Juxtapose

I got my fill of the last warm days today by opening up the windows in the apartment, letting the wind sweep out the musty smells that have accumulated, and mercilessly cleaning house as if my life depended on it. With the onset of baby-induced fatigue I've let the dishes pile up in my sink, with the already washed ones taking up a permanent residence in the dish drainer. If that wasn't bad enough, there was junk everywhere.. dust, mail, clothes all over my room and in the bathroom, books I haven't put away, and, (perhaps most loathesome of all to this sad little neurotic), a to-do list that had ZERO checkmarks on it. My house now feels fresher than a spring day, and I'm eagerly looking forward to tonight, which entails the following:

+ Mark arriving home with two sandwiches for us to eat for supper

+ Drew, Amanda, Chaz and (maybe later) Molly coming over for a Scary Movie Night to watch The Orphanage and (again, maybe later) Donnie Darko, always a cult favorite, in my opinion.

+ Eating delicious snackies and drinking foamy IBC rootbeer from glass bottles and from the comfort of my newly-vacuumed couch that is on top of a clean floor.

+ Retiring to bed at a late hour, full on IBC and french onion dip, to my bed with the millions of blankets on it, perfectly suited for all cold New England fall seasons.

Tomorrow I wake up to a new day, a clean house, and (not so awesome) a physical at the occupational health department of the local hospital where I just snagged myself a new/second job. Actually, God clearly snagged it for me, in fact. I know this for a few reasons, but none of which are so touching to me than that of the distinct absence of any concern, nervousness, or worries that I usually fret over when it comes to new jobs. I can't really think of one new job I've started where I didn't have to almost be dragged in, I was so terrified of the new challenges and meeting new people. This time, I feel as if God just plopped this in my lap, like, Here you go, you silly thing - just go on. One day I got up, went to an open house at the hospital, and almost without a true interview, I found myself on the floor I wanted with the hours I wanted, just like that. It's not always that easy, but when it is, I know who is pulling the strings, and it sure isn't me.

After much waiting due to the home-grown operation that is Reese and Amy Roper shipping all the albums themselves, Mark and I finally got our copy of Brave Saint Saturn's new album, Anti-Meridian, the third in their space trilogy. Our late shipment came with a lovely scrawled note in Sharpie by The Man himself, "Sorry we are so slow. - REESE"

It was worth the wait. Beautiful and building, all seventeen tracks take me all the way back to our pre-dating days, when I got their second album from Mark and devoured it within the day, over and over again. It sounded like Five Iron Frenzy, only a little more earnest and with simple but smoldering words that cut me, all the way to the end of the very last song, "Savior, Daylight, I am coming home! Home! Home! Home! Home!" I was taken and a loyalist ever since.

Since then, a lot has happened. And so here I sit at home the past two weeks or so, my hours cut back at work because of a large influx of new staff on my floor, my days spent trying to convince myself to get out bed, gag down Campbell's chicken noodle soup, and get something done for the day. I've never felt so tired in my life. Even mono, with my giant lumpy neck and headaches, had nothing on this little bugger who seems intent on leeching all my energies into it's grain-of-rice-sized body. For this reason, I've had some time to listen to Anti-Meridian while I'm doing all these important non-activities of my day that seem like such a huge chore at the moment, and I am enjoying it so very much.

I mostly wrote all this just so I could make a post with the words to one of my favorite of their newest songs, which has a line from one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible, Ephesians 5:14, "Wherefore he saith, Awake O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light." The invocation says it all - Get up, meet the world in your new garment, live Christ and He will shine through you and make you new. It also speaks in the chapter about the exposing of sin by the light of Christ. I love it. I am a new woman, awake and alive amongst the living and baptized into a new family, guided by Christ into places I could not go alone.