KAVALENA!!!! :)

hi everyone!
sorry i havent posted in a while, but i've been busy with all sorts of schoolwork.
and even now, i should probably be doing homework.
but this is a worthy enough cause for me to spend time blogging about.

recently, my sister (val) started a business. but it's far more exciting than just that. this business is called Kavalena (combo of my sister's and my names :)) and it's where my sister sells the beautiful scarves she makes. she then takes 50% of what she makes and gives it to a christian organization that takes care of children with cerebral palsy and autism in china. how cool is that?

her scarves are absolutely beautiful and very reasonably priced. so you should definitely check out her totally legit website.
http://www.kavalena.com/#!shop
http://www.facebook.com/Kavalena?ref=notif&notif_t=fbpage_fan_invite&sk=wall#!/Kavalena
i'm so proud of my sister and want to do anything i can to help her. would you help me to do that by checking out her facebook and liking her page? and if you want to buy a scarf, that'd be even better! :) (after all, winter and christmas are right around the corner ;))

Visits Galore

i almost titled this post "Visitations, not Solicitations, with Felicitations". but i figured that it was too long and too "tation" happy.

the past 2 weeks have been filled with all sorts of visits.
the first week in august, lish visited again. :) i got to her house around late afternoon, and after her sister's first birthday party, a huge torrential thunderstorm, getting totally soaked 4 times (as in "i went to a waterpark fully dressed" kind of soaked), waiting out part of the storm at an oasis, and singing songs about rain, we finally got to my house late at night.

the next morning, we woke up super early and were back on the road (only this time with my mom and dad) on the way to visiting cedarville. some might have questioned why i wanted to visit cedarville when i was going to be moving in in about 3 weeks. but i'm really glad i went because now i dont feel as nervous about getting lost and i'm now way more excited about going there. plus, lish is really considering transfering to cedarville next year. so it was really good that both of us got to go see what the campus is like.

we ended up getting there an hour later than what we'd scheduled with the cedarfolks because i forgot to take into account the time difference between IL and OH. so there was no time for the much anticipated lunch before the campus tour was to start. luckily, the tour was pretty interesting, so it helped to distract us from our grumbling bellies. after the tour was over, we quickly went to redeem our subway lunch vouchers. it was delicious. as the old addage goes, hunger is the very best seasoning.
after lunch, we stopped at a quaint little ice cream shop called "Mom and Dad's". it looked like a dive, and it was. but they had really good icecream :)

then it was back to my house. on thursday, brian stopped by on his way to his new teaching job. we all went out for lunch at lish and i's favorite indian place. we stopped for slurpees and took everything back to my house so we could listen to bollywood music on pandora while we ate.
after we finished eating, we had a hoot an' hollerin' good time catching up and making "sleep music" for lish (brian and i attempted to record soothing nature sounds. nature sounds? sort of. soothing? not really. more like hilarious).

on friday, lish and i just chilled around my house and watched some movies before driving back to her house, where we then watched even more movies (only this time with her awesome sisters :)).
the next morning, all the pascoe daughters and i went to the farmers market. let me tell you, i've never loved my dad's minivan more than when i had the 4 of us girls, baby mariah, and a stroller all fit comfortably in my car with room to spare. i'm totally getting a minivan when i'm older. i also kind of want to make a music video about a minivan now.

i got home saturday night and my dear aunt jeanie came from AZ on sunday. i love my aunt jeanie, but we only get to see her every couple of years. on monday, we went into the city and took a wendella boat tour of the city's architecture. then we took a water taxi to chinatown. that part wasnt nearly as fun as we thought it'd be. especially since it's a long walk from the taxi stop and there were no public restrooms to be found. plus, by that time it was raining.

here's my dad on the water taxi

wednesday was much more fun. jeanie, my mom, and i all went to lords park. i hadnt been there in years, and had forgotten most of what was there. we had a picnic lunch down by the lagoon with the ducks and geese. then we went to the public museum they have there. we also stopped to see the buffalo and elk habitats. overall, it was a really fun day.

