success!

Here's a window into what my job is like. The biggest success of my week occurred today. One of my girls actually called in to say she was going to be absent! I mean, sure she's still got a lame excuse to be absent, but the point I'd like to emphasize is that she bothered to call and tell us ahead of time.

This girl was developing a nasty habit of just going AWOL, and basically has no skills in the area of following through on anything. The last straw for me was when I talked to her less than 24 hours ahead of time to confirm that she was indeed going to meet me at a certain time and place. She sounded positive and "of course!" about it, and then she failed to show up at our meeting or call to excuse herself. Needless to say, when I finally did meet her a week later, I really drilled the point home that she had to call if she was going to be absent.

And now, success! She called! I'm on cloud 9! Maybe one of these days we'll start working on getting her in to work more often, but for now I'm glad for this tiny glimmer of responsibility.

eggs!

got the tuesday blahs? have no fear, enlightenment is near!

that is all

snow!

It has been snowing now for about 30 hours without stopping, and this in a city that might get snow 3 or 4 times a year, and you're lucky if one of those snowfalls stays on the ground for more than 24 hours.

In related news, I have a driving test tomorrow morning (in 12 hours).

I'm actually hoping they won't cancel it because in these conditions they would have to be really compassionate, and besides, it's really hard to accidentally speed when everything is slippery and crazy.

I even practised driving today and made it up the giant hill in the slush! True, I had slid 3 lanes over by the time I got to the top, but I was doing better than most people out there. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to practice parallel parking, because there weren't any spots that didn't have a foot of slush in them, and it was hard enough staying straight on the road so why mess with parallel parking in such conditions...

Wish me luck!

car accident

Today there was a car accident at one of the elementary schools we work with at Urban Promise. None of our kids were hurt, but two of our kids saw it happen and knew the children who were injured. It was very traumatising for them. If you're the praying type, please pray for the injured children (the injuries were quite severe but not life-threatening), and for the children at the school who are upset by it.

gut monster

Sorry about the long pause between posts. I've been having a glass is half full kind of week. And for the past two mornings I've woken up with a gut monster. That's a little monster that lives in my gut and twists my insides and randomly pokes my brain so that it yelps "I hate you!" or just plain "Fuck!", but not actually out loud...yet. I like to save up my swears for sewing days.

Anyway, by the afternoon my gut monster was gone, thank goodness!

This evening I went grocery shopping, and the half and half cream I wanted was on the top shelf and nowhere near the front. Since there is a big milk room behind the shelves in the milk fridge, I stuck my head in and hollered, "Hello? Is anyone in there? I can't reach the cream!" I removed my head from the milk fridge to see a Safeway employee looking at me funny. I asked him if he could go in there and push all the cream to the front, at which point it sunk in that this guy was about seven feet tall, so sure enough, he just reached in and grabbed one for me.

worry wart

Today I was worrying that I had offended someone inadvertently. Aaron seemed to think that girls/women spend a lot more time and energy worrying about what other people think as opposed to guys/men.

While this men/women thing is certainly true in our relationship, I was wondering if it was really as universal as he made it sound.

What do you guys think? Have you observed the same in yourself and/or others?

three goals

I have decided that I need to take action on three of my passions that are getting neglected.

1) I want to dance. This means going out dancing (although it seems that none of my Vancouver friends are into this), or taking lessons of some sort. I think I should continue with bellydance, it's been my favourite so far. This would also be exercise, which is good for me.

2) I want to be outdoors. This means going for a hike every month or so, and going camping several times in the summer.

3) I want our home to be a place where people feel welcome to just stop by on a whim. (If you live nearby, this means you can invite yourself over sometime.) Probably the best way to start this is to invite more people over. I think I would like to have a Christmas party.

I think I should start these things by Christmastime, or by January 1st. These could be my early new year's resolutions. If anyone wants to help keep me on track, maybe you could do some of these things with me, or remind me, or ask me how these things are going. Thanks!

I'm back!

So, my week-long work trip is over, and it was quite fun. The work part was all useful and relevant, which was nice. The conference was held in Camden, NJ, which is basically a poor and run-down suburb of Philadelphia, basically a black-and-hispanic ghetto. Hence the Urban Promise ministry of after-school programs and educational/job support for kids and youth.

One of the things that messed with my perception of the community was that most people lived in single-family rowhouses. They almost looked like the simple brick houses such as one might find in the north Beaches or other upper/middle class areas of Toronto. In Vancouver and Toronto, one mostly thinks of poor people as living in apartment buildings, so it took a bit of adjusting before I could see how run-down the neighbourhoods really were.

Now for the fun stuff. On Friday night we took a bus with a whole bunch of Urban Promise people for a whirlwind tour of Philadelphia. We walked and shopped along South Street, and we saw the Liberty Bell, and we ran up the steps that Rocky ran up in the movie (The Philadelphia Museum of Art). I've never seen that movie so I wasn't sure what the fuss was all about, but I ran up those steps and yelled "Adrian!" with the rest of them.

