The one about the ring...

Seven years ago this November, I went to take off my wedding ring after a busy day of hosting my sister in laws baby shower, only to discover that my ring wasn't on my finger. I hunted high and low. I retraced my steps, tearing my house, my in laws house and my aunts house where we'd hosted the shower completely apart. We looked everywhere outside. It was nowhere to be found. It was gone. I was devastated.

I did not give up hope. I knew in my heart that it was somewhere, that it would eventually find it's way home.

Then my super cute husband did what all super cute husbands do and bought me a shiny new ring for Christmas. It could never replace the one he'd given me for Christmas thirteen years earlier, but, it was beautiful and I loved it almost as much as I loved him.

Eleven months later, we had just finished the storage room in the addition we'd built on to the house. I was going through stuff deciding what should and shouldn't go out there and decided to clean out a cedar lined box I'd had since my teenage years.

I lifted the lid, moved a few things and heard a clink. Hmmm... what could have possibly made that noise? Imagine my complete and utter SHOCK to find...

My long lost wedding ring.

OH YEAH... I had gone through that box looking for an item to use for sharing time in primary, which was the day after the baby shower. It had apparently slipped off my finger as I dug through the box.

Now I have two rings. Go me!

Rather than paying to have both rings resized, I kept the new ring on my left hand... and put the old ring on my right hand, after I got it resized it of course. That baby wasn't leaving my finger on it's own ever again.

I don't wear my rings all the time. They could catch on something, break off, the diamond could fall out, the ring could *gasp* mysteriously fall OFF my finger.

Plus, they drive me crazy, so I only wear them when I leave the house.

Last Saturday night, I put my rings on and left the house. By the time we got to Wingers for all you can eat sticky fingers, I noticed my ring finger on my right hand was swelling up and I couldn't get my ring off. I didn't think a whole lot about it, figuring I would put some ice on it when I got home and it would pop right off.

I was wrong.

We returned home. I tried everything I could think of. This ring was not budging. A third of the way into our Saturday night Netflix movie (Strange Brew), it was aching and my finger was turning purple.

Not
a
good
sign.

So the super cute husband did what all super cute husbands would do. He gave me a choice. Either we could go to the emergency room and pay a doctor to cut my ring off, or he could do it himself, which he didn't really want to do but didn't see any way around. So, he went out to the garage, got the wire cutters, snipped the ring and painfully pried it off my finger. It was all I could do not to cry. From the pain. Dang, those points were sharp!

Just one more thing I can cross off my bucket list. Have my wedding ring cut off my finger by my husband. Isn't that every girls dream?

Hosted by Cecily and Lolli

The one about deep thoughts...

Life can be hard, but then we make it even harder by the way we look at it. -
"Recipes for a Perfect Marriage" by Morag Prunty.

This weekend I did something so brazen, so bold, so earth shattering that my husband could hardly believe I actually did it. I deactivated my facebook account. For three whole days. I did it just to prove to myself that I was not addicted to this wildly popular social networking site.

I quickly learned that I don't spend much time doing anything else while online. Beyond my email and my google reader, maybe the weather... that's pretty much all I look at. Life got pretty boring.

Until I started reading a book I'd picked up from the clearance table at Barnes and Noble a few months ago called "Recipes for a Perfect Marriage" by Morag Prunty. I'm not done with the book, nor do I do book reviews either way, so I'm not going to tell you about it but the title says it all. Recipes and perfect marriages. Or lack thereof.

And on page 158, we read: "The day you think you have the answers is the day life tells you that you know nothing at all. When you think you have suffered enough and the road ahead looks sunny and flat, you will turn the corner and find there is a mountain to climb. When you climb the mountain there are no guarantees that there will not be another, and another after that."

So true, is it not? I used to think I knew everything and that life was sunny and flat with maybe a few little speed bumps along the way, nothing major. Then I came to that first mountain. How many more do I have to climb?

My husband is a deep thinker. I ... am not. Most of what runs through my mind at any given moment is what's for dinner and he can attest to you that I don't put much thought into that one most days either. We were recently challenged to sit and discuss some questions about life. I read through them and said, whoa, these are DEEP, I don't think like this, I can't do it. A week later, I'm still scratching my head, wondering what I could possibly say to any of these 29 questions.

Except maybe question 23. What is one way you would like to change. Seriously? Just one? I think right now, I would like to change how I think. I would like to be a deep thinker, and someone who is a more "expressive" thinker. I know my husband would appreciate it.

I need to think about this some more, me thinks, but in the meantime... how about you? What is one way you would like to change?