Yay for James!

our friend (and david's old roommate) james farmer was on the today show this morning giving some advice on fall tablescapes as well as promoting his new book, a time to plant. we are so proud of you, james!!!!

RIP Toomer's Oaks

i think it would be sad for the old trees to just be removed and done away with. i'm not sure what damage to the actual wood the herbicide used will do, so i don't know that this is actually possible, but auburn is home to one of the greatest architecture and design programs in the south (if not the country). i think it would be really cool if the university held a competition of sorts for students to enter designs for something to be made from the lumber - a way to keep the trees around. but it should be something that could be enjoyed by all on campus (just as the trees are now), so no making a sweet coffee table for the president's office. and it could be anything - from a memorial of those from auburn university who have given their lives in the service of our country to an architectural element that could be added to samford lawn. maybe each entry should cite inspiration from a specific line of the auburn creed? i don't know, just ideas. but i think they should look into it.

2004 - the "lost" season

2010 - the best season

War Fun Weekend!

sometimes i wish i had a tumblr account so i didn't have to come up with blog titles. anyway, this weekend, we headed to auburn for a couple of things...obviously, the auburn/georgia game but also because courtney and steve came aaaaaaaaalllll the way from austin (you see, steve is awesome and for courtney's 42nd birthday he gave her a trip to this game). it was one of the happiest weekends i've had in auburn. (thanks steve for the pictures!)

we met steve and courtney friday night. we definitely gave steve an auburn campus tour. oh yeah.

best sign definitely was "breaking news: alert the media! cam newton stole my heart!" david's favorite was "cam newton eats chick-fil-a on sundays"

and just for fun (and because it's awesome), this was the video they played on the jumbotron at the end of the game.

Cam is a Role Model

i thought this was fitting for game day.

cam newton has been mentoring elementary school kids since august. just watch this video...

war eagle and happy weekend, everybody!

Official ATL Residents

well, it is official! we finally sold our house! we signed the papers on monday, making it a year and 22 days since we first put it on the market. it's weird to think that when we go back for football games or for whatever other reason, we won't have a place to stay. it's become a sort of vacation home (that was bleeding us dry).

but there have been 7 years of great memories in that house. it will always be our first home. but for now, we are carefree renters in atlanta.

House: Sold!

sorry about the long time, no blog. i know all 3 of you are seriously disappointed in me. i still haven't gotten my computer fixed so all the posts i used to randomly write as they came to mind are getting thrown by the wayside...

anyway, there isn't much to update you on. we went to houston for memorial day weekend and got to spend some time with david's family (we were all there at the same time! - usually only happens on thanksgiving or christmas) so that was fun. his sister who lives in houston, laura, is having a baby girl in august. we are so excited to become an aunt and uncle to another little niece. so, needless to say, the girls did lots of baby shopping.

other than that, i think the biggest news is that WE SOLD OUR HOUSE! we are currently working through some of the inspection checklist (with such an old house there are certain things that just have to be done) but hopefully it won't put too big a hole in the ole pocketbook. but as of june 22, 306 oak street will become someone else's first home.

june 1st was our 1 year anniversary of having the house on the market. it was a rough one. but we made it. and it is an amazing story of God's provision. all that to say, as much as i will miss that house, i am glad to see it go.

Possible Home Offer!

someone is actually interested in our house!!!!! no offer as of quite yet but we are told they have seen it several times and they are very interested.

everyone PLEASE pray!

(i can still smell the rain from the day this was taken...home sweet former home)

The Last Encounter (for real)

so today was a long day. last night david and i drove to auburn to go to the last encounter. if you know anything about encounter, you know how late it starts/gets over. so that made for a late night coming home and then chasing 2 year olds around all day today. but it was worth it. for my reminiscent thoughts on encounter, check here.

but anyway, it was an awesome night. it was almost surreal to be there, with a completely different band in a building that wasn't even finished when we moved, much less had ever been in before. we thought it was fitting that encounter started in one of the oldest buildings on campus and ended in the newest.

we also had a lot of friends from birmingham, atlanta, etc. to come. it was great to see everybody all in one spot again. it was a great 6 years and we will miss it greatly but hong kong will be gaining something amazing. i'm excited to see what will happen there.

this picture was taken 3 years ago before an encounter. we were talking about this exact picture while we were taking this one...

probably one of the more awkward pictures ever taken. but i love each of them.

all the girls. memories of all the small groups. all the monday night dinners at dan's. all the musical roommates. it was good times.