During this tour, we got in trouble with the authorities twice. First at the Liberty Bell we were trying to take a group picture so some of the people stood up on the low wall. (The bell itself was still about 10 metres away inside a building that had a big window so you could see it.) A cop blew his whistle and yelled something at us that we didn't understand. One of our big black guys walked over to ask him to repeat himself, and the cop got kind of nervous and said "Do not come over here!" as if the guy was going to get rough with him or something. Anyway, it turned out that we weren't allowed to stand on the wall, but we were still allowed to take pictures. It was weird to observe how the cop was afraid of our guy because we knew him to be super-friendly, but I guess he was pretty big (not to mention black), so...yeah.

The second time we got in trouble was at the Museum. Some of us wanted to take a group picture, and we saw this big bronze sculpture of a spider in the courtyard at the top of the oh-so-famous Rocky steps. So some of us decided to climb up on it. Suddenly a voice resounded through the courtyard from an invisible outdoor intercom speaker: "You there taking the picture! DO NOT CLIMB ON THE SPIDER!" (It was totally a "God?!" kind of moment.) I guess they had security cameras and such.

On Saturday, we hopped a train to New York, and spent the day walking around. We saw Times Square (the Toys R Us has a ferris wheel inside, it's so big!), Central Park, and some of 5th Avenue. We also saw Method Man of the Wu-Tang Clan, for whatever that's worth.

On Sunday we went to a small black church in Camden where you were supposed to say "AlleLUiah!" and "Amen!" and "Thank you JEEsus!" all the time. Sam would have liked it. Although, I did find the sermon somewhat questionable because of one part where the pastor was saying that when you've got issues, just smile and say "It is well!" to people who can't help you anyway.

Then we went into Philadelphia and we went to the museum. It is a gorgeous and impressive building on the outside, and all the art inside was fun too. The most famous painting I saw was Van Gogh's sunflowers. I also saw lots of Monet, Manet, Matisse, Degas, and Picasso. I really like a lot of Picasso's stuff so long as he doesn't get so cube-y that you can't tell what the painting is about. Once I walked into a small-ish dead end room, and turned around to go out again and - hello! - there was Picasso's self-portrait looking at me from the wall the door was in. It was kind of a "Hey! I know you!" kind of moment. I also discovered Joan Miro, who I didn't even know was famous until I went home and told Aaron I liked "The Hermitage" and that we should hang it in our house if we ever get really rich someday.

Speaking of which, the guy whose house we were staying in was a bit of an amateur art collector, and he actually had two small original watercolours by Salvador Dali. They weren't crappy either, I quite liked them. Tres cool!

So after we went to the museum, we went back to South Street and ate Philly cheesesteaks for dinner.

Those were my adventures. How are all of you guys doing?

up up and away!

I'm going on my very first business trip today! I'll be in Camden, NJ for three days for a conference, and then I'm staying an extra three days to check out Philadelphia and maybe some other nearby east coast cities. It will be fun, but I hope I don't get sick of strangers and colleagues too soon. We'll see. It would be more fun if Aaron could come and discover a new city with me.

For those of you who pray, maybe you could keep us in mind as we travel to the States and fly (from Seattle). I'm nervous about the border crossing and the flights and such, and I hope they go smoothly. Safety is another nice thing to pray for travellers. Thank you. I will post again in a week or so.

new toys!

Today at work I got a new flat screen monitor and speakers that actually work! I have so much desk space! And it's amazing what kind of an aesthetic difference it makes to have gotten rid of that beast of a monitor and the two phone books it was sitting on!

Yahoo!

Bible and truth

Once again, I find myself pointing out something that Elliot posted about first. They do say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery...

Madeleine L'Engle talks about faith and truth and fact and story in an interview you can read here (don't worry, it's pretty short). I agree with pretty much everything she says. One thing I might not have said is that God is a sh*t, but I would agree with her basic idea that God's not always a jolly old barrel full of monkeys.

I like the way she talks about the Bible being truth but not fact. This is something I learned best from Neil Gaiman and his Sandman series of graphic novels. There are a whole bunch of wacky stories in there, and it's hard to tell if they're actually happening to the characters or if it's all just a hallucination, or maybe both. But the point is that it doesn't so much matter if things actually happened or not, rather, the point is that the stories are true, and you'd better take that seriously!

I would like to add that I believe most of the stuff in the Bible actually happened, and that it has been retold truly but perhaps not entirely factually. That's the way oral history works. Things happen, and then their significance gets interpreted and retold in a meaningful way.

The one thing that I would absolutely insist actually (factually) happened is the life, death and resurrection of Christ. That's the whole point of God's story. The Word became flesh and lived among us. He really, truly died and then beat death and became really, truly alive again.

Maybe I'm making some logistical error in this balance between fact, myth, truth and such, but I kind of think that's the point. It's all in tension and really weird to figure out (I mean, seriously, God becomes a physical, vulnerable, mortal human?!?), but it's really really really true. Thus endeth my spazz.