I should be working

Right now I should be either studying for a midterm that I have on Monday for a teacher that is known to try to trick you, revising a paper that is due Tuesday, finish writing a paper that is due a week Monday or choreographing 18 more routines, but I am not doing any of those things. In fact, what I am doing, I am rather skilled at – procrastination. Since returning home from work this evening, I have chatted on MSN with people around North America, eaten supper, taken my saxophone out and played some tunes after not playing it for at least 3 years, fed the cats, eaten more food, played with the cats and did a small bit of studying for my midterm. As for the rest of my evening, I am considering watching a movie or playing my sax a bit more. I know I should be doing work and I probably will force myself to do more work before I sleep but I have 5 days of class left and my brain has already left on vacation.

So I was sitting in the hall studying for a lab quiz today and happened to glance over and the people’s books beside me that they were studying out of. Of the two people that I saw, both of them had completely highlighted every word in every paragraph. Why on earth do people do that? What good does that really do? Is the purpose of highlighting to emphasize the key points of the paragraph so at a glance you can see what is important? I just do not understand the benefit of highlighting every single word in all or most paragraphs. Hmmm….
Ahh, I’ve got it! They must have an aversion to reading black letters on white paper so they decided to make it a little more visually pleasing by changing the background!! That must be it! At times I have also gotten bored of reading black letters on white paper but my brain must not be intelligent enough to have thought to just simply change the colour of the background! Genius!

So the other day I discovered a new pet peeve of mine: floor routines with no dancing. I am busy choreographing the floor routines for my 13 girls and am really starting to lack ideas for the last few. My co-worker suggested that I go to youtube.com and look up old Olympic routines to get some ideas. I did that and as I was watching a couple of them, I was aghast at how little dancing they actually contained! Are not floor routines supposed to contain dance rather than chasé pose, chasé pose, walk walk pose. Then when I was at work that evening, I was noticing some of the other floor routines and again was not impressed with the lack of dancing and too many skills. Sure skills are nice to look at but they are also places were the judges can take easy deductions if not done perfectly. Ok so maybe I’m also a little biased because I am a dancer, have always been a dancer and gymnastics and dance have always gone hand in hand for me. Every floor routine I had was always very dancy. I realize that not all gymnasts can dance (Believe me some of them have 2 left feet!!! That is why all gymnasts should be required to take dance classes, please!! - for the sake of easier choreography for me and a more pleasant viewing experience if they ever end up on youtube.com and I am looking for ideas) but in my opinion, floor should involve dancing on top of the skills required. And that is my beef.

God is really awesome. I am so thankful that He is in control and not me! I am so human – I make so many mistakes! I am just lucky that I have the capability to learn from my mistakes (I say capability because sometimes I don’t fix those mistakes right away even though I know I should) and that if I trust in Him and obey His commands, His Will will be done. You can’t go wrong with the Creator of the Universe in the driver’s seat.

Amazed and Ashamed

I heard a story tonight that I thought was very powerful.
A little boy had done something wrong and would not admit to his mother that he did it. The mother confronted the boy and realizing that the mother knew what he had done, he ran upstairs and hid. The mother let him go hide and called the father at work to let him know what had happened. When the father came home, the mother told him that she hadn’t heard a sound from the little boy for the past couple of hours. The father went upstairs and looked in the little boy’s room but he wasn’t there. The boy wasn’t in his brother’s room or the bathroom either which just left one room. The father went into his own room and saw a lump underneath the covers on his bed. He went over and lifted the covers off the boy. The boy was soaking wet with sweat from being under those covers for a couple of hours and was lying there motionless trying to decide whether to pull the covers back over himself or lie there totally exposed. The father broke the silence by saying these words: “There is nothing you can do that would ever make me love you less”. The little boy sat up and buried himself in his father’s arms and chest and wept because he was so sorry for what he did.
Those words: “there is nothing you can do that would ever make me love you less”, those words are so powerful! Imagine if those words were the first words out of a parents mouth when their children did something wrong and the children knew that their parents truly meant it. How different would parent and child relationships be? If a human parent can say something like that and truly mean it, how much more powerful and perfect is it when the Creator of the Universe and your Heavenly Father says it! That is just mind boggling to me!


It absolutely does not matter what you have done, God still loves you so incredibly much. It’s not a conditional love and does not require anything in return; it’s totally unconditional, so much so that He let His only Son die to prove that to you!


