thoughts from the deep recesses

Today my husband is 45 years old. He's more handsome and well-rounded than he was when I met him... truly, he just gets better with age. Happy birthday, hon! We volunteered last Sunday at the Coeur D'Alene Ironman. Wow. What an inspiration to see all those athletes working so hard... pushing their bodies. We worked at a bike aid station with Kyler's cross country team, giving out water and Gatorade, Power Bars, Power Gel and bananas. We were at mile 40 of the bike ride... which is apparently when lots of athletes needed to go to the bathroom, because there were TONS of them stopping to use the porta-potties at our station. We will for sure do this again next year. It was really fun. We got rid of the kids overnight for our anniversary on Sunday and had such a lovely, quiet time together. We took a nice long walk together on a new trail, went out to dinner at one of our favorite south hill patio restaurants, watched a movie with some Ben & Jerry's, got up in the morn...

Last Saturday my family and I were in Astoria… we were there to celebrate my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. A few nights before we left I was on the internet and discovered that the annual Scandinavian Festival was taking place while we were there. Now - I grew up in Astoria and only remember going to this festival once or twice… it wasn’t huge on my radar, since I am not of Scandinavian heritage. I had lots of friends who were, though, and I knew it was a big event in their lives, so I spent some time online looking at the offerings of the fesitval. On the website, I saw that they now do a race/walk on the Saturday morning of the festival called the Running of the Trolls. And since I have a son who is a runner, and because I like to walk, I went ahead and signed Kyler and I up to do it. Kyler needed to be running anyway, since he was going to miss several practices while we were out of town. The Scandinavian Festival (and the Running of the Trolls) is held at the Clatsop Country F...

"Dear my mom and dad, Kyler, Savannah and Ethan (the Goins family), How are you all? I hope you are all doing well. Thank you all for the letters you wrote to me and the book you guys sent for me. One of my favorites was the album. It was such a lovely designed album. And I also love all the pictures in it. I am praying for you all always for God to guide and protect you all. Savannah, Kyler and Ethan, how is school going on for you all over there? I hope you are doing well in your work. How is Gracie? I missed her so much and can't wait until the time I will see her again and I really love her. Aunty Cathy, Mama Josephine and Aunty Margaret say hello to you. They cannot wait to see you and your family here in Sierra Leone Banta Mokelleh and they are praying for all of you. I am doing well in school. On the 5th to the 14th of July I am going to take my Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). That is the examination that will allow me to go to the tenth grade. It is a n...

Wow. Where has the time gone? Sorry... I thought I'd gotten back on the bandwagon with blogging and then I sort of fell off the face of the earth again. Two and a half more days of school for the kids. Kyler has finals tomorrow and Thursday... hope he's all studied up. He's really applied himself these past couple of months - after struggling to find his groove in high school. School has always come really easily to him - and having to actually study and work for his grades sort of caught him off guard, I'm afraid. But he's managing really well now. I'm proud to see this maturing process in him. He's such a great kid. Looking ahead to next year, I'll have Kyler in 10th grade, Savannah in 8th and Ethan in 5th... Kyler is taking honors classes again, along with his first AP class. Savannah will be in an accelerated math (9th grade level) class as well as a 9th grade level Spanish class and a special science program called MESA - which is designed to make ...

Sunday night is typically family night here... it's often a game night, or a movie night, or in warmer weather, a chance to go for a hike or a bike ride. Asia and I were both lacking motivation to come up with anything too high energy tonight... ...so we brainstormed and each came up with half of tonight's plan. For my part, I gave each of the kids one dollar to cleverly and randomly give away and a post-it note to write a note to whoever would find their dollar. We then wandered around Riverfront Park until they found a good spot. Kyler taped his to the inside rim of a garbage can. We all thought it was a bad idea - that people wouldn't notice it... but we hung around long enough to see a group of three girls find it... First one noticed it, bent down to read the note, pointed to it, but was reluctant to reach in and take it. Another noticed it and snatched it, then they all gathered around it and took a picture of their treasure. You should have seen Kyler's grin w...

Kyler had his final track meet last Saturday. It was a crazy hot day. He ran the 1600m. It's become his favorite event, for sure, and he's focused all his energy this season on perfecting his splits. He didn't PR on Saturday - it was too hot, really. But he finished ninth out of all ninth grade boys in the city. Not too shabby in one of most competitive high school running cities in the nation... We're so proud of him. He gets a couple of weeks off before the cross country team starts training for the fall. He'll be running all summer. I've got so many books on my nightstand right now it's just silly. I'm really hungry for books right now. And yet it's one of the busiest months of the year and Asia is no longer traveling, which ruins my reading time I used to enjoy when he was gone... I'll never get everything read. But I have really good intentions. Savannah bought a guitar last weekend from a friend of ours who is selling everything he owns to...

Loving the colors and activities of this time of year... Lilacs and tulips and my pup who waits patiently in the driveway while I putter around in the front yard. Track meets and garage sales and sunshine. Life is good.