me and my aunt jeanie at the museum in lords park

between visiting lish, visiting cedarville, visiting the farmers market, visiting with jeanie, visiting chicago, visiting chinatown, and visiting lords park, i'm somewhat visited out. i guess it's a good thing then that a week from today, i wont just be visiting cedarville, i'll be living there :)

Lish Visit :)

now on to happier news.
about 2 weeks ago, my good friend Lish came to visit for 3 whole days!

you see, my parents were gone for that whole week on a missions trip to michigan. they went with Ron Hutchcraft's ministry On Eagle's Wings, which is totally focused on bringing the gospel to native americans. their work is so incredible and so needed, and my parents have long supported and loved their ministry. that's why they signed up to come along on their Summer of Hope tours and cook 4 meals a day for 60 people.

while they were off serving meals to hungry kids, i was having fun. the first part of the week, i stayed with my  aunt kathy and we had fun just hanging out and watching movies and such. then for the second part of the week, i drove up to wisconsin to pick up lish.

i got there mid morning, and since we were both hungry, we went to lish's favorite breakfast place. it's an old railroad car that's been turned into a diner. it was such a fun place and had really good food. here we are:

lish said they had huge portions, so we decided to split a vegetarian breakfast burrito. only lish is a vegetarian, and i am not. so i got a side of meat to eat with my half. only it looks like it's the only thing i'm eating.
as a side note, i dont think i've ever eaten that many veggies for breakfast in my entire life. and i doubt i ever will again. (even though it was incredibly delicious) 

here we are outside the diner

once we were sufficiently stuffed, we drove back to my house. after dropping off her stuff, we became hungry again. so i took her to my favorite fast food place ever, called Just Kabbobs (but they dont sell just kabbobs. they sell non kabbob items as well). it's a little family owned restaurant that's super cute inside and has large amounts of delicious food at good prices. since lish is vegetarian, we ordered pita bread with sides of tzidiki sauce and hummus. it was delicious.

afterwards, we went shopping and bought several different things, including Gnomeo and Juliet and super cute aprons which we wore for much of the time we spent together. i would include a picture, but they're still on lish's camera. maybe later.

we got home with just enough time to make some artisan bread and eat it in the car as we drove to church. after church, we again stopped by Just Kabbobs for more of their amazing hummus.

the next day, thursday, we went to kline creek farm. it's an old farm that my county owns and operates as a free step back into time thing. volunteers dress in 1800s style clothing and give tours and take care of the animals. here's lish, hard at work behind the plough:

we also did some more shopping, and ended the night with a movie from redbox. it was a good movie, but both lish and i were appalled at the fact that someone would make the cover of a movie called "red", blue.
just look at our disgust:

on friday, lish and i put together a care package for our friend tatiana. we filled it with stuff we had bought for her over the past few days and included some notes and drawings. we also made these awesome tie-die colored cakes in mason jars for her and her mom. unfortunately, they were no longer edible when they arrived, but the pictures of when they were made are awesome! ... if i had them... which i dont, because they're still on lish's camera. but eventually... maybe... someday i'll get them on here... somehow.
but in the mean time, here's a picture of tatiana wearing some of the stuff we sent her. she asked that the pictures she sent wouldnt be put on facebook, but luckily, this is not facebook ;)

she loves the color orange

after pouring so much energy and love into one care package, we were both thoroughly famished.
and where do you take a famished vegetarian? to a vegetarian fast food place!!!! it turned out to be a huge adventure (which i devoted an entire blog post to on my other blog. http://www.oneridicalousponytail.blogspot.com/), but right now all i'll say is that it turned out to be a fantastic indian restaurant and we had a ton of fun trying different free samples and talking to the owner and learning how to pronounce the items on the menu. we had so much fun that we even blasted the slumdog millionare soundtrack all the way home and listened to contemporary bollywood on pandora while we ate. it was an unforgettable experience, and one we've both agreed will have to be repeated whenever she visits.

after dinner, we packed up lish's stuff and cleaned up the house a bit for my parents' return. then we packed up the car and drove to lish's house. after an unintentional detour (ie wrong turn) and a stop at 711 for one final slurpee and to eat some of our delicious mason jar tie-die cake, we arrived at lish's house.

it was too late at night for me to drive back home, but not so late that either of us were tired enough to sleep. so we watched jurassic park 3 (i'd never seen any of them before) and i stayed the night before leaving in the morning.  and thus ended my awesome visit with my very good friend lish.