Farewell, Encounter

tonight is the night. encounter comes to an end (on this side of the world) after 7 years. for those of you who don't know, encounter is the weekly meeting of grace campus ministries in auburn, al. my sophomore year of college, i started going with my roommate carol. the next 3 years, i enjoyed one of the greatest communities God put on this earth. upon graduation in '06, david and i went to work for grace. for 2 years we worked with our friends who became a family. we will miss encounter. it provided something for the campus of auburn that was not there before, and i'm afraid will be sorely missed.

in honor of the awesomeness of encounter and what God did through it, i have compiled a top 8/bottom 4 and a montage of pictures...so on with the first...

top 8:

1. learning what grace was really about

2. meeting david...and coming up with bogus "events" to tempt him to hang out

3. mine and carol's cupcake fight (back when encounter was small enough that we provided snacks for everyone afterwards)

4. leading 21 college students to swaziland and meeting some of the most amazing people i have ever had the privilege of knowing

5. getting so hot in the middle of december (back in the au chapel) that you would be dripping sweat from jumping to crowder tunes (hey! it was '03)

6. ice cream socials at the crayola house

7. counting the donations the night invisible children came

8. waffle house after encounter

bottom 4:

1. all the awkward moments that happen when 12 people share one office and one bathroom (which happened to be behind my desk) - this really could be a top 8, though :)

2. the summer that me and courtney were the only staff in town for girls (there is a reason we had desk jobs...awkward)

3. the day we rode our bikes to the office and almost died

4. getting home from encounter at 11:30pm and getting up at 3am to drive to phenix city every week of my internship

matt and josh @ a softball game...josh was just a wee thing

the aforementioned cupcake fight

ahhh, my husband

karen, me, hanna, carol, diane, and erin: 2004

encounter fall retreat: 2005 - i think...whichever one jason morant played

passion '06

remember caleb's baby shower?

josh took this picture

oh the band trips...

did i mention the band trips?

swaziland with kriek and dennis

walking home in swazi

in honor of the happy couple getting married on saturday!

our last encounter...

despite what the freshmen might believe, this is and always will be the encounter drummer

...

what are your encounter memories?

Wilson the Roadie

once, again, i was looking through all my old pictures and i came across this one. back in auburn, i was a nanny for the two coolest kids. this is the oldest one. these were taken by jake upon returning to auburn from asheville, nc to do some recording. he's going to be a rockstar...or a hairstylist. i miss him. (and yes, he was still wearing his jammies). he also does a mean version of the auburn fight song. 

I Miss Auburn

yes, i actually just said that. a few months ago, you couldn't have paid me to stay here. and it is kind of a pain to not actually get to live in our new home on the weekends. but the point is, i miss auburn from time to time. i miss the simplicity of it. NOTHING is simple in atlanta. i miss simple.

here are some of the specific things i miss:

- i miss traffic being trying to get to the chick-fil-a on magnolia during a class change.

- i miss encounter.

- i miss waffle house after encounter.

- i miss a place being "too far away" meaning it took more than 5 minutes to drive there. 

- i miss being able to walk anywhere and not worry for your life.

- i miss band rehearsals (although i am listening to one right now)

- i miss hanging out downtown...reading, writing, talking, whatever...

- i miss season tickets and the student section.

- i miss hanging out at the blounts' house

- i miss the bond you have with people when you all know that that's your home. 

there is something amazingly unique about auburn. the older i get, i know it can't stay the same. i would be miserable if i still lived here. everyone gets younger. but still it was an amazing 6 years and i will continue to miss it nonetheless. who knows, maybe if our house doesn't sell, we can come back whenever we want. 

Another Weekend Away

it's that time again: time to go out of town. we can't seem to sit still. and it looks like it will be that way for a little bit longer. you see, for the next few weekends we are quite busy.

this weekend: auburn. game/david playing at eighth and rail
next weekend: beach with my fam. really sad david won't be there.
the next weekend: back to auburn for lsu weekend.
the weekend after that: finally to birmingham for the first time in a while. get my hair did by morgan and a family reunion.
the next weekend: nashville for vandy game. my brothers choice for his birthday weekend.

that puts us into october where we have one weekend free before going back to auburn for another weekend of musical committment. woop woop!

also, apparently, i have a new symptom to my stress. consistent twitching of my lower eyelid. i looked it up for fear that i was going to have a stroke or something. nope, just stress induced. why did i even wonder?

