Hopeful

November again

It is November already!  A month of traveling caused me to basically forget that October existed.  I missed Halloween!  For the first time... ever?  I think ever, indeed.

I find myself beginning applications to graduate schools.  Essay-writing, proving myself, telling my story...  it kind of comes naturally and conversationally, but I also feel odd in trying to sell myself.

"Accept me!  I'm really great!  I am smart!"

S-M-R-T

So... November will be spent writing essays, sending out reference letter forms, and packing.  Packin' it on up!  I feel like we just moved here, anyway.  Back to the liquor & grocery stores for boxes we go!

Weddings comprised most of the excitement of 2011.  My own eleven-month engagement took prime focus for most of the year, in addition to serving as a bridesmaid (or rather, matron?) for dear friend Bridget in November and enjoying Adam & Kate's wedding on 12/30/2011.  2012 will bring high school friend Lauren's wedding in March, Monica's Hawaiian elopement in May and Jake's wedding in June (with Greg serving as Best Man), as well as plans for my sister Sarah's wedding to take place on 4/13/2013.

Is this the time of life during which a lot of folks wed, naturally?  Mid-twenties seems to be all the rage for matrimony, nowadays.  However, our parents' generation may have exchanged their vows from age 19 to 30.  Do young people nowadays just consider 24-27 to be the best time to settle down with someone? 



Engagement

Greg and I are finally engaged, after having been a'courtin' for the past three years.  Yay!

Family celebrations ensued at the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, with many toasts and much story-telling and support from everyone.  I think the wedding will be a great, fun party with all these excited family members, plus good friends from home, summer camp, church and college.  We are very excited!

Even more exciting is the fact that we have a place booked.  Yes!  In the most difficult month to find an available venue, my parents succeeded in nabbing a catering place with a beautiful hall, great yard with many pine trees and a kind and detail-oriented catering lady.  We're stopping by her open house today to sample cakes.  This will probably be the most fun part of the wedding-preparation process.  Yum.

Besides that, we've got my parents' church reserved for the early afternoon on our special day, which I think will prove just perfect for the size crowd we'll have there.  Next up:  starting pre-marital counseling with our pastor, planning the ceremony with him and our Camp Hill pastor and a church wedding planner, picking out attire and flowers and making invitations and whatnot.  Oh boy!  I'm actually sort of excited to finish our Save-the-Date postcards, and later, make up our lovely printed invites; it's been a long time since I've dedicated myself to a design project of any sort.

What a  busy time!!  I'm glad we still have eight whole months to finish working on all this stuff.

And now, off to brunch and taste cakes!

discontent

Dear friend & college apartmentmate Meghan came to town to hang with me last night.  I rather enjoyed our conversation, catching up on life and ambitions and conquests and dreams.  She kept stating how she missed living in Kutztown, how quaint & quiet it is, how pastoral and friendly.

I find I'm becoming disinterested.

Many folk around here are quite happy and do good in marrying and making babies.  But there are others out there living what I dream about; traveling the country, getting a master's degree, homesteading, having decent full-time jobs.

When will I get there?  Living the dream?

plants

Okay, went to Rodale yesterday to pick up the scraps of what was left of the plant sale.  Parsley, broccoli & some Japanese leafy green that starts with ,M'.  Then poked around in a rack of seed packs & found carrots, turnips, lettuce, leeks, muskmelon & some other stuff.  After that we went to Renningers & the two ladies there had a greater selection of vegetable seedlings [perhaps not usda certified organic, but - ?].  They had at least a dozen breeds of tomatoes for sale, & I'm interested in getting some with a chronological difference in maturity so we'll harvest different sizes & flavours at different times.

AND we've already got a little strawberry plant in a pot [I hope it spreads like a weed & gives us many, many berries] and some thyme & basil growing nicely from seed.  Pesto this summer!

springtime

It is spring in Pennsylvania and green and yellow bleed into my sight everywhere I look.  I drove the back roads betwixt farm & field yesterday on my way to Echo Hill country store and the fields of green were wrecked with dandelion debris.   The pollen floats on the breeze invisibly into every runny nose and itchy eye.  That, I have heard, is at the most ridiculously high levels we've seen in years.  Something like that.

At the present moment, I am searching for a[n additonal] job for the summer.  Parts of my heart long to work at a summer camp, reaching out to kids and spending every moment climbing mountains and searching streams, but I do also feel called to Kutztown and to continuing ministry [hopefully] to the great people I work with at the art stuff store.  They're a beautiful group of women whom I want to love on; I really do enjoy growing into deeper friendships with them and the conversations we have when there are few customers in the store.

Because of this, it seems a 'small' job in town would be the best way to go as far as a little increase in income goes.  I applied for an internship at an organic farm [with professional resume & kickass cover letter], and I'll ask for applications to the little cafes & ice cream shops & boutiques up & down Main Street.  Perhaps I'll market myself for an au pair job.  I'm really looking to work Thursday through Saturday to create a complete work week.  It's nice having more time to work on painting, but the skin on my hands craves clay, and acrylic or oil cannnot satisfy.

Or I'll bake and bake bread, fill a cart & go up & down the street trying to sell my delicious loaves.  Were that a well-paying job, I'd employ myself immediately.

Also, I'm currently accepting ideas for part-time jobs.  Anyone hiring??

Bread

Ever since I've realized home-made bread over the past year, I've sort of become disgusted with grocery store breads.  Even the ones labeled, "whole wheat!  multigrain!" are far from wholesome.  Just take a look at the ingredients list.

HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP


means sugars are added to hyper-speed the yeast's rising.  which means flavours, textures, and B vitamins are lost.

The "12 Grain" store breads consist of (again, please read along) Enriched Flour (means iron, thiamine, and other vitamins & minerals must be added back into the flour mix as they have stripped the whole wheat kernels of nutrition) and "2% of less of..." the remaining "11 grains".

I say screw that.  Right now I'm rising a loaf of whole barley & brown rice (which i had to simmer for an hour - no instant here!), oats, corn meal, whole grain rye flour, wheat bran and a wheat flour.  It's SO grainy; no "2% or less" at all!

...i sure hope it tastes good...

failure

failure:  emily drinks real milk, phil drinks real milk,
    french dairy farmers of 1944 drink real milk; 
    milk is boiled to scorching, milk is skimmed
    milk is bleached, milk is tainted. 

failure:  using coordinates & clues &
    global positioning units for geocaching for hours & finding nothing.

failure:  reading "best meteor shower of the decade", reading "11 pm to 4 am",
    not reading "best view around 4 am", seeing only 4 shooting stars.

failure:  setting goals, breaking goals daily,
    seeking help in the wrong place, self righteousness, self decay.

failure:  landlord remodeling, research demographics &
    rent rates, nowhere to go, close store, lay off employees.

failure:  job searching, another opportunity for failure?

aspiration:  new job, new town, more meteors;
    drinking real fresh milk straight from the milk bucket.

day

today at work i met a german lady whose name is Hildegard  [how old skool].

this evening i hung out with grandmotherly types, as i won't have my own for much longer.

i will learn how to purl.  

Not even at a crossroads

Hello friends of the internet,

Now that NaNoWriMo is over (as well as No-Shave November, which I haven't personally concluded) I can do other things with the time I don't spend at work or with people. I ended at 50,062-something words, although my novel isn't near finished. I had kind of mapped out a plot in my mind, and would skip ahead to write different parts, bouncing back and forth so I wouldn't tire of a particular part of the story. Maybe I'll complete the story during next November.

Recently I read the first half of The Secret Life of Bees, recommended to me by Christine Barlow two summers back. Last night I began reading The Lord of the Rings, because this weekend a TV channel aired all three movies of the "trilogy" and I felt my brain could use some stimulation from Tolkien's adventures in language. (Writing my own wimpy book, I could see how awfully limited my own vocabulary is right now - which I attribute to only having been required to write about art during the past four years of my life)

Right now, I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. It's much more difficult to discern the call of God when I don't spend time listening. I read Brennan Manning's The Signature of Jesus, in which he described how to do a "centering prayer". It's meditative, and you do it for about twenty minutes at a time, before breakfast or dinner so your soul can connect with the hunger of your body. My problem is that I need a clean, peaceful space to do it, and my room is not in that condition at the moment. I miss the Christopher House in a time like this, because it had the chapel - small, intimate, quiet. Lined with a few chairs, stocked with diverse musical instruments for worship, and with candles always lit, it really felt like a sacred space where we as individuals or the whole fellowship could come for quiet (or loud!) time with the Lord, because that space was created specifically to meet with Him there.

Soon I'll be starting a youth ministry internship at my church, which I'm pretty ecstatic about. It makes me very glad that God doesn't call the qualified, but qualifies the called. I'll make curriculums for pre-school through senior high, teach, lead events, work on communications (don't I wish I took some graphic design courses?), and learn how to administrate. My pastor and the elder in charge of youth will be mentoring me through the process, so I'm going to ask that they also keep me accountable for my own spiritual growth, challenging me through this season (ooo, Christian vocab word).

Unpaid internships usually need to be paired with part-time jobs, so that's the thing I worry about. Working at Pier 1 has been a lot of fun, I actually enjoy it a lot, but I'm unure how long employment lasts after the buy-stuff-in-December season ends. (don't you hate having to associate Jesus' birthday with giving gifts to everyone but Him?) The career-building/resume-sending/connect-with-employers websites are okay. Without a degree in nursing or engineering, there aren't many jobs available. There are a few positions as postal workers or typists for the state, so perhaps something like that will hold me over. I feel like I just need a short-term job where I can earn some money to save up for a car; and once I have that, I'll have mobility and I'll be independent and I'll have peace about that.

Saturday was a really cool day because I got to hang out with a bunch of people I graduated high school with, whom I hadn't seen in maybe two or three years. It was hard not to feel discouraged, though, because they're all doing real things, having graduated with real majors that led to real jobs. More (?) importantly, they've all got their own places and aren't living with their parents. Of course, some of them received cars from their parents; something I don't have the luxury of, and also something that keeps me immobilized, tied down.

I know I need this transition period, this internship, because I didn't go to school for what I'm called to do - stupid - so I am hoping to put a lot of energy and effort into mentoring and loving on the kids in my church, and learning as much as I can from this experience so I can go do it, serve where I'm called to serve on my own. I'm still on the road toward the point of decision making, and that intersection seems so far off right now.

Fighting a battle against time is stupid. However, I seem to subconciously enjoy doing that. I feel tied down, like I want to start the great adventure of my life, but I have to save up some money before doing that. I have so many friends who are serving in different ministries around the country, around the world, because they had opportunities to jump out into the unknown in faith, following God with reckless abandon. I want that. I'm crushed under the waiting for it. Hopefully I can bear this all for as long as it takes...