Another Month

thus ends another month. into the black, words to the ether. granted, many read this, but many more will never even think twice about it or regret not reading it. does it matter? not in the end, unless your goal is to know me. i feel that i've done well enough to communicate enough of who i am through this blog to sufficiently give someone a picture of buel newman. i'll continue. when i hit the one year mark, i'll decide if i want to continue doing this daily. i probably will, thinking right now, but i hope such discipline remains a priority for me. it'll serve me particularly well once we've gone back to hong kong.

speaking of which...

i've been mentioning the struggle between the decision to go to seminary or not, and at this point i am unexpectedly leaning away from the idea. there are a lot of reasons that i won't get into here, and i don't want to simplify it, but the basic gist is that i'm just not sure it's the right move for me at this point and season in my life. going back is the biggest and most important thing, and i want to do it right. but right now i'm thinking that may not be best served by heading off to two to three more years of school before going out, as well as essentially rendering my last few years of work toward the end of teaching english rather pointless.

anyway, that's enough musing for the day. today we got the jeep 'smogged' and it passed and all that jazz. good for two years, which is [in my opinion] hopefully more time than we plan to be in this state, let alone the country. elijah and i hung out during the day, spent some time with the wife at her job and then escorted her to school to register for her classes. good for christin! then we went to the mall and had delicious fake chinese food and hung out at lovesac. then we came home and watched some south park, some movie and some firefly. he's liking it more now, which is excellent. i find the repeat viewing equally satisfying as the first. ;-D

Keep Or Jot

today we celebrated becky's birthday! elijah and i went out and got her a cake, then came back to the house and watched plinket's phantom menace and avatar reviews [they will never get old] and an episode of south park in which they made fun of hoarding and inception at the same time. well played, parker and stone. well played. once christin got home, we made the cake and watched last week's community, which was great, before heading off to check out our new place we'll be moving into in another week or so. good times!

it's gonna be totally awesome.

once back home, becky came over and we had spaghetti. the sauce was bland and no one told me, which makes me angry! well, not really. elijah said it's because he's been having bad french food and airplane food, so anything is better than that, and christin genuinely liked it. i have higher standards for my own food, i'll say. i put some more garlic and some salt on it and it tasted great. all in all, it was a good night, and the cake was delicious. it was most definitely not a lie. i called my buddy zach kueker and my dad, and elijah and i watched the pilot of firefly, which was just as good the second time. he seemed to like it. bedtime!

Plush Twin Size

i just heard a t.v. pastor just explain that he was the most loving pastor in the world. ha! strange thing to say. today was a whirlwind of sickness followed by feeling quite a bit better, followed by a lot of video editing [final product] and culminating in the picking-up of elijah from the airport. it's cool to have him here. we got him a little inflatable bed and at current, he's asleep in the living room after a long flight. i just finished my homework and am getting ready to head to sleep as well, but i had to finish this, of course. no failure tonight!

so yeah. the next few weeks will be interesting, between hanging with elijah and working at sears sporadically and moving to crofton. we'll probably be playing a good deal of wow, chatting it up, making him watch firefly for the first time [jealous!] and other random things. we'll definitely have to hit up d.c. and baltimore, and film many many videos. it's gonna be so fetch. lol! now i'm tired. i apologize for the shortness of this post, but the excitement in the coming days should translate well to text, and thus shall make up for it eventually. i bid thee good morrow!

In Dreams

they say you can't die in dreams, but i have several times. more often than not, it involves being bitten by a snake and dying from poison, which has happened in at least 3 dreams that i remember from my childhood. it's been a while since i've died in a dream, and last night it happened and it was one of the most vivid and realistic dreams i've ever had. notice that i say 'dream' and not nightmare because it wasn't particularly frightening, at least not for me. but when i actually woke up and everything, i seriously had to check to make sure i was able to move.

and the weird thing is: at first, i wasn't.

it took a few minutes, but i could move again. it was probably mental, but i seriously felt paralyzed to the point where i thought that i had died and 'resurfaced' in my room but i was actually dead. it wasn't the case, of course. it was a weird dream. christin was giving me a back massage and telling me to relax, and i made a joke about not relaxing and having a heart attack. right after that, like some kind of cruel irony, my heart stopped for no apparent reason. it was bizarre. then i got a kind of strange throbbing pain that pulsed quickly, then faded into a sharp constant pain. then it was gone when i woke up.