We ran/walked Bloomsday today. There were over 55,000 participants registered... almost 50,000 finished the race. Kyler ran near the front of the pack. Asia and the younger kids and I walked. I'm so thankful that I ran into my friend Brynn at the start... she and I stuck together the whole time. We got ditched by everyone else because they all decided to run the majority of the race. We both ran the first mile and a half, and then wherever there was a downhill... but walked a lot of the course. We finished with an appromimate time of 1 hour 43 minutes. It's a 12K race (7.46 miles) We don't know Kyler's finishing time - we should know by Tuesday... I think he finished in just about an hour. Here's the whole fam with our race t-shirts... bright green this year! Yay, Bloomies! Update: Here are Kyler's results ... he did awesome, finishing 7th out of 479 fifteen year old males and 782 out of 49,674 total runners. I'm so proud of him.

Okay - so I know it's been too long since I've posted when Blogger doesn't remember who I am and I have to re-log-in. So what have I been up to? Work. Still loving my job. Hoping to get a few more meetings, but I'm pretty content with my schedule right now. I've had tons of enrollments lately - not sure if people are responding to the Jennifer Hudson campaign or if it's the impending swimsuit season getting people through the door, but I'd bet I've had 20 new people in the past couple of weeks. Good stuff. I love new members who've worked up the courage to bring themselves through the doors. Track. Two track meets a week is keeping my Thursdays and Fridays busy. Kyler PR'd with a 5:04 mile last week, then only managed to do it in 5:05 yesterday. He was disappointed, but is still hoping to run a sub-five mile this year. I hope he can do it. Savannah is running the 100 yard dash, the 4 x 100 relay and is hoping to do the high jump sometime. They on...

How is it that hot water poured over little ground up beans makes such a magical drink? The weather has been positively glorious the past four or five days... we had our first dinner out on the deck Sunday night. I love dining al fresco. I just had to google 'al fresco' to be sure it meant what I thought it meant. I had this fear I was saying I liked dining nude. Speaking of google, I don't really Google anymore. I use Swagbucks now exclusively. Are you using Swagbucks? Because it's just another search engine, except that you can earn points (swagbucks) and then turn them in for free stuff. I've already earned $15 in Amazon gift cards. I'm just saving them for Christmas... hey - it's free money. Kyler ran his personal best for the mile last week at his track - finished at 5:12. His goal is to do a sub-five mile this year... GO KYLER! I love the end of the school year busy-ness... we're constantly on the go with some event or another, but so many of the e...

So all year for the internship at church we've been reading books. Books about humility. The poor. Leadership. Church planting. Lots of books. And all year I've been searching for a book I could really relate to... the one that really grabbed me and where I found myself saying "This is me! This is what God has for me! This is why I did the internship! This is what I'm supposed to be doing!" After awhile, I found myself willing to settle for just a chapter... I kept asking at intern meetings "Where is my chapter?" While in Chicago, we visited SO many different ministries... from Latino churches sitting right on the border between two gang territories to ministries reaching out to the African-American neighborhoods on the south side of the city, tutoring, teaching computer skills and mentoring youth. Business owners purposefully settling into poor neighborhoods to invest their lives into improving the quality of life and ministries that take the most at r...

I've been feeling particularly wordy lately... Perhaps it's because I laid in bed the other night and read my hand written journal from the time that Tejan was here... while I blogged a TON during that time period, I have more personal journaling that I kept to myself... something inspired me to pull it out. We're coming up on two years since he left... April 20th will be the two year mark. It's been ages since we heard anything from him, even though we recently sent a nice big package of pictures and letters and a gift to him. It saddens me. I have a lovely picture of him with his house mother Mama Josephine up on our kitchen wall. I see it every single day. The other day I really paused in front of it. Kissed my fingers. Placed them on his picture and said out loud "I love you, T." It made me cry... that spontaneous affection. I miss him. We are still saving money for a family trip to Sierra Leone. Sometimes I get positively overwhelmed by the magnitude of t...

It's been ages since I've decided to tackle any sort of baking/craft/holiday project beyond the classic sugar cookies at Christmastime. I used to be the mom who made elaborate cakes for all the kid's birthdays, until we discovered that no one in our house really likes cake... But when I saw these bunny cupcakes in a recent copy of Woman's Day magazine, I knew I wanted to give them a try. We started with simple chocolate cupcakes - a Weight Watchers recipe made with a devils food cake mix and 12 oz. of diet soda. The original recipe calls for cola, but I had some diet lemon lime soda in the fridge... you don't add anything else. Just cake mix and diet soda. And guess what? It makes the fudgiest, yummiest cupcakes out there. I made these the other day with the yummy frosting I linked to awhile back... best cupcakes EVER! For the bunnies though, I decided to go with simple canned frosting. We made the ears by cutting large marshmallows in half and then dipping the sti...

