Rawr. I am annoyed. My All Natural Face website is NOT working. My mother-in-law tried to put in an order through my website (bless her heart for being the brave guinea pig!), and I asked the owner if the sale was showing up as credited to me. Unfortunately, it was showing up, but not as a sale through me. UGH.

I e-mailed Crystal (the owner) about it, of course, and she just requested my mother-in-law's name so she could credit the sale to me. I'm still waiting for her to respond to tell me she did it. :P

But I'm so happy! Margie's my first follow-up customer! YAY!

In other news, goodness gracious. God is trying to tell me SOMETHING. :S We had yet ANOTHER fire. This time it was only a pot of food left alone too long on the stovetop. The smoke alarms started going off in our next-door neighbor's apartment and the fire department responded. She wasn't home. Which was really weird. It was midnight, and she has 5 kids, and there was a pot of food left on the stove? What the heck?

...Just checked back through my diary entries; I guess I haven't talked about all the fires here. The first one we had, I wrote about here. A few months later, we had another garage fire next to our building.

And the last one, the biggest one, was at the tail end of February, and it was the apartment building directly across from us. They're still investigating what started it--most likely, we think, a cooking fire--but it burned out FOUR APARTMENTS! And the other two apartments are hopelessly damaged by water and smoke. They're working on rebuilding it all now; it's going to be a long project!

It's making me nervous/anxious about a fire coming to our apartment. We have renter's insurance, but I have definite struggles with materialism and "hoarding" tendencies. I'm better than I used to be, but the idea of losing all the stuff I've bought still freaks me out.

Case in point: What I grabbed last night when I was afraid we were going to be evacuated? My makeup. :S Namely, my All Natural Face makeup. Sigh.

For what it's worth, I grabbed my laptop and purse first. Then my makeup. :/

Later, when the threat was diminished but the fear/nervousness was still somewhat present, I also grabbed my diaries and a few of my favorite childhood books. It's funny what does and doesn't matter when you can only grab a few things.

It was even interesting which childhood books I did and didn't grab. The two I wanted the most were Mandy, by Julie (Andrews) Edwards, and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi. Only after a second thought did I take The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, the two books I usually list as my "favorite" books. Also interesting was that when I grabbed my diaries, I was not doing it so much out of a desperation to save them, but in a sense of duty to my former self, because years and years ago I swore to myself that I would never let anything happen to them. I wouldn't do the same thing again today, but I still feel a sense of duty to that Stephanie that needed them. I'm still thinking about that, pondering it, mulling it over.

Anyway, regardless... Now I'm truly scared of what the Lord might be wanting to do here. :/ I know I wrestle with materialism and hoarding tendencies. And I'm really, really scared that God is going to decide to use a fire to divorce me in a very harsh way from those tendencies.

So I'm feeling a bit panicky, and I want to have a yard sale PRONTO and get rid of a lot a lot of my stuff, because if God is trying to teach me not to be materialistic through the threat of fires, I don't want to have so many materialistic things around me!!!!! But I know that isn't even the greatest motivation for wanting to get rid of the stuff...Because in the end, I'm still worried about losing them to circumstances out of my control instead of losing them to circumstances within my control. :(

Oy. God has so much work to do on me. :(

-Stephanie

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