putting the pieces together

The other day at church, my small group spent a few minutes making fun (very righteously, of course) of people who say things like "Praise the Lord" about almost anything, especially when meeting new people.  You wrote a paper today? Praise the Lord! You study turtles? Thanks be to God! You work at Krispy Creme? Hallelujah!  It can be a bit much. 

But this is different. My terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer semester is OVER! 

PRAISE JESUS!

Truly, I am thankful to have survived. And despite the fact that there were too few hours in the day for the amount of work I was supposed to do, I am convinced that the non-school things I did this summer are what got me through it (mostly) unscathed. Surprisingly enough, helping Alexander with his remodeling efforts is at the top of the list. Since most of my time is spent reading and writing about abstractions all just to get some theoretical and largely meaningless "grade," there's something incredibly satisfying about using my hands to do something concrete, that I can see and touch when it's finished. My favorite is the mosaic we made for the laundry room counter a couple of weekends ago, so I thought I'd share.

The people who lived in the house before did a mosaic in the floor of the sun room, and they left behind tons of tiles and marbles and rocks and such.  After making a huge (but oh-so-fun) mess by spreading them out all over the floor, we started playing came up with this:

After a trip to Lowe's (I don't even want to try to count how many times I've been to Lowe's with this boy) and very strategic planning and measuring, we starting laying it out in its proper location in the laundry room.  This was the most fun part.

Here's what it looked like when I left Ocean Springs.  Alex spent quite some time getting the border just right in my absence. 

And now, the finished product, complete with grout and accompanied by our mutually-agreed-upon paint color!

I think I'm more proud of this than of my GPA.