life moves pretty fast.

food of the heavens.

2008-10-09T16:45:00.003-05:00

So a friend of mine had me try these at her house a couple of months ago and I loved them but she said the only place she could find them was Whole Foods, so the thought to get them went out of my head. Until Sunday, when the church I am going to now is so close to a Whole Foods, so I went in and bought 3 bags, the third of which I am finishing off now, granted these aren't super huge bags but still I'll admit I ate a bag for dinner Tuesday. Yes that was just 5 days ago. Check out the info here.

long time no blog...

2008-10-09T14:04:00.011-05:00

I have the day off from school today (and tomorrow...), yay for small town schools where the fair is such a big deal it merits 2 whole days off from school! We never got a day off from school just because the fair was going on, really all the fair meant for most of Tyler was going to ride tons of rides, play games, eat a lot of cotton candy and sausage on a stick, and a funnel cake...the American way. Ill have to ask my kids on Monday after the fair is over what they did over these two days.

So anyway I'm blogging from the couch. I honestly couldn't have asked for better timing with these days off though because I have laryngitis/some kind infection and I have no voice, or rather what I do have is horrid to listen to. Tuesday was the first day it was bad and my kids made fun of me all day, but I think they felt a little sorry for me because they were offering to read and explain things where normally they are quite reluctant. My kids are great though I really love them a lot.

I guess I haven't really updated since I moved here. I'm living in Katy which is...interesting. It is the epitome of suburbia. I'm living with a friend of a friend from college and that is going well. She owns a house in Katy, (she's already been teaching for 7 years) and so it's nice being able to pull into the garage every day and not climb 3 flights of stairs with loaded arms. The house is in a newer subdivision and there are kids everywhere and tons of inflated pumpkins and ghosts and witches and whatnot adorning most of the yards. The kids around here are nuts, or I should say their parents are for not teaching them not to play in the street. Just last week these 4 kids had set up their soccer field in the street, as in they had to move their "goals" everytime a car came because they were taking up the whole street, and countless times every week when I'm coming home there are kids literally skateboarding, bike riding, ball playing in the middle of the road in a high traffic subdivision. Yesterday I was going along and to my right up ahead was an empty lot (a rarity) and the grass/weeds are tall, right as i'm about to pass it a kids comes bounding out of the lot right in front of my car with his skateboard in hand and proceeds to spend the next 30 seconds mounting the thing and doing whatever else RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY CAR as if I wasn't even there. I had to hit the brakes to begin with but then I eventually honked at the kid to get out of the way. Then he looked at me like, oh hi, didn't see you there. I have yet to really meet any people my age, I'm slightly convinced I'm the only person under 25 here.

I'm going to a church in Sugarland right now with a friend of mine who lives in Houston. This weekend will be my 3rd time to go but I think I'm going to stay there for awhile. Finding a church has been so hard. I looked around Katy for the first couple months and I found some great churches there it's just no one close to me in age on walk of life everyone is either 30 or older already married with kids. And not that I don't value intergenerational relationships, I do, I'm pretty sure after being at LH for 4 years I value them more than anybody but there is just no one my age anywhere around here and it's hard not have that kind of community because I only have 2 good friends in the Houston area anyway, so I am looking forward to meeting new people and making some new friends. It has definitely been a difficult 2 months getting adjusted to living here and starting school all with only a couple of people who I am really close to who don't even live in the same town. But I have just been clinging to the truth that the Lord is good and he provides in perfect timing.

Work has been going really well, I seriously love my kids. Somedays I want to knock them into next week...with my vicious rhetoric of course, but their moments of brilliance and sheer hilarity are priceless. I love my co-workers too, they're always looking out for me and helping out and they're so supportive. I really love my school. Open house was this past Monday and oh man most of the parents just walked right by me as they turned into my room and then I would hear their kid say, "mom, mom that's my teacher out there.." followed by, "where?" and then they would look out and see me and go "Oh! I thought you were a student!" But most of the parents seemed to be really supportive once I started talking with them.

So Courtney tagged me to list 7 things about myself, so here goes...

1. I think secretly I could be a fashion designer or a designer for pier 1. When I go shopping I spend just as much time trying to find some article of clothing or piece of furniture that I invented in my head as I do looking at what is already in the stores.

2. I drink entirely too much diet dr. pepper. Like I think one day they are going to find out that my insides have been permanently altered because of it.

3. I am adopted. This is not a big deal or a sensitive subject to me at all but whenever people find out about it they are curious so feel free to ask.

4. I LOVE the Cosby Show.

5. I took piano lessons from Vanilla Ice's mom. I have his autograph.

6. I rode horses and showed competitively for 10 years and even went to the national championships.

7. I trim my own hair. In between haircuts I shape up the layers myself. I don't trim the longest layers because I need those as a guide and so it doesn't look like I cut my own hair, but I trim it every 3-4 weeks. The last time I paid someone to cut my hair was the first of july.

yeah, but...

2008-09-28T20:44:00.000-05:00

Amen.

if you only had a few days left...

2008-08-03T18:46:00.002-05:00

...in college station, where would you go eat? I've already had Koppe Bridge now I'm trying to decide where to go with some dear friends for a going away dinner, current and former College Stationites (?) vote now.

update!

2008-07-27T10:29:00.002-05:00

So I have a job! I go tomorrow to sign a contract with a high school just outside of Katy to teach U.S. History and Government (I don't think I will post on here exactly where I am teaching for several reasons so if you want to know please feel free to ask I'm happy to share!)

I'm going to Houston today after church to hang out with Brittany and then tomorrow I'm going apartment shopping in Katy. If you have any apartment tips, or questions you think I should ask when looking, please let me know I've never lived in one...also if you know of any great churches in the Houston area!

I plan to get totally moved in the weekend of the 8-9th of august, but Ill probably be making a few trips back and forth between now and then.

I'm headed to LH now for probably the next to last time...i'm okay.

fondant, the devil's play-doh.

2008-07-20T23:40:00.004-05:00

oh how innocent and pretty you look.

don't be deceived.

I've been wanting to try a fondant recipe for awhile so if I ever wanted to make a fun cake for a party or birthday or just because, I would be able to. I wanted to just make a plain cake and make plain white fondant as a simple layer over it so that way I would know how to make it, not for any specific reason or for it to be pretty and colorful. So I looked up a recipe this afternoon and went to the store and came home and got to work.

When looking at the recipe and procedures I knew it would take awhile but that was no problem, I had the rest of the day to play in the kitchen. I found the recipe here. What was alluring about this recipe was that this fondant was actually supposed to be remotely edible compared to most fondant that is while pretty quite tasteless, and making the icing this way was more economical that buying it pre-rolled.

The reality: this was by far the messiest project I think I have ever participated in in my life, including things I did as a child that I got in trouble for. My kitchen at three different times looked as if a powdered sugar/corn starch bomb blew up in there. At one point the island, surrounding floor, rug, everything I was wearing were all completely covered in white dust. The recipe and procedures had you spreading powdered sugar and corn starch and crisco over the counter and kneading the "dough" (read: and by dough I mean until you get the consistency just right, homemade glue). There is absolutely no need to have an ever expanding mess all over everything by doing this on the counter or any other place that is not contained, it is much easier and lots cleaner to just knead the mixture in a large bowl. I say this because it takes awhile to get the consistency just right and you are constantly adding water and powdered sugar and more powdered sugar and/or crisco to the counter itself to keep it from sticking (a huge problem) and by the time I had it sort of close to the ideal consistency the island in my kitchen was completely covered with powdered sugar and dough and mess. You only need to bring it to the counter when you are ready to roll it out (hence monstrous messes #2 & #3), which is an activity I think is probably a punishment in purgatory, seriously, it's awful and pretty close to impossible to roll it our big enough without it tearing or sticking to the counter.

Oh and my hands are a little sore from all the kneading. And it took 4.5 hours.

I think this is one of those things you just have to go ahead and try so you can get it behind you and say I will never do that again. A project such as cupcakes or making fondant decorations for a cake with the first layer of fondant on, sure. I think they sell special non-stick mats made for rolling out fondant and I would try again with that but not with anything less I think. Here's my cake with just a plain white layer over a layer cake:

doing church differently.

2008-07-19T14:41:00.004-05:00

Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be) by: Kevin DeYoung & Ted Kluck

This is a witty and smart work written by a pastor and a member of his congregation and they are out to set the rather crooked record straight about what so-called and not so so-called emergent authors, pastors, leaders, bloggers, and others which reject conventional labels are presenting as the rationale and basis for the emergent/emerging (DeYoung & Kluck use these words interchangeably - although some view them as markedly different) movement and how embracing social issues doesn't mean you need to forsake a life founded upon orthodox beliefs, propositional truths about Jesus, and the authority of Scripture.

As a disclaimer to anyone who may stumble across this blog I feel I should report the same disclaimer DeYoung and Kluck put wholeheartedly in their book,

"We fully understand that emergent means a hundred different things to a hundred different people, so if what you read in these pages is not what you mean by emergent then so be it...We do not think of our emergent sparring partners as the "bad guys", no doubt many people reading this book have been helped by these [emergent leaders]...when we talk about the emergent church we are not simply referring to what is new, postmodern, culturally with-it, or generationally up and coming, the official Emergent organization, or the Emergent village; we are talking about a movement led and inspired by a cadre of authors and pastors who express many of the same concerns with the evangelical church, hit on many of the same themes, and often speak as the most influential voices in the emergent conversation...We don't want to get hung up on labels let alone poison anything that has been called emergent."

To begin DeYoung addresses the question he is asked most frequently, "So what is the emergent church anyway?" and he says defining the emergent church is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. This is, he says because of several reasons, first because it is new and all new movements are usually amorphous and hard to define, but the blurry nature is also very intentional as emergents view themselves as just participants in a "conversation"; emergent authors and bloggers do not view themselves as authoritarians or theologians but as talkers.

DeYoung counters this position of being just "talkers" and the general lack of accountability within the movement with the fact that thousands of books have been sold, podcasts are downloaded everyday, speakers tour the country, and once this happens you cannot deny that you are indeed a leader and teacher whether you want to be or not and this is serious because as James says, "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness" (3:1)

The things emergents are addressing generally involve the importance of relationships and inclusivity, addressing the social needs of people; their mantras include, "doing church differently" and "all we need is Jesus"; and the leaders include, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Spencer Burke, Brian McLaren, Dan Kimball, Rob Bell, and Peter Rollins. They rally around postmodernism which really means anything that is deconstructed, embraces uncertainty, lacking central ideas or hierarchy, anything that departs from tradition or the way that things have been done in the past, and so on.

In this book DeYoung and Kluck address several issues and interpretations where the evangelical church and the emergent movement seem to be at odds and why it is important to not just dismiss these differences as unimportant because they come back to the foundations upon which the church was built and in some circumstances the very fundamentals of Christianity, such as: the importance of the journey verses the destination, the knowability of God, uncertainty verses humility, homosexuality, the encouragement of doubt as a part of our faith, the acceptance of rebellion and the legitimacy of authority in the church, the Bible as inerrant, etc.

I would highly recommend this book even if you are not interested in the emergent movement solely as a work that will get you thinking about what you view as foundational and how important it is to hold fast to the truths of the word. I was eager to read this book as I know someday I will be searching for a new church home and I wanted to use this as a resource to help me be as discerning as possible when examining the doctrines and fundamentals of a new church and not let things not found in scripture effect my decision about where I should be and I am really glad I read this book.

the emergent church. (?)

2008-07-17T16:26:00.002-05:00

what is the emergent church?

in all honesty no one knows exactly because the main feature of "emergent/emerging" is elusivity.

I am almost finished with the book, "Why We're Not Emergent: From 2 Guys Who Should Be" and I will expand on their findings soon hopefully. Before reading this book I had heard of the term "emergent church" (read: also postmodernism - I knew about this term but I didn't realize they were two peas in a really hip pod) but had no clue what it was about and now after delving into this mess of a topic I can honestly say there is no way anyone can neatly cover the basis/understanding/foundations/differences of this topic very well because it is so vast and nothing is nailed down but Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church (NOT the openly emergent Mars Hill of Grand Rapids Michigan) gives a little breakdown here that is a really good intro to this topic.

food for thought.

2008-07-14T22:19:00.001-05:00

So I found a great new website: www.conversantlife.com and they are tracking curious project, check it out here.

I can barely recall but it's all coming back to me now.

2008-06-30T23:08:00.003-05:00

Time to own up.

What is that song that old school song that you hear once a year on the radio or on your ipod when it's on shuffle that you just belt it out like nobody's business.

You know what I'm talking about. You're alone in the car or with a good friend and it's american idol finale go time.

I'll start: Celine Dion - It's All Coming Back To Me Now (Who can resist an 8 minute long power ballad?)

happy birthday to me.

2008-06-16T22:21:00.004-05:00

My parents got me this wonderful invention I have been coveting for awhile. I first saw it at the house where I was a disciple now leader back in february. It is a Keurig Brewer! What does it do? What doesn't it do is more appropriate. It makes a wonderful cup of coffee or gives me a perfectly hot cup of water for my tea in less than 60 seconds. What's better is there is no measuring or cleanup with this holy machine (pretty much the sole selling point for me over a conventional coffee pot)! You just buy these single serve "k-cups" (you can buy them pretty much anywhere, target, bed bath & beyond, etc.) in over 150 different coffee and tea flavors and put it in the machine, let it do its rapid magic and then throw it away! It's great!

grad school is like...

2008-06-05T12:08:00.003-05:00

...regular school on crack.

So I'm actually in class for 6 hours a day and on campus for around 10 hours a day if not more for work and then doing things that only people in grad school do, such as walk around surveying people about their high school curriculum preferences and finding books in the library and then making endless copies for some unknown reason, just because your professor told you to.

