Old Year's Eve!!

This is not a New Year’s post.

I know I’ve been gone for a while and I kind of figure that most bloggers have also taken a break for the past few weeks and now are arriving back at the ol’ laptop to muse about the New Year and their resolutions or fond memories of the year past. The reason this is not a New Year’s post is because I feel like I’m still living in 2011, and for good reason.

The end of December had a lot of adventure.

Firstly, and most importantly because it is certainly life changing, Kate and I got engaged! There will be a post later about why exactly I came to this decision... I'll give you a hint, it's because I am completely head over heels in love with her (even when she's a jerk and reads things over my shoulder... not that that has happened recently or anything, like right now). Check out this video that took me forever to put together. It comes in two parts because YouTube hates me.

Part 1: Pre-engagement

Part 2: Engagement

So, that all took place on the Wednesday night/Thursday morning before Christmas. Later that Thursday Kate and I had our first date as an engaged couple. Originally it was at this date that I was going to propose but if you watched the video you can see that isn’t what happened, instead we spent some time talking about wedding stuff and buying our wedding journal. It’s pretty awesome.

Here are some pictures:

this isn't the one she wanted but you know girls
they never know what they want :-)

Our wedding book!

She'd be smiling bigger if she hadn't skipped breakfast and lunch
out of excitement

my favorite part of the Americana

happy.

super happy!

I love this little trolly.

see... I love it!

To me, that’s enough to warrant this being an “Old Year’s Post” but that is just the beginning. A hefty beginning, but still. The next day (Christmas Eve Eve) I was ordained. My parents and my brother, and my future parents and future brother and sister were all there with a ton of my old friends and some of my new friends from Park Avenue, not to mention my new FIANCE, and Fred and Kendra who I failed to thank in the little ordination pamphlet (which I should thank Lynne and Gary for), so I’ll thank them here profusely. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It was awesome.

The best part was probably having some of the youth kids come up and talk about how I’ve impacted their life, but in a close second was this award:

It’s called the “Salsa de la Tierra” which means salsa of the earth, which is a play on words from the Hope International Salt of the Earth award. It was awesome cause I was always a little sad that I didn’t win that Salt of the Earth award and now I have something 20 million times better. Casey Miller (whose blog is here) made it upon Fred’s request.

it has a butt... in case you were wondering.

So then there was Christmas Eve, where I preached my first sermon as an ordained pastor and my first Christmas Eve sermon. I was crazy nervous and running on very little sleep so you can imagine how that worked out.

And then it was Christmas morning. It was a Sunday so I was back at church for the third day in a row. Luckily we had tamales and awesome board games or else I’m sure I would have fallen asleep, which apparently is a big no-no for Youth Pastors. Afterward it was family time, first with my family and then with Kate’s. It was awesome, mostly because Christmas is always awesome.

I know I’m running through a lot of this stuff, so my deepest apologies for those who came here to hear more about my crazy winter break, but I do need to thank the Homet’s for getting me this domain name as a Christmas gift so I can now officially welcome you to Alexhasofficehours.com  !!!! It’s pretty exciting.

And with that, sorry for my teen-girl-journal-blogging but I hope you’re as excited as me to get back to my normal blogging. With Donald and the Dust Bunnies now over and the Spiritual Eating Disorders series just beginning we can look forward to a new creative story based of a different old idea I had and a whole lot more ridiculous rambles from me. I’m happy to be back but I’m certainly still living in 2011, so HAPPY OLD YEAR’S!