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 :)