How to Save the World, One Plane at a Time

tonight i got to get dinner with my sweet friend christi who just got back from china for the summer. it was so much fun to get to catch up and along with her was our friend, biscuet, who lives in china and is just home for the summer. it was hilarious hearing her stories of how her students called her fat (she is the farthest thing from it) and biscuet's revelation that the only applicable thing he learned in his training was not to erase the board side to side because it causes your butt to jiggle and your students will laugh at you.

i think it is safe to say that christi gets scared a lot - much more than the average person. so we were sitting at mike 'n' ed's (which we wound up closing down) and christi proudly declares "let me tell you about the flight. i only thought i was going to die once!" it was at some point when they were over the ocean and everyone else was asleep and her mind started to run wild and she started thinking of everything that could go wrong...at which point, we decide to start brainstorming and coming up with logical ways that the airline industry could give its passengers more confidence in its ocean-crash-landing-scenario. here are some of the things we came up with:

- install gigantic water plane "thingies" that can come out from behind the landing gear in the event of a water landing.

- instead of just having your seat as a flotation device, consider having it strap onto your back and deploy a parachute. 

- make every row an emergency exit...you can choose for yourself if you want to go that route.

i think those were all of the suggestions we had come up with when we decided that its all really pointless because when you are plummeting 7 miles to harder-than-concrete water, you will probably just have a heart attack and die before you hit anyway...but they were just thoughts. 

My Malorie

so, i got a job in atlanta, and as of sunday i will be moving there. i don't feel like i'm really moving cause i'm only taking some clothes and i still own real estate in auburn but its as good as permanent.

so today i had breakfast with my dear friend malorie. i love her more than words can express. here's the deal...mal is three years younger than me. she is embarking on her senior year of college. that being said, she is wise beyond her years. i quite often find myself forgetting that she's younger than me. but anyway, she is just so precious to me and now that i've started writing this i feel overwhelmed to put down all the reasons why. basically, she just one of the most genuine people i know. she doesn't say a word that she hasn't thought out and processed and purposefully put together with other just as intentional words. i am ceaselessly amazed by her humility and her pursuit of the Lord in every aspect of her life.

the other night, we were just sitting around talking about a lot of different stuff and she said, "bek, i just have to believe that people can change. i can't live my life thinking otherwise. i mean think about it. if we, as believers, live as people CHANGED, we have to take people at their word that they CAN change." these few sentences spoke to everything we had been talking about that night (friends, some family members, etc). but i was just so amazed because if we would just start thinking about all things in those terms, how different our perspectives would be.

anyway, i love her to death and the way she challenges me. i can't wait to see what the Lord does with our relationship as i move, but i will miss her so much. next stop: sweet leigh anne. 

Holding it Together

to kick off my morning, i start by laying in bed reading my blogs. one of which is written by my former boss. i see the picture is of the "for sale" sign in their yard and then i realize it is a post of how their house has sold after 4 weeks. now, a sane reaction to that post would be to get excited for people who are in the same situation as you. however, what happened? i started crying.

we are going on week 9 of our house being on the market with no offers in sight. my husband lives in a different state and works a job that keeps him so busy, i'm lucky to hear from him for 5 minutes a day. not to mention we both suck at talking on the phone and the things we have done during the day just don't seem important enough to talk about when your tired at the end of the day. 

i am desperate to get to atlanta. to live with my husband again. to be able to hang out with friends when i'm there and not feel like i'm missing important time with david. i get really sad when i think about it, so i just try not to think about it and then one day it rushes out as i'm reading matt's blog. 

i will say this...i am grateful for the time i have had here this summer. it has given me a chance to spend some much needed time with a friend that i have missed so ridiculously much the past few months. i have gotten to hang out with a friend who is on a break from teaching in china as well as a friend who stays so busy with music that he hardly sits still. i have been able to go and do without figuring out what the "plan" is. i have realized how God has blessed me with david (you know how you don't know what you got til it's gone?). He has shown what a gift david is. 

i know at the end of this, there will be an amazing lesson but right now i'm having a little trouble seeing the forrest on account of the trees and whatnot. 

(disclaimer: this is not intended to be a pity party or plea of any kind. just a little honesty.)

Wilson sings "War Eagle"

i was organizing things on my computer just now, and i came across this video of the sweet little boy i used to keep. when david played with martha's trouble, i kept their kids and i spent more time with those two than i did with david. i miss them so much!

but the story behind this is that wilson loved auburn basketball (thanks to his ga ga, not rob and jen) and so one day i decided to play the fight song for him on my phone. that was the end of it. every day, multiple times a day, he would bring me my phone and say "aubie, bek. aubie." meaning, "play the fight song." the version i have on my phone is only the band playing but i still managed to teach him the "go! go! go!" part...the arm thing he just started doing. i guess its inherent to collegiate spirit. anyway, i think its one of the most precious things...maybe it will make you smile too. note: he does not get faked out by the intro. (for rss readers, there is a video here)

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wilson fight song from Rebekah Ytterberg on Vimeo.

