Free Time? Huh?

Apparently I've been pretty busy lately. I didn't realize it until this morning when our engagement photographer asked, "What do you do in your free time?" and I responded, "Huh?"

Lately, free time has consisted of premarital counseling, driving around Arlington checking out rental units, a bit of wedding planning, and applying to Grad School. Apparently what I do in my free time is nothing that could or should be considered leisurely. You should know that I don't prefer to live my life this way. I love free time...vast spaces of nothingness that can be filled with whatever desire happens to be floating by at that moment.

However, even if life right now is a bit more busy than I'd like, I'm still stubbornly convinced my life should not be classified as busy, so here is a list of interesting things I have done recently that are not about weddings, grad schools or leases:

1. Watching Seasons 1-7 of Friends (on my second series watch-through). Mostly, I watch it while I'm doing my taxes or updating Quicken. Joey is a very funny man, even moreso when you've been doing a budget analysis for the past 45 minutes.
   
2. Reading my Better than Oprah book club book for the month: The Hero and the Crown. This book is actually a fantastical biography of the life of my maid of honor, Renee, who makes a very good fictional character.
   
3. Cooking fabulous dishes. Recently, I made a fantastic asian noodle soup (with bok choy!), a healthy bean dip (with homemade whole wheat tortilla chips) and a ginger pear cheesecake. I cannot wait for my Pampered Chef Bridal Shower in Ohio next month!
   
4. Listening to my latest set of purchases at Best Buy and iTunes:
   Derek and Sandra's Ampersand EP
   Natasha Bedingfield's Pocketful of Sunshine
   Anna Nalick's Shine EP
   Sara Bareilles' Little Voice
   Jon Foreman's Fall EP, Spring EP, and Winter EP
   Caedmon Call's Overdressed
   Also, I'm still enjoying some Christmas gift/purchases:
   Allison Krauss and Robert Plant's Raising Sand
   Levon Helm's Dirt Farmer
   Shawn Colvin's These Four Walls
   Gillian Welch's Soul Journey
   (n.b. Recently, I discovered that in Clay and I's shared music tastes, female pop singer/songwriters don't really make his cut...thus many of these purchases have been either reactionary, or to fill in a void in my life. It neglects to inform you how much Counting Crows and Ryan Adams I've soaked in over the last few months.)
5. Purchasing tickets to see Radiohead in Seattle the week after we return from our Honeymoon! I'm so pumped! Thom Yorke, the lead singer for Radiohead, looks very much like Clay's very good friend DeJon. If you want, I can get DeJon's autograph for you.
   

Okay, honestly, I feel a lot better about myself now. I was seriously beginning to worry that my life was no longer in my own hands, but apparently, through music and cooking, and the occasional book and episode of Friends, there is my sweet respite.

Thank you sweet respite. You are being good to me these days.

I Love to Tell the Story

I don't know if I'll ever get tired of telling people the story of the way Clay and I met.

Last week, we were looking at a condo to rent, and the real estate agent asked off-hand where we'd met, and we breezily replied, "Oh--we were at a convention in Austin, and Clay posted an ad on the convention bulletin board looking for people to go to a concert with him, and I just happened to see his ad and call." We turned sheepishly to see her eyes wide, and her jaw a bit dropped, and we laughed a bit, because although it's a bit surreal at times still, it's what happened. We love telling our story.

Yesterday morning, we went and spent a few hours standing (freezing) in the middle of a bright red tulip field telling our story. We hired my coworker Aaron, who runs Hands On Films, to create a video documentary of us telling our story. It's a piece we're putting together to share at our wedding--so that for those who don't know Clay so well or for those who haven't seen Heather and Clay together at all--they can feel more a part of our story.

It might seem a little taxing to stand in a field talking to a video camera for 2 hours, but it really wasn't. Just being able to look out at a hazy Northwest gray sky, across acres of bright red, pink, and purple tulips, and green, green grass...and tell someone how we got together, how we got engaged, why we're getting married, and why we love each other, it was such a blessing. We loved telling our story.

And telling our story was energizing. At the end of it all, we were able to just look at each other and say, "I love you so much" because we'd been so reminded of where we'd come from these past 18 months.

