settling

settling is an interesting process.

yesterday while tom was gone i pulled most of the office together. tom built the desk, complete with lego-like cinderblocks. I put up the bookcase, set up the printer, dragged the bed in from the garage, stacked boxes I didn't want to work with. Nerd Town is coming together nicely, and it is unexpectedly fantastic to be able to type and work at an actual desk again. Who knew?

yesterday afternoon tom and I also began our 10 day trial of WoW Burning Crusade. It's nice to be playing again. So far it's only been with our new people, but I am excited to go back to Melleona, my all time favorite Dwarf Pally. She is pretty much awesome.

plus now that we have the desktop up and running again, I can listen to all my music from college that I nearly forgot I had. Nada Surf? Awesome. Aaron Sprinkle? Nice to know you're still here.

next week tom and I both have the whole week off, well, mostly, so we are really looking forward to playing WoW until we stink from not showering and have gained at least 10 pounds from all the snacking. ah... just like the good old days.

things are getting there. and that's something.

So this is the new year...

... and I have no resolutions ...

Things have been so crazy busy. I got a ten week sub job at the youth corrections center - it was a total God thing, they called me out of the blue and have been so willing to work with me and my tutoring schedule. I have a month left and it's like a real job now and I really don't want to leave, but I'm pretty sure we're going to open the bakery full time after I'm done at the jail, which is exciting in its own right.

I have realized that this next year I need to take better care of myself. I need to avoid the isolation I've been seeking lately. I need to exercise more and eat better. I need to seek out oportunites to give more of myself.

I also need to get rid of a lot of stuff. I started purging yesterday and already I feel much better. I just hope I can stick with it.

mj

crazy pants

a few reflections:

last week I worked a whopping 45 hours just at kaplan, teaching two classes, tutoring a plethera of students, prepping and proctoring and driving here there and everywhere. On top of that, the bakery got the account with Margies, which means we are baking more than ever. Early mornings and late nights make for a very sleepy mel. On one side, I know that I need to work this much if we have any hope at all of making rent next month... on the other, I just want a nap.

before things got so busy, I read all seven harry potter books in two weeks. they were amazing and I walked around in a daze for several days after finishing seven, not quite sure what to do with my life anymore. luckily the business of everything has solved that problem for me.

building plans for the bakery are sort of at a stand still, as I have had zero time to further investigate anything.

The Block Party is friday... only two days away, and we are not ready. We are closer to being ready than we were last weekend, but there is still a lot that needs to be done, and not very much time to do it in.

Now that Tom is back in school, we're back to missing eachother. I'm sometimes around in the day while he's in class, but have to take off as soon as he gets out. I wish there was a better way to work things.

Lately I've been reflecting on how I'm not doing much reflecting anymore. I only got back from Peru a few weeks ago, and already the exprience seems lost or, at the very least, hibernating. Have I significantly applied anything that I've learned, or thought about anything at all? I don't think being broke counts as application, since it is by no means intentional.

I'm happy that it's finally fall, my most favorite of all seasons, even if I don't have many opportunities to enjoy it. Tom and I have taken to wearing our chuyos around in the mornings when we bake. It gives me hope.

Hope. That which I must cling to.

update

I suppose an update is in order as it's been longer than I care to remember. What is news?

I'm done at the radio station (angelic choruses ring in my ears) and have spent much of the last two weeks basking in the glory of simply being. I have more than enough other things going on, between the bakery and Kaplan, and driving with Teresa to Chicago.

Yes, Chicago, and we have hence returned, very tired, and very impressed with Nebraska. The roads are smoothly paved, the landscape is rolling green on and on, and the rest stops are amazing. Yes, my friends, the rest stops in Nebraska have more public services, more funding for the arts, and more love for pets and their owners than our fair city of Greeley. And they are wireless. In the middle of a corn field. I am both shamed and amazed.
Omaha is the home of SaddleCreek records, a personal favorite of both Tom and I, and you can imagine our excitement at being able to stop there around lunch time. We had heard that Collin on the SC crew had taken it upon themselves to revitalize downtown Omaha. Given this single piece of information, and also the idea that they had a recording studio in a barn, I imagined Omaha to be a small place, with a neat downtown. But it turns out Omaha is actually quite large, bigger than the capitol of Nebraska, actually, and the downtown is indeed in need of revitalizing. While I at least had secretly imagined a fantastic lunch surrounded by indie hipsters, we found nothing more exciting than a Quiznos and two very suspect Chinese restaurants, and left the city with nothing more in our bellies than disappointment.