Louie

If you've been reading my blog even somewhat regularly, you'll know that it's very rare for me to have short posts. so the fact that i'm doing 2 in a row is just shy of a miracle (yes, i consider the dog sitting one short).
but i really dont want to write at any length about this topic, because it still makes me sad. i even considered not writing about it at all. i'm only writing about this so that my friends won't be surprised when the topic comes up sometime down the road and they find out that my cat died over a month ago and i never told them.
so consider yourself officially informed. i no longer have a cat named louie. he died on june 21, 2011 when he got hit by a car.
i don't really like talking about it.
end post.

Dog Sitting

after the seminar, all i did was lots of homework with a bit of hanging out with friends and family on the side.
but then i got a dog sitting job.
jim and carol are family friends of ours and they asked if i would take care of their 2 golden retrievers while they were on a 2 week vacation. i of course agreed.

cherokee and buster are 2 very big boys who are both very sweet and slightly needy. they loved to be with me, even when i was asleep. here's a cute picture of them:

i enjoyed having some dogs again. it's been a while since my family had a dog, and it was nice to remember what it was like.

Creation Speaking Seminar

a few weeks after i got home from wyoming, i was off on another trip. this time, to missouri.
during the spring geology trip, i learned that dave and maryjo nutting were going to hold a seminar on how to present creation materials. this really interested me because i love the topic of creation science and would love to teach it some day.
i knew that my friend brian was trying to start a new ministy having to do with creation speaking, so i told him about it and he wanted to go too. so we told the nuttings we wanted to go and they arranged free accomodations for us both. in the end, the only thing we had to pay for was the gas to get there :)

i'm so glad i was able to go. i learned so much, i met a lot of great people, it was exciting to help brian and the nuttings figure out more of what brian's amateur creation speakers ministry would need to be and include, and i had a lot of fun to boot.

on the drive down, we saw a sign for the world's largest rocking chair, so of course we had to stop. here are some highlights from the trip down:

me in front of the world's largest rocking chair. it is also the largest rocking chair on route 66.

a curious cannon next to the rocking chair. apparently, that's how they guard it. after all, they dont want anyone to drive off with it.

a lawnmower that did not work no matter how hard i peddled.

there was a cool mural next to the rocking chair. so i took a picture with it. the goal was to blend in with the picture. something that's hard to do when you're about 4x larger than the people in the painting.

we ran into some crazy weather. thunder, lightning, a downpour, hail, rainbows, and this crazy sky. i'd never seen anything like it before. this was the same night the tornado hit joplin. luckily, we weren't close enough to be affected by the winds.

the week went by very quickly. the seminar was from around 8 or 9 until 5 every day. then we'd go out to dinner, and afterwards i'd do some homework (i missed the first week of summer classes for this. but it was totally worth it). in the middle of the week, we took a field trip to the creation museum in strafford which one of the men (dr. rod butterworth) at the seminar runs. it was really cool. and if i'm free next summer, then it's all worked out to where i could be a tourguide there and live free of charge with the family that hosted me for the seminar :)

they had some madagascar hissing cockroaches at the museum. dr. butterworth asked if i'd like to hold one. even i was surprised when i said yes. here i am:

after the seminar was over, brian and i visited our friend amy swan. she went to jhbc the same year i did and we're good friends. since she lives only an hour from where the seminar was, we decided that we couldnt miss this opportunity to hang out. we ate dinner there and caught up and it was really fun.
in the morning, we left and toured a local civil war cave. my camera died, so this is the only picture i have of it.