However, there is a silver lining. Two actually; one: it is for only 5 weeks and i'm almost 2 weeks in!, and two: 80% of what i'm learning is practical knowledge and immediately applicable once I start teaching. In fact I'm not sure how I would have started teaching without all the things I'm learning, I'm pretty sure I would have been awful because no one except teachers realize how much detail and organization is really necessary to have effective classroom.

So now I just need a job. But since all of us in my program will begin teaching in the fall we're all in the same boat, the jobless boat that is. There are a few that have jobs and those that do have them already are a result of some connection with a school district back home or from a family member, etc. But it is a little encouraging in a weird way that i'm not the only one without a job still. I had a screening interview with KatyISD on tuesday morning, it was more substantial than I was thinking it would be but it went really well, except there are no job openings yet.

I will post pictures from the cruise Brittany and I went on when I get the rest of the pictures, we usually only took one camera with us everywhere so I only have about half.

Back to work on more assignments...

a little update.

2008-05-13T17:05:00.002-05:00

I'm a college grad!

And I'm still looking for a job!

I went to Austin ISD's career fair this past saturday (the day after graduation) and was told the same thing over and over, 'it's still early and we don't know what positions we will have open, but we'll take your resume'. Oh and 'So do you coach?'. Pshh. So at least all of the Austin ISD high schools have my resume now so, there's that. I left Austin saturday and drove to Dallas (McKinney), and stayed the nite with one of my aunt and uncles because my whole family was getting together there on sunday for Mother's Day. Always good food and a lot of laughs when my family gets together.

I leave for my cruise on saturday! Brittany and I fly to Orlando saturday morning really early and then leave that afternoon on our ship to go to Cozumel, Belize, Honduras, and the Bahamas. I'm so excited!!

Oh and 3 more things:

1. The new McDonalds chicken biscuit breakfast thing is disgusting. I never go to mcdonalds but I wanted to get a drink on my way to my subbing job the other day and so I pulled in there and saw the sign and thought I would try their new copycat of Chik-fil-a's morning deliciousness and it was really gross. The chicken part anyway, it's pretty hard to screw up a biscuit, but the chicken tasted funky.

2. Chocolate skittles are also gross. Take my word for it. They are so artificially flavored its revolting. There are like 6 flavors in the bag, s'mores, chocolate pudding, brownie batter, caramel chocolate, some other gross chocolate flavor, and vanilla. I tried each skittle twice to make sure it wasn't a fluke and the only one I liked was...the vanilla. It tasted like the vanilla tootsie rolls, you know the ones in the blue wrappers.

3. Texas avenue construction is complete! Yes you read right, it is finished! Just in time for a significant decrease in overall trafiic due to the summer so I should be able to get to Target and HEB in less than 10 minutes now instead of 20 or 30 (in cases where I was a dummy and didn't take back roads).

Well, thats all for now.

it's over. sort of.

2008-05-04T18:55:00.006-05:00

Today was the near-dreaded official last normal sunday of the year at Living Hope. The one I blogged about back in October and January. I knew this was coming and so I mentally prepared myself this morning telling myself things like, "this is not your last sunday so it's not a big deal", "you've already written letters to people and gotten tears out then", and "It's ok I sit upstairs anyway so it will be less intense and emotional". When the time came to take your little prayer request card up to the altar at first I didn't do anything because I didn't know what we were supposed to do upstairs. So I just contently started singing the first song and then people started going up to the front of the room so I was like, dang it. I filled out the card and walked to the front.

The tears were falling before I was even kneeling.

I started to pray and then a second song started which was when people could come pray over you and my hope group leaders/second parents came and each prayed with me and it was useless trying to wipe away the tears. Then the Moss', two of the most sincere people I have ever met and were on the spring break trip, each came and prayed. Then Barbara who I teach sunday school with came and was already crying so much she couldn't even talk which was fine with me because her long bear hug said more than enough and provoked at least as many tears as any prayer would have. Then Lynn, her husband came and prayed for me and I could feel his tears hitting my hands and then the time was up so I just spent the last few minutes trying to wipe away all the mascara off my face. The only thing that could have made me possibly cry more was if Jean, another lady in my hope group had been sitting upstairs, just being around her is such a blessing and I will miss her terribly, it will be a wound to my heart that will take a long time to heal.

It really hit me last week how grateful I am to have such amazing people in my life that I am so broken about leaving. That fills me with joy when I think about how blessed I am. I really feel sorry for college students who are not only not involved in their churches but have no relationships with people other than college students. I wish I could tell everyone who is not how much they are missing, but unfortunately I think it is one of those things that can only seem beneficial once you're involved and sadly too many college students only see benefits in terms of labels and facebook friends.

Anyway, I started crying again the second I left the parking lot and started crying again as I typed this post. I wonder how I will make it through my real last sunday at lh.

Now I'm off to go run for 20 minutes straight. Maybe I'll update about that later, it might have the same tearful result.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

2008-04-22T11:33:00.002-05:00

I blogged about this movie a while back and it is finally out in theaters. I wasn't expecting it to come to college station but after seeing it I understand why it was probably a prime target audience . Expelled was witty, grave, and very enlightening. I have already seen it once and plan to see it again, I would encourage anyone to go see this film. So go see it!

rebel without a cause.

2008-04-15T10:42:00.005-05:00

When I was in New Orleans over Spring Break we had devotionals a few of the mornings from a student at the seminary where we were staying and he talked out of Matthew 9 & 10 every time. The primary realization/conviction I took away from the messages was from 9:37, a verse I'm sure most have heard a few times,

Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few."

Whenever I read this verse before I always applied it to my life as, okay you need to be telling people about Christ, period. It was always convicting and now even more so. I was completely ignoring the first part of the verse and only looking at the part that applied to me. Jesus is not saying in this verse, "Not enough people are proclaiming me so get over yourself and just do it." as I had always thought. This verse is saying that not only are you called to tell people about Christ (we should all desire that anyway if we really love people the way that we say we do, do we really care about where people are spending eternity? I would hope so.) but that there are plenty (an entire ready harvest) of people who are completely ready to receive Christ all you have to do is share! It's not just about me not doing what I'm supposed to, it's saying that Christ has already prepared the way! He's not sending us out into a fallow field and telling us to pick a bounty of wheat, He's showing us the abundant bounty and saying, "Just go get it!" Meanwhile I'm just standing at the edge of the field equipped with my wheat-picking sack, just staring at all the wheat.

I really wish I would get over myself and just start sharing. Writing this makes me feel disgusting.

However I am glad that I am still being convicted of this all the time, maybe one day I will finally quit being rebellious in this area and I can allow the Lord to refine me in others. blah.

coincidentally..

2008-04-11T22:01:00.002-05:00

an article came out from Relevant today that communicates exactly and more clearly and with a much better analogy what I was trying to explain in my post from yesterday. good stuff.

and then I remembered I had a blog...

2008-04-10T15:59:00.005-05:00

I feel like I've been moving at breakneck speed over the last few weeks and this week has been a welcomed slow down. Kind of like shifting the riding lawnmower from rabbit to turtle. We never had a riding lawnmower but my sister and I would always play on them in the stores when my parents were looking at something else. I wonder if riding lawnmower manufacturer's thought people with yards big enough to need a riding lawnmower could only comprehend pictures? Always the rabbit and the turtle.

Anyway. The past few weeks I've been steadily filling out and submitting application after application to school districts in Austin, Houston, & Dallas in hopes of one day in the near future becoming employed. The education career fair was monday and it went well, I wasn't sure what to expect because my advisor had prepared us all for the best of all possible worlds scenario and that being actually getting an interview and a job. Well in reality, not so much. No one was interviewing, at least not at the high school level, but I did get to find out valuable information about each districts hiring process, etc. Unfortunately my position is one of the latter ones districts usually hire for so it looks like its going to be a long waiting process. oh patience, please let me embrace you.

Its hard to believe I only have 2 more weeks of regular classes left. 2 weeks! A little hard for me to grasp right now.

I will finish my observation hours next week and I'm starting to substitute tomorrow, I'll get to do this twice a week from now on in my attempt to save up some extra money.

Last nite we concluded our semester long study of 1 & 2 Peter in hope group. The last two verses are these:

Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.

The theme of what Peter writes about in his two letters is living your life according to the Word and to the standard which Christ has called us. Mr. Hutton asked us last nite why we are called to live like this, why do we not for instance live like the man from Romans asked about and sin more abundantly so that grace may ever more abound? It is easy to answer, well Christ has called us to live that way so we should. period. I am okay with that answer because I desire to submit and obey the Lord that is all I need. But to someone who doesn't understand submission to the Lord why else should they change their life for the sake of Christ?

I think its like this: Imagine an adult who cannot read. It would be a safe assumption to say that they would have a hard time in life. I think that would probably be an understatement but nevertheless, life would not be easy not knowing how to read. Then one day someone taught that person how to read and all of a sudden the world became so much more friendly and open and that person's life was instantly enriched. Granted knowing how to read would also instantly make your life more complex and you would immediately become aware of consequences you did not know about before but it is definitely in that person's best interest to be literate, the cost is worth it.

Living your life for Christ is the same way. You follow Christ and live according to his word because it enriches your life, you attain life to the fullest, despite the seemingly legalistic "commands". I want to be commanded because it is better than my own free thinking. Light years better by infinity. I think being God requires God to be looking out for himself, for his own interest, for #1, but his own interest is in looking out for #4,936,295,371! for me! What is there to lose? Nothing! Sometimes I forget how good I've got it.

Then I read an article like this at work and start to cry. Then I remember.

slideshow tool?

2008-03-18T12:00:00.002-05:00

So I want to post about my mission trip to new orleans and post pictures, but I don't want to post them one by one because I have so many, does anyone know of a slideshow tool I can use on blogger?

tomorrow is primary day!

2008-03-03T08:51:00.003-06:00

I don't watch the daily show, but on a political scientist's blog I read he recently posted a blurb about how he hates public opinion polls too and how incredibly worthless they are and cited this clip from Jon Stewart's interview with John Zogby, the head of Zogby polling. Apparently John Stewart realizes the truth too.

if engineers were mostly girls...

2008-02-20T15:18:00.003-06:00

I would work in a therapy office disguised as a computer lab. These engineers spend HOURS in here every week. There have been so many times work has been lost or destroyed because of a computer malfunction or something and hours and days worth of work is simply gone. And I can't do anything about it. And it KILLS me. If this happened with girls mostly I would watch the tears well up in their eyes and I would try to somehow uselessly [because really, how do you see the good in a ton of work gone down the drain] comfort them and let them tell me all about what was just lost [because we're girls and we need to talk it out] and how hard they worked on it. Maybe I would carry a bag of cookies with me to work just for circumstances like this.

Maybe I'm just thinking what it would be like if I was an engineer. Well if I was I wouldn't have to be concerned with not passing my test on saturday and living in a dark alley pushing a shopping cart and living in a cardboard box.

I hate tests [that determine the rest of your career].

2008-02-19T10:51:00.003-06:00

I have my content exam this saturday. Its basically a test over all the material you could be required to teach, in my case: world & u.s. history, geography, government, economics, & some sociology. If I don't do well on this I can't teach. I'm not THAT worried about it, but I'm not taking it lightly, kind of the same feeling I had before I took the GRE and knew if I didn't do well on that I wouldn't get into grad school. Anyway so I'm reading through a prep manual and I come across this little tidbit of "inspiration":

If a sensation of panic begins, work with the fear and imagine the very worst! Work through the entire scenario of not passing the test, failing the entire course, and dropping out of school, followed by not getting a job, and pushing a shopping cart through the dark alley where you’ll live. This will place things into perspective!

Oh, thanks, that's much better.

high school laugh out loud moment of the day.

2008-02-18T13:06:00.003-06:00

teacher:...right so the students in the court case were suspended from school for wearing the black armbands in protest of the Vietnam war, have you ever seen any students here protesting anything?

kid: those pro-life people.

teacher: what about them, what did they do?

kid: ...they're..pro-life, they have those shirts that say, "Pro-life" on them...

teacher: ...okay...anyone else, do you remember anytime students have protested something?

same kid: anti-gang people, people against violence.

teacher: okay, what about them?

same kid: they're anti-gang, they wear those shirts that say, "My leader walks on water".

more food for thought.

2008-02-14T17:24:00.007-06:00

An article from Relevant came out today about our generation's epidemic of identity crises. Here's a bit from it that rang true for me personally, and here's the link:

I once considered myself an idealist. I have come to realize that my license for optimism has since expired. The more seasoned I become, the more I understand the realist I have ripened into. I have been weathered down by this world. I am jaded, as you are jaded. I am not who I say I am, just as you are not. I am a liar, a beggar, a thief, a fake, just as you are. An idealist might say that it is better for us to all be weathered pieces that have now formed to fit the abstruse shape of the next. As a realist, I will tell you that the Maker has cultivated far too much beauty in each individual heart for us to toss aside to blend in.

Another Relevant writer posits the following adaptation of the words of Allen Ginsberb in a piece hilighting the self-destruction that inevitably comes from following Hollywood's example for "cultural living",

The best minds of my generation. Destroyed by madness. Madness we have created in our cultural insistence on (groupthink) individualism and (false) freedom.

How blessed am I that my identity & worth is found in the creator of the heavens and the earth?

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.

You can be sure that using people or religion or things just for what you can get out of them—the usual variations on idolatry—will get you nowhere, and certainly nowhere near the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of God. Ephesians 5:1-2, 5 [The Message]

read me.

2008-02-12T17:43:00.000-06:00

So practically everyone is calling for Huckabee to pull out and let McCain officially enter the RNC as the only choice for nominee and get a head start on unifying the Republican and quite frankly his biggest thorn, the (big C) Conservatives. Well my man Mike is still in it against McCain as I foolheartedly predicted a couple of months ago, however I am a realist and realize McCain will get the nomination as long as nothing like a silly PR spectacle (i.e. Howard Dean circa 2004) gets in the way. Since my wishful thinking panned out for Huckabee's campaign I've been keeping an eye out for any pundits who are expressing why Huckabee should positively stay in the race (for now) and my faithful Economist came through with such news.

