bmg's blahs

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Reflections on Quiet (by Susan Cain)

Quiet now sits in the hands of the Jeff library circulation desk people, who kindly informed me when I asked to renew it a second time that I cannot because of their fairness policy. hahahaha. Of course I can go check it out again tomorrow, but I just don't have time...

I had a hard time finishing this book because of my busyness in my current occupation... :) And honestly, I had to skim through most of the second half of the book. So I'll make no claims of expertise on her expertise or anything.

If you're curious, based on her quiz of common traits of each, I'm actually about 60% introvert and 40% extrovert. Surprised me, but the more I read, the more I realized it! I come across to people I know as extroverted, and yes I can be very social, but that is from years of training in church and MBI to be bold about my faith. What she said about the extrovert ideal in American culture spreading even to evangelicalism is so true. Many churches/organizations I've volunteered in have stressed being outgoing.

I think, however, there needs to be caution to some extent of focusing too much on dividing people into two clear-cut categories. Though the author also mentions that caution here or there, she usually followed it with words like, "Yet..." "However..."etc. She always seemed to point to data insisting on a dichotomy like this. Also, as I came across the studies and descriptions in the book, I would try to put either myself or my husband into her oft-described categories, and we had traits on both sides. Both of us.

I still found myself bothered by her equating introversion with wisdom, humility, genius creativity, and extroversion with impulsiveness, superficiality, etc. I think this in part comes from her non-biblical worldview, in which a lot of people blend together moral traits with personality traits, making them both unchangeable and non-moral issues.

Overall though, I really loved all of her research and data behind what she wrote, and found it to be very true and applicable. It's refreshing to see someone out there exposing the extrovert ideal and GroupThink for what it really is - peer pressure and a popularity contest. hahaha!

Thanks to my mom...

I grew up around a lot of scrap booking and scrap booking supplies... perhaps you've heard of Creative Memories? :) Well, mom sent me a lot of scrap booking supplies recently and here's some of the result!

This is going to be Carson's first year photo album. I was going to go digital, but that actually costed more! So this is only the first 4 months of it.

b/w photos by prima luce photography

1-2 weeks

4 & 8 wks

6-12 wks

3 mos

4 mos

rolling over & 4 mos

Monday, October 29, 2012

6:28 pm

Random blue-ish slime!

In the spot next to mine at Aldi today there was this:

It looked even weirder in person! I instantly thought of all the slime I saw on Nickelodeon growing up. But usually that was green. So my guess is that this slime is not man-made. It's alien-made!

As you can see below, I have fabricated proof of UFOs in Jeff.

There it is, flying off into the sun.

(It's actually something on the windshield or a bag flying in the wind. Forgot which.)

Aldi is awesome!

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Playtime Oct 21st

banging is always involved!

crawling at super-speed!

a quick stop at this toy before moving to the next!

Fall at Southern

The other day we took a trip as a family to the seminary so David could copy sources for an exegetical paper on Matt. 19:1-12 :) And lucky I brought my camera because the leaves were breathtaking! Southern has awesome landscape, and when I worked there the landscapers were working all day every day on it!