A Little Rambling

In case you are in need of some bizarre entertainment, read on. Dreams are strange. I often don't remember mine, but when I do, they're usually something semi-ordinary, put into an extraordinary context. Old relationships may surface, or strange locales, or seemingly random events. Things get hodgepodged into a lump of silliness. Last night, my subconscious took this to a whole new level. I'm afraid I don't remember it well enough to give an accurate tale, but I would like to point out some of the things included. There was a tiny black kitten. Somewhere in my kitchen was a vortex of sorts that emitted blinding white light and allowed demons into my home. One of these was the smoke monster from LOST. Somehow, I escaped the house and then there's a blank between this and the next event - I had a car, but it had no engine. Two famous brothers (not sure who they were, just that they were famous) came to fix it for me, since they'd built it themselves, and th...

Tonight was the first time I enjoyed reading a text book in years, and all because I got to read birth stories and look at cute pictures of babies all evening. Sigh.

If you ask me, cooking for just one person is way harder than cooking for 25. (Unless you're making spaghetti and you only have a 2-quart pot. Then 25 is nearly impossible.) When you're one person, you have a lot of leftovers. Depending on what you make, you may be eating the same meal for days. For instance, I really wanted fruit salad with everything in it this week. If I use just one of each kind of fruit, I still end up with an enormous bowl of deliciousness that will start to go bad quickly if I don't devour it. The solution: share with friends at school and foist it off on whoever looks hungry. Works pretty well, but there's still a ton left in my fridge. The problem is, it's very hard to cut down a recipe that already only calls for one egg. What am I supposed to do with the other half of the egg? Like the fruit salad, you tend to have to use a whole something or you end up with a half-something taking up space in your refrigerator, getting forgotten...

I've been back in the USA for a whole week now, and what a week it has been! Jet-lag coming west isn't too bad, and the wide-awake-at-7-am thing launched me into a good schedule for school. I hit the ground running, as it were, and it has been a wonderful and busy week. Friday, I got to go see Shantel's horse show, even if I didn't get to see her ride. I still got to get out in the sunshine (walking around with no jacket? incroyable! ) That night, I got to celebrate my cousin Hunter's wedding to his beautiful bride Andrea. Saturday I was back to work, and oh how I have missed it! I really am fortunate to love my job so much, and it was nice to be back. After work I headed over to a choir party, and saw a bunch of my friends. I have MISSED them so much! Germany was wonderful, but no where in the world is good enough that I'd want to leave them behind for a long time. My heart was full and happy to be among such excellent and admirable folk. After the pa...

I really, really dislike packing. If you haven’t been around my blog during travel before, this will show you just how much I hate it. Sigh. I think I actually did pretty well this time. I’m blogging after I packed, rather than during, which is an improvement. The only breaks I took were running stuff downstairs as I came across it in my room and going down again to check in for my flight. Not setting any records, but it took me less than 6 hours, so I say that’s pretty good. My carry-on is very heavy, and my suitcase is currently underweight, but we’ll see how long that lasts. I hate having to bounce things between both bags to try and even it out and make sure everything fits in the restrictions. Also – gummi bears are heavy!! So, my time here draws to a close. I finished the four videos yesterday and got them on DVD, and have started the interminable process of uploading them to youtube. Tonight is the last ministry night I will get to see. Yesterday, Debbie took me out s...

It's a little weird to see January 1, 2012 above the posting, no? 2012 already??? I'll admit, last New Year's seems very long ago. I was still in the apartment with Ashley, I hadn't started back at ASU yet, and I don't even really remember what I did. This year, I spent my second New Year's Eve at the Festaburg setting off fireworks. Germans know how to do it, man. It's especially cool as we're all in these little hilltop towns, so you can look over and see the other villages setting off theirs. They don't have nearly as many restrictions here on what you can and cannot set off, and some of them are big. We had sparklers for the kids earlier in the evening, but we had a bunch of big-kid rockets to set off at midnight. The Americans down the street had an arsenal that sent clouds of smoke billowing up the street to envelope us in the sulfurous scent. The German family just above us on the hill had some very large fireworks, one of which accid...