Growing up, we'd sing the old hymn, I Love to Tell the Story:

I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love.
I love to tell the story, because I know ’tis true;
It satisfies my longings as nothing else can do.

I love to tell the story, ’twill be my theme in glory,
To tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

It's been awhile since I told the story of how Christ has worked in my life...how we met, how I fell in love with Him. I don't even remember the last time I told my story of meeting Christ. But when I see how energized I was to tell Aaron and the video camera how much I love Clay, and how satisfying it was to share that love...well... I think it's a story I should share more than I do.

I think this is how we are supposed to be sharing Christ with others anyways:

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power. (1 Corinthians 2:1-5.)

Sci-Fiiiiiiiiiii

I've decided to become a sci-fi nerd.

Now, to just be a sci-fi nerd is one thing, but to consciously become one certainly attains an even higher level of nerdiness.

Why would I want to do such a thing? First of all, because sci-fi is freaking cool. What's not to love about Star Wars, Star Trek, Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Jurassic Park, Transformers. Face it, you love sci-fi too.

Second of all, because there's more amazing sci-fi out there to be read and seen, and honestly, Star Wars and Star Trek are just the tip of a very extensive genre. Last week when Chris and Janelle were visiting for Spring Break, we all went to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. It was pretty awesome to see the original Death Star, the Rocketeer's jet pack, and loads of other stuff from Paul Allen's personal collection.

But I was actually embarrassed to be in the Science Fiction Museum having never seen Blade Runner or I, Robot or having never read Ender's Game or Slaughterhouse Five. I was like, "What in the world!? I'm missing out!"

In response, Chris, Janelle, Clay and I promptly returned to my house to watch Contact and I Am Legend, in order to make up for lost sci-fi time.

And now I have printed out the list of the top sci-fi books, where I have sadly discovered I've only read eleven of the top 100! So--slightly more interesting than my last top 100 goal (to watch the AFI Top 100 Films), I will now attempt to read the top 100 sci-fi books. This will at least be good, in that it will require me to read Ender's Game, which will allow me to be better friends with both fiance Clay and maid-of-honor Renee.

At this point, pre-top-100, my favorite sci-fi book is probably either The Time Machine or Brave New World...and my favorite sci-fi movie is probably Return of the Jedi (who doesn't love the Ewoks, eh?), although I still have a soft spot for Batteries Not Included (which may seem dumber now than it did 20 years ago...) And I loved Firefly...

How about you? How do you stack up against the top 100? And what's your favorite sci-fi book/movie?

TU on Dateline

I missed the Dateline episode last week, but here's the coverage...

A Dateline special on the Taylor Accident of April 2006 and the case of mistaken identity. It's incredibly moving...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23849928/

Let Them Eat Cheesecake

On one of Clay and I’s early dates, we discovered a mutual love/obsession for fantastic cheesecake. He promised to introduce me to the best cheesecake I’d ever had--and he took me to Claim Jumper. I’ll tell you what--after sampling the divinity of the White Chocolate Raspberry dream-on-a-plate at Claim Jumper, I’m telling you that if you can’t eat this piece of cake, should just fast for the rest of your life rather than subject yourself to another slice of Sara Lee or Cheesecake Factory.

A few months later, during our first visit to San Antonio, I discovered that Clay’s mother shares our love for cheesecake. This was discovered during a great evening around the dinner table discussing “Great Cheesecakes We Have Known.” It was all too fitting that the next afternoon, at our stop in Fredericksburg, Texas, I picked up a fantastic recipe book called, The 50 Best Cheesecakes in the World. It was like--there was so much cheesecake love in our midst--that the book just couldn’t help but reveal itself to us.

I am now endeavoring to make them all.

I started with a Marzipan Raspberry Cheesecake. And for the record--anytime there’s an option for a light alternative, I make a substitution...if there are the 50 best cheesecakes to be made, we have to save enough room for all of them. So using low-fat cream cheese, low-fat sour cream, and low-fat cottage cheese, I made a slice of heaven. The raspberry sauce was a little intimidating, requiring me to strain freshly blended raspberry puree through cheesecloth in order to remove all the seeds. (messy!) But when I sprung the cheesecake onto some unsuspecting friends at a dinner party, it resulted in 6 of us consuming an entire cheesecake in one evening, my friend Jimmy eating three pieces and saying, “I don’t even normally like cheesecake, but come on--this is lowfat.”

