long summer days

here i am, sitting around on a summer afternoon, bored again. it kinda sucks having to wait around for a little one to wake up from said nap. i made this old family recipe called "great aunt eva's beef stew" and it is wonderful but the thing of it is that it takes 6 hours in the oven. no. i am not making this up. a literal 6 hours to cook. and no, not in a crock pot, the oven. basically when i walk past the general vicinity of the oven, i feel like those guys on the titanic must have felt, you know the guys who stoke the boilers? i just feel the heat radiating from the oven from about 4 feet away. so beacause dinner literally went in the oven this MORNING, i have not a lot to do this afternoon.

so back to the boredom.

i have recently decided that since we are not going to be run out of town with pitch forks (the church turmoil has settled down a bit) i would try my hand at starting a business. well, not really a business, well, let me explain. my sister lives in boulder and she told me about this great club called moxie moms. you pay like 50 bucks and get a great membership card that gets you discounts at local shops and stuff and also you get a calendar with a lot of awsome events that you are automatically invited to. so the objective of moxie moms is two-fold: 1. support local businesses and 2. to get moms off their butts and out the door. hmm, i said to myself, wouldn't it be great if they had one of those in winona? (stop laughing! i was just hoping!) so i emailed them. the reply was something like this, "there is no moxie-moms chapter in winona, but if you would like to start one..." that was all i saw. the rest of the email was all blurry. at that time, there was no way i was going to "start" anything. i was attempting to get life off the ground (college ministry) and that was totally consuming every spare minute of my time. but at the end of this past school year the idea popped back into my brain. "what if i were to start up a chapter?" so i emailed again which lead to some phone calls with the directors (no, i have absolutely no background in business) and some calls around town (when will the manager be in? yes, i'll hold) and here i am trying my hand at something new. i have to recruit some moms, which should not be too hard to do and plan some fun stuff to do. when i called a friend (who is the manager of a local business) she said, but honey, aren't you too busy already? curses! you're right! i am! i have a ministry, a pastor husband, two little kids, an exchange student and who knows what else i am forgetting. i was a little discouraged.

which leads me back to this afternoon.

this afternoon has been a perfect example. dinner made and me wondering what on earth i could possibly do with my spare time. clean out that closet? nah. do something crafty? nope. make cookies? not if i want that svelte bod i have been hoping for! start up moxie moms? sa-weet!