Bitter Amalgamations

So far I seem to not have achieved my goal

  

So much for my return to the blogging world.  To be fair, I did just recently get my internet set up.  And things have been just a tish busy since then.  To summarize: I am now in my 3rd week of real work, I am completely unpacked and my apartment is all set up, I have started volunteering again, and life is speeding by rapidly.  Things are, overall, going wonderfully.  I absolutely love my apartment; it feels so huge for a 1 bedroom!  But I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to actually be unpacked.  All of the junk I own in one spot and set up and put away…it’s amazing.  And luckily there are huge perks to the hand-me-downs of being third born and I actually am fully furnished.  I’m very happy in it

Work is also going well, altho of course it is a difficult job.  But not that much.  The rest of the staff is incredibly supportive.  And it’s pretty easy to remember that the girls have issues going on and that’s why they’re acting out.  The hours are long, and definitely not worth the pay, but it usually goes by pretty quickly because there is a schedule.  I’ve made a ton of mistakes, I am sure, but I really do feel like I am learning *so much*, so it’s wonderful.

Speaking of learning, I am gradually upping my cooking knowledge.  Nothing crazy or huge yet, but actual real meals.  Of course, the downside to this is that I have a ton of leftover food that inevitably does not all get eaten before it goes bad.  But I try to eat most of it.

Otherwise, things are good.  Real blogesq posts to come after this dull update about my life.

My mood is: Thoughtful.

I suppose it’s actually time to return (for real) to the world of blogging

  

I don’t have internet in my apartment *quite* yet, but I do have plans for it to be installed next week.  August 4th is rapidly becoming, for many reasons, an important day.  In the meantime, I’m feeling that anxious feeling that usually means there has been an absence of lists in my life.  Which undoubtedly means I need to make some.  And one of my new goals is to make my blog more reader-friendly & interesting, as it kind of took a backseat to…well, everything that is life…this past year.  But in an effort to actually discipline my writing a tad, and to broaden my own interests, and really, just have a chance to appropriately run my mouth on whatever I find interesting (because what place is better for that task than the all-accepting internet?) I am re-committing to my blog.  How silly and technological of me.  So, apologies for the dryness and sheer lack of postings for the 2007-2008 academic year, and cheers to high hopes for 2008-2009 Look for changes on a variety of levels.

Sidenote: Isn’t it interesting that I still find a need to timeline my life according to the academic year rather than the calendrical one?  So silly.

My mood is: Happy.

Brief status update

  

Clearly, have not resolved the internet situation yet.  Honestly, have been too busy to really focus on it.  But soon!

Apartment life = fabulous.  Don’t have all of my stuff yet, but have unpacked everything as much as possible withouth additional things to put them in lol.  But all of the boxes are gone!  And hopefully everything should be down by the end of August (it will be nice to have more than 2 forks…and a table…and a desk…etc.)  But I have bookshelves, and a wonderful boyfriend bought me a microwave as a housewarming present :)  It may not *sound* like a romantic surprise, but it totally was, trust me.  Speaking of, I’m actually enjoying using my oven/stove and cooking!  I’ve mostly been sticking with things I already knew how to make, but I did make “easy” chicken & dumplings (thanks Bisquick) which I think turned out pretty good.  Then again, I’ve never had them before, so who really knows.

As for work, I’m almost done with pre-service training…and I actually start on Saturday.  8am-10pm.  Nothing like jumping in feet first, eh?  But I love everyone I’ve met so far and am excited about who I’ll be working with…make no mistake about it, though, this will be an incredibly difficult job.  And I’ve already learned so much, and I know this is nothing compared to what I’ll have to pick up from experience.  But it should be an amazing opportunity.

So, all is well!  Love to all.

So so brief

  

First and foremost:  I need to work on setting up internet in my apartment ASAP.  This sketchily hanging around campus in my random  bouts of free-time that I don’t spend exhausted or unpacking (or both) is just not conducive to good web communication.

So, super-brief update as I have to get back to training: I have moved to Winston!  Just moved Friday.  Started training at The Children’s Home for position of Residential Counselor on Monday.  Training is until the 25th, and I start work on the 31st.  I work every other Wednesday (beginning the 6th) and Thursday-Saturday in the second shift, which means my schedule falls somewhere in 2-12 range.  Crazy!  Learning so much in training.  Love the organization and the people more and more each day I’m there.  Mildly terrified of how hard this job will be (and depressed by how little it will pay) but overall excited :)  Still dating Michael.  That’s wonderful.  And in my spare time, I am trying to get ready for my sister’s wedding in September - so exciting!