Also I've been equally curious as to who McCain will pick for his veep, and I read an article this past week from the Washington Post about how McCain has a tough choice to make. The buzz around the watercooler has been that he will choose Mike Huckabee or Lindsey Graham or the like, which is a good pick because they would compensate for his outings with Conservatives. However also has the option to go with Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. From the article,

The first and only female Texan to serve in the U.S. Senate, Hutchison brings the kind of conservative credentials on taxes, defense and foreign policy that McCain's Republican critics ought to love. Gun lovers adore her -- as much as we District residents resent her attempts to kill our sensible gun-control laws. She votes consistently pro-life and has earned a 0 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America, though she has said Roe v. Wade was correctly decided.

As chairman of the Senate GOP policy committee, Hutchison is the fourth-highest-ranking Republican senator. She's plugged in with the party faithful, good on the stump and as savvy as they come.

It should be interesting who he picks.

Just a question to the void, would you vote for a Presidential candidate who is pro-choice?

money, money, money...

2008-02-07T11:32:00.000-06:00

I am a pretty strong anti-debt person, pretty much generally meaning no charging credit cards more than you can pay, etc. Apparently Americans are starting to come around as well since their houses are getting foreclosed on left and right, here's a good article about current debt crises from the NY Times.

heaven in a box.

2008-02-06T14:38:00.000-06:00

I don't eat cereal because I don't care for milk. However occaisionally (1-2x a year) I'll buy a box of cereal to put it into small ziplock bags to grab on the way out the door in the mornings. Well I hit the jackpot with this box of Kashi granola. I love granola and this has got to be some of the best I've had, it's not too sweet and its not sticky AT ALL. However I probably won't make this a regular purchase because of a) calories and b) price ($4.50 a box).

severely unmotivated.

2008-02-05T18:06:00.000-06:00

I have a paper to write, albeit a short one, that I am in no way wanting to write, so I'll blog instead.

I was a leader at a junior high disciple now in katy this past weekend, my partner and I had 7th grade girls and they were so great and so loud and so exhausting, but in a good way. The dnow was at a megachurch, you know the ones on major highways with the big digital signs, so it was quite different than any church I've ever been to but it was good to experience somewhere different. My girls were pretty solid for 7th grade girls and they have an excellent youth pastor who is providing a great foundation for them. Oh and I had the best pizza & breadsticks I've ever had, Fuzzy's in Katy, they might have more locations, if you're ever in Houston look them up.

I visited Brittany in Houston after lunch on Sunday and we shopped and did non-college station things for a few hours before I headed back. She lives in a really neat part of Houston now, close to the Galleria area. Her company is in a big skyscraper and I got to see her cubicle; it was fun I felt like adult for 5 minutes, and I look forward to visiting and taking shopping trips many more times. :)

I never really caught up on sleep from this past weekend and as usual on tuesday and thursday afternoons all I can think about is what I want for dinner. Any suggestions?

gratitude.

2008-01-27T18:03:00.000-06:00

Today during worship, Butch's words wrapped themselves around me like a giant bear hug, the kind that you just need, and they don't let go. With every sentence the tears were inching upward, my chest was getting tighter, I gave my best low key sniffle, and I did everything not to think about the inevitable, the last Sunday I come to Living Hope, the last hope group I have with my essentially second family. And THEN, Butch closed with a video interview with a church member that turned my inconspicuous corner eye rub into crocodile tears. I hope Heather puts it on her blog soon, or it becomes available on the website, because this man's words were so true and sincere you could feel the holy spirit breaking hearts and melting fears. So lets see how many more times I cry during church when I think about leaving before August. I highly recommend downloading the podcast of today's sermon, or you can find it here.

in the words of relient k...

2008-01-26T12:47:00.000-06:00

...opinions are immunity to being told you're wrong.

I thoroughly enjoy studying politics and world affairs.

With that said there is an integral aspect that I absolutely loathe even thinking about. And by loathe I mean I hate it more than the texture of mushrooms and velour track suits combined. What is it?

PUBLIC OPINION.

barf.

Some love keeping up with the latest polls and survey results and analyzing what that could mean for such and such policy or candidate or the president. But I think, polls, questionnaires, etc. and intrinsically and severely flawed, (In my opinion, mainly by the subjects themselves - the public. Yes, I'm debbie downer about my faith in the American public to give an educated answer.) and even more than that are the way results are presented. I'll just stop there. Anyway, I saw this ad a couple of minutes ago on washingtonpost.com and thought this was a prime example of my frustration. I think it speaks for itself.

how gorgeous is this?

2008-01-25T11:49:00.000-06:00

So, I love decorating. Even though most of the time it's only in my head because, well, lets be honest I'm a little short on rooms and money. But with the knowledge that I will be living somewhere new next fall comes the opportunity to create at least a new bedroom sort of from scratch, which excites me to no end. Anyway, I read a few interior design blogs and this picture was featured in one today and I think it is absolutely adorable (you can click on the picture to see more from the company). So, I've decided I want one for my new bedroom, but I know I'm probably going to have to buy a plain form and either paint or drape the design I want on it, because they don't even list the price of this one, its only listed as being sold at some ritzy store in London, so I'm not even inquiring. So, I'm on the lookout for a really cheap form, but hopefully one with a semi pretty stand. Rachel, you're such an avid seamstress, any ideas where to look? I'm thinking maybe ebay...

just a few of my favorite things.

2008-01-22T16:45:00.000-06:00

I'm really hungry right now and I don't get off work until 7, so here's what's on my mind:

1. Cool Whip (Free). I could seriously eat a whole tub if I had no self control. But I usually just put it on top of frozen raspberries.

2. The Laughing Cow cheeses, especially french onion, which I discovered thanks to Courtney.

3. Sonic's new double berry smoothies - very delish.

4. Bread.

5. Cheese enchilada's from Mercados.

One man's humble quest to follow the Bible as literally as possible.

2008-01-21T11:58:00.000-06:00

I read this book over Christmas break and it was enlightening and entertaining to say the least. As some of you may know, I'm a sucker for memoirs and this story of one Agnostic man's year of "Biblical" living in New York City is a great read. It is very frustrating much of the time but not because of his own doing but because I so wanted to track down this guy's phone number and tell him, "You're missing the point and you can't help yourself and I feel bad for you!" But then again, he is very clear that he is not spending a year living for Christ, so inevitably his legalistic end result is not going to satisfy. But I recommend this book, it gives a look into how Christians are perceived and a generous amount of Biblical history.

remembering Jerusalem.

2008-01-15T10:16:00.000-06:00

I meant to blog about this organization a few months ago when I found it but I just forgot. I heard about Rosa Loves through Relevant magazine. Part of their mission statement is this:

We hope to encourage individual people to get involved in the community around them on a somewhat tangible scale. We will accomplish this by providing financial support to those in need by infiltrating the t-shirt industry with a
new perspective of how clothing can serve a purpose other than outfitting. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a need. By using art and creativity, we hope to foster hope and encouragement through the aid of apparel. Each story will be told through stimulating graphics and actual text that will appear on the inverse of the shirt directly in line with the heart, where the Rosa Loves movement stems from.

Basically they see individuals with tangible needs in their area, i.e. a new walker, a new home, a meal, and create these shirts with graphics unique to that person's/family's story and sell them to meet that specific need. When they raise enough, that shirt is no longer available.

I was talking with a couple of good friends the other nite, one of whom is apart of a very active Christian organization on campus and he talked about how busy he was last semester with a large service project they were doing and how the spring project usually "tops" the fall one and he was having doubts about the effectiveness of the large project and all the resources it took compared to doing several smaller, local projects. When considering, Acts 1:8,

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

I think it is easy to only think of the "end of the earth" part, especially as a college student when speaker after speaker presents amazing opportunities to go serve Christ in far off places. I can definitely say I am guilty of not reaching out enough to the people I come in contact with on a daily basis.

food for thought.

2008-01-13T11:40:00.000-06:00

As someone who tries to moderately keep informed of current affairs on a global perspective, I find myself often times as the "Debbie Downer" in groups of friends when hot topics come up such as any one of the African states in crisis, the war on terror, global warming, immigration, etc. I find myself in this position because most argue a) without knowing the complete story, only what has been fed from usually a single source and b) without taking into consideration circumstances beyond the seemingly "narrow" topic of interest.

The truth is that our world is ever more inter-connected than ever before and it increases exponentially everyday. Just for example, the conflict in Darfur is largely managed by the President of China, Hu Jintao whose country is largely choking on its own twofold growth, its extreme pollution and skyrocketing economy. The United States borrows billions of dollars from China largely to finance the war on terror, and therefore takes no action against them on either front, Darfur or global warming, other than mild lipservice. This is just a minuscule example of how nothing is "single-issue" anymore. But getting to point of this post, there was an interesting article titled, "5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit" from the Washington Post this morning that I feel illustrates this point very clearly. And just a disclaimer, while I realize that solutions are very complex and encompass much more than meets the eye, I do not subscribe to the school of thought that we should just be apathetic, quite the opposite actually. I hope you find this enlightening.

mysteries of the world, vol. 1

2008-01-12T23:20:00.000-06:00

Why do businesses sometimes keep only one of their two doors unlocked? Does the manager find it humorous to watch people essentially smack into the other door? As good as I am at creating explanations in my head for things, for this one I'm only drawing a blank.

One time in Wehner, not the main entrance, but another one, there are two sets of double doors you have to walk through. I went to one, it was locked but the one beside it was not and then for the second set I automatically went for the door right in front of the one I just entered but it was locked and its opposing one was open. Its a dumb thing to make you peeved, even if only for a moment, but maybe one day I will find out why this exists, or maybe you know.

Oh, and p.s. there is no promise that this "mysteries of the world" series will ever make it past vol. 1.

back to the grind.

2008-01-11T12:04:00.001-06:00

I've been back in College Station for a couple of days now and I already have 3 post-its with scrawled and crossed out to-do's on my desk. In addition to the normal, back in town chores, I'm working on researching Austin area high schools, as well as skimming possible price points for apartments, reworking my resume, and as of today possibly finding a new job.

I have a meeting tomorrrow to discuss grad school this summer, career fairs this spring, and everything I need to do to be ready to be a legitimate teacher come August. I'm not stressing about any of the things its just placed a lot on the back burners of my mind. Oh and I suppose on the front burner is a pseudo fight with Alltel, but never mind that.

I kind of wish I was just in the "real world" already.

receding urgency, redux.

2008-01-09T23:29:00.000-06:00

It's always a little depressing to me how quickly the holidays end, for something so grand you would think there would be a little more of an emotional hangover, but alas it doesn't seem so, only a rush to look ahead to the next thing.

If you don't know what that is for you, stores are already jumping to help remind you with promotions for the corporate holiday of all corporate holidays, valentine's day. Just fyi.

I've been a little absent from the blogging scene for the past few weeks. Once I hit the pineywoods of east texas, napping on the couch became an activity I looked forward to more than writing about the happenings of christmastime in tyler, texas. Yes, the chronic laziness set in, my rush mode evaporated, and all was well with the world.

Christmas was wonderful and I enjoyed the time with my family. We always do what I call, "big family Christmas" all day Christmas Eve at my Grandparents' house, and then just the four of us usually on Christmas Day. My dad came to wake me up at 7 on Christmas Eve morning and told me to hurry and get up because a main water line had burst at my Grandparents' house and now the 32 people would be coming to our house in mere hours. I helped my parents tidy up and start prepping. Two of my cousins have 3 kids combined under the age of 4 and they are all adorable, one I got to see for the first time, I really love spending time with kids, they're so refreshing. Around 8:30ish people started to either leave or follow us out to our property in the country to shoot off fireworks, which some of my boy cousins and my sister along with my uncles and dad did with vigor while the rest of the females watched and reprimanded. Christmas day was good as well, very relaxing with the 4 of us, my Grandparents from the day before, and one aunt and cousin who were still staying with them. I love my big loud family.

I also went to the Alamo Bowl with a few friends and overall it was a fun trip, the game a little disappointing but, eh, I'd say we're all used to it by now. However I did have the best hot sauce I've ever had at a restaurant on the Riverwalk, Courtney, you and Josh need to go to Rio Rio, our food was good, but the hot sauce was amazing! I wished I could have bought jars of it.

I'll blog more later about some other things, including a book I read over the break that was insightful and generally misdirected but a worthy read.

receding urgency.

2007-12-10T23:52:00.000-06:00

They say the first step is admiting you have a problem.

So, here I go, I have a problem, several actually, but for the sake of brevity, I'll just leave it at this one, I am an efficiency junkie.

I want things done in the quickest, most effective way possible. I want them done right.

There I've said it. All 3 of you who read this blog now know.

I heard that old country song on the radio the other day, it goes something like, "I'm in a hurry to get things done/I rush and run until life's no fun/All I really gotta do is live and die/ But I'm in a hurry and don't know why." I remember some odd years ago hearing this song on the radio when I was in the car with my dad and he said, "I think he wrote this song for me." My dad owns his own small business and runs himself ragged a lot of times and is the epitome of the efficiency junkie. Wonder where I get it from?

I really only realize this around finals, once they're over and my brain is still going 90 to nothing like I'm going to run out of time before I get everything "done", even though I have hardly anything to do.

See I go through my days incredibly too mindful of what I'm doing and how long it will take to do it and mainly how much time I have until I need to do the next thing, even when I have no specific deadlines to get whatever it is done.

example 1: Our first morning in Jamaica. I was freaking out because I thought I had slept until noon on my vacation and "wasted" time. What if I had slept until noon? I would have been...rested? But no I even had an agenda on vacation.

example 2: this morning. I was completely finished with finals. My plan: wake up and go to the rec, come home, shower, run errands, make chocolate things for family dinner, go to family dinner around 6ish. I set my alarm for 9:30 in case I didn't wake up at my standard without an alarm time of 8ish, well I woke up at 8ish and then went back to sleep and woke up at 9:30 and then freaked out a little and proceeding to hastily get dressed and get to the rec. Why was I in a hurry? I have no clue because I was back home, showered, and had my errands run before 2.