When it Rains, it Pours

right now i feel like i'm living in that episode of "the o.c." when it was like the one rainy day in california and everything else was falling apart too. the weather this week has been less that great. i like rain, though. it cools things off. we need the rain. but right now i feel like it is an outward expression of the state of life we are in.

as of last monday, my husband moved to atlanta to start his new job at matchstic. he loves it and it is amazing. but he's not here. or i'm not there. whichever way you want to look at it. we have been struggling because we were both unemployed for about a month before he got this job, and thankfully we were able to make ends meet. but i can't leave auburn until our house sells. 

(this blog was briefly interrupted by the sound of a key in the door which caused me to throw aside my computer and attack my husband as he walked in the door - he's home for the weekend!)

but anywho...so we are trying to sell the house right now, which is looking better (after a couple of weeks of absolutely no one wanting to see it). and then i dropped my phone in the toilet, which i know isn't the end of the world, but as i mentioned in my previous post on the subject it is just a senseless waste of money). and then this morning, i am woken up by a call from david, and he doesn't even say hi, he just says "so there was a really bad storm last night and i woke up and a huge tree limb fell on the honda and cracked the windshield and knocked off the side view mirror." if you know david, you would probably have my same reaction...none, because you would expect him to say, "just kidding," and go on with what he was going to say. so i said, "you're kidding." and he said "no, i'm serious"...."you're kidding."...."no, i'm serious." so by this point i'm starting to get the picture that he is actually serious. so that's another thing that we are dealing with right now. and it's like at any point we could handle these situations fine, but because of the circumstances, i am starting to get a little worn down. 

the past few weeks have been wrought with emotional breakdowns, mostly because i miss my husband. i can't even imagine how people deal with husbands who are overseas or traveling constantly. i'm usually one of those people who is like "give me my space!" but i think its because for the longest time we worked together and came home together and i needed my time. but i didn't know how much i needed him til he was gone.

but then i was going through some things i cleaned out of our car and i found this note my friend, courtney, had written for me a few years ago on the back of a bank envelope and is so perfect how the Lord gives encouragement when needed (why of all days, would i choose to go through the stack of trash out of the tahoe?):

"dear brothers and sisters, whenever trouble comes your way, let it be an opportunity for JOY. for when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. so let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be strong in character and ready for anything. if you need wisdom, if you want to know what God wants you to do - ASK HIM, He will gladly tell you. He will not resent your asking."       james 1:2-5

so thank you, courtney, for your note that means so much years later. and thank you, Jesus for bringing this to me amidst my business.

side note: as i was writing this, i was watching glenn beck (what else) and his interview with bob barr...i think i am voting libertarian this year...)

It's Been a Good Six Years

i have had the luxury of not ever really having to move the past 6 years. that is virtually unheard of seeing as how during the last 6 years i was in college, graduated, got a job, got married, etc. we bought the house that we live in from the 'rents because they bought it for me and my sister when we came to college. its not much. a typical 1960's house. but its got character. and a lot of love has gone into it. my sister and i along with carol, mandy, and jamie changed it into a great college girl house. we had some amazing times in that house. then me and david made it a home. toned down some of the brightly colored rooms and made it "us."

we also took on some huge projects that i liken to labor (like, having a baby) in that, no matter how painful and miserable we were, afterwards we seemed to forget about the bad and moved onto the next miserable project. some of these include ripping up all the carpet upstairs and refinishing hardwoods in the middle of summer (when, a few days in, our ac gave out and we almost died of heat stroke and fumes). then we remodeled the kitchen. we thought we could get this done a week before david's family came to town for christmas. we may have been able to pull this off, but we will never know because two days before his family's arrival i contracted rotavirus from the baby i was keeping and spent the entire christmas visit in bed. then came the painting the exterior of the house. not only did i get bit by a black widow spider during this process (of course david was out of town so i spent one night horribly sick by myself and the next two days on my friend, leigh anne's, couch so that if i died, there would be a witness) but after three weeks of excruciating heat we outsourced the work to our friend dan in exchange for some drum shells. that is only a fraction of what we have been through together. but now, it is time to move on.

it is sad. so much of our history as a couple is in this house. but we are beyond ready to leave auburn. so here's to good times and more to be had.