I was talking with a friend today at school and she was telling me about a near death car accident she was in on the weekend. A lady actually died in that accident but thankfully my friend and her boyfriend were ok! That got me thinking, what if she had died? I am not the type of person that goes and shares the gospel message the first time I meet someone. I like to get to know a person, and let them see me and how I live my life and hopefully that will be a good example. Then when the time is right I will slowly bring up the subject of God. That is how I have been living my life but maybe I need to step it up a notch! I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to this girl about God or about my relationship with Him. She could have died and I never once told her about Jesus. I am ashamed. I feel horrible. Now I can go on the defensive saying that I see this girl only once a week for a couple of hours and those hours are spent listening to professors speak or running between classes so we don’t really have the time to chat. How many other people in my life should I be sharing more about Jesus instead of letting them just see the way I live my life. That is something that I really have to work on because if by some chance her boyfriend didn’t swerve in time and she didn’t make it to class today…I could have planted a seed in her life already but I didn’t. My mission is to both show Jesus in my life by example as well as sharing the love I have in my heart for Him through conversations – which I know is not going to be easy for me. Then again, who said making a difference the world was going to be an easy task – I didn’t sign up for easy!

Temporary breathing time...

...but only for a day or so. I have been rather busy since the last time I blogged. I got back from Pennsylvania and found myself really behind in my school work so I have been trying to catch up on that. I have had at least one midterm each week and will continue having that until classes end in the beginning of December. Ahhh, gotta love the life of a student :-S Right now I am just wishing I was done already, but I know that when that happens I will miss some aspects of this crazy life I lead right now. And it would also help to know what I'm going to do with my life!

So on top of all my school work I am in the process of choreographing 26 routines for my girls to get them ready for their competitions. Half of those routines are to music, half are on the beam, each one of them must be unique and fit to the personality of each girl. I have almost completed 2 of the floor routines, barely started another floor routine and half done one beam routine. Oh, and all of these routines must be done before Christmas! I have my work cut out for me!

Speaking of my girls, so many of them are mad at me! We are approaching competition season and they need certain skills to be able to compete at certain levels. They have gotten really lazy and don’t care to fix their mistakes or try hard enough to fix them. I will not have my girls go into competitions feeling unprepared so I will not take the laziness anymore and so I have been making them do things they don’t want to do. I have been pushing them hard to try to get them to where they should be working and they don’t like that very much. I have been asked by several parents why their children are mad at me and after explaining the situation, the parents totally back and agree with what I’m doing. That is always nice!. It is a competitive sport and compared to what I went through, they have it so easy!! I just want them to do really well and learn new skills and perfect the ones they have because I know as that happens, they will continue loving the sport and have a desire to keep learning. If I don’t push them, they will never learn, if they never learn and are only there for the social aspect, they won’t love the sport anymore and the parents will pull them out and I don’t want that to happen.

I have decided that some of the courses I wanted to take next semester I don't really want to take anymore so I have to also figure out what courses I do want to take and see if those courses fit into the schedule of my required courses and hope there will be space in these courses. I really wanted to do a course where you dissect a human cadaver but I don't think they offer it anymore :-( and I have heard from so many people that the prerequisites for that course are insanely difficult. I was thinking about taking both of the prerequisites next semester but I think I would like to keep my sanity! Then again, I recall back to my first year when I took biology, chemistry, physics, calculus and computer science all at the same time and think that if I survived that, I'm sure I could do the anatomy prerequisites. I'm still debating about that one, I have a couple more months to decide what I'm going to take.

I watched a movie the other day and I was kind of shocked. The movie Grease is rated PG I think but I was paying attention to the content that was presented in the movie and was dumbfounded. I remember going to a dance camp when I was about 10 and we had a musical theatre class. In that class we sang Summer Nights for our little show at the end of the week and did a bit of dancing and acting in it. I was Sandy :-) but what amazed me the most is that the teachers let little kids perform to such a song. Maybe they hoped most of the kids didn't understand what it meant or they assumed everyone did know, I have no clue. And then I just recalled right now that the following year we sang Copacabana! In my opinion, those aren't the types of songs I would be letting kids sing and dance to especially at that age but I guess that is me and why I got fed up of dancing at the typical dance studio and the style of dancing that was taught.

Well I guess I should either do some homework or get stuff together for tomorrow – I have at least a 12 hour day at school tomorrow. One good thing about taking dance courses is that I get to go see dance shows, it just stinks that it’s on a Wednesday. Hopefully I will take some time out soon to write again. I enjoy writing in my blog, that’s why I started it, even if no one reads it, I still like writing it!

I will end it at that until I get another small gap in time with which I can blab some more :-)