25 September 2010

Project 24

Check out The Half-Naked City and see my most recent appearance in North Park's annual Project 24! :)

24 September 2010

It's official!

I have officially been accepted to the University of Botswana for next semester!!!!! I'm super-excited, and now busy with filling out paperwork, et cetera. Hopefully I can keep on top of things: in the last week I have given the wrong dates to my current boss, nearly double-booked myself for a meeting, and accidently scheduled my new job for when I have class (luckily class is cancelled that day, so I'll be able to sit in until something else gets figured out). This weekend I am in Project 24, which will perform tomorrow, and then I'll spend all Sunday doing my homework, which will include lots of reading + the writing of a paper that's due next Thursday. I'm going to bed soon because I'm trying not to get a cold. In two weekends the Nordic Play Festival (or whatever the official title is) will be going on, and I will be involved as much as possible; that's also the weekend of the Concert Band concert for special-ed kids and their families; and the weekend of the Falling Whistles event that I'm trying to plan to host on campus. It's going to be another crazy weekend. And in the meantime, I'm working a security job, a tutoring job, offering to work at whatever else comes up, trying to do homework, have a social life, go to African Student Club meetings at 10 o'clock on Wednesday nights and sleep enough to function in my 8am lab the next morning.

Something's got to give.

21 September 2010

A Gift:

Today a nice boy gave me a pretty flower.
This pretty much makes my day.
:)

20 September 2010

Another week

Today's been outrageously productive in such a short amount of time. But that's what happens when you've got a lot to do: you budget your time a lot more strictly. I've taken care of printing, delivering, scheduling, typing, cooking, and retrieving today, and it's only half past noon! This week is looking pretty busy on its own. I've got to finish reading Anne Moody's book today for tomorrow - I don't think it's going to happen, but I do think that I'll get close! Today and tomorrow I'm on a team that is interviewing the candidates for the new Urban Outreach coordinator (my new boss, essentially). Tomorrow morning Bekah and I are going to breakfast at Tre Kronor with Scot McKnight, which we are both excited for - you miss being in his classes, really. Wednesday will be another busy day, starting when I wake up at 6 and going until the African Student Club meeting at 22. Thursday I'll be sitting the Carlson security desk from 17:30 to 22. Friday will be another trip to Cornerstone, the first time I'll get to see my friend Sam's baby, and the annual Project 24 event will begin at 19 and go culminate in a show at 19 on Saturday. After which I will be student security in Hanson from 22 to 0:00. And that's my week in a paragraph, excluding classes, homework, and private meetings. Should be a good one!

17 September 2010

First Cornerstone: Success!

Currently reading: Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody

We had our first trip down to Cornerstone tonight, and it went great! Seventeen of us went down, and we rounded up 18 kids to play with us. All the new things that Karissa got us over the summer were a hit: a new checkers board, card games of "go fish" and "crazy eights", even a miniature "connect four"! It was a great night, and the kids were outrageously well-behaved. Hopefully the weather stays good and we'll go to the playground next week. It's nice to be back in the swing of things - I feel like Cornerstone is the last piece into my weekly puzzle for things to feel like a routine again.

This week has been pretty crazy, what with papers and presentations, catching up on homework that I didn't do because I was at the UMin leadership retreat over the weekend... but the last few days have been VERY productive. Thursday I gave a presentation on Aztec agriculture and the importance of corn. I started a little slow, but then something clicked and I went into Bodie interp-mode. I sat back and listened to myself and thought, "Wow, I've gotten a lot better at this over the summer." I was telling them all these stories, sounding all knowledgeable, pointing things out on the slides behind me, and even playing off the audience to see what jokes and stories I should or shouldn't tell! So things you learn in a ghost town really can be made applicable to daily life. :)

Otherwise, I've just been very productive: running around, getting stuff done. I've been making to-do lists and actually crossing all but one or two things off of them by the end of the day, and it's because I actually wasn't able to do them, not that I just didn't get them done. So that's encouraging, but I have to say that I am ready for the weekend. I've got a fair amount of work to tackle this weekend, from reading, to writing, to researching, to creating the preliminary bibliography for my capstone paper... it's going to be a doozy! But at least I'll be around and able to get things done.

Tomorrow morning my plan is to get up, do some reading, bike over to the Farmer's Market, maybe do some homework/reading at Dell's (which I still haven't seen yet!), come back for lunch and maybe go swimming at Northeastern (another thing I haven't done yet!), do some more homework, and in the evening I'll work the security shift at Hanson. Should be a good, laid back day.

But enough on that: I have to get going. I wasn't able to fold my laundry before going to Cornerstone, and my room is a mess!