so yeah, i don't know if that's what a heart attack feels like, but that's what it felt like dreaming. the dream shifted from third-person to first several times, but until i was 'dead' it was first-person during all the pain. at the end, just before i woke up, it was third-person again and i could see christin fall on me in frustration and sadness. it was pretty miserable, but then she was next to me when i woke up and i realized i had been dreaming. technically, i knew i was dreaming all along, because of the location [out in front of my parents' house, 3,000 miles away in california] but yeah. weird.

oh, and in case you were wondering, my last thought before i died was: 'no, Jesus... i can't come yet... *pause* well i guess this is it.'

Why?

oh, black friday, you are a horrible creation of consumerism. i woke up at 2:30 in the morning just to get out the door and eat and be at work at 3:30am, though 'woke up' is a bit of a misstatement because i essentially didn't sleep at all. i fell asleep for a few hours from 10pm-1am but couldn't manage to stay sleeping long enough to get anything resembling rest. the first hour of work from 4am-5am was pure chaos, with lots of customers and pretty much a non-stop line. then it just kind of turned into a consistent, busy day.

so basically it wasn't all that bad.

it was just like a really busy day for the most part, but a really busy day as a cashier in a notable department store filled with impatient customers that generally aren't interested in all of the dumb promotional questions i am obligated to ask them. also, i had very little sleep and worked a 10.5 hour shift. after i got off work, i went to hang out with my wife in the mall at the new lovesac store. it was nice to relax for a couple minutes on weird alternative furniture that i will probably never be able to afford. we had a lovesac store at our mall in california, so this wasn't the first time i've checked it out, but it's cool that there's one here now.

after that, you'd think i would go home and pass out, but no. i went to best buy because i broke my mouse and stole christin's, leaving her with a crappy one with no side buttons. so i got her a new cordless one that suits her needs pretty well. i walked around the store and checked out the 'super sweet deals' on stuff i'm not allowed to buy because we're poor and can't take any of the stuff on a plane to hong kong when we move. it's fun to look, though. i ended up getting back to the house at 5pm and expected to pass out but ended up recording a probably hilarious video. i say probably because i haven't edited it yet, and don't remember most of it.

then i took a nap and woke up in time to raid, which was eventful but not necessarily productive. i was dps for the most part this time, which was a welcome and fun change for me. i need to go and reforge my melee gear and get all mail. ;-P anyway, that was my day, eventful and insane. now i'm sitting here the next day and wondering why i never posted this blog last night. i did get pretty sick over the course of the day and went to sleep pretty much immediately after the raid was out, but i still should've hit 'publish'. oh well, i'm a failure. black friday!

5, 6, 7, 8!

work this morning was ridiculous. whoever thought it was a good idea to have sears open today is mentally unstable and must be destroyed. well, that's an exaggeration, but it was dead. i probably rang up between 6-8 people the whole time i was there, and thankfully i got to go home early. i came home and took a short nap before heading over to our brother bob's house on the eastern shore. we ate dinner there and it was great! christin's turkey and pie were fantabulous. i would've tried the turducken [chicken inside a duck inside a turkey] but the stuffing in it had shrimp.

after spending some time with my crazy nieces and getting more than enough exercise to work off all of the turkey, rice and pie i ate, we headed home after picking up christin's car and the monster dog from christin's parents' house. and here we are. my feet stink. they always stink, though. now i am trying to force myself to stay awake long enough to not sleep too long and end up tired, so i get to go to sleep at around 10pm tonight. only an hour and a half to go! happy thanksgiving, all. black friday, here i come. 3:30am, ugh. i promise these blogs will get more interesting after the hectic weekend.

Un-Morning Person

i have to be at work at 6:30am tomorrow, on thanksgiving. this does not please me. much of today was spent in deep thought and prayer on the topic of yesterday's blogging, but no conclusion was immediately reached. that's probably a good thing. i didn't make a video today, like i said i would, but i did set up my rig so i would remember to do one sometime tomorrow. it's been far too long. i think i may revamp and re-launch my channel on the 1-year anniversary of my first for-reals vid. as with all things i announce on this blog, we'll see how that goes. it's unfortunately bedtime for me.