I've always thought I could be rockstar at coming in and making companies run more efficiently. I don't know if that's a job, but if it is someone should hire me.

I think I need to slow down and stop being so conscious of time because it's distracting and ridiculous. I'm welcoming the break and time at home to practice this.

hullabaloo.

2007-12-04T19:26:00.001-06:00

I just finished my research project.

So I thought I would do a little blogging while I am waiting to get off work.

I think I've realized my biggest clothing trend pet peeve: the velour track suit.

I'm sorry if I just offended anyone who owns one, but only because it hurt your feelings, not because I regret saying I hate velour track suits, including yours.

I'm not a fan of matching track suits in general unless I suppose you are working out, or running outdoors and that is it. And then companies go out and make them in velour, a cheap imitation of some luxurious fabric and all of sudden, what is essentially workout wear becomes fashionable, solely based on utility. And I think the reason I dislike them so much is because I have seen them cost upwards of $100 AND I because most of the people I see them on are not flattered in the least by them; it seems that they think its the essential "cute and comfy" wear. I want to walk up and say, I know that is comfortable but throw it away. Okay that is the end of my rant about velour.

But while I am on the subject of fashion, I will admit that I just jumped on a bandwagon rather late, incredibly late actually. Saturday I bought...black leggings. The capri kind. Solely to wear under my favorite casual dress that is a babydoll silhouette and made out of really thin sweater material and the most comfortable article of clothing I own. I'm excited about them.

Oh and another clothing related conundrum, I took my ivory coat to the dry cleaners this past weekend and I picked it up today and they said they wouldn't clean it because it didn't have a care label, I'm assuming it got axed by the alterations people recently. But anyway I really need this coat cleaned so I'm wondering what else I could do? Plead with them to just do whatever they would normally do to a wool coat? It was Briarcrest Cleaners, which I've heard are good, but does anyone else use a different dry cleaning place that I could try.

I just found a recipe for Chicken Spinach Wheat Ravioli that I want to try soon, probably this weekend when I have time to do so much prep work, I'll report back on the results.

I will blog for real again some day.

2007-12-03T11:35:00.000-06:00

but for now...

Mitt faces the music...in College Station.

it's the final countdown...

2007-11-27T10:09:00.000-06:00

[cue the music...]

well I suppose it's not officially the FINAL countdown but for now if I can survive the next

1 day...presentation and portfolio due
2 days...final #1
9 days...research project due
10 days...final #2
13 days...final #done

I apologize for the lack of blogging lately, I will expand later about what's been going on, but for now it's back to school.

possibly cuter than courtney's new puppy...

2007-11-06T15:23:00.001-06:00

...otters holding hands.

from the freakonomics blog...

2007-11-05T18:54:00.000-06:00

November 5, 2007, 1:42 pm

Environmentalism Run Amok
By Stephen J. Dubner

An e-mail just turned up in my in-box. It was clearly selling something, and the text ended with the following thoughtful note:

Please consider the environment — do you really need to print this e-mail?

And what, you ask, was the e-mail selling?

Private jet travel.

Like the man said: please consider the environment.

things I love about going home. [weekend edition]

2007-11-04T22:37:00.000-06:00

[not in order of importance]

1. eating at Mercado's. This is my favorite restaurant in Tyler, it's a super good mexican food place that has been around since before I was born.

2. playing with my dogs.

3. the feeling of "home".

4. sleeping in my bed.

5. NOT checking my email, facebook, etc. all weekend.

6. shopping with my mom and Kaitlin.

7. my routine of getting coffee when I leave CS and getting a big diet dr. pepper and rolo's on the way back.

8. my family's humor when we're together and how we laugh a lot.

9. completely forgetting for 2.5 days about all the things I need to get done in college station.

10. conversations with my dad.

And on another note, while briefly checking the news a few minutes ago, I saw this article from the post about the science behind crying in movies. I found it funny since it takes hardly anything to get me crying in a movie.

life lesson learned the hard way #821: you can't make pesto in a blender.

2007-11-01T16:29:00.000-05:00

Or with a hand mixer.

Or by pounding the basil with the thing used to push the food through the food processor. [well maybe if you had hours.]

You have to have a good food processor then when the recipe says it only takes 5 minutes can you actually believe it.

This morning I was browsing recipes online at work - trust me there was nothing else to do - and I decided I wanted to have chicken and pasta with pesto sauce tonite for dinner, I got so excited about my delicious meal and I was looking forward to making it all day and after my last class I got everything I needed at the grocery store. I rushed home and prepared everything, [I planned on eating a late lunch/early dinner because I go to work at 5:30 and get off at 8 and have plans afterwards] and realized that chopped basil can only turn into paste one way, through a food processor, like the recipe says. I tried using my roommates little one to no avail, I'm still not sure how it works but besides basil flying everywhere and the amount that did go through not getting turned into paste, it was a horrible failure. Thats when I turned to the blender, mixer, and the pounding. Sadly all my efforts on resulted in about 5 tablespoons of something closely resembling sewage. I'm a little disappointed.

But I'm going home tomorrow and I'm very excited about that, and speaking of I need to go get some packing done.

size matters.

2007-10-28T21:51:00.000-05:00

So my dad and I are planning a trip to Phoenix/Sedona/Grand Canyon in early January because I really want to see the area and it seems like a really good time while I'm out of school to take a trip with my dad. Anyway so I've been doing some google-ing trying to see what kind of travel info is out there about Arizona and today I came across an interesting quote in an article I was reading about experiencing the Grand Canyon, and how it is incomparable and whatnot,

"Dimension means nothing to the senses and all we are left with is a troubling sense of immensity."

I read that and paused for moment and was struck by its application to God as well. So many times I know I start to ponder on the overall magnitude of God and because I can't wrap my mind around it, I will sometimes put up these pseudo boundaries and casings so that somehow the idea of God is shrunk to a nice Happy Meal version that I can digest. Shrunk so that I can be comfortable putting God in my pocket. Shrunk so that I can try to compromise His power and justify being fearful instead. Shrunk so that somehow the idea of God becomes less than terrifying. Shrunk so that I can pretend to understand things I was never meant to. Troubling because we like when we have things all figured out, definitely not when we realize we are not in control.

Foolish and fearful.

So far, my favorite book by C.S. Lewis is The Weight of Glory and I love how he describes our lack of capacity for the vastness of God's:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mudpies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Just a few thoughts I had from reading that quote.

Oh, and if you've been to the Grand Canyon/Arizona, let me know if you have any ideas, suggestions, recommendations, etc.!

serious disappointment.

2007-10-26T15:55:00.000-05:00

Everyone has made such a big deal about honeycrisp apples, so today while I was at HEB I decided I would give them a try and I bought 3.

Let me preface this with the fact that I have not eaten a whole apple, [and by this I mean like taken a bite out of an apple, I've only had apple pieces or slices] since before I had braces, circa 2000.

Apples, while pretty, don't appeal to me that much. I think certain foods got the "never eat again" stamp while I had braces, not because they don't taste good, just because the desire permanently went away I suppose while the braces were on, corn on the cob is another good example of this.

This past summer when I switched to HEB and discovered all the pre-cut things they had I also bought a bag of pre-sliced green apples. When I tried these, after I ate one or two slices I started to feel kind of sick and my lips and gums felt weird - can't explain it - and then a few minutes after I stopped eating it I felt fine. I thought this was probably because they put something on the apples to keep them from turning brown and my body didn't like that, so end of the pre-cut apples. Fast forward 5 months to now and the same thing just happened.

Weird.

However, even after the first bite before I felt weird I wasn't that impressed with the apple. It tasted just like a really crisp - which I appreciate - apple. So now I have this barely eaten, $2 apple here and 2 more downstairs. Stake your claim now if you want in on the discarded apple gold.

Pumpkin Ginger Nut Muffins

2007-10-19T07:13:00.000-05:00

Real quick before I go pretend to be an adult for the day, I made this recipe last nite and these muffins are amazing so here it is:

1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup pumpkin purée
1/3 cup melted butter
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup water
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup chopped toasted walnuts or pecans
2 Tbsp well chopped candied ginger

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. In a medium sized bowl, sift together the flour, salt, sugar, and baking soda.

2. Mix the pumpkin, melted butter, eggs, 1/4 cup of water, and spices together, then combine with the dry ingredients, until just incorporated. Do not over-mix. Fold in the candied ginger and chopped nuts.

3. Spoon mixture into a prepared muffin tin. Bake for 25-30 minutes. Check for doneness with a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin. If it comes out clean, it's done. Cool on a rack.
Makes 12 muffins.

I left out the nuts and the candied ginger, but make sure you use all the spices listed, enjoy!

Oh, and for a little something extra, if you happen to have some cream cheese icing, a little on top is wonderful, like those pumpkin cream cheese muffins at Starbuck's.

Recipe from SimplyRecipes

some perspectives on adoption.

2007-10-17T16:13:00.000-05:00

I was reading a blog by the pastor at FBC Grand Cayman, Thabiti Anyabwile, [also linked on the right], and soon found my way to another blog, [don't you love how that happens?] a Christian adoption agency in South Carolina where he was being interviewed about transracial adoption. I know it is a common occurence to see biracial families at my church and hear wonderful and heartbreaking stories about the process, but truthfully it is a very hard thing for a lot of people to not only approve of but accept as morally okay, which is ridiculous, but it's the way things are. This is a journey I want to embark upon one day God willing and so I thought it was worth posting about here. I haven't read everything, it's quite a bit but here are the links if you feel like digging though some Biblical truths about adoption and racism in general.

Pure Church - blog of Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, really challenging to read on a regular basis, not just this once

Carolina Hope Christian Adoption Agency & their blog

Specific interviews on transracial adoption:

by Thabiti Anyabwile
by J. B. Watkins

An extensive article by Anyabwile on racism, ethnicity, our identities in Christ, and how this relates to the church, it's long but it's probably all worth reading, I'm taking it a little bit a day.

cold flannel pumpkin pants?

2007-10-16T16:06:00.000-05:00

So it got cool here yesterday afternoon, in the mid-60's, and I was constantly in the mindset yesterday that it was "cold" outside, you know the feeling that you get, so last nite I took the opportunity to bring out my favorite pair of flannel pajama pants and I went to bed so happy because I was getting to wear them. I also made it a "to do THIS WEEK" priority to get my coat in to the alterations place so I would be sure to have it in case the weather gets legitimately cool soon. One can only hope. Oh the simple pleasures of life.

There are a few recipe blogs I read, and one recently posted 2 recipes, one for pumpkin biscotti which I'm eager to try out and also pumpkin ginger nut muffins. Maybe this weekend I'll do a little baking and let you know how they turn out. There's also another one for pumpkin praline tartelettes [served with butter pecan ice cream, no less] which sounds like a lot of time on the elliptical but it's a pretty complicated recipe, so maybe I'll try it when I go home for thanksgiving or when time becomes a less than a luxury again. Until then...

do you have anything for lifechange-itis?

2007-10-14T20:30:00.000-05:00

After church this morning Barbara (who I teach sunday school with) invited to me to lunch wither her and Lynn (her husband) and Bill and Kathy (I have hope group at their house and Kathy is Barbara's sister). I gladly obliged as I love spending time with them and have grown very close to both families over the past year, kind of like a second family here in College Station. Lunch was great and afterwards I had my normal Sunday afternoon routine of homework, a few errands, and the rec tonite.

Coming home from the rec just now, my mind started to run away from me thinking about how I have such a short time left here and how valuable the community has become to me and all of sudden before I knew it I was sobbing uncontrolably driving down University. Not because I am worried about where I will be and all the details that entails, I just really hate life transitions where people I have come to love [immensely] are not at an arms length anymore. I like familiarity and I could go on and on about how I know I need to get out of my comfort zone anyway and trust God, etc. etc., but that's not what I'm getting at. Let's be honest, I'm emotional and I'm a crier.

Somehow I think no one was really surprised by that.

I'm sure no one likes that specific part of change, and I am not worried about not finding new friendships and community wherever I end up, but regardless, I am wondering if God would really frown too much if I started planning now to skip that church service in May where Butch makes his speech about seniors and leaving and everyone cries. Because I cried at that one last year and I didn't even go anywhere.

see below.

2007-10-11T09:57:00.001-05:00

so I started a post about headphones a couple of weeks ago and just now got around to finishing it, but it published it as part of the entry for the day I started it. So, see below for the post about headphones.

universal health care is stupid.

2007-10-04T08:45:00.000-05:00

When I was leading a discussion in class yesterday a student made the above remark. I sighed and climbed upon my soapbox to inform them that when we are having a discussion they are not allowed to make statements or arguments such as "X is dumb.", "Y is retarded.", or "Z is gay." because those statements do not lead us to any higher understanding. I instructed them that if they are going to give an opinion it needs to be backed up by something other than an insufficient adjective. The student then rephrased his sentence and said, "Universal health care is stupid because it increases your taxes." Hallelujah! By him finshing his argument I was able to then elaborate on that and present a complete picture of universal health care/higher taxes and therefore the students could then make an informed judgement on the issue. Getting them to think is so great. I am still working on the kids in the group that wrote this bullet point on their poster, "Saddam leads a country of oppression and is currently working with terrorist groups to destroy the west", ignoring the overall subjectivity of that statement, I asked the group if they saw any major flaw in what they wrote. "No." So, you don't think it is a little outdated? "Oh, well, that is just what was in the article we read so we wrote it on here." I then tried to communicate the importance of thinking beyond the words they read on the pages. It's only the beginning of October, maybe there is still hope.

Oh, and teaching is exhausting. Fun, and worth it, but seriously exhausting.

one more..

2007-09-27T22:45:00.000-05:00

I also LOVE this one from delias.com:

isn't it such a gorgeous color?

it's back..