13 September 2010

Auntie Jay!

I'm an Auntie!!!!!!! As of about 9:30 this morning, I am an aunt to the yet-to-be-photographed Garrett Casey Mekkes! I couldn't be more excited, and I just had to share my joy! :)

10 September 2010

Going camping... ish....

This weekend is the UMin leadership retreat at Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. I have to admit that I'm pretty excited. While this makes my new homework routine of work on the weekends, rest during the week a little off-kilter, it'll still be a great time and I'm excited to see what we've got going for us this year. I've decided to branch out a little bit more this year, and I've signed up for Tribes, which is the new incarnation of small groups. I'm not exactly sure how it's going to be now compared to how it was before, but I suppose I won't really know the difference! Still, I'm excited for the new experience.

Church-wise, things are shifting (yet) again. I'm thinking about trying out (yet) another one. What seemed nice last year, this year just seems like I'm not able to plug in how I want. We'll see where that all goes, but I'll be sure to keep it posted. I have to say that "church shopping", as it's termed, has got to be one of the hardest things to do - especially when you're an out-of-state college student who isn't always around. Sometimes I just want to give up on finding a church out here, but I know that if I can dig into a good one I'll be happier than just sitting in the back row at NP Cov and not talking to anyone. What can I say? I'll just soldier on in this like I do in everything else.

Every now and then my mind gets snagged on financial thoughts. This weeks it's been thinking about study abroad and how in the world I'm going to pay for that. (Clearly, only with God's blessing.) I'm working on scholarship applications right now. Yesterday I spent some time looking at flights: turns out that different websites can have DRASTICALLY different prices. I found websites that actually offered roundtrip flights to Botswana for $1400 ($1600 after fees and whatnot) when other sites only offered $1600 and $1800 flights, not including the fees! Crazy! I told Jen Pope I was feeling overwhelmed and she gave me a couple coupons for different sites for $25 or $30 off. Not much, but a small consolation. It's the thought that counts, after all. I've been trying to brainstorm other ideas for raising the funds that I need: becoming a pop can smuggler over the Michigan border is probably my best one so far. Only problem is, I don't have a car to smuggle them with, and it wouldn't be worth it to just take one bagful. Still, I thought it was pretty creative, reverting back to can collecting to raise money. I think that I should do some sort of fundraiser something-or-other... maybe I'll make a bunch of necklaces and sell them to Buffalo Exchange or some similar store. The whole Time vs Money thing is always an issue with stuff like that, though. Perhaps I could do an impromptu baked goods sale or something. Cheap pancakes in the apartment or the like. $2 a stack. We've got enough dishes....

06 September 2010

Cooler weather, longer weekends

Currently listening to: Pandora - Bluegrass genre station.

This has been a weekend of getting stuff done and getting nothing done all at once. I have been very productive on some fronts: my T/Th class homework is completed for the week, I've gotten the Cornerstone mailing list for the year pretty much made up, emails in the inbox that needed action have been taken care of, etc. On the other hand, I've wasted a fair amount of time in mostly enjoyable ways: watching Star Trek with roomies and neighbors, "testing the waters" - so-to-speak - at a new-to-us Forest Preserve and seeing a doe, a fawn, and even a 7pt buck, playing games, and taking catnaps in the breeze and sun. A whole lot of napping took place this weekend.

Marlee has inspired me to join her in a practice of making and working toward six goals for every six-week period. I've been thinking about it all day, and I think I have come up with my six for this six weeks:
1. Settle into a good weekly exercise routine.
2. Search and apply for scholarships to help pay for study abroad.
3. Carve out a healthy balance between homework reading, personal reading, music practice, and spending time with my friends.
4. Delete my Facebook and develop a communicative and social life without it.
5. Get organized and pack up things that I can send home.
6. Start on research for my term papers.
Pretty simple, but some of them will still be harder than others in the midst of everything as it goes. So today is day one, and hopefully I'll have accomplished these goals by the time 18 October rolls around. We'll see how it goes!

03 September 2010

Sea cows?

Currently Reading: Numbers 4-6

This morning I thought I'd pick up where I left off in Numbers this summer, and lo and behold, the strangest thing occurs: the Bible starts talking about the hides of sea cows. Manitees? in Israel? I'm confused. I think I'll ask Bekah about this phenomenon, since she's the one who convinced me to read Numbers anyway. :)

So, life in general. My plans are underway to delete my Facebook account. Something in Pastor Judy's chapel message on Wednesday, combined with what she said at chapel chat afterwards about Facebook specifically, just pushed me over the edge: I have to drop it. So I'm going to, and I'm ramping myself up for it. At the end of this month, I'm going to put an end to it, and that'll be that.

