It was recently said...

"Hello cows!" -Allie, said after about 30 minutes of silence.

"We're not talking about positions here!" -Valorie

"What?!?! ...the crrrap?!?!" -Another Allie-ism

"Don't wait. You gotta life to live." -Bracken

"When it comes to Provo, it's not the sexual tension. It's sexual frustration. It's so thick I can swim in it!" -Moose

"Please don't ask to kiss me. Just do it!" -Noelle

"Don't make someone a priority in your life when you are merely an option in theirs." -Allie

"Hey, they weren't my fireworks. I just set them afire!" -Brent

"Megasis!" -Jeffrey

"Ooo la la!" -Jared

"Maaa!" -Dane (2), when seeing a picture of himself.

The Update.

A lot has been going on lately and I haven't been as good as I want to in posting. So, I'm just going to post it all at once here.

In late July my family and I made a trip down to Sacramento to be with the Jensen side of the family. It stated out with a 5K run to support the Alzheimer's Association. Most everyone came and it was A LOT of fun. The kids races were adorable. Unfortunately my camera died right before so I couldn't take any pictures. I ran and had a pretty good time, and am excited to run more races in the future.

The next day we had a surprise 50th birthday party for my Mom. It was at my aunt Rachelle's house in Lincoln, CA. It was a lot of work, but I think it went well. Because of the run and the DeLucia family reunion that weekend, a lot of people were able to come. What was really neat was that three of my Mom's friends from high school came. She hasn't seen some of them for years. The coolest thing was that they had all joined the church during/after high school. As I was talking to some of them, I came to realize what an influence for good my mother has been in so many people's lives. Because of her quite, humble, daily diligence in following Christ, she has helped so many other come to see the goodness of His eternal plan and mercy. I am truly grateful to have such a wonderful Mother.

Aunt Caryn, Scott, Grandpa Jensen, and Uncle Tom all wait for the birthday girl to arrive.

Surprise! Marcia arrives at her 50th Birthday party. Uncle Kent and Aunt Marian look on.
Mom, and her high school friends, Kimmy and Dawn.Abby, Lindsay, Micheal, and Vicki Stevens enjoy the party.
Mom and her high school buds blow out 50 candles together.
My cute princess cousins Joelle and Sofia.
Max, the cutest redhead!

I snatch some pics of the men of my family on our road trip home from California. Kyle, Dad, and Adam.

Lindsay Wooley and I at Katie Farr's 20th Birthday bash. I love this girl. She is so sweet!

A beautiful Oregon sunset!

The Girls, Elle, Lindsay, me, & Dianna.

Sarah, Spalding and I after we went and saw Mama Mia. Such a good flick. I wanted to leave that theatre dancing!

This last weekend I went and saw Nathan perform the lead role of his drama group play called, "The Princess Test." He was the prince and did a fantastic job! The play was just so adorable with all the kids ages 8-11 putting on the production in a local family's backyard. For only having 4 days to prepare, it was amazing and Nathan remembered all of his lines! Go Nathan!

Insomnia

It's 1am and I can't sleep. I want to sleep. I crave sleeping. In fact, this morning at work I could hardly contain my yawns. Sleep is definitely in my top three list if enjoyable activities. As some who know me well will tell, my favorite time of day is that moment when you get into bed. If the bed is well made with heavy blankets (preferably down), fresh sheets, and several pillows that easily conform to your personal and unique neck and head structure, my friend...there is almost nothing better. It's at that moment that muscles relax, thoughts slow down, and breathing steadies. On nights where I can enjoy this moment, I can't help but get a little excited. I get to sleep! Finally! The responsibilities of the day are over and I can simply... rest.

I am really good at getting to sleep. In fact, I consider it one of my talents. Some people dance, some paint, some can set a piano on fire with their "mad skills." Me, well, I can fall asleep faster that you can say "goodnight." As a missionary serving in Spain, this was a very valuable tool. I don't know what it is about being a missionary, but I was ALWAYS tired. Even though I was getting the most consistent sleep I had ever received in my life, I was always exhausted. So, the fact that I could fall asleep almost on command was wonderful. Not a minute was wasted. I was getting my full eight hours dang it! As my former companions can attest, there were many nights when I wouldn't even make it through our prayers before I was on my way to REM sleep. But that was okay only as long as I still wasn't on my knees. There is nothing worse than waking up at 3am because your legs are blue from lack of circulation due to four hours of being in super kneeling position. Then you have to slowly unfold your body as the blood suddenly floods back to your toes, awaking every nerve with sharp force between your the bottoms of your feet and your belly button. Gratefully, normal circulation soon sets in and you can return happily to dreamland. I cannot remember one single night where I heard my mission companion fall asleep before me. Never happened. Not once.

Sadly, outside of missionary life there have been many nights of my mere 25 years of existence in which I have not been able to relish the euphoric moment of falling asleep. But, perhaps it is because I have spent many a night perched upon a textbook as I dream, or pressing the letter "g" for 176 pages with my forehead while unconscious, that I can really appreciate a good "bed time." When all you want to do is get under the covers and close your eyes, and that's the last thing you can do, you really come to value those laid back nights.

