Quote Project

So, I've always been an avid quote keeper. I think it started when I was a young teen when they gave us quotes in Sunday School our in our Young Women's classes, but I don't know. My journal contains a few from before that time.

Either way, they've collected over the years in paper form. Most of my life in the past 20 years has been electronic from the days of my Brother typewriter for some journal entries to completely digitizing EVERYTHING now (except I've reverted back to my little notebooks for daily to do lists).

But, I'm catching up with my prior past (0-22 years old).

I'm down to 4-5 little plastic bins of journals that I'm re-typing, random certificates and forms I'm scanning and ....all my stories and quotes. Luckily, many of these are now available on the Internet with a simple word search.

Perhaps it was the fire at work, where at the end of the day, all the electronics, photos, and personal belongings ended up strewn about on the lawn for us to pick through.

Or, perhaps it is just me realizing that I'm getting old and it is time to take care of this now and it will never happen. Or, probably most likely it was me realizing that I needed to get all this done before having a family, even though that goal went through a temporary disappointment.

Either way, I'm at it again. Documenting, uploading, tagging. In fact, you can take a look if you want at http://bloggerpickles.blogspot.com. I've had the blog for a few years, but I'm adding LOTS more over the next month or two. They are my favorites and so they aren't there to impress, but rather to act as my personal resource. But, if you ever need to leverage it...go right ahead. At some point I'll turn it into a blog book for myself (like this blog), but for now I'll just keep the stream flowing.

Side perk: Our house is getting simplified! Less paper dust. Fewer plastic bins to lug around. More space.

But,  I will take a picture of a couple of the dittos - remember those? So awesome when they came off the machine all white with purple ink and a bit damp. Memories....

Growing in His Light - priorities, fulfillment and a quote

My efforts to blog this year have been minimal. In fact, from January to June has been one big stress for me. Most of the stress was from March - June, but anticipation can be just as alarming for the body and mind, right?

Here's the chain I put on my blog a few months ago with each stress event as a link.

Thankfully, here's the chain in June. I opened up each link as the event happened.

At many of the events, I was a speaker which was a great honor. As I gathered the lanyards in the picture below, I realized that there was one that I was most proud of.

The Young Women's Camp Assistant Director (gofer, photographer, trainer of Youth Camp Counselors) was the one! After months of preparation typically taking 10-15 hours out of each week, I ended up having a wonderful week at the camp.

The theme was "Grow In His Light" and I think that many of us leading gained just as much or more of a testimony than the Young Women at the camp. Plus, being away from the day-to-day work allowed me to get closer to the Spirit and ultimately helped me with some upcoming decisions that my family needs to make. Ok, so our family is only two of us, but we are still a family. (-:

Here's a lantern that we had the Youth Camp Counselors carry for the night time activities.

Here's the website I created to house all of the info for camp. I really do like it and it was a way to leverage some things I've learned over time toward a meaningful resource at church.

http://www.growinhislight.wordpress.com

All the camp photos (mine plus others) are now at http://photobucket.com/YWCamp2012. I took about 1,000 and others took about that many too, but as I look through the individual shots (toward the end of the pile), I am amazed at how wonderful all the teens look even though they sometimes dreaded having their photo taken. They are all truly beautiful young women!

Here's me posing with the training manual I created with the help of materials gathered by others. It truly was a team effort and I'm so grateful for all of the friendships that I was able to form with the other leadership in our congregation and the surrounding congregations.

My biggest worry was all of the stresses from work, but by day 3 of camp those had left me. We were there a while (Monday - Saturday) and normally that would mean I'd have a few thousand emails and multiple project updates to worry about. But, with the storm and with people deciding to go out of town at the last minute, catching up wasn't so bad.

It reminded me of one of my favorite quotes:

“When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives. Our love of the Lord will govern the claims for our affection, the demands on our time, the interests we pursue, and the order of our priorities.”

― Ezra Taft Benson

Again, I had a chance to realize that this principle was true. Now, to keep living it!

Quote Garden - New Year quotes

Found a great little blog that is called "Quote Garden." I have always loved and collected quotes, which is why I started Blogger Pickles - http://bloggerpickles.blogspot.com/ - so that I could keep some of them straight.