when we walked into the main building, it came up that the owner of the cave and one of his employees were admiring my awesome boots and were saying that i maybe could one day work there. plus, the employee's name was lesley!!!! spelled the same way i spell it!!!! so i thought that was really cool. and if i come back to be a tourguide at the museum, i might apply to work there too :)

then we went inside the cave. it was the first time i'd ever been in one and it was awesome. i love caves now :)

after the cave, we were off to the long road home... or so we thought. after stopping for lunch at chick-fil-a, my car wouldnt start. so i popped the hood, called my dad, did some quick diagnostics, wiggled a wire on the starter celenoid and basically fixed my own car. it was an extremely rewarding feeling :) even though all i did was find and wiggle a certain wire.

after that, it was all smooth sailing. i dropped brian off at his house and then drove back home to finish my mountain of homework before class on tuesday.

Roadtrip Home: WY to IL

I hated leaving JHBC, but going on a roadtrip home with friends made leaving a little bit easier. after packing bam's car to the gills, lish, brian, and i left campus and drove to the pearl street bagel shop to meet up with lish's parents for breakfast. once we had all gotten our delicious bagels, we hit the road. lish was in the car with bam and me for the whole first day of driving. needless to say, we had an awesome time filled with much singing, dancing, laughing, and talking.... and a bit of sleeping. after all, we were driving through wyoming. and in some places in that state, there isnt anything to see except bleak stretches of sage brush for miles and miles and hours and hours. but for the most part, we had a blast.
we even found some cool attractions!

like a dinosaur that seats three! and even has a saddle!!!

oh ya!

we also found a city where the elevation was 8,000 times greater than its population.

we also learned a few interesting things along the way. such as:

sometimes the people who make your sandwich really dont know the combination to the safe.

to what lengths we were willing to go to listen to music without static

if batman got into a fight with a dinosaur... batman would lose an arm

we ended up driving really late into the night in order to get to lish's aunt's house. once we finally got there, we got to have a fantastic sleep. then we woke up in the afternoon, ate some food, and got ready to leave. from that point on, it was just brian and i because lish's parents wanted some time with her and also wanted some help with her younger siblings.

so brian and i drove on to his house. but by the time we got there, it was too late for us to go on to my house and to lish's house to drop off her stuff. so i stayed with his family overnight. his mom is such a sweet lady. the next day, i got to hang out with his mom a bit and we became friends. before i left, she even gave me some awesome tupperware! turns out, she's a tupperware consultant and loves to give tupperware stuff away :) so i got a bunch of stuff i can bring to college and even a veggie platter for my mom!

after leaving brian's house, we drove several more hours through lots of traffic to lish's house. they had driven through the night, i think, so they were already home. we dropped off lish's stuff and got to meet the rest of her family. her sister, abigail, is super fun and it was awesome getting to know her over some delicious pizza.

i hated to say goodbye to my friend, but i knew my parents were anxious to see me. so it was into the car again and off to see my family. it was good to see them, and they were very happy to have me back. and thus ended my roadtrip adventure home :)

Formal and Graduation

Dear people who read my blog,
I can hardly believe that it's been over a month since i've written in this thing and i still have to cover stuff that happened way back towards the end of april/beginning of may.
so i'm only going to try to talk only briefly about the formal and graduation.

here we go. the formal :)
it was the friday night before our apologetics class started and everyone dressed beautifully. it was different from the first formal because by now everyone knew eachother much better than we did then. we had so much fun just eating and talking together and then each table made a toast. although all of the toasts were good, none were quite as memorable as danilo's. For background, Danilo is originally from Brazil and had all sorts of trouble with his visa that he had to work on all year. so danilo stands up and with a sad yet courageous look on his face he begins to tell all of us that his visa problems couldn't be resolved and that he had to leave the country immediately and was going to miss the last 2 weeks of school and graduation. since all of us love danilo, a bunch of people started crying. but then he admitted that while his visa was denied, he was able to get permission to stay long enough to graduate. this brought cheering and a slap to the face from jessica.
other than that short sad spell, the night was very happy for everyone. after dinner we took lots of fun pictures and then did some colonial dancing.
here are some pictures:

the food

the ladies

everyone/ my friends :)

lish, tat, olivia, me

me and my beautiful roomies :)

now on to graduation.
after 2 great weeks of apologetics, it was time to graduate. families started arriving early in the week, and while it was nice to meet everyone's families again, it was definitely an extremely time for us students. you see, after spending 9 months always being around eachother and doing everything with eachother, we had become like a family of our own. and as more biological family arrived, it only sunk in the fact that our student family was about to be separated for an indefinite amount of time. one thing i remember about that weekend was how very thankful i was/am that my JHBC friends are all my sisters and brothers in christ and even if i never get to see them again on earth, i'll still get to spend all eternity with them praising Jesus :)

the events of the weekend went something like this:
friday- i dont fully remember. nothing super spectacular. i think i packed, and i think there was some colonial dancing.

saturday- that morning pretty much everyone whose families were there went and explored the town. that night we all ate dinner together. then the girls were whisked away for a quick surprise tea party where we talked about the value of community and fellowship and we all got these adorable little mini tea cups. then we all ran over to the classroom where everyone watched the slideshow of pictures of everyone throughout the year. it was awesome. i think we danced later that night as well.

sunday- the big day. it was wonderful and horrible all at the same time. it was a lovely ceremony with great speeches from Cort, Aimee, and Danilo, and great music and singing from Christina and Jessica M. but it was also the end of our schoolyear, and thus, horrible. we took so many pictures and used so many tissues. after the service, we all ate lunch at the church and said goodbye to a few students.
the rest of the day was spent packing, enjoying a few more hours spending time together, saying goodbye, and one final night of colonial dancing.
it was one of the saddest days of my life. but i guess that's kind of a good thing, because it just shows how fantastic a year i had in jackson.
monday morning bam, lish and i packed up super early and drove to meet lish's parents in town. i cried almost the whole way to the bagel shop, but after that i was able to move on a bit and focus on having a fun roadtrip with my friends.
but before i go on to the roadtrip, here's some pictures from graduation:

Pastor Don giving me my diploma

me with sunshine and brett. they're my friend tatiana's parents who adopted me for graduation weekend because my parents couldnt make it.

me, tatiana, olivia, and lish

me and my wonderful roomie/hairstylist heather

this post has gotten really long, so i'm going to move on to another post to i write about my trip from wyoming to illinois. which is kind of fitting if you think about it. stuff that happened in wyoming in this post and stuff that happened between wyoming and illinois in another :)

Celebrity teachers

After we got back from the geology trip we had Ken Ham as our teacher for a few days. He's the president/ceo of Answers in Genesis, which is an organization dedicated to showing why the young-earth position and a literal Genesis account are both true and necessary considering both the evidence and the rest of the Bible. You see, when you don't have a literal Genesis, then you don't have a literal fall, literal sin, or a literal need for a Savior. So when you attack Genesis, you also attack the foundation of the Gospel. This is just a very brief and incomplete summary, but if you want to learn more about why Genesis is and needs to be literal history and you want to look at some more evidence, feel free to either contact me or go to http://www.answersingenesis.org/ . That week we also had to read a pre-publication copy of his new book Already Compromised. It was really fascinating and showed how incredibly off we usually are in our assumptions about christian colleges. It was incredible to find out how non-conservative the faculty is at supposedly the most conservative christian schools in america. It's a really good book. I highly recommend it.
I also got a picture with him :)