That's why I am so frustrated! I graduated didn't I? there are No more tests to study for at 4am, no papers to write all night in time for a 7am deadline. My job doesn't require any loss of Zs. I have no children to keep me up at night. I'm not sick. I'm not depressed. WHY CAN'T I SLEEP??

It's not just tonight mind you. Ever since I have moved to Oregon, leaving the land of the jell-o salad and big hair, I haven't been able to bring myself to go to bed. Although I yawn, my eyes start to droop, and my head begins to throb, I cannot get myself to get under my covers and rest. What is wring with me?!

It's funny. As a child I hated bedtime. "Bedtime" was the foulest word in my vocabulary as a seven year-old. I remember pleading with my parents to let me stay awake. I used every tactic to prolong the moment when I would have to get under the covers. It seemed like everything exiting began to happen after I fell asleep, and I didn't want to miss any of it. I only knew this because at age 5 I snuck out of my bedroom around 9pm and stealthily snuck out to the family room. There it was--the party. My dad was eating a what looked like a gargantuan bowl of ice cream, my mom was dipping a plethora of her favorite chocolate covered graham crackers in a big glass of milk, and some television program was on that looked exciting. Realistically, it was probably the evening news as all I remember is bright colors being flashed across the screen. Pretty soon, I just new, they were going to break out the party hats and confetti. I mean, Santa Clause came in the middle of the night, so it had to be the most fun part of the day!

Luckily for me, and my parents, by the time I was in my teens I realized the delight of sleep. That's when I discovered my talent. I was 15, had been up for an early morning seminary class since 5am, gone to school, club meetings, swim practice, and mutual (a youth group). I came home about 7pm dropped my backpack, swim bag, and sweater on the floor and literally crashed. Laying on the ground I slept for the next four hours on my living room floor, while my five siblings, two parents, dog, and another bazillion neighborhood kids trampled around me. Although I came to rest in the middle of the Harris circus, I sleep like a bear in hibernation.

Maybe that's it. Everyone has a good bedtime quota and I've reached mine. You can only have so many pleasurable wind down experience and one you reach the limit, your outta luck. And so, I'm doomed to 50 to 75 more years of bad night experiences. Stink. Sleeping is something I love, something I look forward to, something that makes me happy and I can't do it!

Well, maybe if I give it another go, it will work out.

May you dear reader, always have the best bedtime experiences and never reach your wind down quota.

Off for another attempt to find dreamland,

Meg

Bigotry in America

While glancing at the morning news, I happened upon this article on CNN. Although I personally think Romney would be an excellant choice, what caught my attention was all the comments that users made. I was shocked at all the hateful, ignorant, and belittling comments people were free to publish. First of all, shame on CNN for allowing such comments to be published on their site on a supposed monetored board. And second of all, shame on Americans for being so biggoted. If anything, this election has made me realize that this nation is lacking when it comes to freedom and respct of religion. Take a look at it might just make you sick. Oh, and guess which comment was mine.


July 15, 2008
McCain praises Romney's surrogate skills
Posted: 12:30 PM ET
From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

Romney has said he is interested in being McCain's VP.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/07/15/mccain-praises-romneys-surrogate-skills/

100 Books to Read

Patsy posted this on her blog and I just had to follow her example. Looks like I have a lot of reading to catch up on!

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

1) Bold: I have read.

2) Italics: Those I intend to read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nine-Teen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler's Wife

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milner

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meany-

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I moved to Oregon

Goodbye Utah! I decided to move to Oregon, back with my parents, so I could come and help my Dad with his business. Although the thought of living at home agian NEVER crossed my mind before, after my Dad asked me to come home, I just couldn't get the thought out of my head. I'll be saving a TON of money, and be able to help my family out as well. Although I can tell you, I already miss Provo and all my wonderful friends there, I think this will be another good adventure.

Here are some pictures from the trip. We made the 14hour drive down to 12! I think I inherited a lead froot from my father. Anyway, Val was so kind to take off work and make the drive with me. I can't thank her enough. I probably would've fallen alseep at the wheel without her!

Here's Val putting air in the tires on our way out. Check out that car. We packed it to the brim! Can you belive that I only left two boxes behind! We are master packers!

I love this picture. I can't decide whether I like my silly face, or the mardi gras beads best!

We saw this truck on our way. I LOVE it! I actually reminds me of my friend Christopher who always used to say that. I think it's a great motto to live by.

We also saw this truck. Just goes to show that you can do missionary work anywhere!

Here's Val and I. Agian, check out those boxes. The car was full to the max! Also, I look a bit wierd because I was looking at the road, and not at the camera.

Mount Hood welcomes us!

And here we are, at the end of the day, in beautiful Oregon.

So, I can say now that I've finally taken the LSAT. The Law School Admission Test is something I've been studying for for the past year, and now it is finally over. I feel really good about it. The day was a pretty good one. I woke up, went to the temple, got myself my favorite salad and sandwich from Zupas, and then headed to campus. The test itself was challenging, and I came home with a headache from concentrating so long, but I feel like it went well. It could have certainly been worse. Now, it's just a matter of waiting. We don't get our scores for another three weeks. But, whatever the outcome, I think I'll be okay with it, because I've done all I can. The rest is in the Lord's hands.