2007-09-27T18:30:00.000-05:00

...the itch for a new coat. In almost 2 months, it will get cool/occasionally cold, and I can not wait. I have always loved winter for the sole purpose of the clothes I get to wear. Primarily the outerwear I get to wear. Coats are my #1 favorite thing about the cold. I get excited when I check weather.com and I see a cool front coming. They are my favorite thing to wear, hands down. So naturally this time of year the coats start coming out and I begin lusting after them. Right now on the top of my list are these 2 from Gap, hopefully they will go on sale in a few weeks,

I can see myself in them. And of course I'll have to bring out the superstar from last year, whitey the diva, after she's had a little altering I'm afraid. If I lived up north I would probably need a separate closet just for my coats because I would rock a different one everyday. Well maybe I should say that differently, if I lived up north and was a millionaire I would rock a different coat everyday, or at least every other day. It's bad, I know. Especially living in Texas, it's pretty ridiculous to have an obsession with coats, but I digress.

i've had it up to, well, my ears...

2007-09-27T08:22:00.000-05:00

...with headphones.

Okay here's the thing. I have really small ears. I'll admit it, next time you see me, feel free to check them out, they're tiny. The earbuds that come standard with most mp3 players - including my ipod - do not even fit inside my ear. They just sit there, so unless i'm sitting absolutely still they're of no use, I quickly abandoned them.

Then I found this pair that are "L" shaped that are great. These lasted for a long time, but not without their own frustrsting tendencies. See the grey cap things, those are interchangeable. The headphones come with different sized sets of those to adjust for size. Naturally I needed the smallest. Well about 2 weeks after I had them one of the caps came off so I had a medium and small then about once a month a cap would fall off somewhere never to be found again until eventually I had two large caps on that hurt my ears.

Since then the last of the caps have gone missing and I've tried a slew of headphones, even the ones that kind of wrap around your ear, but alas, those are much too big.

Anyone else have this problem or any suggestions? I bought a new pair recently that are the same structurally as the ones above but the cap things are different and seem to stay on much better, but we'll see.

high school musical

2007-09-24T20:40:00.001-05:00

No, no this post is not about the, in my opinion, over-rated disney movie.

It's about a recent phenomena administrators are experimenting with in schools. I'm talking about the playing [read: blasting] of music over the intercom system during passing periods.

The high school I observe does this.

The first day it freaked me out a little when I heard, "ohhhhhh, oh, oh, for the longest time..." begin right after the bell rang. I asked the teacher, "Where is that music coming from?", thinking maybe students had taken to carrying around stereos, with amps? or something? How were they allowed to do this? And why were they playing Billy Joel? His response was, "Oh, yes, they play music in between classes and when it stops it means they have one minute to get to class before they are tardy."

Oh. It was still bizarre when second period ended and Blink 182 came blaring over the intercom. No joke, Blink 182! I'm pretty sure I haven't heard them since sophomore year of high school. So I quickly realized there was no rhyme or reason to the song selection, the only requirement is that the music should be so loud in the halls it is nearly impossible to have a conversation. Or yank out someone's weave.

I'm getting used to it now. However today the music player thing was a little off. The "Most Random Cycle Ever" option must have been disabled because first we heard, "Just Can't Wait to be King" from, The Lion King, seriously, almost the whole thing, it was really hard not to grab the eraser and karaoke out in the hall with accompanied dance moves. But then for the next period instead of KT Tunstall or Hootie and the Blowfish or the like, "Provincial Life" from Beauty and the Beast came on [I think is what it's called, you know the opening song when she's in the town and then she goes into the Library and has the dialogue with the Librarian - yeah we heard all of that]. Now if it was hard to supress my desire to be a college kid and bust a move and sing into an eraser before, it was as close to impossible as it gets this time, but I held out and tried to be mature, just mature with a silly grin on my face. Then for the last passing period as I was walking to the front office on my way out the Lion King song came on again so I've had that stuck in my head all day.

It's gonna be king simba's finest fling...

anti-wrinkle cream anyone?

2007-09-18T08:39:00.001-05:00

I'm getting old[er]. Here's a few things I've noticed I do differently as of late:

1. I'm in bed before 10:30 every nite. Sometimes later on fridays, and special occaision saturdays.

2. The latest I've slept this whole semester is 9:30, and that was only once.

3. My new favorite thing has become getting into a made bed. I have found I love getting into a bed that is made verses a bed that is disheveled - I used to only made my bed about once a week, not anymore! So sometimes, if I didn't make it that morning I'll make my bed right before I go to bed just so I can have the feeling.

4. After seeing 1-3, apparently I value sleep a lot more than I did before.

5. I feel as if I can talk & care about today's "youth". I don't think I'm apart of that group anymore.

6. I appreciate a clean house much more than I used to.

7. I'm shopping now specifically for business casual, it's a little weird and a lot of fun.

8. I'm picturing furniture and decorating ideas in my head for a new hypothetical apartment I will have in 8-10 months.

9. I've been vaguely thinking about budgeting once I have a real job with real money.

10. .....

In other news, here are some things I found worthy of note.

NYTimes:

1. Michael Gates Gill, who once made about $160,000 a year as an advertising executive and who now earns around $10.50 an hour making coffee at Starbucks, has written a book called “How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else,” and it is so admiring of the firm, one fears he has drunk of the Grande Iced Kool-Aid.
His story — divorced, broke, entitled middle-aged white guy with brain tumor and no health insurance learns to respect persons of other races who did not go to Yale. article

2. Apparently if you wear Crocs on an escalator you will die. Or you will be sucked in up to your waist if you fail to make a clean exit from the machine. seriously? seriously.

and there's this,

The news on this has been out for awhile but if you haven't heard, Ben Stein has a documentary coming out in February called, "EXPELLED: No intelligence allowed." Synopsis: educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance & Ben Stein decides to investigate. Check out the website here.

you can call me ms. g

2007-09-13T09:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was my first day to observe at a local high school. I kind of had a picture of it in my head the way things would go.

I would come in and I would sit at some table at the back/side of the room and quietly take notes, observing the students' behavior, social patterns, etc.

I got to the high school and checked in with the front desk, got my little 'observer' badge, and made my way to the classroom. I got there and my teacher's door was shut and the light was off. This struck me as odd since it was about 10 minutes before class was supposed to start. I walked into the classroom next door where a teacher was making preparations for the day and asked about where Teacher Smith might be. She said he was probably at a meeting or something and would be right back. Okay. I kind of stood around and we made small talk and then a student walked in, and asked,

"Do you have Lisa Frank in your 1st period?"
"Yes, I do, can I help you?"
"Well, I'm not in your class, but my friend Adam Jones wants to ask her to homecoming and so I was going to see if you could give her a note?"
"Oh, Lisa already has a date to homecoming, Carter Creek already asked her and she said yes."
"Oh."

This felt a little leave it to beaver-esque and I wondered if the rest of my epxerience would be as innocent.

Teacher Smith showed up and we made introductions and then handed me a sheet of paper with the lesson plans on it and asked me if I would write some things on the board since he was running late. I got a little excited at this, chalk! I get to write on the board! I did that and then he asked if I would cut some poster sized pieces from the roll of brown butcher paper. Sure, anything you need. Teacher Smith was very enthusiastic and happy to have me there in the classroom, it was encouraging. When the students started filing in, I was on my hands and knees cutting butcher paper, in my cute wrap dress, trying to make sure I wasn't giving anyone a view of anything. Class started and Smith introduced me and then started talking about the new unit they were starting: Rights & Liberties! Specifically today they were studying the Bill of Rights. After a warm up assignment, and a few minutes of lecture, they were split into groups of 3 and had to come to a concensus about 10 rights/freedoms they wanted to have if they were starting their own country. Afterwards they got to walk around and see everyone else's and star one's that they disagreed with, and then we had discussion. I was on my feet the whole time passing out markers, looking at student's work, etc., by the second class Smith was having me answer questions, and at the end of the 3rd period Smith asked me if I wanted to lead the discussion!

"Umm...sure!"

I was supposed to lead an open discussion about what the students thought about their own rights, other groups, and one's they disagreed with. I panicked for about 2 seconds. How did he start the discussions before, what were the exact questions he asked?

The discussion went off without a hitch. Out of some deep place came teacher mode and the questions and prompting came out automatically. It was like I had been mediating opinionated high schoolers arguing about religion, marijuana, taxes, and gay marriage for years!

It was amazing hearing [some] of them actually think about what they were saying and thinking deeply about the ramifications of their decisions and completely heart-wrenching to hear of others complete intolerance and hatred. After class I was talking to Smith and he was highly impressed with the job I did and I told him about my desire for the students is that they would just learn to THINK. They would go beyond superficial, ad hominem arguments. I told him I wanted to change the world one high school student at a time. I momentarily wondered if there was a teacher worth his salt that didn't start out that way. Smith smiled at me knowingly and told me of his desires for teaching. We bonded.

I got to my car and sat for the first time in 3 hours, welcoming the tiredness, I left, changed out of my superhero teacher's clothes into a t-shirt and jeans to go to class. For the rest of the day it felt as if it was meaningful, that somehow my day meant something to me because I was doing something not for myself, like somehow I contributed a small bread crumb to society, to those high school seniors. I think because not once during my 3 hours in Smith's class was I ever motivated by how much I would gain, but only how much could I help these students. For once I had a break in my day from revolving around me.

It was good. I'm going back tomorrow.

help?

2007-09-08T08:48:00.000-05:00

Okay so doing the posts about my vacation brought out the worst in my OCD. Does anyone know why when you space things perfectly when you're composing it changes it all once you click publish post? Like there will be extra lines or it will delete lines. How compact the font is, is always different. It would almost bring me to tears when I couldn't get everything spaced neatly. I finally took to editing the html code and that helped some, as I know nothing about it, I just look for patterns.

Anyone? Anyone? [Bueller?]

days 6, 7, & 8: Oiy!

2007-09-07T16:58:00.000-05:00

Sunday

d-day! I had been thinking of sunday as d-day for the past couple of days, I think because the name Dean starts with a 'd' and because of the reference to the invasion of normandy except instead of the allied forces against the nazi's, it was the graham family against the hurricane. And except instead of us [the good guys] doing the invading it was going to be dean. Oh well. So I woke up around 8 that morning and Mom told me the power was going to be shut off in two hours. I wondered for a minute what was of dire consequence and all I could conclude was to recharge my camera battery and straighten the front part and little frizzies of my hair. So I did.

It was kind of cloudy but not too bad, you would never guess a hurricane was coming later that day, so since we knew we were going to be couped up for a while later with no electricity we decided to go our driving and walking around. We walked around for awhile, the streets of Ocho Rios virtually empty where they were usually packed with people and cars.

So after we took some more pictuers, particularly one Dad wanted with us all in front of a street sign "Graham St.". We got in the car and started driving to no real destination. We drove around a gated community that was being developed about 15 minutes west of Ocho Rios. We drove up some random hill. We drove around to where the local hospital was supposed to be, just in case, and never found it. We just drove and drove and then came back around lunch time kind of dreading the rest of the day. We got back and surprisingly the electricity was still on so we watched the the Weather Channel and Law & Order [USA and TNT were the 2 major American channels we had and they both play Law & Order like it's going out of style].

Dad had told us to make sure our bags were completely packed and ready to go, in case we had to suddenly leave, the night before, so there wasn't even any cleaning or organizing to do. I'm still not sure where we would have gone, the hills? I'm sure Dad knew though, he always knows everything, I'm sure he had some hidden cave in the side of the mountains already staked out and camouflaged with foliage ready in case the water was about to engulf our car or something. I saw it in my head, Dad calmly saying, "It's too late to pray when the devil comes." [his favorite, most used expression] and us loading up the car easily, as half our stuff was already in there and Dad driving up to the cave and it would be a perfect fit for our car and us as if he had a contractor ready it just for us. We would just ride out the hurricane in our cave playing gin rummy by a fire. I could see it. That's probably the real reason I wasn't worried about the hurricane because Dad wasn't worried. Dad always works everything out, he can dodge bullets, he's Dad. And I was with Dad so therefore there was no reason to worry.

Well they turned off the power at 2:00. After about 30 minutes it started to drizzle and the wind picked up a little bit. We left all the windows open and played cards. That got old kind of quick, sadly. Kaitlin and I played Operation on a coconut we found, only to be disappointed in the result, our coconut had clearly flat-lined a long time ago. Around 5 the wind and rain got pretty severe, for a thunderstorm, NOT for a hurricane. It stayed about the same for the next 3ish hours. I was disappointed. Dad and I had the videocamera all ready for some action. We got none. I went to bed at 9, later that I probaly would have if we had not had a little visitor. We left our front door open the whole time to let the breeze through and around 5 an older woman, gnawing viciously on a chicken leg, just walked in, crossed the living room to the open window saying, "OOOooh Rooobert! Look at doze waves, looks at da sea! Oh my my my!" Mom and I were sitting on the couch and Dad was upstairs doing something when she came in and Mom and I exchanged looks. Dad came down and introduced her, this was Miss Patricia Perkins, whom he had met earlier while she was preaching to someone on her cell phone.

Patricia Perkins is 64, a native Jamaican, and lived in one of the condos in our complex. Well, she stayed around for the next 4 hours and talked for almost as long. As the hurricane was disappointing, her stories and insight made the time go by faster. We talked quite a bit about Jamaican politics and the state of the island, the people, and development. She told us if the opposition party won the elections she would most likely lose her job [she is the top management of Dunn's River Falls, government owned - where thousands of people go a day, including us the day before - has been with the Parks & Recreation Department for 32 years] and would move to Florida and look for work. We asked her what she would do. She said she would probably be a greeter at Wal-Mart for awhile while she looked but it would be hard to find a comprable job in the U.S. We were a little taken back. That would be like going from the head of the San Diego Zoo or a Colorado ski resort to Wal-Mart greeter to put it in perspective. She wasn't bitter about it, not wanting it to happen of course, but just understood that was the way it would be. The opposition party won this past week and I wonder if she really will lose her job.