Last night I went to the North Park Theatre Company meeting. This year is going to be great, and I'm a little bummed about the things I'm going to miss out on by not being here next semester, but that's one of the many prices you pay to study abroad. Still, this semester will consist of two, one-weekend projects that I will totally be able to give the time to and participate in. One of them is my usual, typical, Project 24, which I love. I'm thinking this year I might put "writer" down as my first option and see where that goes. The other is a Nordic play festival that will be one weekend, script-in-hand performances of recently-translated Nordic plays. It sounds awesome, and I told Chad Eric so. I'm actually pretty excited for that one, just because it sounds so neat and I'm so interested as to what it's going to be like.

Classes are going well: I've made it successfully through my first week. I've got my morning dose of Intro to Cell Bio today, and then I'll be set loose for the long weekend. My goal is to get as much homework done as possible so that I can relax a little more during the week. I've been getting up at six o'clock in the morning these past couple weeks, and I'm hoping to keep the trend going so that I can have some morning time to myself to wake up slow, do some reading, etc. My goal is to not have to do homework in that morning time, because I want that to just be a time for me. I feel like that's something that was really lacking from my last few semesters, combined with personal, recreational reading. So this year I'm trying to remedy that as best I can. We'll see how it goes.

My attempts at finding work have bottomed out, and it looks like I'll have to be content with the few hours I manage to pick up this semester with my security job. Which, come to think of it, is not a bad thing, considering that I have plenty of other stuff that I want to do and be involved with, while staying on top of homework, and hollowing out some me-time. God is shutting doors to take care of me, I think. And I'm really going to have to trust him a lot in these next few months and the next year, because as it is: I know that paying for study abroad is COMPLETELY out of my power right now, and if the funds all show up, it will only be because God's hand is taking care of it for me. In the meantime, I'm applying for as many scholarships as I can find and just praying that he blesses.

Ingenuity and creativity are also areas of my life that have suffered from school. I'm trying to remedy this with little things: creating my own (free!) pencil holder for my desk out of a cereal box and tropical blue duct tape; writing a memoir on my time at Bodie; giving more time to song-writing and story-writing; and trying to relearn (if I ever really knew it to begin with) the art of doodling in and around my notes. Of course, on the flip side, this semester I will be writing an average-sized paper for Cell Bio, a decent-sized paper for Mexican History and Culture (probably on ancient agriculture and the importance of corn in particular), a term paper for 1960's & American Culture (not sure what that'll be yet - brainstorming will occur this weekend, but ideas have popped into my head as polar as national and state parks or the rise of punk music out of the era of peace and love), and a capstone research paper for my History Senior Capstone Seminar (which I have no idea what it's going to be on yet, but again, brainstorming is going to occur this weekend). So this semester, like most semesters as a History Major, is going to be a lot of reading and a lot of writing. But at least it's all in English this semester, so it shouldn't take me too long!

01 September 2010

el primer de setiembre

Currently reading: Mind of the Raven
Classes are in full swing, more or less. The apartment is fairly moved-into and I am, for the most part, unpacked, although I do need to go through some things over the next few days. We have everything an apartment could need, minus a cheese grater. It has been terribly hot and sticky these last few days, but finally this morning things have broken a bit with a nice, lengthy rain. Still, the humidity index is pretty high. Little gifts from Bodie have been coming in the mail for the last two days, and I'm hoping for one more today: first an envelope with a 2011 calendar, a cd with pictures on it; then a box with some clothes of mine, the gift of an awesome compass and a book about how to use it; the next box should have the rest of the clothes that I left behind. I'm enjoying these little prizes, but I'm a bit more interested in the moment at that last shipment of textbooks that I'll hopefully be getting SOON. Cornerstone sign-ups went well, and the interest meeting is tomorrow night. I'm hoping for a good turnout - we'll see. I've pretty much figured out a good, varied work-out schedule for the semester, so I'll start putting that into action somewhat this week, but mostly next week because I'll be taking some of the exercise classes at Helwig (yoga, boot camp, and spin class) on some days, and those don't start 'til the seventh. But I'll start some of it this week. This semester is going to be pretty heavy on the reading, as most of my semesters here have been, what with being a history major and all.... but I'm hoping that my slightly increased reading speed from this summer will help me to get through things with perhaps a little less stress than the last couple semesters. Enough rambling for now, I suppose. Really, I'm just chipping some time. I miss Bodie - especially the weather, at the moment - but I am so bound to return next summer that it's not that bad: more like something to look forward to than to look back on.