Today, Clay and I were introduced to cheesecake #2--a ginger pear delight with freshly grated ginger and freshly grated pear. When my roommate saw it sitting on the counter, she actually thought it was store-bought. The result--absolutely delicious.

So why do I share all of this? Because a wedding is a perfect excuse to share what you love with 250 of your best friends...and what do Clay and I love? Cheesecake. So be prepared, because on August 2nd, you will not be served just any plain old white or chocolate corn syrup and white flour mumbo-jumbo...you will partake in a fine array of dazzling cheesecakes.

Okay, I’m not going to handmake 50 cheesecakes for you to try the 50 best...that would be obsessive...but I bet there are at least 50 of you reading this, so...if you all schedule a visit to the Utley home in the fall and request a cheesecake as your parting gift, I bet we can check every one off the list in a hurry.

The Perfect Dress

So I found “The Perfect Dress.” It happened a lot more matter-of-factly than I thought it would. Believe it or not, the heavens actually did not part when I found, “The Dress.” Believe it or not, a choir of Spanish monks did not emerge from the storeroom to sing an “Ode to the Dress” in Gregorian Chant. Believe it or not, my mother did not spontaneously burst into tears when I emerged from the dressing room in “Theeee Dress.” How dare I make such a claim to have found “The Dress” during a perfectly normal dress fitting in a perfectly normal dress shop, where a perfectly normal salesgirl would assist me in diving in and out of perfectly normal white gowns.

So if none of the romanticized heaven-beaming-down-its-joy signals revealed it was, “The Dress,” then how did I know?! I have no idea! I JUST DID! I guess it’s because it’s the first dress I tried on that I didn’t necessarily want to put back on the rack. I just wanted to walk around in it and view it from every possible angle in every possible mirror. And I wanted to sit and drink tea with my pinkie finger pointing to the sky. And--I really wanted Clay to see me in it. (Don’t worry--he still has to wait till August 2nd.)

After about ten minutes of parading around in “The Alleged-and-Potentially ‘The’ Dress,” Mom asked (matter-of-factly), “Heather, is this the dress.” I was momentarily confused. How could she ask such a thing? Obviously not! There were no choirs of angels! There was no fissure in the sky through which a booming voice was saying, “This is Heather’s wedding dress with which I am well pleased.” No, it was just my mom’s voice asking, “Is this the dress?” A simple yes or no question. How anti-climactic!!!

But this whole wedding business started by saying a very simple “yes” to a very simple question. (The question was, “Will you marry me?” just in case you were a little slow on the uptake there.) So, it strikes me that weddings are very beautiful and terribly romantic, and in the midst of all the romanticized beauty, they’re also very simple. Simple in a good way...but sometimes romantic and over the top makes a better story:

Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. Boy asks girl if she wants to get hitched. Girl says, “YES!” Girl begins wedding plans. Boy plays video games. Mom flies to town to go dress shopping with girl. After days of searching over hill and dale, the perfect dress remains elusive. Exhausted and heartbroken, mom and girl take a bit of respite by a glassy pond near a golden meadow. A tear drops from girl’s face into the glassy lake, causing ripples to softly move across the water’s surface. Suddenly, the heavens part and a radiant and perfect dress emerges up from the pond and choirs of angels come towards the girl singing “Gloria in Excelsis Deo!” Mom turns to girl and says, “Is this the dress?” Girl cries out, “Yes!”

Yeah...And...it pretty much happened just like that.

Nuns Having Fun!

I'm in my second year of using the fantastic Nuns Having Fun 12-month Calendar. Every month, I look up and think, "Those crazy nuns. I wonder what they're going to do next." This month, the nuns are doing karate, and the caption says, "Everybody was Nun Fu Fighting." Those crazy, silly girls. Whenever I remember to bring the camera cable back to work, I'll show you a fine nun-filled karate kick. For now, this will have to do.