Monday

We slept with our windows open all nite as it drizzled outside. It wasn't too bad without A/C. When we got up we ate a hodge podge of leftovers for breakfast and then decided to go out driving again, mainly to look for a beach since the weather was gorgeous again and ours was closed so they could, "clean it up". We set off to survey the damage which was minimal, a power line down, palm tree branches and other foliage on lightly covering the roads. While we drove down the coast looking at the beach we didn't see an immediate access point. About 20 minutes west of Ochi, Dad decided to turn down a random road to see where it went. We passed a farm and made it to the beach where an American looking guy was leaning against his truck smoking a cigarette. Dad got out and talked to him. He soon signaled for us to get out. This clearly wasn't a public, well-kept, beach, you could tell even after the hurricane. But we got out and walked around. I heard my sister shout gleefully, "Crabs!" I looked down and saw little holes all over the beach and then saw a little crab the size of a dime, maybe a little smaller crawling furiously toward the water. He was so cute. We trod carefully along looking at the reef, grass, and debris that had been washed up by the tide during the hurricane. We saw a few more little crabs and then Kaitlin and I went crab-hole wrecking with sticks looking for more. We soon found a much bigger one about the size of a post-it, but more rectangular and compact in shape than typical crab. And he was like a yellowy-brown color. I immediately donned him Lester. Lester the "probabaly a molester" crab. He was definitely a molester crab if I ever saw one. And he was stinkin T.O.'ed! Kaitlin and I were chasing him around - he was faster than us, and he runs sideways! - and then Dad walked up and just caught him like it was nothing. He held him for a couple minutes and then after telling Kaitlin how to hold to hold him, passed him off. Kalitlin immediately dropped him after he pinched her, and Lester hightailed it the remaining 5 feet to the ocean. That was the end of our track star pet crab. Luckily we only knew him for about 5 minutes so there wasn't a strong attachment. And he was molester anyway.

We went excursioning a little more then came back to the house to see if the beach was open yet. Nope, they hadn't done a thing. Nothing else was open in town either except for a couple of gas stations that I suppose had generators, because the electricity was still out. We didn't want to waste the day so we went to the pool, where a lot of other people were and got some last rays of Jamaican sun. Dad and I played in the pool with some super cute black kids from 'South Jersey'. Then we came back up the room and pondered ways we could make a fake hurricane dean video that was really cool, like with boats flying through the air and us standing on the beach with fake rain, shivering, hair blowing wildly, with someone shaking a scrap piece of tin roof in the background for appropriate noise. Then we realized we need electricity for a lot of the effects we wanted to do. Defeated in our quest, we packed up the rest of our stuff and went to bed fairly early since there wasn't much left to do. It was a good day.

Tuesday

It was the smoothest and quickest exit we've ever made from any trip ever since we had already had everything packed and half of it in the car. It was a little melodramatic. No last checks, or multiple trips to the car, no "Wait! I forgot ______!"'s, we were in the car and leaving Ocho Rios by 8 a.m.

We got to the airport around 10 and where you check in is the same for everyone, its a ginormous lobby with airline decals on the wall representing where appropriate lines should form. Now, the airport had been closed since Saturday night and had only just re-opened that morning. The lobby was packed with people, you couldnt tell where lines were supposed to form, or where they started or ended, just thousands of people all over the place. We see the Continental area but had no idea where the line for it was. So we got in a line and Dad set off to figure things out. A few minutes later Mom, Kaitlin, and I heard a distinct, loud, Dad whistle. The lobby got a little quieter and we set off in search of Dad, we quickly saw him right by the Continental counter. We made our way through the sea of people with our luggage and got in a line with about 6 people in it and asked Dad what was going on. Apparently Continental only flies to 2 cities from Jamaica, Houston and Newark! So our line was uber short and quick, it was amazing! I cannot vouch for Continental's domestic flights and service [I think Courtney can though...] BUT if you ever go to Jamaica, fly Continental! I mean only flying to 2 cities [non-stop, I might add] verses the other carriers flying to a long list of multi-stop destinations, I mean it really couldn't get any better. I felt really bad though for all the people on standby, because there were a ton.

Our flight left on time and we arrived in Houston a little early, and on top of that from the time we landed, 5:01, to the time we had gotten through customs and gotten our bags it had been only 20 minutes!! I was getting a mocha light frappacino at 5:23 people! Amazing! I'm fairly certain it will never again happen in my lifetime.

That brings my little vacation story to an end. Hope you enjoyed!

days 4 & 5: more beach and river.

2007-09-06T08:44:00.000-05:00

Friday

Thursday nite after we got home from Port Antonio, we watched the news for a little bit to see if there was any more word about the hurricane that could possibly be headed for Jamaica. Sure enough The Weather Channel was predicting a direct hit sometime on sunday. Cool.

I really wasn't concerned in the slightest for 2 reasons, 1) my only experience with a hurricane before this was when Rita completely missed the Houston-area coast and everyone got worked up for nothing and 2) we were on the 3rd floor, seriously what could happen to us up here - there's not even very much glass at all because of the shutters. And I was convinced if there was going to be a hurricane, it would make a really cool story, I didn't want to leave.

So I went to bed and slept like a rock. When I got up Mom appeared to have not slept at all and instead spent the whole nite worrying about the could-be hurricane. Dad, even though he had the same position as me, had called the airlines and done all that he could to see if there was any way off the island and there wasn't unless you had a private jet. Mom couldn't harp on that anymore.

So we made it another beach day and basked all morning in the beautiful weather on the beautiful sand in front of the beautiful water. Around 11 the water sports pimp [we had been approached every day since we got there] came up to see if by now we had decided on anything, snorkeling, fishing, jet skis, etc. Dad said me and Kaitlin should go para-sailing. Mom and Dad had already done this on a previous trip. We said okay.

Mom, Kaitlin, and I climbed on the boat and went off shore a little ways while being fastened into our harnesses. I said I would go first and so the guy kinda threw the rainbow parasail thing in the air [at first it looked like he was pitching it in the water] and magically it caught wind and wanted to fly away like a kite on steroids. He fastened my carabiner and let me go and off I went into the air. I don't know how long the rope was and I'm a really bad judge of distance, but I was pretty far up in the air and the view was of course amazing. You're so high up that even though the boat is moving at some given speed - enough to keep the slack out of the line - you feel like you're just sitting in a swing, in mid-air, with your feet dangling, hardly moving at all. I don't have any pictures of this because Mom grabbed the video camera case instead of the regular camera case, just this one dad took from the beach of us getting on the boat when I suppose he realized we got the wrong one. But you can take my word for it, it was pretty amazing.

The rest of the day we spent shopping and for dinner we went to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville at my sister's insistence. The words 'tourist trap' couldn't be used anymore appropriately. I won't elaborate on how awful it was but needless to say my sister didn't get to pick again the rest of the trip.

Saturday

Well, we knew Hurricane Dean was coming so went to Dunn's River Falls on saturday, the one thing left we hadn't done that we definitely wanted to see before we left. We have been snorkeling and deep sea fishing before, so if that got scraped it would be okay. Dunn's River Falls is 600 feet of cascading waterfalls that flow from a river coming down the side of a mountain into the ocean. You start at the bottom and climb your way to the top, you start out in this chain with your group kind of pulling each other up but that kind of broke up after the first little phase. The water is coming down pretty fast and hard and it's cold and the rocks you are climbing are misshapen and sometimes slippery with algae. After making it straight up the first phase I looked down and thought, if I slip I will die. It was exhilarating. [Oh and the water looks muddy in the pictures, but its really clear, its just the huge rocks it's going over.]

The fear evaporated and I was quite shocked with my agility and cat-like maneuvers as I climbed up, quite the opposite of the way I was expecting things to go down. We stopped a few times for photo ops, to soak in the rushing water, once for our guide to push Kaitlin and I down this spot in the rocks where the water rushed down furiously and made a pseudo-water slide, and a few more times for me to get the river silt and rocks out of my chaco's - if I ever go back I'm definitely taking closed, dorky water shoes to climb in. But overall this was immensely fun and a good work-out, I felt really refreshed afterwards probably my #2 favorite thing after the river rafting trip.

We drove around some, went to see Fern Gully, an area that is very rainforest-esque, the growth is so thick and tall it closes out almost all sunlight [pictures below] then we got lunch and went home and set out around 3 to see if there were any more stores open to do a last bit of shopping but most were boarding up. I made a last minute purchase of some sunglasses and then we headed home. Raquel and Winsome had come by and taped the small windows above the shutters and brought down all the furniture from the roof. We had dinner that Winsome had made, fish [no heads or tails], vegetables, and rice, and then watched tv [mostly the weather channel] on the couch together with the windows open hardly believing the extreme warnings and predictions the weatherpeople were giving with such vigor. Their favorite word was "catastrophic". Right before we went to bed we flipped to CNN and saw the new projected path of dean was not straight for Jamaica but more directly west vs. wnw. I think Mom slept a little better. Tomorrow: d-day!

day 3: indescribable.

2007-09-03T18:51:00.000-05:00

We decided to make the drive east down the coast to Port Antonio to "raft" down the Rio Grande river. Mom and Dad had stayed here before on a previous trip and is my Dad's favorite part of the island. We left Ocho Rios a little before 8 and expected the drive to take about two to two and a half hours. We got about 10 minutes down the road and from that point on the roads became almost impassable. There would be splashes of paved road for a couple of miles at a time but aside from those we barely got over 30 miles an hour and were constantly slowing to a crawl to go over parts of the road [more like just mildly packed, horribly rough limestone] where it looked like 2 contractors got in a fight about where they were supposed start and stop because there would constantly be huge horizontal chunks of "road" just missing. A couple of times we didn't see them until it was a bit too late and hit the spots with tremendous force and mom and I would get thrown a couple inches in the air. Fun times.

Four hours later we made it to Port Antonio, dropped off the car at the bottom of the river [where it met the ocean], rode to the top in a taxi where we met our raft captains, and began our journey.

The rafts were made of 10-12' long bamboo stalks with a bamboo seat made for 2 towards the back as you can see and the captain stood at the front and pole-d you down the river with a big bamboo stalk.

I cannot express and the pictures do not do justice how amazingly gorgeous this river is. When my parents told us we were going to go rafting down a river, I just assumed we were going down a [brownish] river. I was clearly mistaken. We go down 7 miles of river and it takes about 2 and half hours. If you ever go to Jamaica, you HAVE to do this. The landscape we floated by was breathtaking, the hills were covered in huge trees and ferns and banana plantations and the water was bright turquoise and crystal clear just like the ocean, it was incredible. You could see straight to the bottom and it varied in depths, sometimes only a few inches and sometimes several feet. As we went down we would occasionally reach quick little rapids where we would go down with a rush and then we would travel on lazily. We stopped at one point about 2/3 of the way down and got some true Jamaican cuisine that a woman was selling on the river shore and we went swimming for awhile. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

We then went into Port Antonio to look around and go visit the Blue Lagoon - the real one - and where the movie Return to the Blue Lagoon was filmed. Basically the Blue Lagoon is an insanely deep cove type area - it flows into the ocean - which is fed by a natural spring. Because of it's depth it is a brilliant blue color. It was also really cold, I didn't get in. Here's some pictures.

It was almost 6 o'clock and we decided to go ahead and drive back to Ocho Rios even though it would be late getting back and we were exhausted. It was going a little quicker since we didn't have to stop this time for directions and there was a bit less traffic. Well, scratch that there was less traffic until we got to Port Maria, a little more than half way home, when we were suddenly in a huge line a traffic going at a crawl.

I can't believe I haven't mentioned before now that this year is an election year in Jamaica. Their elections were today actually. So needless to say there was major campaigning going on around the island and we talked to everyone we met about state politics and the general feel is that everyone is fed up, not only with the current ruling party, but the government in general, however no one planned on voting. I am curious to see tomorrow the estimated turnout.

Well the traffic we were suddenly in was actually a long line of campaigners on their way to Port Maria for a political rally for the Jamaica Labour Party [the opposition]. We finally made in into the city and the streets were packed with many more people than cars as we arrived just when it started. Adults, children, everywhere you looked wearing green, waving green flags & streamers, blowing green horns, blasting some official song of the party from these huge speakers on top of their cars. All incredibly passionate and pumped up about the possibility of their party winning. I wondered how many of them were going to vote.

We made it through slowly but surely and were home around 9:30, feeling it was definitely worth the long drive. Here are some more pictures we took just on the drive.

now a word from our sponsor...

2007-08-31T17:01:00.000-05:00

sorry to interrupt the regularly scheduled vacation blog post, but I've been cleaning/reorganising/throwing away lots of stuff and I realized I have a ton of these:

At the beginning of sophomore year when I moved ino the house I still live in now, I thought these storage container things were simply amazing [and they are] and I bought about 3 sets of these things, and they came in cubes of 6 that you assemble [that adds up to a lot of these things]. Well I've quit using them completely since them and I know I will never need that many ever again - I had crazy colossal ideas of storage for my closet when I bought them, it didn't work out quite as planned - so if you would like some of these storage cubes, they are currently unassembled in my closet and I would LOVE to give them away. So if you want any let me know!

day 2: walking on sunshine.

2007-08-30T08:48:00.000-05:00

Blazing light had filled the room as I awoke the next morning. I felt incredibly rested as I squinted joyfully into the radiant sunlight. However, I immediately became worried that I had just wasted away half the day in bed. I wanted to be on the beach by 9! What if it was already 10? or worse, noon? I have been known to sleep that late. My vacation plans have already been spoiled! I rolled over and saw that Kaitlin was still asleep in the other bed and it became my paramount mission to find out the time. As there was no bedside clock [this could be foreshadowing to the considerable lack of clocks anywhere, and moreover to the lack of concern with the time in general in Jamaica] I struggled to think where I left my watch.

