I also love looking at wedding pictures, even if I don’t know the couple. Whenever someone on Facebook uploads their wedding pictures or pictures from a friend’s wedding, I look through every single one of them. Partially for the photography, I admit, but mostly for the happiness and love visible on everyone’s face.

(By the way, Sunday will be our 4-year, 4-month anniversary! Not that we’re celebrating, but it seems relevant to mention.)

I like quotes so much that I spent an entire week during my first NaBloPoMo sharing my favorites in several different categories:

• Quote Week, Day 7: Life
• Quote Week, Day 6: Success, a.k.a. Hard Work
• Quote Week, Day 5: Productivity
• Quote Week, Day 4: Writing
• Quote Week, Day 3: Friendship
• Quote Week, Day 2: Food
• Quote Week, Day 1: Happiness

Quotes make me happy because so often they touch me deeply. Right here, I feel like I should tell you my favorite quote, the one that has touched me the deepest. But I can’t really do that because there are so many. So here are three that have really been on my heart lately.

Love each other and you will be happy. It is as simply and as complicated as that. MEH

It’s so true. Marriage is as simple and as difficult as just loving each other.

Life, if well lived, is long enough. Seneca

Am I living life well? If I died right now, would I be satisfied with the life I have lived? If not, then I’d better get at it!

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. Carl Sandburg

Am I really in charge of my life? Or am I letting other people, other tasks, other responsibilities take me away from the ones that are truly my top priorities?

What are some of your favorite quotes?

It happened more times than I can count while Beth and I were playing cards as teenagers, at Beth’s place during college, and even a few times in Lawrence. In fact, once time, we had to clean the water I’d spewed into the dining room, onto the table, and onto Jame’s cool picture (luckily it had a class cover!). Sometimes Rob does it to me too, and usually in the wee hours of the night when we’re silly-tired.

You know the type of laughter. Your stomach hurts. Your cheeks hurt. You are crying because you’ve been squeezing your face up all tight in glee. And then it happens! You become silent because you’ve laughed all the air out of your chest, and you take a huge, deep breath, and even then sometimes you still can’t breathe because your laughing-breathing timing is all off and you can’t quite get it back in sync.

It hurts so good.

On a related note, during those laugh-until-it-hurts (or you pee ) sessions, I have always wished that the one scene in Mary Poppins was real. You know the one I’m talking about, where they start floating because they were laughing too hard? That would be so much fun! Like flying, but better because you are laughing at the same time! Just in case you don’t remember what I’m talking about, take a minute to watch this clip from YouTube.

But no matter how I get the message, it still makes me happy.

And it infected me. Slowly at first, but now, two years later, organizing and maintaining that organization has become a part of my life. It makes my happy, it makes my life run smoothly, and it makes me want to find more ways to organize the other areas of my life that aren’t organized yet.

Plus, as my life changes (which happens every semester), my system has to be adapted. So it’s fun to modify my current system to the new semester, the new courses, the new demands.

I also enjoy reorganizing a cluttered space: home office drawers, messy bookshelf, kitchen cabinets that are over-stuffed, or the purse that’s become unusable because there’s so much crap in it.

My latest task is my email inbox. I love Gmail because the conversation view changed the way I processed email messages. The filters are great for auto-sorting and filing. I have set it to check all of my other necessary accounts (like work and webmaster accounts) so I don’t have to. I love the sleek design and intuitiveness of the controls. But those features only help the onslaught of emails to a certain extent. Since February, I’ve been trying to figure out how to respond to all the email I receive in a timely manner, how to keep track of the emails I need to keep track of (by moving them to my ToDo list or calendar, or labeling and archiving them). I tried Zero Inbox during March and April, but once the semester started, I didn’t have the processing time each day. Which means I’m currently trying to figure out the process that works for me and my mind. I’m getting there, but I still get behind in my emails. Maybe I need a 9-to-5? Teaching is so variable that it is hard to change a good routine once you’ve found one!

Time is harder to organize for me than physical space. Even so, I like organizing.

Sometimes we sleep facing each other, just holding hands. And that is quite wonderful. But what I really truly love is when we “spoon,” with his arms wrapped around me, his breath tickling the hair on the back of my neck, and his knees snuggled behind mine. He can’t fall asleep like that, so most nights, we cuddle like that for a while, and then he rolls over.

It isn’t only physically comfortable, it’s emotionally relaxing. I lie there, warm beneath my down blanket, with a roof over my head, a tummy full of food, and all my needs met. And I am blessed enough to be married to a man who loves me for me, someone who gets me (most of the time ), who knows my warts and loves me in spite of them, treats me right, and makes me laugh til I can’t breathe anymore. There’s so much more, but all those things make being enveloped by his arms the emotionally safest place I can think of.

I love the feeling of rain on my skin, so getting wet isn’t a problem either. I love seeing lightning light up the clouds. I love seeing breath-taking lightning bolts attack the distance, illuminating the clouds, rain, and world with a strobe of blinding light. I love feeling the building rumble from the thunder. I love remembering when Mommy and Daddy telling a little 6-year-old Lindy that I shouldn’t be afraid of the thunder because it was just God bowling with the angels (sometimes thunder sounds just like a strike!). I love seeing amazing photographs of lighting, like the one I saw recently where the photographer caught on film lightning striking an active volcano.

The last two years we lived in Springfield, we had a west-facing sliding glass door, and I would open the blinds and the door and just lay on the couch to watch approaching storms.

It rains a lot in Germany, but I have yet to experience a real thunderstorm here. I can’t wait.

He laughs like that every time he hears something real funny, and every time, my heart skips a beat, and I fall in love with him all over again.

When we first started running, I really enjoyed how much Sarah knew about health, and I think she liked my encouragement. I remember the day she mentioned that she’d like to run a 5k eventually. We had been running 2 miles that week, so I told her that a 5k is only 3.1 miles. I added, “Why don’t we just see if we can do 3 today?” And we did. The rest of that semester, we ran our miles, talked, and she showed me how to use the weight machines. (You all know what it’s like to be the only person in the gym who can’t figure the machine out, while all the buffed beauties walk by and snicker at you as they add more weights. Sucks.) We didn’t stay in touch during the summer, but she ran her first 5k and even took second place in her age category.

When school started back up in the fall, we started running and lifting together again. Our desks were next to each other, so we talked a lot, plus we took a web design class for tech writers. We spent almost every Friday together doing homework for the class, checking for typos and sytax mistakes.

It was the next spring semester that our running became very serious. Sarah mapped out our road to the marathon, thanks to the great support and publicity running has in the Springfield area: a 5k during spring break, a 10k in the June, a half-marathon in November, and then a full marathon in spring 2009. With the exception of a week off here and there for illness, injury, and vacations, we ran together four days a week from the middle of January until I moved away in late September.

When you find a good running partner, you will learn a lot about her. You don’t just plod along those miles silently! You talk. And you tell her things you didn’t think you would because you have four more miles to go and you need to talk to fight that pain in your knee. You listen and learn about her as she does the same thing.

And your running partner sees you at your weakest. When you feel like every muscle in your body is going to snap, your running partner tells you you can go on. When your mind is screaming that you are an awful runner, that you’re slow, that you’re tired, that you really want to walk, she says no, you can’t walk, “Push it, Linden. I know you can. We’re runners, not walkers.”

We ran that 5k, we did the 10k in the hot June heat, but that is where our paths diverged. I moved half a world away about 3/4 through our half-marathon training. Luckily, I found a half-marathon in mid-October and I ran it. Sarah continued on with an awesome showing in the Cohick Half-Marathon in early November.