Phew.  Hopefully will update more later!

I know this doesn’t excuse my lack of a real entry, but it’s a fun survey…

  

1. Bold every book that you’ve read.
2. Place brackets around those books you were required to read in school.
3. Underline every book that you’ve read and loved.
4. Italicize every book that you intend to read.
5. Strike every book that you started but never finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 [ To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ]

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

[14 Complete Works of Shakespeare] *read partially?

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 [The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald]

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

[41 Animal Farm - George Orwell]

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

[57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens ]

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

[81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens]

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

[87 Charlotte's Web - EB White]

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

[91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad]

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I know, I know, it’s been an unforgiveably long time…

  

but to be fair, there has been a LOT going on. I’ve been too busy to even update my journal adequately, so you can imagine that this has kind of taken a backseat to all other forms of communication. But now that I have a bit of a break for a bit, it’s time to fill you in on everything!

Exams were…whatever. Last exams of college…the effort I put in was minimal, to say the least. But my grades turned out fine! And, most importantly, I GRADUATED!!!!!!!!! Yes, I am now officially a college graduate of Work Forest. Thank goodness. I can hardly process that it’s over…an amazing 4 years to be sure, with so many outrageous opportunities and wonderfully delightful people. So graduation was a nice culmination to that…I actually really loved the speaker and thought he said some very challenging and cool things. He did kind of ramble, but when he finally made his point I was totally with him. Graduation was also great because all of my immediate family (altho sadly sans spouses) made it, and we were able to have some meals and funtimes together.

After exams were over, but before graduation, I had my final Living Parables tour at Hilton Head, South Carolina…once again, amazing people. Love those folks. Wake Forest would not have been half as great as it was without them. I had the opportunity to kind of explain and brag about LP for awhile to others in my South Africa group and I was once again struck by how unique, awesome, and absolutely nourishing that group is. I’m very excited to see it continue growing, and I know the people in it now are going to make it even more wonderful than it already has been. And I am so so so thankful for all the people in it.

So. This brings me to South Africa. I know I’m never one to be at a loss for words, but really, I draw blanks when trying to articulate this experience. On one hand I could objectively and calmly tell you all that we did - the people I was with, the chronology of our days, the food I tried, the people we met, the places we visited, the jokes we made, the movies we watched, the pictures we took, the reflections and conversations we had…and it still wouldn’t really capture it for you. No matter how much effort I could put into that (and it would be considerable) I’d miss things. Language fails things like this; pictures only serve as reminders of how little they capture. Needless to say, I had a wonderful time. The group I went with was…amazing (see I’m already running out of positive adjectives in this post). I really wish you could meet each person; so cool. So smart. So loving. And we all really clicked together. Our faculty adviser is also one of the more remarkable women I’ve ever had a chance to meet or work with. The people in the Kayamandi Township were wonderful, and did amazingly in the computer program; they learned so much so quickly and were so dedicated…and taught us quite a bit as well. Everyone we met and talked with taught us something. Once again I was blessed with even phenomenal tour guides. I learned SO much…there is so much interesting history in South Africa - just like everywhere. But for some reason, everything seems so present and immediate there, like everything really matters a lot. Perhaps because you can feel that it is, as Alet said, “volatile”. But I kind of felt like I was as close as I imagine the 60s in the US would have been like. People talk about the racial issues, the economic issues, the political issues, and they sound different than we do here. Maybe because they’re a younger democracy and less jaded with the process, but they are in no way unwise. Just more honest, it seems. Aside from all of that, the actual landscape of South Africa is just breathtaking. Mountains and beaches, and animals and trees…I loved it. Pictures will do this more justice than I can, altho believe me when I say they come a long, far way from doing the countryside justice…pictures here.

I do not mean to imply the trip was always serious or full or reflection or somberness - far far from it. We were constantly laughing and joking and having a good time. Music was everywhere, movies were everywhere, shopping was everywhere, wine was…literally, everywhere. Everyone we met was smiling and friendly. Xenophobia seemed so far removed from our experience, that it was always a bit disorienting to read or hear about it from concerned friends/family at home. Luckily we were kept very safe and the problems didn’t interfere too much with our program or ability to work with the people in the township - altho we did have to change locations. All in all it was an incredible, incredible opportunity, and I cannot thank you all enough for your thoughts, prayers, support, and well-wishes.