Dreams and Nightmares

Last night I had one of the most stressful nightmares. I don't have nightmares very often, in fact I can count all of my nightmares on one hand. The problem is, when I do have them, they are so vivid and disturbing that I can't get them out of my head for days. Because they are so realistic, I've remembered each one. Isn't it creepy that some of my most vivid and striking memories are my nightmares? I don't know what that says about me, but I don't like it. Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, let me share a couple.

When I was about eight years old, I woke up screaming one night after a particularly disturbing nightmare in which me and my family were being chased and hunted down through a stucco maze (resembling the old apartments that we lived in in Arizona. remember those?) Most strikingly I remember the screams of my Mother as we heard bullets being fired, Dad yelling for us to keep running as he went back to distract the pursuers, and then turning a corner only to come face to face with the man who was terrorizing us. I have never met that man, but I can tell you everything about his appearance, down to the black piercing eyes and the brown cowboy boots spattered with red dirt.. It really freaks me out. That's probably the worst dream I've ever had.

Another nightmare, that actually reoccurs about once a year, especially during particularly stressful weeks of school, has to do with test taking. In the nightmare, I check my finals schedule online, only to find that I had forgotten to drop one of the classes I had at the beginning of the semester. Because of this oversight, I hadn't been to any lecture, hadn't done any of the homework, and had to take a HUGE final the next day on a subject that I had absolutely no knowledge about. Of course the subject of said class is something that I am terrible at, like calculus or organic chemistry. It usually end with me walking out of the testing center after completely flunking the final. Maybe this is just one more evidence that I stress way too much about school, but let me tell you, that nightmare has made me overly conscious about checking my class schedule.

So last night, my nightmare had me taking the LSAT, and absolutely EVERYTHING going wrong. The test was in a completely different format than I had studied and I was cramped on the very corner of a long banquet table with other test takers elbowing me and pushing me off the ledge. Not only was the test different than expected, but someone had written obscenities all over it. I could hardly even read the questions and could only find four of the 100 places to bubble in my answers. To make matters worse, the two girls and boy that were surrounding me at the table were obviously cheating, and I felt not only distracted, but morally conflicted. I wanted to tell the proctor, but was so stressed about figuring out how to read my own test, that I couldn't really focus on either problem. The nightmare ended with the proctor yelling times up, me having only answered four questions. I asked the proctor if I could re-take the test because of the writing all over my copy, only to hear that it was too late. I would just have to settle with failure. Needless to say, my nerves got the best of my in my subconscious, but luckily I will not let them take control completely. I took a pre-test today, and it went really well. In fact, I feel more peaceful right now that I have all summer about it (Thanks Eli). At least I know, that whatever happens Monday, it won't be as bad as that...and therefore I can handle it.

Just so this doesn't sound so depressing, let me tell you my earliest memory. It's actually a vivid dream that I had several times as a child. I know I must have been young, because Cecily wasn't born yet, and I remember my Mom looking like she was in her twenties and my Dad's bright red hair. It takes place on a warm summer night on a country road. My parents and I are in a red convertible car, the warm air passing through my blond hair. I'm sitting in a car seat, strapped in the back, while my parents are in the front seats. The road is cradled on either side by lush, green rolling hills, and we are canopied by a sky bright with stars. The one word I would use to describe this dream is peace. That's it. Secretly I've always wanted a red convertible, and I think that's because I've wished to someday to be a mom in the front seat, with my little girl looking at the stars in the back seat. Hmmm....that's a happy thought.

Well, there you go; you have a deeper look into the mind of Meg, including the disturbing and hopeful. Isn't it amazing that our minds can think up these amazing scenes, all while we sleep? I hope I don't have another nightmare for long LONG time, but luckily if I do, I have other happier dreams to reflect on.

Happy Dreaming!

Quote of the Day

Val: "Wow! I was squozed!"

A Quarter of a Century.

I can't believe that I have lived a quarter of a century. It really has made me reflect on my life, what I have done with it, and what I want to do with the next 25 years. Overall, I have to say that I am happy with what I have accomplished. Although I've walked a different path than I thought I would, it has been a great ride. I've traveled, served, learned, played, danced, sung, swam, and laughed my way through this world for the last 25 years. I've experienced wonderful adventures that have influenced how I see the world, and view myself. I am grateful for the wonderful people that have been a part of my life and the things that they have taught me, especially for my wonderful family. Man, if the last 25 have been so good, just think how amazing the next 25 will be!

Here's a picture from my 25th birthday dinner. It was an interesting night with weird shoulder pats from the waiter, the spilling of a COLD strawberry daiquiri all over my jeans, a cute candled chocolate milkshake, and ten of the most awesome women I know. Thanks girls! I had a blast!Left to right: Eleanor, Kalli, Andrea, Cecily, Allie, Val, Jen, Your Truely, Shannon, and Eliza.