Oh! In the dresser drawer! I put my aggie ring on the band and put it in there for safekeeping. I was debating before we left whether to bring the ring or not for fear of losing it somehow, but then decided to use this opportunity to hone my "being-an-adult-and-not-losing-valuable-things" skills. I pulled out the watch and stared at the face. I turned it sideways and stared some more to make sure the thing was still really ticking. It was 6:15! Rested or not, that was entirely too early to get up, so I walked to the window and pushed one side open to make sure I wasn't missing something outside that could only be seen at that hour of the morning, nope, still gorgeous like yesterday, so I went back to sleep until I rose at a more respectable hour, 7.

Eventually we were all up and ready for a day at the beach. Mom, Kaitlin, and I walked down around 9:15 and Dad said he would come down a little later, he wanted to find a bakery first. So we played in the beautiful turquiose water for a little bit and then got our chairs positioned and began to bake. For the first 30 minutes I sat facing the water, occaisionally looking around at the lush hillside to my left with the white houses with terra cotta roofs built into it, unable to look away, as if I couldn't take it in fast enough. Halfway through the morning I starting forming an idea as to why a kept staring as if it would all suddenly disappear. Most of the time in our everyday lives, we get mere glances or snapshots of real beauty. I see an entire family out together enjoying each others company or the technicolor green that covered east texas this summer because of the abundant rain as I drove home, where normally everything is burnt to a crisp. Hardly are there bountiful opportunities to submerse ourselves in creation, and for this I only blame ourselves. We run around all the time trying to get more and more things 'done' as if when we get those things 'done' we are accomplished and we scarcely stop to slow down and just look around from time to time to look at the authentic beauty God has created all around us. So it took awhile for me to adjust to beauty being unashamed and then I pondered for awhile on what God was thinking when he made this part of the Earth. I didn't get very far, as I hardly ever do when I try to wrap my mind around God's but that morning was wonderful just sitting there. My mom and sister had flipped over a couple of times but I never did the first day, I stayed laying on my back, afraid if I did I would miss something even though the Jamaican landscape, as wells as its people, are never quick to change, and I feel as if there were an official facial expression of Jamaica it would be a lazy grin.

Winsome had lunch ready for us around 12:30 when we came up from the beach. Pumpkin soup and tuna sandwiches, both of which were amazing. Originally in my mind the day was going to go as follows: beach, lunch, beach, dinner, something else. Well after lunch we were all pretty tired so we took naps and around 2:30 Mom, Kaitlin, and I decided to walk around Ocho Rios and browse a little, while Dad wanted to go out driving around. My Dad always does this on vacations, he likes to just go off driving around to see whats there and so on. So we walked through several strip-type shopping centers [not getting as many blantant complements since Mom was there, but still obvious once-overs - we got used to it as the day went on and it didn't feel weird anymore - but realized it was just the culture and not that every Jamaican man wanted to take my sister or I down a dark alley] and then we came upon a large open-air type craft market where they have all kinds of hand-made souvenir type things: dolls, bags, paintings, jewelery, wood carvings, clothes, sandals, musical instruments, etc. As we came upon the market a vivacious woman, with named Dimpers came up and introduced herself to us and said, "Oh sexy ladies and sexy Mama let me walk with you and show you my friends shops." Okay, if this woman wanted to spend a few minutes walking with us around this thing that was fine by me.

The market is really just rows and rows and rows of poles and tarps haphazardly thrown together to form rows of shops that were each about 5'x8' and the owner of each shop stood or sat right outside it and when you approached said some form of,

"Come in and have a look, I have a special price today."
"Please come in, you don't have to buy, but just entertain me with a look."
"Come see, I have [insert random souvenir] special for you today."

At first I was obliging, going into every sweet persons little 'shop' as they called it and spending a couple of minutes looking at their things, even though I knew I wasn't going to buy anything that day. Then I realized all of them had pretty much the exact same thing, were using the exact same line, and Dimpers was leading us through every one like we were circus animals and the shop owners were the audience. I was beginning to wonder why this woman was still wasting her time walking around with us, I rationed it out as that in Jamaica they don't care what time it is, how long something takes, and the word efficient is not in their vocabulary, so I didn't care that this woman was tagging along trying to get us to buy something from her friends, which were in ample supply. After about 30 minutes we get to another shop, where the owner carves things out of wood, which are not surprisingly, just like all the other wood carvings we've seen [not to dilute the quality of the stuff - I mean some is junk - but a lot of it is really neat]. Dimpers turns to me and says, "Whadmondaryoubarn?" "What?" "Whadmondaryoubarn?" "What?" "Whadmondaryoubarn?" "What?" I look at Kaitlin because I could not understand what she was trying to ask me if my life depended on it. Kaitlin tells me she wants to know what month I was born. I tell her June. She sighs and looks away while I look at the wood things. After a minute or two she comes back to me and says, "Do you have defiansay at home?" I look at her and laugh and say no. Then she looks at me and tells me this is her son's shop and points to the rasta leaning against a pole.

Moving on.

We're almost done and Dimpers asks where we are staying and we tell her as we start walking in that direction. She is still with us and when we're about a minute from the entrance she says to my Mom, "So, sexy Mama, you going to help a lady out?" This woman wanted money for leading us around a place we were plenty capable and willing to do on our own! I was taken aback but apparently my Mom and sister had figured her out from the start. My mom gave her a few dollars I think and I was a little bewildered for awhile at her money-making opportunities. Did she not have a real job and just kind hung around on the streets until opportunity strikes and then siddle up to some Americans who happen to pass? Was this her only source of income? Was it her day off or had she just gotten off work and she thought she would make a few dollars in her spare time? It was beyond me and I wasn't bitter about it so much as just a little dumbstruck.

We got back home and Dad returned a little while later with new discoveries, one of which being Fern Gully, a couple of kilometers outside of Ocho Rios, which we would visit later in the week. We spent the rest of the afternoon resting around the house and enjoying the view out the windows until dinner was ready. Dinner consisted of jerk chicken [sooo goood, a carribean staple], rice cooked Jamaican style, and cabbage. It was reallly good, definitely compensating for the previous nite's meal. We went out and got ice cream a little later and then spent the evening together on the couch watching a couple of re-reuns of law and order.

Day 1: Welcome to jamaica.

2007-08-27T19:21:00.000-05:00

So, where is jamaica exactly? Well for a good look at the geography of the region and the island, and to reference major points of interest throughout the posts, click here.

So we left for Jamaica on tuesday, august 14 from Houston around 10 a.m. and arrived in Montego Bay around 1 p.m. [no time change]. After breezing through customs we then were thrown an abrupt halt before leaving the airport because our rental car reservation had disappeared so Dad had to go through different companies to get us another one. Finally after over an hour of waiting the rental car guy drove us in the car to some other place, a headquarters of sorts for their cars by the looks of it, to finalize some paperwork, and then around 2:30, we were off to Ocho Rios!

Well, sort of. They drive on the left side of the road in Jamaica, and therefore all the cars have right side drivers seats. If you've never experienced this set up, its a very curious sensation. My mom and I were in the backseat with my sister in the front and Dad manning the wheel. As we were pulling out of the place, Dad says, "Just keep reminding me to 'stay left', especially in this crazy circle thing we've got to go through up here." In Jamaica they have 'circles', that they call 'round-abouts' that sometimes connect 2 or more roads instead of just a traffic light, and generally it's just proceed at your own risk, no yield or stop signs, just people driving all over the place with no regard for left or right sides of the street or whether or not it was their turn to get in or out of the circle. Dad was kind of apprehensive about this already, as him and Mom have been to Jamaica previously a few times and have experienced these mad traffic inventions before, and know you have bring your 'A' game to negotiate them successfully on the first try. We we're approaching the round-about and somehow 2 seconds later Kaitlin was yelling that we had missed the turn.

We were starting to go up a hill on a narrow street and all of a sudden a car flew around a corner in our lane and we missed a head-on collision by inches. It happened so fast, our gasps were late. Seconds later as were past the curve we see a line of cars zooming towards us in our lane, only scooting over at the last second and always with multiple honks. I became a bit concerned for our lives. Dad reassured us it was just the way they drive and that everyone honks at everyone else, not in a malicious manner, but more like, hey, you're in my way, scoot over, or hey, im passing you.

I tried to shreik quietly the rest of the day. We were looking for a side street to turn down to get going back the other way and then we saw a wide-ish one where some cars were waiting to pull out and some young Jamaican boys were walking around trying to sell olive/grape looking things. Right before we turned Dad went to turn on the blinker and he was met with the windshield wipers instead now going at full speed and instead of working on turning them off he got the blinker going, but for the wrong way as it was on the opposite side of the steering column, and in all the commotion managed to honk the horn for good measure as well. The boys selling the bundles of round things were laughing as well as the people watching us turn. We were pretty amused as well. We got turned around and after getting in the round-about and missing our turn only once, once we were in it, as well as quite a few 'STAY LEFT!'s, we were headed east towards Ocho Rios.

We arrived at our resort and were quickly escorted up to our new home for the next week by Raquel [our housekeeper] and Winsome [our wonderful cook]. We chatted for a bit and then Kaitlin and I wanted to quickly go down to beach for a look before they closed the entrance from our resort. On the way down to the beach [about a minute long walk] we passed several Jamaican men and everyone of them wanted to talk to us, imagine that!

"Hey princess..."

"Smiley, why don't you come over here?"

"Beautiful girls, come over here and talk to me."

"Where you girls going in such a hurry?"
Inaudible noise.
"Pretty ladies, let me show you something..come over here."
"Come with me pretty girls, I can show you a good time!"
Whistles and catcalls.

Kaitlin and I went onto the beach and played in the gorgeous water for just a few minutes, hardly noticing it however because we both felt so awkward, as there was still one man calling at us from across the way. We hightailed it back up to the room completely ignoring every greeting we heard and told my Mom we were never going anywhere without Dad again. She laughed at us and said he had gone to the grocery store with Winsome and Raquel to stock up our house for the week and would be back soon.

In the meantime we saw those grape/olive things on the table and asked about them. It turns out they are a native fruit called Genips [pronounced ginneps], [I forgot to take a picture, but I found this one in a google search] pictured here:

They are also known as spanish limes. They look like a minature lime from the outside, but their 'peel' is actually very thin, and once you tear it a little you can just push the little ball of fruity goodness out. The inside comes out in a ball, that is a pinkish color and fleshy that you put in your mouth whole and work off of the big seed in the middle. They are sooo good! I meant to look for them at the grocery store, but I forgot, I'm pretty sure they don't have them but I'm going to see anyway.

Dad returned later with our new friends carrying $12,000 in groceries, Jamaican dollars that is. It was about 6:30 and so Winsome and Raquel made a recommendation for dinner, John Crow's restaurant right across the street so there we went. Raquel recommended to me the steamed fish with vegetables which sounded really good and so I ordered it. Our food arrived and a plate was put down before me with an entire fish on it covered with various vegetables in a sauce.

Ok now when I say entire fish, I mean like in the movies with the head and tail still on it.

My dad saw me about to freak out and promptly covered the head and tail up with vegetables before I got a good look at it and showed me how the fish easily came off the bone. I took a few deep breaths and picked about the body part where a fillet would normally come from. It wasn't bad but I was so disheartened from seeing the whole fish it kind of ruined my appetite. So meal #1, not so great, but there was still hope.

We walked back home around 8 [it is pitch black in Jamaica by 7] feeling tired. My sister immediately went to bed, I followed around 9, with a weird apprehensive feeling about the rest of the trip which, looking back, I blame solely on the fish & catcalls.

coming soon!

2007-08-23T22:55:00.001-05:00

In the next day or so I'll start posting about the Graham family vacation in Jamaica so stay tuned! Here's a preview...

Mission: MAN BAND

2007-08-07T10:14:00.000-05:00

Remember these guys?

and these too,

and a little less known,

and who could forget [mostly everyone, especially if you never knew them to begin with],

So I saw a commerical for this new show on Vh1 a week ago or so and it looked too good [read: a huge trainwreck] to pass up. I set it to record and I watched the first episode last nite. I'm talking about Mission: MAN BAND, people. No, I'm not making this up, vh1 decided to take 4 washed up, former boy band members, give them a contract and a manager and see "if lighting can strike twice" according to one of the guys.

The players:

1. Chris Kirkpatrick. Formerly of N*SYNC [my boy band allegiances lie solely here]. Also, the 'host' if you will, for the others while they are recording, etc. in orlando, in other words theyre living in his way nice mansion. Chris' platform for the show is, "I drink too much and have done absolutely nothing since N*SYNC [career-wise or other], I'm kind of tired of being really lazy, this should be fun."

2. Jeff Timmons. Formerly of 98 degrees. His platform is, "I have all this other stuff going on in my life, [cut to several shots of him on the phone sealing deals and whatnot], I don't really know if this is a good idea, I'm not expecting much." Talk about your debbie downer.

3. Rich Cronin. Former front man for LFO. Remember, the abercrombie and fitch song?? That's them. His platform is, "I was diagnosed with leukemia 2 years ago and now I want to live every day to the fullest and I think we can really turn this into something big!"

4. Bryan Abrams. Formerly of Color Me Badd. ... Well, anyway, his platform is, "I work at a tire factory, my wife and I just found out were having a second child, were in huge debt, this HAS to pay off, we need the money really bad."

I mean with characters like this, how could this not be hilarious? I was laughing through the entire first episode that was supposed to be serious, but between them auditioning with Police's "Every Breath You Take", Jeff quitting and coming back, the comforters Chris had made with each of the guys' huge head shot screen printed on them, and the native american 'new beginnings' ceremony they took part in, I mean really. This should be golden.

2 new finds:

2007-08-05T20:34:00.001-05:00

1. I'm pretty sure this has been around for forever, but, turkey pepperoni! I guess at the beginning of the summer I started cooking with ground turkey, I didn't cook with ground beef much, but after I made dinner with Denise one nite at her house and used it on pizza, I was hooked. Then I saw in the store turkey pepperoni, and its amazing [I make a personal size pizza for a meal at least once a week, it's relatively low-cal since you can control what goes on it and super good].