Take a look at quote garden. They have a bunch of quotes specific to the New Year!

http://www.quotegarden.com/new-year.html

Christmas Gift Suggestions - from a Facebook post

Saw this on Facebook and thought I'd post it here:

"Christmas gift suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness.To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect."

Oren Arnold

Blog Bits becomes Blog Pickles

So, I had the idea of writing down some of the things I've purchased or ideas I've acted on because I read about it on a blog. However, my intended title - Blog Bits - for these notes is already being used by numerous people on the web.

Now I have to figure out a good name for this, but I'm not good at forcing these types of things.

A few ideas:

- Blogtion - blog and action combined
- Blogdeas - blog and ideas combined
- Blogites or Blog bites - but, this too is taken elsewhere on the Internet

Perhaps I will get a better idea as time goes on and will create a useful phrase. For now, they will be "blog pickles."

Now, this pickle term does have a story.

A long time ago when I was a missionary, we often left people with a little spiritual thought from scripture or an inspirational quote. At first I would write these out on pieces of paper, but then I started to type them up, cut them out and glue them to construction paper. Often the little notes would kind of look like pickles. I actually found one amongst my mission pictures.

Whenever we read a good quote or scripture, we would write it down and keep it for those moments every few weeks when we had access to a typewriter (yes, a typewriter) or a computer (back when the font was orange and the screen was black).

And so, the term "little quote pickles" was born. And now the term "blog pickles" carries the tradition on.

Random Thoughts cont...

After I posted some comments the other day about people saying things that help me change, I got a text message from my friend:

"As I prayed tonight, the following scripture made me think of you. I would be disobedient if I didn't share it with you:

I will bless the Lord who has counseled me; Indeed, my mind instructs me in the night. I have set the Lord continually before me; Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Psalms 16:7-8

Good-night, Angela"

It was perfect timing because I had someone at work (my boss) that made comments that made me doubt my abilities. I probably took the comments wrong, but either way, it was good to get a little inspiration from a friend through the cell phone.

Quote

"Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing." - Thomas A. Edison

This was on the email signature of someone at our help desk. I think I may have posted another quote to myself that came from her email signature and so this is becoming a pattern.

Anyway, I have always loved to work. I think I officially started in the 4th grade when I got my first paper route, first babysitting job and first lawn to mow (Mrs. Thomas paid me $15! and I could complete the job in 1 hour each Saturday). I was quite the highly compensated little shy girl on Burrell Court. Luckily, there have been many jobs between then and now and it's a far greater feeling of accomplishment for me than my formal education. I guess it's because I see value in producing a product and not in answering questions on a test. As far as I'm concerned, tests measure if you are good at taking tests and work measures what was defined in the quote above.

An interesting phenomena I have at my current job is that there are people that are really good at appearing to accomplish work. I'm not talking about someone playing solitaire on their computer and then switching screens when their boss comes in the room. I'm talking about people who do expend a lot of busy-ness with talking, ideas, processes, and politics that lead to no solution.

I've demonstrated this phenomena to people by showing them to a row of various brochures that sit on a table in my office. The piles are neatly arranged and it's clear that each pile represents a different brochure. The "expend energy" busy person comes in and says there has "got to be a better way" (sometimes there is and that is followed by a "Big Idea" that makes millions - just ask Donny Deutsch) and starts re-arranging the stacks, piling them on top of each other, mixing them up, separating the ones that have bent corners, including them with a pile of adjacent business cards all while bringing other like minded people into the conversation to get their opinion about whether there should be any brochures in the first place. At this point the entire transaction will boil down to two possible solutions. One, they actually re-arrange the brochures somewhat to their original state and beam with pride that they resolved my issue. Or, more likely, they will look at their mess and say that we need to get more people involved and set up a big meeting for a later date so we can discuss the best way (and every exception to the rule) to resolve this mess we have gotten ourselves into with the brochure stacks.

Guess what happens then? This entire process leaves people like me in a numbed state and we can't even think after the transation. After all, all common sense has gone out the window and once that is gone we are in uncomfortable territory. The temporary self-doubt kicks in and the "Am I crazy?" question starts bouncing around the mind instead of the voice of reason.

Anyway, what was I originally talking about? Now I'm all messed up.

Quote

Once in a while someone has a good quote in their email signature.

Here goes one:

“Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The
shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

Abraham Lincoln