That's What Jenni Said

My first published travel article to add to my portfolio: http://travelguide.affordabletours.com/Article/120/ *squee* All pictures alongside article were all taken by myself or hubby.

Publisher: Beach Books Author: Sasha Soren In this novel, Ms. Soren weaves a tale of adventure from the threads of common cultural references (Alice in Wonderland, book jumping, a bit of Harry Potteresque magic, etc). Alice in Wonderland has gone missing and Professor Random has appointed one of his students to find her. Along the way mischief and mayhem ensue. Eventually everything is resolved and wrapped up satisfyingly in the end. Random Magic is available on Amazon.com   The plot is detailed, inventive and interesting. Combined with Ms. Soren's precision in utilizing adjectives and adverbs in nearly every sentence it would do well as the foundation for a witty screenplay. However, while professional actors can benefit from the abundance of adverbs and likewise set designers will be right on track with the numerous adjectives, the constant barrage of descriptions tires the novel reader. Likewise, the subtle British humor, innuendos, and doublespeak would play out be

It's been several weeks since I've posted about my couch to 5k progress. I have been on the mat so to speak wrestling with the program. It took me 6 tries to nail w5d3 and that was my hardest goal to accomplish in terms of number of tries up to that point. On to week 6, I switched from the time goals to the distance goals so that I could master a 5k by graduation. D1 and D2 of W6 went by smoothly but it took 7 tries to succeed at D3. Seven tries! The distance goal was 2.25 miles and took me approx 28 minutes of running. Still, I refused to give up and I faced each session with a new dose of determination. It never occurred to me to consider quitting. Then....then I went out to tackle W7d1 (2.5 miles) and failed spectacularly. I cramped up before even a mile. I was going backward in progress! So I tried again and made it just 1.5 miles. And again going 2 miles. Just the week before I'd done 2.25 miles and now it was a struggle to even get to 2! What was going on?! I was

Today I am feeling very discouraged about my personality. I’ve always been a bit ‘different’. This difference is not just some imagined phenomenon wrought out of an emotional ‘nobody gets me’ teenage angst. It’s a well documented set of traits objectively observable by others around me. My husband told me while dating that it was my sincere and open/vulnerable kindness (a kind of sweet naivety in his words)  that drew him to me as he found it to be unusual. Friends often tell me I’m quite different than most others. According to Myers-Briggs testing I am an ENFP, which is less than 8% of the population. ENFP summary: I wear my heart on my sleeve; I’m very passionate about things that spark my interest (and very unmotivated to tackle things that don’t); I have the strongest need to be liked/loved out of any of the personality types; I have a directed sense of purpose and require that my relationships and job work toward that purpose in order to feel ok with life; I am intelligent; I

This year I have decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month ( NaNoWriMo ). The annual event occurs in November and the objective is to write a fiction work consisting of at least 50,000 words within the month. I have begun to brainstorm plot constructs and thinking that it’s best to start from a base of ‘what-you-know’ I have decided to write about a woman’s life that followed the alternative path to mine. Then I got stuck trying to decide where to veer my character’s life off the course of mine. To make the decision easier, I sat down and mapped out (in decision tree form) all the major life decision points I’ve gone through so I could play with alternative choices.  While I’m sure there is truth to the claim that even the tiniest inconsequential decision can alter our lives irreversibly, I wanted to focus on the major choose-your-own-adventure moments. Here is my tree. Here are over 30 decisions I made which changed my life. When I look back over these decisions I hav

It breaks my heart the way the enemies of God are able to leverage the little agonies and injustices inflicted by the spiritually broken to perpetuate the brokenness over generations of a family. Look at such a situation from the outside and it seems helpless but I know that with God nothing is impossible. God is stronger than any of his enemies and he can break the inheritance of brokenness within us. I pray frequently that God will affect this miracle in myself.

There is something deep and philosophical about flying above the clouds. As we cross over oceans, we have a chance for meaningful fellowship between ourselves, our God and his sky. Just like the plane hurling forward, our lives advance in an irreversible march toward our final destination. ‘Trapped’ in the modern metal cabin we are given the chance to reflect on what we really value. And when we eventually land halfway across the world and spend time in the local culture we realize (if we’re lucky) that our travel has broken through many of the artificial constructs of who “we” are (versus “them”) and shown us that we are all fundamentally people.

Publisher: Zondervan Author: Walter Wangerin Jr. Many Christian readers are already  familiar with the story of Naomi and Ruth. It's often touted as one of the most beautiful stories of friendship in the bible. The sad recounting of the Levite who gives over his wife to the sex crazed mob in the book of Judges to protect himself is also known to most readers although structurally these story lines are presented as unrelated in scripture. Wangerin weaves them together brilliantly in ‘Naomi and her Daughters’, providing a back story of events in Naomi's life that propel her and Ruth together on a journey to Bethlehem. Throughout the novel, Wangerin uses an italicized typeface whenever he directly quotes the bible. This is helpful for the reader to discern Wangerin's beautiful fictionalized embellishments from what's been lifted out of the Word of God "as-is". Fictionalized accounts of historical events prove justice to their story when they draw interest