Resistance Is Futile?

Despite mounting pressure, I have thus far remained the only person in my circle of friends who's not on Facebook. I didn't want my already-neglected blog (or, for that matter, my children) to have to compete with it for my time... and if my husband and housemates are any indication, a Facebook account takes hours a day to maintain. Furthermore, I'm starting to think the reason you need all your friends to post profile pictures is so you remember what the bottom half of their faces -- you know, the part perpetually obscured by their laptop screens -- look like.

*sigh*

Yeah, I'll probably have an account there sometime next month. Look me up.

Update on Monday, December 29, 2008 at 10:54AM by mrs. nygren

A brief retraction statement:

I'd like to publicly offer my deepest apologies to Paul and Julie, who are also currently Facebook holdouts and most certainly do belong in my circle of friends. I suppose I just lost count of how many people have asked quizzically "What, you aren't on Facebook?" and assumed that by now I'd heard it from everybody I know.

Would someone please pass me a fork? It isn't ladylike to eat crow with one's fingers...

We Don't Need No Water... Evidently

In fall of 2004, a California woman saw a car with her friend inside smash into a light pole going forty-five miles an hour. Believing the car was about to explode, she hastily pulled her friend from the wreckage. As a result of the way she extracted the woman from the car -- "like a rag doll," in the victim's words -- she was rendered a paraplegic.

Four years later, the victim has made amazing strides... not toward her recovery, but toward being able to sue her friend for the injuries she sustained.

Yes, the California Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that unless a person is administering emergency care, he or she can be sued for injuries resulting from attempts to render aid. In this case, since the car didn't blow up after all, it turns out it wasn't an emergency.

Is there a way to know that except for in hindsight?

Here's what else I'm wondering: couldn't she just as easily have beed sued for negligence if she'd done nothing and the car had exploded?

I'm envisioning a new line of greeting cards just for the state of California: the cover would read, "I only know of one way to show my gratitude for all you've done." The inside would say, "Bend over."

Winter Blossom

So, in the past couple months...

...I've conquered several new recipes (one of which was a pastry crust that should have earned me technical points for difficulty), much to the delight of my housemates, who serve as guinea pigs for my culinary experiments.

...I've figured out a morning routine wherein both my toddler and my newborn get clean diapers and breakfast before either has a chance to be upset about having to wait for them.

...I've started wearing a bit of makeup again, stopped wearing so many things that look like Western society's answer to the burqa, and even started occasionally wearing shoes at times when they aren't mandatory.

It's weird. I'm not sure what's happening to me. The best way I can describe it is... I feel like I'm in bloom.

It isn't that I hated being a stay-at-home mom before now. I've just never felt as deeply satisfied with that role as I have lately. No small part of the blame credit goes to Crunchy Granola Ami for passing me a copy of Edith Schaeffer's Hidden Art (which has since been re-released as The Hidden Art of Homemaking), wherein some tasks I once viewed as mundane are revealed to be what they truly are: opportunities to create beauty and show love in an increasingly ugly and heartless world.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm still no Stepford wife, and my organized-chaos approach to housekeeping is the stuff of Martha Stewart's nightmares. I'm a long way from where I'd like to be as a wife and a mom... but unlike Russia, I think I can see it from here.

For Kristen

...who observed that I don't have enough pictures of my Sugar Bean in circulation yet.

She's six weeks old today and looks so much like her Daddy, I might even feel a little slighted if our son the internet celebrity didn't look so much like me.

We're falling behind on pictures because we left the camera at my in-laws' house across town and haven't had a chance to retrieve it yet. So when we get more photos, so will you. Meanwhile, a parting shot: at VISION, our last ArtLoveMagic event of the year, Jenice Johnson snapped a picture of me showing off my latest masterpiece...

Seriously. No, SERIOUSLY

Yesterday, senior Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen got a phone call from President-Elect Obama... eventually.

The first time he called, she thought it was a joke by a local radio station, so she hung up on him. When he had Rahm Emanuel call her back, she hung up on him too. It took a third call -- this time from a representative she knew personally -- to convince her the call was legit.

Dang.

One has to wonder if Obama got a glimpse of what God feels like when He's trying to get through to us and we keep blowing Him off as though it were a prank call...