Curious about the scetchy quotation marks yet? No?!!?!?!

Well there is time yet.

As an FYI, this post was drafted almost 11 months ago. I publish it now to inspire all children all over the globe to be creative and impulsive (cough cough) and follow there dreams and all that great stuff.

**Also enjoy all the food and wee hour shopping and holiday music (and if you are in my area, hunting) this break. Yay!**

Here we go, twelve easy steps and only a bit of scrolling:

Step 1) Create an unorganized, unplanned poem, while procrastinating on a school night in November. Take little care to rhythm, punctuation, or the content of this poem. Reflecting I didnt understand half the emotions I weaved in when I wrote them. But still they were born. 

Anyone else make #poems when they are #stressed ?

Rain fell on the windows
As if it never rained before

Loud and sharp
And I closed my eyes.

An owl cried out nearby.
And wind howled through the trees.

Silence I requested.
I opened my eyes and saw
you.

​Step 2) Post it on tsu ^^  with some hashtags for good measure. Get a compliment in a reply, making your day a little better and the guilt of distraction a little less. Thats always a plus. 

The comment: Only always. It really does help. That was good, you're incredibly talented! Would you mind reading my recent poem and letting me know what you think? Thank you!

Step 3) In December, come across a blog post announcing a winter writing contest, from December 1 to December 31. For the highest probability of winning, it should be 10:12 pm on December 31 that your browser loads the page. In my case this was precisely accurate so I can say this method has pretty good odds for your success.

Step 4)  Look at all the other entries and see that people are writing poems not stories and they are about snow and wintertime and a hooting owl. Decide you will cover all three. Oh, and while your at it start writing the poem, of course!!! Time is running out! 

Step 5) Madly search through tsu feed for the poem you wrote in November. Of course, because you had been maxing out at 32 posts per day every day.... this takes a while. However, it had something to do with weather, as you recall so the thousand plus posts of scrolling are worth it. I think. 

Step 6) Tie in that poem into your new half written, and largely contrasting, one hoping that the contest host isnt also looking 1000 posts back in your feed. Tell your sister to leave the room, "I really want to concentrate". Let her go to her room and do not feel bad when she falls asleep before midnight on New Years Eve. This is part of The Plan to win.

Step 7) Search Pinterest for the below appropriate image, another image of the countryside, and then pull up the photo editor to make some sort of collage along the diagonal... and then scrap the idea of playing with images because you know you would play with color and contrast and see what happens if you add hair dye or lipstick to this area or that area.... and get distracted. This is a writing contest, after all. 

Step 8) Start drafting a post and detail all of what you have done so far. Decide that its far too boring to win so think up anything possible to help your odds. 

Step 9) Cut all 26 periods and the 3 apostrophes in the poem you wrote somewhere about Step 6, because those are bad, coloring too much in the lines and thinking in the box. After all, all the best writers ditch logical grammar and punctuation and no one complains. Along these lines, quickly add in some nonsense.... its like abstract art, the stranger and more undefined, the more the price value. Mine made a metaphor of "The City" but please, please dont ask what it is a metaphor for. Discuss instead, like a highly priced piece of art. 

Step 10) Throw the now finished poem and image madly into a Wattpad story and comment the link onto the contest page. Preferably, twice. Finish at 10:43 pm. 

Time Elapsed: 31 minutes.

Step 11) Finish writing this post about winning the contest 6 days before the winner is even announced, and for good measure before midnight. Meanwhile, wonder what time zone the host-blogger is in and if you unknowingly missed the contest altogether, lol.

Step 12) When the winner the blogger chooses is announced and you are NOT that person, give yourself your own award with this website. Especially when it turns out that the blogger hosting the contest knows the other blogger who won.

^^ That website has a wee bit of cursing. It gets on my nerves and I just wanted to warn you. I'm sorry about it. 

Close enough, right?

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Recently I was away for a week and when getting teachers to sign my absence, I would ask "Can I have your autograph?" as I handed them the paper. It was hilarious. 

Similarly, two years ago, I handed out "Tear-able Puns" in exchange for a few words in a DIY autograph book at the end of the year. That went over well. 

This year I am contemplating some sort of "Gimme a Epitaph" for a theme in a similar little book but I havent decided if that will actually come to happen or I will do something else.... In any event, here are the terrible, I mean tear-able, puns I printed to bribe my friends with. 

I actually had to reprint copies by the end of the week as people wanted all of them. This is that version. 

“Tearable Puns”
-Kate Gold @ majesticgoldenrose.weebly.com
# 1: Hungry clocks go back four seconds.
# 2: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
# 3: The definition of a will is a dead giveaway.
# 4:  I used to be a train driver but I got sidetracked.
# 5:   A monkey in a mine field is a baboom.
# 6: A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.
# 7:   Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
# 8:   When the toilets were stolen from the police station, they had nothing to go on.
# 9:  Birds are grouchy in the morning because their bills are over dew.
# 10: You know the drill if you’ve seen the dentist.
# 11: Being struck by lightning is shocking.
# 12:  Corduroy pillows are making headlines.
# 13: The butcher who backed into his meat grinder got a little behind in his work.
# 14: Toy store sign: The animals are stuffed; do not feed them.
# 15:  Did you hear about the optometrist who fell and made a spectacle of himself?
# 16:. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
# 17:   A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was ticketed for littering.
# 18:  A toothless termite walked into a tavern and said, "Is the bar tender here?"
# 19:   The man who lost his left side is alright now.
# 20:   The fish make of two sodium atoms: 2 Na.
# 21:  Koalas aren’t bears but have the koalafications.
# 22: I’m on a seafood diet. Every time I see food, I eat it.
# 23: Some people are wise, and some, otherwise.’
# 24:    Whats big, red, and looks like a bucket? A big, red bucket.

