear floor covering. GREAT STUFF.

It’s been great fun to have the whole family exercising more and having fun together! We’re burning calories and dancing the night away! I don’t know that we’ll ever catch up with the amazing abilities of the teenagers at the arcade, but we’re sure going to try!