Wedding Website

I know the blog's been in sad repair lately...but to appease you, you can go read my newer, cooler, mac-ified website...it's Clay and I's wedding website, and I'm pondering moving my blog that way as well...mostly because our domain name is cool:

www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com
www.sinceaustin.com

A New Approach to Lent: Tilling Dry Soil

For a large part of my adult life, I have observed Lent. This has typically meant "giving something up that I'm really fond of but it's kind of unhealthy." The first year I gave up soda, because I felt quasi-addicted. The second year I gave up dessert, because I was hoping to trim up a bit (bad motivation!) Another year, I gave up music, which was constantly playing in my car, in my apartment, and in my office. (Although I did permit music chosen by others, which was even more painful than the silence most times.) Last year, I gave up all forms of caffeine, which induced the most terrible headaches.

Why do I fast for Lent? Because it feels good to give something up. It feels good to take away something in my life I feel like I can't live without and surrender that desire. It's good to realize that caffeine and music aren't my Lords, Jesus is. I love this tangible reminder, and it always fills me with hope and new love for Christ.

This year, my observance of Lent is not going to be about fasting so much as it is going to be about renewing my commitment to the Lord as my first love. Clay has returned home from a weekend of traveling feeling convicted that our relationship needs to be much more diligently focused on the Lord...and fortunately...over the last few weeks, both of us have independently come to the conclusion that we have not been treating the Lord like our King, but more like a button we wear or a box we check.

So during Lent, we are renewing our commitments to the Lord as King of our life, and we are committing to pray and read His word daily. This morning, we started our daily readings out in Lectio Divina style. We began this Lectio Divina using the guided readings in a book called Enjoy the Silence. The book is actually marketed for youth leaders to use with teenagers, but it's application is not limited to teenagers...and we renewed by beginning our day with meditation on God's word.

Our reading this morning was in Luke 8 (The Parable of the Sower). The reading guide in Enjoy the Silence directed us to read through the passage three times, listening for new insights each time we read it...the third time through, we specifically stopped and meditated on the different kinds of soil in the passage, inviting the Lord to reveal to us what kind of soil our hearts most resembled.

It was evident to me that my heart was similar to the seed that "lacks moisture." I could feel my heart as parched and dry. I also got very distracted during our meditation about the seed the grows up in the thorny grounds, and woke up from my daydreaming to realize I was living out my own distraction in the midst of attempting to meditate. I was able to confess my dry and distracted spiritual life to the Lord and invite him to cultivate my heart into something that's ready to grow His word.

It's amazing what 30 minutes in the morning of silence and reading God's word can do to renew my heart. It feels like bringing a cup of cold water to my lips after a long hike in the desert.

I'm excited about what Lent will bring in 2008, and I'm excited to have a partner in my spiritual journey.

What does Lent mean to you? Does this all sound crazy or weird? How do you choose to celebrate Lent, if you do? Why do you think fasting is or isn't important?

Your First Love

Who or what is your first love? What's the thing you want most when you're tired or lonely or upset? Who do you think about when you first wake up?

Lately, I think my first love in the morning is my down comforter...or coffee...my first love in the afternoon is my lunch break...my first love in the evening is Lost on DVD...(Clay's been away this week, so we'll assume that Lost is taking a place usually taken by him.)

Based on the way I live my life, I wouldn't really call Christ my first love.

Last week, at our staff conference, one of our staff read to us from Revelations about the church in Ephesus (Rev 2):

I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

So the speaker is saying that the church in Ephesus did a lot of good stuff...they worked hard, did good things, kept wickedness from themselves, endured hardship, persevered. But they still weren't completely right in the Lord's eyes because of one simple reason:

Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.

What are the things you do at first when you're in love? For me, it was staying up late at night to talk on the phone and spend time with Clay. It was saving up all of my available time and money to travel to see him. It was thinking of him a hundred times a day--sending him emails or text messages. It was seeing fabulous gifts in a store window that he would love and buying them for him.

What does it really mean to love Christ like this? With fresh eyes? With new love? What does it mean to make Christ your first love?