Monthly Archives: December 2014

So I’ve been seeing all these websites with Holiday Gift Giving Guides and thought that I should make one of my own.  You know…just for fun.  Or in case anyone wants to buy me a Christmas present.  Just kidding!  Here are a 12 of my favorite things or things that I think would be favorites if I owned them!

1.  The Polar Loop – Candied Jansen got me one of these back at the beginning of the summer, and I love it!  There have only been a few days when I haven’t worn it since then!  I love that it tells me how many steps I’ve taken as well as a calorie burn count and an activity level marker.  It also tells time!  The best part though is to spend the night at Candied Jansen’s house and to almost be at my activity level goal and then to just go to bed and not worry that I didn’t meet the preset goal.  It drives her crazy knowing that if I would just run for 2 minutes, the loop would shoot fireworks and sing my praises, and I still get in bed. HeeHee!

2.  A Kitchenaid Mixer – this is the old standby.  I still don’t own one despite my complete lust over them for years.  I just drool over them on a regular basis and pull out my red Oster handheld which works remarkably well!

3.  A Raclette – I seriously need one of these!  A party centered around cooking food??  YES!  And this could totally be healthy as well!  And here is where I will add that Candied Jansen has concluded that I am a “scrap” eater.  I eat small portions of lots of things.  She basically says that what I eat amounts to the scraps leftover from what others have eaten.  While I don’t completely agree with her scrap assessment, the raclette totally fits in with eating lots of different little things!  SOLD!

4.  This handy dandy drill and circular saw combo set!  Because we can all use some power tools in our lives!  And because I have two wooden pallets that I keep saying I’m going to do something creative with, but I don’t have a saw or any tools really so one is leaning against the fence and the other is in my garage.  That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

5.  These stackable holiday blocks – I have 2 sets of these and they are super cute!  I got the reversible ones so I have a Halloween/Fall set and a Valentines/St. Patrick’s Day set.

6.  A firepit table.  I honestly need two of these…one wood burning that things can be thrown into for fun and one gas lit one that looks pretty!  I don’t even need to put  a link here, because you can google fire pit tables and click on images and see them all!

7.  One of these Erin Condren life planners!  Have you ever seen anything so amazingly cute and functional all at the same time??  I must have one so I can be the envy of all my teacher friends!

8.  An iPod –  I am one of those people who likes my music separate from my phone.  I’ll probably still have music on my phone, but I LOVED my old iPod classic.  I loved plugging it into some speakers I had in my kitchen and jamming to music while I cooked.  I bought a refurbished one in 2009 and it died this year.  That’s 5 years of use which  I guess is forever in technological terms.  I was tempted to buy another refurbished classic, but they are outrageously priced now because apparently there are many of us out there who don’t embrace change!  Sadly, my cooking is often done in silence these days because I don’t think to use my phone or computer.

9.  A Carhartt jacket.  I’ve been eyeing a couple…this one and this one!  Ok…I guess I’ll go with one of each!!

10.  This nightshirt!  And as far as I’m concerned this is unisex!  I think it looks amazingly comfortable!

11.  A rice cooker.  Way back in 1991, my ex-husband and I received a rice cooker for a wedding present.  I don’t remember what kind it was or how good it was because we never used the thing.  Not one time.  The person who gave it to us said it was the most used appliance in their kitchen.  I couldn’t believe it.  We got rid of it at some point and I didn’t think about a rice cooker again until 2009.  I had just gotten my own apartment and was strolling the aisles at Walgreens while I waited on a prescription to be filled.  I saw that their small appliances were on sale for the holidays and there was a little Kitchen Gourmet rice cooker for $7.  All of a sudden I thought I needed a rice cooker.  I would use a rice cooker.  So I bought it.  Five years later, I am still using that little $7 rice cooker.  And, yes, it is probably the most used appliance in my kitchen!

Here’s a video I found of my exact rice cooker in action!  

12.  The Try The World food boxes!  Wow!  Every other month you receive a box delivered to your door with gourmet foods from a particular city around the world.  Each box costs $39 and has 7-10 items in it. First month is Paris, second is Tokyo, third is Rio.  I looked at their website and see that there is also a Rome box and an Istanbul box!  I think I might be in love!  International Scrap Food for the win!!

I guess I should stop this post and do some shopping for my kids who would probably not appreciate any of these gift items!

So the text conversation about Candied Jansen’s health took a turn when she said this…

“I find it weird that the things we love to do and the things we love the other person to do…we rarely do when we are together.  I LOVE that you blog and you love to blog…but I can only remember one time that you blogged when I was with you.  I love to workout and you love that I am active…but I very rarely do it when I’m with you.  We need to work on being the part of ourselves that we love and being that person around each other as well.”

I told her that I haven’t been blogging even when I have time and we’re not together.  I just haven’t been in the mood to blog lately.