me and Ken Ham

The other celebrity teacher we had was Dr. Jason Lisle. I'm pretty sure he's the only full-time Christian astrophisicist there is. But don't quote me. He taught us about both apologetics and astronomy that week. He actually wrote a very good book on presuppositional apologetics called The Ultimate Proof. Basically, he showed us that the only worldview that can possibly account for the existence of laws of logic, morality, and the consistency of laws of nature is the Christian worldview. All other worldviews need to borrow from the Christian worldview in order to even argue against Christianity. You see, if there were no consistent, righteous, logical creator, then there would be no reason for us to expect to see a creation that is consistent and logical and we would have no basis for morality. Again, this is just very skeletal here and if you want to ask me questions about this I'd be more than happy to answer you to the best of my ability.
His book is another one I'd highly recommend you read. Especially if you have any interest in defending your faith whatsoever.
I also got a picture with him too :)

me and my friend Lish with Dr. Lisle

oh, and one night we went stargazing with a really big telescope and learned about how to find different stars and we looked at galaxies and star clusters and even the planet saturn. we also saw the space station, several satelites, and a bunch of shooting stars. it was a pretty awesome night :)

Geology Roadtrip: Part 2

So even though I got back from this trip about 3 weeks ago, i have been extremely busy and haven't had time to update this thing until now. So please forgive me that it's taken this long, but i am doing it now and will try to catch up as soon as i can.

Ok, the second half of the geology trip was super fun. We went to the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon Dam, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Wupatki Indian Ruins, and Fossil Butte. All were very cool places, but i think my favorite was Bryce Canyon. It was like nothing i've ever seen before. here are some pictures of the different places:

Grand Canyon

 

Glen Canyon Dam. This is what keeps the Colorado River looking cleaner and smaller than it naturally would.

 

Wupatki Indian Ruins. It was pretty cool, but you couldnt really touch anything. But there was this awesome hole in the ground that blew cold air out at you. It has something to do with a large underground cave and different air pressures. It's pretty cool. It also makes for a great photoshoot.

here's the blowhole.

 here's a picture of Jessica from the blowhole photoshoot.

 

Zion National Park

another picture of Zion

Bryce Canyon

me at Bryce Canyon. it was rather chilly that day.

one of the fossils at fossil butte. a fish eating another fish. just goes to show just how rapid deposition can/needs to be in order to make fossils.







Geology Roadtrip: Part 1

i am currently about halfway through my 2 week geology roadtrip. it has been a week full of fun, hiking, amazing sights, lots of learning, fun pictures, and a ton of traveling. this first post will have to be pretty short because i dont have that much time to use this computer, but i figured a short update now will mean less to write later. plus, i can always edit this to add more pics and details.

for my school's geology class, we actually get to go out and see what we're learning about instead of just being stuck in a classroom. we are traveling all over the southwest to look at evidences of Noah's flood and other massive floods and stuff like that. we're also looking at earthquake and volcano things, but those are more secondary.
so far, we've gone to Colorado National Monument, a dinosaur museum, fischer tower overlook, rabbit valley (where we got to see some petrified dinosaur bones), Arches National Park (where we saw a bunch of awesome arches and got to hike in fiery furnace), Canyonlands National Park (where we stopped at upheaval dome, green river overlook, and grand viewpoint), Natural Bridges National Park (where we saw ruins and petroglyphs, one of which looked like a dinosaur), and two indian museums.

Colorado National Monument

me standing next to a t-rex leg

i loved the dinosaur museum. super. fun.

there's a really old native american staircase in there.

double arch. it was my favorite.

i think this is green river overlook. either that or grand viewpoint.

Tatiana throwing caution to the wind and entering the terrifying unknown of an ancient anasazi indian ruin. it was mostly just a circular hole in the ground with lots of dead spiders on the thatched ceiling, but it was still pretty cool :)

me having an arizona tea party in arizona

Danilo at Natural Bridges National Park, pointing to a petroglyph of a long-neck dinosaur. It's way easier to see in person. it doesnt photograph that well.

it's been an amazing trip so far. i can't believe i get the privilege of going to see all of these places and learn all of these things. hopefully next week will be good too. we're supposed to go to the grand canyon, bryce national park and zion national park, but we've been hearing a lot about snow. so hopefully we'll be able to go, but even if we cant it's still been a fantastic trip.