Getting ready for my Holy trip!

Well, I am not as ready as I thought I would be. I have known this day was coming, but I procrastinated as usual. What is the big deal you maybe thinking? Or not?  Monday I go to the Cardiac Imaging Center at UCLA to find out how my holy heart looks.  Yes, I know I spelled it wrong, but I love the beautiful symbolism by saying my "Holy" heart.  Just in case you haven't talked to me lately or read here before: In a nut shell, I was born with a sinus venosus atrial septal defect (hole in my heart and a vein going in the wrong direction) that wasn't diagnosed or corrected until 2002 when I was 33 years old.  Seems that my corrective surgery may have failed since cells have a memory. I am a Christian in case you haven't figured that out yet. I serve a mighty God who I believe has healed my Holy heart. I am confident that God has a plan. Which is a fabulous thing because I don't have much of one.
I thought I had some plans. I was going to record me reading some books for my children, write some letters to them, record some video and create some great memories in case we discover that my life maybe shorter than we thought. Since I am not having any surgery or invasive testing done I put it all off. Heck I lived for 33 years with a gaping hole, so what is a few more months or so.

Open Heart Surgery to correct a defect isn't the big deal it used to be, but I have some co-morbidity issues and had some complications before. I am the less than 1%.  No worries, it is all in God's hands.

So I have a bit of a bucket list that I have been ignoring. I do say though that I have a peace about it. I have had challenges in life and this is just one more that I can face with the joy of the Lord. I figure we are all on borrowed time. Whatever I do have in place now will just have to do. Yes, I have a document labeled, "Leslie's Funeral Plan," on my computer to try and help my family get through it all confident that many decisions are already made for them.

I did follow through on one or two bucket list items. We are scheduled to have our family portraits taken tomorrow. We will have all four of us together in one place for photos.

We are going to take the girls to Disneyland while we are in California. I think it will be a great opportunity to create some great memories. I just have to remember to have pictures taken of me in them. I am the picture taker in the family so I tend to be missing in many of the events in our life. I can't blame anyone but myself for that. I don't like pictures that are blurry, off center, or have peoples eyes closed so I am a bit of a control freak with the camera. I don't take great pictures and I myself don't  photograph well. Sure the weight doesn't help, but I have a bit of a lazy eye, well really a lazy eyelid that droops, uneven eyebrows (thanks to a Merle Norman incident), I have scars, and now wrinkles. I don't particularly like how I detract from my beautiful family.  I do realize that most of my family and friends don't see those things so I have to get over myself and have the pictures taken.  

I have to remind myself of Proverbs 31:30, "Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised."

However, photographs serve as reminders too of my disobedience.
1 Cor 6:19-20 "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body."

Romans 12:1 "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship."

Anywho, I am a work in progress. I do try and I think that is all that God asks. So off to UCLA I go to at least deal with the exercise aspect of my efforts. Once I am cleared for aerobic exercise I will have no excuse. My holy heart can only get me so far, eventually my stubborn willful addicted brain has to join the fight too.

Oh, I am going to tweet my adventure. Follow me: ruready1st

Let me leave you with my favorite blessing:
"The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace." Numbers 6:24-26

I Feel Like a Pirate Lately.

I keep encountering changes I knew nothing about, didn't pay attention to or are just a part of life. When I encounter these changes and I can adapt to them easily, all is good.  It is those times that I find myself roadblocked from adapting that make me say, "Argh!"  Now I am not a pirate, never have been, never had any desire to be one.  I just find that since I type out many of my emotions that I am running out of ways to express myself without using expletives that won't offend someone, mainly my Mother. Wow, she would be so proud of my run on sentences. Not.  Although the insanity is that my Mother will never be on Facebook, Twitter or my blog. Well, maybe someday on my blog, but that seems way in the future. These posts will be old and off the front page so it won't matter eventually.

Okay, I digress. Somewhere in my continues learning of technology and human resources training (yes, I was an HR Director, forgive me please), it occured to me, well it was mentioned several times to me as well, that you shouldn't post anything online that you wouldn't want your Mother, Boss, or Priest to read.  To bad someone didn't mention my grammer teacher. Oh wait, I never had that in school. Can you tell? Anywho, I digress again. So in trying to keep my language cleaner I find myself saying and typing words like, argh, dang, bummer, shoot, sugar, damn, crap, freakin' A, or just freakin', screwed, hell, etc... I think you get the idea. For the most part I don't think these offend anyone, not even my Mother. I have been well trained to try and control my tongue. Well, my use of freakin' has been annoying sometimes and didn't sound very good when it came out of my 5 year old. I have refrained from using that lately.

I don't consider myself a person who swears in general. I have let the $hit word slip out when injured, but that is rare. My mother always said that if a person has to swear then it displays their lack of education and good vocabulary. I would like to think that what is happening is that I write more, especially on Facebook and because the written word can be so impersonal that I feel the need to add emotion. Unfortunately those emotions come out in silly or stupid words.  Actually to think about it, I am not the only one. Since life is often times summed up in 140 characters or less for a Tweet or FB status there are more and more emotional sounds being expressed in typing these days.  I see sounds of emotion expressed all the time now. Phew, Sigh, LOL, LMAO, <3, etc... So I guess my saying "Argh," isn't all that odd these days. I think others online have found much better ways to communicate their emotions than I. I will keep exploring my options.

Oh, you know what started all this. I couldn't get my blog dashboard to come up correctly for me to post something. I had actually planned to spew some other garbage. Got sidetracked. Well, I will save it for another month or two...