Well, I’m back in the states, as most of you know. I turned in my two weeks notice my first day back at work, Wednesday, and now mostly spend my time at work reading back issues of features on McSweeney’s. In fact, this is generally what my work day looks like:

8:30 – should be at work but am actually still several streets away
8:40 – get to work, log in to computer, stare into space while it loads
8:50 – open outlook and delete junk mail
9:00 – open firefox, read gmail, begin with McSweeney’s online
11:30 – take a break from McSweeney’s to make tomorrow’s log, pretty much my only job function
1:00 – go to lunch
1:40-ish – come back from lunch. Commence McSweeney’s reading
3:00 – take break from McSweeney’s to answer ringing phone. It’s a telemarketer.
4:45 – finish McSweeney’s story I’m on, begin shut down procedure

I am still trying to sort out everything from Peru. I suppose I should be spending some of the free time I have at work trying to process, but this isn’t really a very conducive environment for that. I am trying to get pictures posted… I am hoping over the weekend that will successfully happen. I am trying to caption them all so that you can see what happened.

So far possible “big lessons” – humility (because working with Zach wasn’t enough to pound that into my thick skull), joyful giving, hospitality. I’m also noticing that most everything around me (especially at work) is annoyingly excessive. Florescent lighting. Air conditioner. My 10 ball point pens. All the equipment. Radio in itself. Our office which is big and has carpeting and a door that locks. Two doors that lock, actually. Maybe three.

en yanoca

we are back in yanoca where our favorite family lives. we stayed last night and bob and i will leave this afternoon for cusco so we can catch the early train to machu pichu. Then erika and mary kay will meet us in cusco tomorrow night.

the time has gone by so quickly, we just need so much more. so many people here need help, are giving help, need help themselves. the things that they are proud of make me cry. our family just installed a closing device for thier outhose - some string and a nail in the adobe wall. this is fantastic, such a big improvement, we don´t have to wake eachother up in the night to go to the bathroom... but... but this is horrible. they should have a bathroom with a sink, a proper door, a mirror, tiles.

yesterday we visited the internada, which is a bit of a bording house for girls from the campo that want to go to high school, since there aren´t any out there. Some of these girls walk 8 hours just to get there. Right now there are 14 girls living in two small rooms. They stay for a week and then go home for the weekends, because their parents wouldn´t let them walk so far every day. What they have means so much to them, and it is so little. They are working on building better dorms, so that there will only be two to a room, but they have run out of money, and construction has stalled. they are so excited. can you imagine, having a bathroom down the hall, inside, with tiled floors! you wouldn´t have to put your shoes on in the night to go to the bathroom. oh, it will be lovely.

The other day, who knows when it was, yesterday maybe, Erika and I hung out with a baker in Siqani and we learned how to make empanadas. We didn´t wash our hands, we didn´t have clean water to wash the pans in, it was wonderful and lovely, and crazy.

Something that is becoming clearer to me daily is this: there are people all over the world who are giving their entirety to other people. there is hope. restoration is occuring.

estoy in peru!

have i written from peru yet, i can´t remember? wow, the keyboard in this internet cafe is really hard to type in. um... a quick up date, we are in seqani, i thikn that´s how its spelled, staying with the bishop, which is by far the nicest place we´ve been since he has wooden floors and hot running water. in a few days we will head back to yanoca, dirt floors and no water, anywhere, hot or otherwise. then back to cusco, where I shoudl be able to do a fair amount of updating, since there will be internet in the convent thing. okay, times up, hasta luego, mel