Life Updates

House:  We are set to close on our house (the one I posted about on Feb. 2) on March 11!  In less than two weeks, we will be the owners of a WHOLE BUILDING.  Wow.  We just bought a new (well, "new" to us) dining set today, as we had no stable chairs and needed a china cabinet in which to store our dishes.  We plan to "camp-out" in the house for a few weeks while we clean it, paint most of the rooms, and lay tile in the kitchen and the basement den.  It's so much easier to do all that stuff before there's a lot of furniture to work around... or so we've heard.

Fertility/Kids:  I took Round 5 of Clomid last week.  Still at 100mg.  I'm staying fairly positive by reminding myself how difficult it would be to move during first trimester exhaustion....

I did contact the Agape social worker in Birmingham yesterday to let her know we were interested in becoming foster parents.  She replied today with an application and let me know that training classes could start as early as the end of March!  Training would be 10 weeks, and I assume the home-study would also happen during that time.  We could be only a few months away from caring for one of God's precious children!

And last but not least....
The other week I went to Curves as usual, only to find over 30 pages from Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition plastered all over the mirror.  I immediately felt my face get hot.  It was distracting to work out with all those women staring seductively off their pages, especially while realizing how many men would be lusting over the same pictures in their own copies.  How many men would fall into the deep pit of s*xual addiction because of these pictures?  Almost everyone I know who's struggled with p*rnography began their battle with photos more innocent than these--undergarment advertisements in catalogs, etc.--yet here they were, in public, put up in a business founded by Christians and run by Christians.  I just got angrier and angrier, while the women around me chuckled and thought of it as a joke.  How could I say anything?  I'm already quite an anomaly there (and everywhere else, for that matter), and I didn't want to ruin anybody's fun.  So I left.

But I didn't stop thinking about it.  I went back on Friday, determined to explain how offensive those images were to me in as loving but firm a way as possible, and they were gone.  I was relieved, but I still felt like I needed to pursue the subject.  Before I could, I heard people discussing it already.  Apparently someone else had quite firmly but also quite unlovingly said how they didn't want to feel pressured to look like those perfectly airbrushed seductresses, especially not while working out, so take them down or else.  I threw in my two cents, mentioning how they had been rather offensive on a moral level (though not in those words exactly), and my view was immediately dismissed.  I went to the bathroom and started crying.  I couldn't help it; it's a very sensitive subject for me.  I came out, reminding myself that many people just don't understand the effects those images can and do have on the majority of men (and women, and their families), determined to continue my work-out, but the sweet lady who works there could tell something was wrong, and realized that her words had hurt me.  I explained things more fully, and she was truly sorry for it.

I left that night feeling better about the whole thing, but also quite discouraged.  If older, Christian women can't see the damage that even soft-core p*rn has done and continues to do to our men, what hope do we have?  What do you do in situations like this, when someone offends your morals unintentionally and/or is completely unaware of the sin which they are encouraging?