Return Stateside was definitely good tho; and it was time. I missed my family & the boy quite a bit (I may have neglected to tell you there is, in fact, a boy at the moment. He’s kind of wonderful). I also was anxious to get back and try to figure out my life. You know that bit about graduating? Turns out there’s life after college. And it’s like…real. Thankfully, I had an interview at the Children’s Home two days after I returned, and it went really well I am 95% sure I am going to accept the position of residential counselor, and have decided to move to Winston-Salem (either way the ish goes down). So currently I am in Pittsburgh, babysitting the boys for a last couple of weeks and bonding with my brother & sister-in-law & basking in the free wireless while trying to solve life before moving into an apartment down there. I’m hoping to move down by the beginning of July, and assuming I take the job, training begins July 14th. I am pretty excited to be living in an apartment (aka NOT being a nomad), especially with Cat, and especially in Winston-Salem. All in all, I’m feeling extremely blessed at the moment, and am very excited about the way things are going

Tomorrow is my last day of class for the forseeable future

  

Thank goodness.  I am truthfully so burnt out on school that it is not even mildly amusing.  This is just a slight example of why: today I had a 5-6 paper due, tomorrow I have a personality research paper due, as well as a 10-12pg final paper for WGS/ENG.  In the meantime, I have my final LP performance in the Ring.  Oh, and sending out as many resumes as is humanly possible.  This is also the time to spend as much time with the people I love on this campus as possible…since I’m graduating and won’t really have time like this with them again in the forseeable future.  Oh yes, and then there are STILL exams.  I have 3.  Not happy about it.  Need to catch up on a LOT of reading.  Blah.  Oh, and let’s not forget I need to pack up everything I own, and prepare to go on a two-week trip to South Africa (which is SOOOOOO EXCITING!!!)   So needless to say, there is just a tiny bit of stress in my life right now.

But mostly, things are good.  I’m surprisingly unfazed by the amount of work I have; it’s more of an annoyance than anything else.  Mostly because I want to be spending time with all of these incredible people…there just aren’t enough hours in the day, you know?

Speaking of these wonderful people, Parables tour is also very soon!  And I actually scheduled performances!  Four!  In like a month!  Thank goodness!  Hilton Head should be absolutely amazing.  Oh!  And we chose our new theme for next semester, which is…TRANSFORMATION.  I’m pretty excited for them.  I think it’ll be really, really good.  I think they’re going to do great as well.  Which speaking of, it is time to hand over the reigns so to speak…elections/post-mortem are on Thursday…it’s the end of an era…

Ok, back to these papers so that I can perhaps sleep a bit tonight.  We’ll see :)  Happy end o’ April!

This month is moving rather rapidly…

  

…which is right terrifying, considering that once this month is over…life kind of begins.  Things have just been so busy and crazy; it didn’t help that my computer died last week.  While I was out of town, no less.  But, no worries: it is all fixed now and hopefully should last me a good while after graduation due to its repairs and brand, spankin’ new battery.  Silly computers…

Classes, however, are even sillier.  Honestly.  I thought I was apathetic and unmotivated before - and I was right of course - but now it’s just a bit ridiculous.  I quite literally couldn’t care less.  I am just trying to make it to graduation.  Which is in exactly a month.  Holy cow.

Which also means in a month + 1 day I leave for SOUTH AFRICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And I am getting so excited :)  Love that group.

But speaking of groups and before SA, I get to spend a week in Hilton Head with my lovely Parables…they are good folk.  This semester turned out better than I expected in terms of our service.  I’m pretty happy with it :)  Love these people.

Otherwise, things are mostly good here…trying to figure out some sort of plan for next year, but whatev.  Mostly living in the present at the moment, which is…surprisingly refreshing

Your higher learning is a worthwhile investment

  

I am so, so, SO tired of classes.  Really.  There is so much I need to get done that I just can’t work up the motivation to do.  I just want to spend time with the people I love.  And sleep.  I am soooo tired…consequently this will not be the most coherent update ever…

Parables has had a lot of performances!…transitions?  But surprisingly going better than expected.  Just not that great in comparison to Healing…sigh.  Love those kids tho.

Grad schools are slowly ruling themselves out.  I applied for some jobs at the amazing family services, and then remembered they’re in the middle of their giant move and am not sure when they’ll get around to looking at my application.  Purpose?  Life plan?

Overall tho, things are amazing here.  I am so blessed with the people in my life, and with all the incredible opportunities; I’m so excited for South Africa after graduation.  I’m also excited to go to PA this weekend to see the boys

Birthday Festivities

  

Too too much to say about the wonderfulness that are my friends and family. I had a great week, an amazing weekend, and an utterly wonderful day of birth Pictures here. Thanks so much to everyone!!! (And Scott…we should talk ASAP lol)

Tags: birth, birthday, Eve, Family, friends, GRE, ho, pictures, weekend