​In God we trust. Ramblings of God and Trust.

A week or so ago, I had an intriguing revelation about this very familiar statement.

 Now I am back in the USA, and safely home if not impressed with America anymore, so these words are ever returned to my life. I figured I would share my ideas with you although they are redundant at one point and not entirely coherent......

So I begin that an English class I am taking suggested when we analyze images in a literary context that we also take into consideration what isn't there.

So it's obvious to draw the conclusion that trusting God applies to our circumstances, and recognizing that God is reliable through these. When times are good, it is simple to trust God to provide, but trusting suggests we also rely on his wisdom when things are not going well or as we had hoped. Trusting God affects our every response to the world around us.... and I think most of us have considered this concept before.

The Star Spangled Banner ends:
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

...and we may have not have heard these words recently but we get the idea. 

At the same time, many, I might point a finger on scientifically minded people, don't feel that there is a God to trust. They rely on riches, abilities, personal understanding, quality relationships with others, routines, resources, ignorance, our own desires and impulses. So many practically worship celebrities, musicians, polititions, and sports stars. Much like the rest of us only to a slightly greater extent. 

So in my recent enlightenment, I realized that the above things are not there. We say in God we trust, not In the things I can see I trust. These sorts of things are a missing component altogether to the "picture" if i can draw back to my idea of considering what is not there.

^Have you ever thought about this? All the things that arent listed as trustworthy in the phrase "In God We Trust"?

If I steal words of the men deciding this motto as they wrote back and forth, "No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins."

If I can play with this idea, trusting God means,that these other things are not so critical. Sure they might be there, but they are not first, because we have God in whom we trust first.

We might have riches, a foundation on which we feel safe and a resource on which we rely, but above this, we trust God to provide for our needs. The money might be stolen, spent, or whatever, but we trust God... first.

The same applies that we might have abilities. You might be able to sing very well, however above this skill, is God. God is the only way they we can sing at all. God is there even when our skills begin to be neglected or unimportant.

 It was a quote by someone named John Newton that encouraged my thinking.  It said "It is no less difficult to have great abilities than great riches without trusting in them".

So I went through and thought about these things in the context of trusting God. I thought about the qualities of God as well and the logic of trusting such a God.

I believe God is just, so I never should need to feel things are unfair or unreasonable. God will set wrongs right and properly finish all things. Its hard to apply this trust especially as I realized, as a greedy, selfish American who wants convenience and service as soon as possible. 

I believe that a God is loving, that he has good things in store for me. I thought about Jesus. God sent Jesus to die as payment in my place as I could not restore my fallen state. I thought about the fact that I could never please God without repenting, and the perfect Heaven in store for me and my Christian family because we have embraced Jesus. Thats love.

Similarly I pondered that God is loving, caring, forgiving, understanding; that God is the best there is. I thought about the wisdom of God. That even when I dont know what is going on, God does because he is all knowing.

That God is so powerful. He is capable of redeeming us from certain death, of setting the world in motion and govorning it from his sovereign place of authority. 

I thought of the way God brings new life-- renewing us and the things around us.

He is a solution to every problem, a defender when we are weak and forgiver when we wish to repent. 

Finally that God is just. We would not want to trust an unjust God and ours has never taken back or changed his plans. Those who chose hell over God will get there desire in full and those who love God will soon suffer no more. No gray, just black and white. 

There are a lot of people out there who do not trust God very much at all. I don't try to make the claim that I am very good at applying trust to my life, but I can think about the need to restore the trust, to restore the relationship of every human on the planet... and in this, it is very clear that Americans do not trust in God. 

I have spent a week in a culture of happy religious people, where everything closes at 5 and no one complains if the electric doesnt work til 3pm (Only the tourists ran for wifi) and therefore no A.C. in the 91 feels like 108 heat. These people are not shaken if there is an earthquake or they dont have hot water ever or they have to walk 8+ miles every day. This was a people of community but also relationship with God, of self sufficiency but also constant connection with the God who provides them with beans and rice and fresh fruit and coffee to eat and drink respectively. This was a people unlike Americans and I just wanna go back lol. I miss my mama tica and miss her trust in God.  

Strange right? You would think it would be Americans who live up to our own motto. Just a thought.

More videos today. If you have seen my other sewing/serger posts, this one might interest you as well as I have the other videos I promised you. 

It is very basic, however I find a serger very useful and I think these videos do a fair job at explaining why and how one is used. 

Thats all. 

The party is down at the bottom as usual. 

** Also because I am away this week, if you have left me any comments likely I have read them but not wanted to fight technology to approve and or reply. Just a little longer and then I'll get things in order again, promise :)

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