2. This one isn't so "new". I love Orville Redenbacher's Kettle Corn Popcorn, it's like 94% fat-free or something, and I had always bought the regular size bags before, then I noticed they had the mini-bags, AND they were advertised as only 100 calories per bag. I was a little skeptical, it seemed to good to be true because I liked the popcorn so much, so I was wondering if they altered it at all to make it fit the 100 calorie advertisement, but low and behold it's no different! Just a perfect sized bag. Oh, the simple things in life.

why I love my major: reason #385

2007-08-02T16:58:00.000-05:00

Today in class,

Professor: "Okay, now we're going to talk about terrorism."

Class: "YAY!"

Literally, that was our response. I think there were a few gleeful grunts from some of the corps boys, but general it was a roomful of yay!'s.

it's back.

2007-08-01T21:38:00.001-05:00

I've gone through the phase of wanting to get my nose pierced twice, and it's back.

Like for real, if I could go right now I think I would.

And now I'm considering the option logically. Before, it was just I really want a little thing on the side of my nose, now its I want the little thing on the side of my nose and I only have a year left to have it. What other time in my life am I going to be able to have it? I can't think of any, unless I only wear it on the weekends or something once I join the [scoff] "real world" [which I completely agree with John Mayer on, that it doesn't exist; and so what if I think the best of me is hiding up my, ahem, sleeve?].

Christina is coming in on the 7th, I think I'm going to inspect hers again, and then possibly start praying for a clean piercing place to appear in jamaica while were on vacay, where I will plead my case, ["It's only for a year!"] to my parents. I can see it all now. Really, I can, remember the last post?

kg

a peek inside my brain.

2007-07-30T20:01:00.000-05:00

So, I've come to terms with the fact that my thoughts [the ones going on inside my brain all the time, not the ones I voice aloud] can be [read: are] pretty peculiar. Here's an example of a normal thought process,

[preface] I go to tidy up a classroom and close it down for work one night, the room is usually in an expected state after a day's worth of classes; some empty bottles, scrap paper, a few batts, etc. I walk in this time and the room is especially messy, primarily with battalions everywhere, I immediately think:

Man, there are a LOT of newspapers in here, I bet that there was a group of freshman that used this room today to register for classes. It seems it always a little messier on those days. As I'm picking them up I'm positive it went down like this,

Advisor man: "Okay kids, before we get started we're going to play a little game to get you all pumped up for starting your undergraduate careers!"

freshmen: "YAY!"

AM: "Okay here's what you do, I'm going to give you 2 minutes and you need to go run and find as many of these here campus newspapers, called The Battalion, as you possibly can and come right back here, okay GO!"

freshmen & parents scramble in a mad dash out of the room and return almost as quickly with armloads of papers, faces beaming in eager anticipation as they are so ready to take part in this wonderful game that truly welcomes them in to the Aggie family just like a big bear hug from Stephen McGee.

AM: "Alright when I say go, I want you to throw your Battalions as high and far as you can all over this room! Got it?"

freshmen: "We got it!"

AM: "Okay, GO!"

Papers flutter everywhere landing draped over unoccupied chairs, completely covering the floor, somehow defying the laws of physics and wedging themselves under laptops.

They have succeeded.

Parents have never been prouder when they leave ushering their new Aggie to the car, traces of "Aggieland really is the best place on earth!", and "When we get home I'm throwing away all those silly burnt orange clothes of your fathers, he has no idea what its like here!", can be heard along the way.

I'm mildly weirded out by typing that just now, but that usually how it is in my head. I'm quite frequently envisioning how something or someone got to the state it is currently in. Like with decorating choices that are clearly awry, While most people just ask themselves, "What were they thinking?", I actually answer that question in my head. Yes, I create a whole fictional environment and characters and they do a little one act play that leads to the logical answer as to why the trim is that horrid shade of blue, why the restaurant I'm in arranged their tables the way they did, or why an area of foreign policy failed so miserably.

I love reading memoirs, and I've gotten to read a few this summer. It really makes me wish I had a tape recorder for my brain, so I could transcribe my fleeting thoughts, comical renditions of conversations, and everything else that goes on up there onto paper for me to read and refine. I suppose that what a journal is for but I don't really journal conversationally and I think that's the way I think a lot of the time, there's more than one person providing the material for the story. The usual players, there's the heart, the brutally honest, the compassionate, the realist, the pride, the fearful one, and the holy spirit too, quiet, but clear and always heard, never abasing.

idk, my bff jill?

2007-07-18T18:20:00.000-05:00

I can't believe its already half way through JULY.

Only 3 1/2 more weeks until I'm basking in the warm jamaican sun. That seems so soon, but yet the end of my shift today at work seems sooo far away. Oh the paradox.

I've subscribed to the Relevant magazine podcast recently, and I've been listening to it while I work out. [www.relevantmagazine.com] Man, oh man, they are so funny! There have been a number of times I've been on the elliptical and had to cover my face with my towel with one hand to stifle the sound and grip firmly to the bar with the other to keep from falling off the thing in laughter.

I read an article a little earlier about this guy [20-something] in D.C. who recently bought a Hummer. We'll call him Eminem, [just because he kinda looked like him and my Russian prof [my prof who is Russian, not my Russian class prof] made an analogy today where we were to pretend we were Eminem, before being famous, living in Detroit, shopping for a car]. The story goes like this: Eminem has wanted a Hummer for a long time. Eminem gets his finances in order enough to finally buy said Hummer. He immediately sends it off to have it customized to his specifications, one being a 'lift kit' to be added to the Hummer. This lift kit on Eminem's new Hummer raises it 7 inches, making it impossible to fit in his complex's garage, so he parks it on the street. The typical cars on Eminem's street consist of a number of Prius', Volvos, & other generally non-environment-threatening vehicles. In the middle of the 5th night since having his Hummer, 2 vandals come and attack it with basesall bats, shred his newly purchased custom tires, and a number of other atrocities including, carving the message, 'for the environ' on the side of the car.

It's probably really wrong to laugh.

But I did for a few seconds.

Anyway every single day I read articles about some new study, or energy saving solution, or as a first for today vandalism in the name of all that is green. I have come to one conclusion about all this as far as how/if we should be responding to 'Global Climate Change'. And as far as I can tell science and the Bible coincide about how we should be living.

Consume less.

That's it. The goal is not to buy all eco-friendly products, in fact all this marketing for green everything kind of contradicts in a way the solution. However, buying flourescent light bulbs, using the dryer less, only running the diswasher when it's full, etc. are the kinds of things that we should be doing - not because of a trend or it being the IT thing to do but because it makes sense. Here's my logic - and it is lacking but for now this is what I've got - consuming less in general [clothes, food, electronics, electricity, etc.] is in line with the standard for Godly living. Nothing we have is our own anyway [psalm 24:1], so hoarding lots of things certainly is not good when we are called to be giving and pouring out into others and our different ministries [1 Corinthians 9:19-23,1 Corinthians 10:24] . Consuming less energy specifically is good because you're not wasting as much a money - a resource the Lord has given you - that could be going towards other things.

I think this passage in Haggai [1:1-11] I came across paints a good picture, these people were ignoring what God had been telling them [to build a house for Him] and instead focusing all their efforts on their own houses and only serving themselves,

This is what the LORD Almighty says:

"These people say, 'The time has not yet come for the LORD's house to be built.'"

Then the word of the LORD came through the prophet Haggai:

"Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?"

Now this is what the LORD Almighty says:

"Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it."

This is what the LORD Almighty says:

"Give careful thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored," says the LORD. "You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?" declares the LORD Almighty. "Because of My house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with his own house. Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the oil and whatever the ground produces, on men and cattle, and on the labor of your hands."

So pretty much just keep doing what the Lord tells you to do. Pretty groundbreaking huh?

yum.

2007-07-03T22:01:00.000-05:00

Triple Berry Crisp

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 cups fresh blackberries
1 1/2 cups fresh raspberries
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
4 tablespoons white sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/2 cups butter

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, gently toss together blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and white sugar; set aside. In a separate large bowl, combine flour, oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Cut in butter until crumbly. Press half of mixture in the bottom of a 9x13 inch pan. Cover with berries. Sprinkle remaining crumble mixture over the berries. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until fruit is bubbly and topping is golden brown.

In the picture it has whipped cream on top but I didn't do that, but it's still soo good!

attacking shower curtains exposed!

2007-07-02T21:57:00.000-05:00

Maybe this doesn't happen to everybody, but apparently to enough people that someone decided to figure out why. What I'm talking about is when you're in the shower and all of a sudden your shower curtain starts blowing towards you. And if you're me I usually give it a punch thinking it will slink away in defeat, seldom does this actually happen. So, why does this happen you ask? It has something to do with the vortex of something else, it's all explained here. I didn't really care too much about the actual reason, I was just altogether satisfied in knowing my shower curtain wasn't possesed. Enjoy.

green and blonde.

2007-07-01T17:43:00.001-05:00

My favorite color is now an annoyingly trendy catchphrase. green this and green that. I just read this article from the times, Buying Into the Green Movement, and it sparked so many thoughts in my mind that there's this roundtable discussion taking place in head right now with 20 different me's shouting out various viewpoints. So, I'm going to let this item simmer and come back and discuss it later.

"I have caused no small stir over the past few weeks with my comments about modesty...", Butch proceeded to bring a shopping bag on stage and pulled out items that he brought to "clarify what he means by girls wearing underwear as outerwear". He pulled out 2 camisoles and 2 tank tops (the ones that Old Navy sells in every color under the sun on a huge table in the front of their store every summer). His talk on parenting today was so real, (I feel like using adjectives to describe Butch's talks serve more as an evaluative tool and that completely misses the point I'm trying to convey, i.e. Butch's talk was so good. is it ever bad?), anyway I feel like the more and more I hear from Butch and families at Living Hope the more I am being prepared for 'real life'. I know I talked about this last time but it is so true, and I'm so thankful. I always walk away trusting God more and worrying less, in permanent sense, not just I don't worry about that one thing for the rest of the day. So good.

I occaisionally find a blonde hair, like every few months, and you're probably thinking its really grey and I'm in denial but thats not true they are always a really golden color. I found one last nite and I started thinking about if I was a blonde instead, with lighter eyebrows too of course, and then I just started laughing, but I do know that if I had thin hair instead of masses of hair my locks would be like corkscrew curly, funny to think about.

I can show you the world...

2007-06-19T15:49:00.001-05:00

Ted Slater from Boundless, published this article today about traveling/wanting to travel/being able to travel and how crummy motives often are not far behind. I thought it was very relevant for today especially how it seems life isn't complete without venturing off to another country to do mission work. Sure it is good and necessary to reach peoples who otherwise wouldn't hear about Christ, it is part of the great commission. However, Slater brings up this excellent point,

'It can be argued that the most culturally relevant person ever to have lived was Jesus. And Jesus wasn't much of a world traveler, having never gone more than a few dozen miles from his town of birth. His life demonstrates that ultimately how much you travel is irrelevant to how effective your ministry can be and how rich your life can be.'

I think a lot of time these desires to 'travel' can be traced back to the selfish motives he discusses and also back to being unsatisfied with the tasks the Lord has presently put before us. As someone who would would love to travel the world and experience everything there is to offer, I've also realized that if I am called to live in the suburbs the rest of my life I should be just as exited.

kg

summer in the station, the sequel.

2007-06-18T12:53:00.000-05:00

So you might remember how depressing it was to read my few entries from last summer. Well I would love to tell you that circumstances have drastically changed and life is just one big party this summer, but that would be a lie. It's the truth that I'm still going to school and working this summer, and there is more fellowship, however I think the condition of my heart is a lot different. I'm a lot more satisfied than I was last summer. Instead of feeling constantly worn down from chasing something I wasn't even sure of, I am rested in following the one who sets the perfect pace. Circumstances make no difference in how we should live. My only complaint is...well, I don't know if I even have one anymore since they finally smoothed over the road where you cross the railroad tracks to go the rec.

I have discovered HEB this summer. Sure I had shopped there before, but only freshman year for non-necessities. Starting sophomore year I always shopped at the Albertson's 30 seconds from our house. I was seldom satisfied, as far as produce went, but little did I know I was settling on very limited and usually overripe/bruised/even sometimes moldy produce until I decided to go to HEB when Albertson's had crossed me for the last time with their bad produce. It was like stepping into a utopia of fresh food. What made the find so much more exciting was finding the solution to me letting so many vegetables go to waste. At HEB they have pre-washed, cut & pakaged - onions (my big find), celery, bell peppers, carrots, apples, pineapple, avocados, etc. etc. I love cooking with fresh vegetables but often either forget or don't have the time to wash and cut up said produce. And having fresh, sliced fruit right there to just put in a ziplock and go is amazing! Thanks HEB.

Butch's current series is amazing, and what I realized I love most about Living Hope and Butch is how practical & real faith is the standard. No fancy rhetoric for the sake of a warm, fuzzy feeling, but real people, sharing real mistakes, embracing real grace, and living for the real God. I was just thinking about how I have no fears about how to live for Christ, or what will or will not be provided for me wherever I go once I leave college station, I am confident in the truths that have been engrained in me from the word over the past 2 years, and the standard for righteous living has been unapologetically raised and continues to be. I know there will be struggles and times I will fall flat on my face but they don't worry me because of the many promises I know the Lord has made to me. That's a really good thing to rest in.

I get to go to San Antonio next week to visit the newlyweds! woo-hoo!

I suppose that's it for now, back to finance homework (only 5 more days!).

kg

something new.

2007-06-14T15:20:00.000-05:00

It's been in the works and I finally set up this new blog, and in a very not-so-kristin-like fashion either. More of a non-impulsive, think-things-through fashion, and alas, here it is fresh and ready to add to your google reader!

kg