“I guess that’s why it’s hard to me to explain my NEED and WANT to be healthy and active because the things I think are so important to you, you can just let go of so easily or change….(blogging…kindergarten)”

I explained to her that over the years I’ve seen my blogging ebb and flow.  I loved blogging so much in the beginning that I couldn’t imagine my life without it.  I wrote about life in Turkey on my main blog and then started a secret blog for the crisis of faith and sexuality issues I was dealing with.  I blogged because I needed it.  I was away from the Baptist bubble I’d grown up in and I was experiencing things I had never even imagined.  Because I was overseas working for a christian company, I needed a safe place to process without condemnation.  So I blogged.  When I lost my oldest friend because of the whole sexuality thing, I blogged as I fell to pieces.  When we came back to the states and I grieved leaving a place that felt so much like home, I blogged.  When I decided to leave my husband and come out, I blogged.  All of those times were full of so many blog posts because I needed it.  I needed that place to fall apart and gather myself and contemplate life.  

When my last girlfriend and I broke up, my blogging picked up.  I didn’t really need to process the break-up, but I did need to think about who I was and what I wanted in life.  Those are the posts that Candied Jansen read and loved.  I was in the midst of discovery and so I blogged.  At the beginning of our relationship, I blogged some because I was so overcome with feelings that I needed to put them somewhere.  Even the posts that didn’t have to do with her much were written because I was full of emotion.  Now that life has settled down some, I am not blogging as much.  I am still overwhelmingly in love with her.  She is still so wonderfully my perfect match.  My love of blogging hasn’t changed one bit…just my need to do it.  When things get tough, as I’m sure they will at times, I will blog.  It’s what I do.  I love that Candied Jansen enjoys my words.  I am so thankful that I will have her to lean on during tough times.

And then the conversation morphed again because of these words…

“even the way you handled & talk about your family.”

Here she is referring to the way I handled myself when my family didn’t talk to me because I had a girlfriend and the way I have prepared myself for the possibility of my family alienating me again because of my relationship with Candied Jansen.

I explained that I had a hard time with it, but I had expected it.  I didn’t like it at all, but I knew that it was the most likely scenario.  In stressful situations, Candied Jansen looks at every possibility and at every outcome.  She thinks through all scenarios that she can come up with from beginning to end.  For me, it is different.  I looked at the worst case scenario when it came to my family, and I prepared myself for that.  I knew that coming out would be a major life-changing thing for me.  I would most likely lose all my friends and family because it totally went against everything we believed in.  I contemplated the reality of that for a long time before I was ever brave enough to actually do it.  I knew that I could be homeless when I left my parent’s house the night I came out to them because I was living in a house that they owned.  I knew that every friend I ever made was either from church or a missions organization I was involved with.  I was dating someone at the time, and she was literally the only person I knew I could count on, but I knew that she wasn’t someone I considered a lifelong certainty. I knew that everyone could turn on me so I had to decide if I was enough. If all I had was me and God, would I be ok?  And I knew I would be.  I felt a peace about it.

When I told my parents, I was shaking and crying and preparing for a goodbye.  That didn’t happen.  They didn’t like it and needed some time to think, but they said they loved me.  They still talked to me, but there was a definite shift in our relationship.  My sister did tell me goodbye.  She met with me and shared her thoughts on it and said it made her sad, but she had to do what she felt led to do.  She was the only one who reacted that severely.

Later when she discovered that I had a girlfriend and told my parents, my parents stopped talking to me as well.  My dad and I reconnected through text messages, but I didn’t talk to my mother for about 8 months.  It was hard, but again, I was prepared for it.  I had hard days and ok days.

Candied Jansen wondered how I could prepare and plan for something like that.  It seemed impossible to her.  She said she would fall apart in the same situation.  This is where our personality differences come in.  My seemingly flippant attitude is not really that at all.  I handled it, because I didn’t have a choice.  I knew my family would have issues at first, but my hope was that as long as I did the right thing, they would come around.  So I waited.  When I was invited to birthday parties for nieces and nephews, I went.  I sent text messages to keep in touch even if I didn’t get a response.  And they slowly came around.  They still don’t agree with my choices.  I don’t know what they will do when I tell them that Candied Jansen and I are moving in together.  I have been preparing my heart for their reaction since the day we first mentioned it.  Worst case scenario…they stop talking to me again.  I know I can handle it, because I handled it before.  And it’s so different this time.  I have my kids.  They have grown so much since those early days.  They won’t leave.  And I have Candied Jansen.  She means the world to me.

And that is where the conversations ended that night.  With talks about my family and how I handle them.  I can look at the progression of words and see how we ended up at my family after starting with Candied Jansen and her need to exercise.  I like that we can talk for long stretches and never run out of things to say.  That works for me!