I stand AMAZED: Revalations from computers and the stress of family pictures...

Broccoli chedder bread bowl at Panera Bread and some free wifi is the perfect way to spend a day off. With pandora's holiday...CHRISTMAS station in my headphones. *sigh* Life is good.

It's been a stressful week, but God is faithful! I guess the biggest thing that I'm sorta...kinda really excited about at the moment is that the computer problem at work is FIXED! OH thank you Jesus! Last week, I got to the point of completely giving up, but God came through. I guess I should give you some background...
So I'm a video editor intern. Working on a couple projects. Well for some odd reason we couldn't get the final video burned onto DVD. We wondered why Avid(the video editing program we are using--oh how i wish we were using final cut) didn't come with a program to do this. We hit stone wall after stone wall with Roxio(the other program we bought to hopefully stick movie onto DVD). It told us our video card wasn't updated enough, stupid because the computer is under a year old. *Random note: even if it is cheaper...NEVER EVER EVER Do video editing on a PC. It's a total fail.*
We spent weeks going through all the red tape to order new parts and update/upgrade everything! And Roxio still didn't work! I should mention that this has been going since June. 2 weeks ago we decided to buy the new version of Roxio(which I still want to learn because apparently you can make 3D movies and I wanna try this!). We installed it and waited.....to no avail! Talk about the pits! I started looking around for other jobs. :) My boss....thank the Lord...is also a christian, which is totally awesome because we can talk about God while we want to burn the computer! We decided to pray every time we got together that God would give us wisdom and fix the computer! Well right after we did that, I'm getting ready to leave the office and I look on my desk and there's a cd sitting there, still in the wrapper. Avid DVD??? I looked over at Tom and was like...Um...is this what we're looking for?!! It was! Oh God! Haha! I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry! I came into work the next day with high expectations of finally being able to finish my project, but......when I installed it....I got an invalid registration error. So frustrating! Turns out Roxio and Avid DVD conflict with eachother when installed on the same computer.

But not without revelation. :) I started thinking about how true the situation was if you put it into real life. Think about it, how often in life do we look for the solution to a problem and get all frustrated and wonder why we can't find it, so we "go out and buy something else". We find something else to "fix it"....but in all reality it just makes it worse. So many times it isn't until we reach rock bottom that we think it would be a good time to cry out to God for help. And we find that the solution to it all has been there in front of us the whole time! :) But we still have to deal with the consequences from the "other solutions" we tried. Which can lead to more frustration, but in the end...God works everything out.

This morning my phone was ringing off the hook while I was doing my hair and make up. Tom got Avid DVD installed and working. Apparently the O in the serial number was an O not a 0. That's the only reason he could think of. I practically flew to the office just to make sure it was real! SCORE! :) :) :) When I walked in, and saw it working I said "You know what Tom, God fixed the computer!" To which we both decided was the only explanation we had! Thank you God!
So I guess what God's really been teaching me through this experience and recently in general is that I like to "do it myself".....true story...haha.....but I need to remember to do it with him! :)

This past weekend was a stressful, but fun one. I went ice skating on Saturday! Oh my...I'll state again that I love ice skating so much! And now that I'm getting better at it, it's much more entertaining! I can go backwards and skate on one leg!!!!! Of course the people you go with are the best part! Never a dull moment when I'm with the Brant sisters! :)

The stress came as I decided we were getting our family picture taken by Rejoice Photography(You can find her on Facebook). With 7 people in the family, it's a pain to get everyone, especially Daniel, to agree to get their picture taken. Then there's the matching clothes part. AAAHHH! This time, however, I found colors that matched the season, that went together, and everyone had something around the same color! Thank you Jesus! We didn't even know when we were doing it, Sunday afternoon or Monday. Finally we decided on Sunday afternoon. So all the clothes needed to be washed and matched and I had to make sure that everyone wore what they were supposed to. Ok, I'm very OCD and a perfectionist when it comes to photos! But in my defense, we haven't had a family picture in 10 years. They need to look good, because who knows how many of us will be married by the time we get another one! haha!
It turned out quite well. We had a great "make them smile" person and a very patient photographer. The weather even turned out pretty much perfect with hardly any directional lighting and just a little on the chilly side, but not too bad! And the pictures....priceless. I have one crazy family! :)