I've just about settled back into things after my trip to Chicago... why is is that the week after you get back from a trip always FLIES by so quickly? Can it possibly have been a whole week already since I got home? Where did the time go? We had the loveliest of Easters yesterday... I ended up singing a little background choral bit for the service at church - been YEARS since I've done that. It was extremely low key. But fun. Then after church we had people over... my nephew Spencer and his girlfriend Annie were already here after arriving in town Saturday night, then we had our friends the Pannells over, as well as Kevin (my niece's boyfriend) and a young couple (the guy is a fellow intern...) It was loud and wonderful and we had more food than we could possibly eat... including ham and flank steak and the obligatory deviled eggs... good stuff. When everyone left we had a little family time watching "Life"... it was great to have a Sunday off from work. (No Weig...

Seven days. Eight people. A windy city. It would take forever to tell you about everything we did in Chicago... we hit the ground running and were in and out of our rockin' 15 passenger van about a gazillion times... and we saw everything from the poorest neighborhoods to one of the wealthiest churches in the nation. Chicago is a city riddled with issues - corrupt government, poverty, crime and hopelessness abound. Cook County decides how many prison cells to build based on 4th grade test scores. So instead of putting money into prevention (ie education), they literally just build more jail cells. I was appalled at the policies - infuriated by the lack of concern for the poor - overwhelmed by the broad scope of the problems this city faces. And yet, it is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich cities in the world. I got to spend a morning at the Art Institute... such a strange contrast between the wealth and beauty there on Michigan Avenue and the garbage strewn streets a...

5:00 am airport call tomorrow morning. The interns are off to Chicago. I know very little about our agenda while we're there... just that we're going to be visiting lots of different ministries and that the itinerary is custom made to stretch each of us in individual ways. So there are certain things on the agenda just because our leader thinks I need something... and something else on the agenda for another member of the team... can't wait to see where we end up and what we do. I LOVE my intern team so much - and am privileged to play mama hen to them. Just to be able to hang with them for a whole week and grow alongside them is such a thrill. They're amazing people. If you're the praying sort - please pray for my health. I woke up this morning with one eye that is running constantly and very achy - I went to the doctor and got some conjunctivitis drops - but the doctor thinks it's just viral and told me not to use the drops unless the discharge gets gooey an...

I am absolutely head over heels in love with these . I want all 26. Too bad I don't have ten thousand billion dollars, which is what I think it would come to when you convert all those pounds to dollars. I recently bought these . Savannah insists on using a straw with every pickin' beverage that passes her lips. I got so tired of having to throw her straws away when I was doing the dishes, I figured these would be a good thing. We love them. They're guaranteed. Which means if we ever break one, Strawsome will replace it. And they're eco-friendly. I just throw them in the silverware basket in the dishwasher. Think of all the landfill space we're saving by not adding 10 to 15 straws a week to the garbage. (And economical, since I'm sure you all know how expensive a straw habit can be to support, what, with straws costing a dollar for like 300... I'll recoup the cost of these babies in about twenty five years...) Whatever . They're fun. Loving the free wall...

Asia and I switch cars fairly regularly. It used to be that the Trailblazer was always mine and the Mazda was always his - but with me driving across town four days a week, it makes more sense for me to take the car that gets the best gas mileage on those days. It's never a problem in the Trailblazer, since it's a really smart car and knows how to adjust the seat depending on which key fob opens the door. If it's Asia's, it sets the seat to his settings, and if it's mine, it magically knows I'll be the one driving. But in Asia's car - the Mazda - we have to manually move the seat. And both of us think the other one's seating preferences are completely whacked. Asia likes to sit with the seat back WAY straight. I'd venture to say it's even beyond straight, and actually pushing you up toward the steering wheel. I prefer to lean back, which Asia thinks is completely ghetto. It's a miracle we've stayed married all these years. American Idol.....

So yeah, I'm going to post again - a mere two days from my last post. Crazy. But there's stuff on my mind - lots of random, silly stuff and I want to put it down. Somehow writing on the blog helps me let go of stuff. So here goes. I'm really struggling lately with productivity. Not sure what's going on with that, but I find myself practically glued to the couch - or the chair - or the bed (nappy me...) There are oodles of things I could be doing. And instead I sit there feeling badly about all the things I don't do. If I could change one thing about myself, it would be this tendency in myself. I have never been naturally industrious. I think perhaps I need to sit down and make some lists and work from them... set some goals. Anything . I would like to blame it on Seasonal Affect Disorder, which I struggle with, but really, this blob-ish part of me can rear it's ugly head any time of year. So no - I'll just say that I'm lazy and now that I've said it ...

My nephew Cameron and his beautiful bride, Kate Married 2/27/10 I wish them... laughter every day years and years and years of time together to discover God's best for their lives the supernatural ability to continue to be fascinated by each other even as they walk through the monotony of daily life faith that carries them through the rough patches complete trust in each other providential timing and clarity for all of their major life changes - jobs, babies, houses etc. the sweetness of lifelong love together Congrats, Cam and Kate. We love you.