Ketchup:

I just finished unpacking from my trip to Boston, which was over two weeks ago. I only decided to unpack now because I need my suitcase to go to Florida on Wednesday night. Otherwise, I'd probably let it all go right on sitting there. Sean says I need a "rock bottom" for habits like this. A "rock bottom" is a wrestling move that Sean basically thinks will solve any problem in the world. I have yet to be impressed. My roommate, Amy Beth, is starting to pack up all her stuff to take back to Seattle this summer. Allan walked through our room the other day and said, "Oh Carolyn, are you packing too?" My response? No, I just live like this.

So, I'm really, really excited about going to Florida. I am going to have a bridal shower! Ever since I was about 9 or 10 years old, and went to both Lisa's and Theresa's bridal showers in the same year, I have wanted a bridal shower more than almost anything. A bridal shower and a rehearsal dinner. These events always struck me as far more important and glamorous than the wedding itself. Some girls dream about their weddings growing up, I dreamed about my rehearsal dinner. This is probably why I bought my rehearsal dinner dress before even securing a wedding dress.

Today made me so very happy because after a week of oppressively cold weather, it was sunny and relatively warm, and I wore my soon to be sister-in-law's red track shorts from middle school, and felt quite exuberant and sunny. After premarital counseling with our dear Father David, we drove home via State College, and stopped at the beautiful park situated quite nicely at the intersection of State College and Bastanchury. We parked the car, and stood for awhile in the warm sunlight, watching the green hills, and the hazy, still-snow-covered mountains in the distance. Life is so beautiful, and I was seized with an unshakable desire to go hiking. I made Sean promise that we will go hiking a lot when we get married, because hopefully then I will have a job with somewhat regular hours and will not have to work on the weekends.

Speaking of jobs, I will take a brief moment to mention my frustrations with my current job searching status: It is, for the most part, halted. I realized that I can't apply for a job in April and then say that I can't start working until July. So I'm still keeping my eye out there for opportunities, but I really do think that I'll have to wait awhile longer before I can really start applying for jobs--which is just as well, I suppose, considering how much work it's taking me to plan this wedding.

Yesterday, we celebrated St. George's Day, at St. George's, no less, which is the name given to the back apartment of Took Hall, where Peter Gross and Lewis Reynolds currently reside. The party was nothing short of splendid: we drank tea, and ate treacle toffee and all other sorts of specifically British delicacies, played the Great Dalmudi (of which I had a brief, but "M-A-L-evilent" reign, as Sean dubbed it [which is a lie, because I was an absolutely delightful ruler]), read aloud the story of St. George slaying the dragon, made merry, and said many times, "God, England, and St. George!" We left feeling quite jolly, which could have simply been a result of all the treacle I consumed going straight to my bloodstream for a wondrous sugar high.

My reading life has been quite interesting of late. Upon finishing Two Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle (which I highly recommend), I picked up a couple of books and tried to start them, to no avail. They just didn't feel right. And then a strange thing occurred--something similar to what I imagine a pregnant woman experiences when she starts to crave laundry detergent, or pickles, or something equally odd--I had a literary craving: a craving to read Ovid. And so I did. I read the first two books of The Metamorphoses, and loved every word of it. I read parts of it aloud to Claire, and she enjoyed the poetry as well. (At least it made her laugh.) With that craving out of my system, I have embarked on a new adventure: Science Fiction. Particularly, the Miles Vorkosigan series, of which I just finished the second book: Barrayar. IT IS SO GOOD! AND SO FUN! I love reading just about anything I can get my hands on, but there is the specific and unbeatable pleasure of reading a good story, that draws you in and doesn't let you go until the last page. Sean will probably be relieved that I've finished this book, since I've spent the last couple of days making continuous statements like, "I've just GOT to find out what happens on Barrayar!!!!"

In the audio book world, which is another pleasant land in which I often travel, I just finished listening to Whale Rider, which delighted me beyond belief with its characters and excellent reading, and now I am listening to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets--my least favorite book in the HP series, but wholly wonderful nevertheless.

I told Sean this afternoon, in all serious, and probably with only a hint of exaggeration (if I am honest with myself), "You know, after Christ, and you, and my family, and my Torrey education....Harry Potter is probably the best thing that's ever happened to me."

The end.
(For tonight.)

"I am a hostage to my own humanity..."

1. I've decided I want to be a nanny.

By that I mean, I want to pursue being a full-time, professional nanny, because--after all my skirmishes and struggles over grad-school options and career moves, this fits. I would love it, and enjoy it, and be good at it, and I am qualified for it as well.

In some ways, it feels really, really good to know what I want to do, and thus, to go about pursuing it. But it's also far harder to want something...to really want it--it just makes waiting for it, patiently, so much harder. It was easy to apply to any job that looked remotely possible just for the heck of it, but now that I want a specific job, my heart feels much more on the line.

2. Sean and I have a tentative plan.

This is a relief because I was starting to go insane with not having any definite plans for after our marriage. Our plan? Well, unless something drastically changes (like one or both of us get a good job), we'll pack all our stuff up in L.A. and take it up to his parents' house in the Bay Area. We'll enjoy our wedding and honeymoon, and afterward come back and stay at his parents' house for a few (couple?) months while we look for jobs. This makes me happy. While I suppose it would be ideal to have our own place picked out before the wedding, this just takes all the pressure off. It allows us to finish up at Biola, to graduate, enjoy family, get married and honeymoon without having to stress out majorly about jobs. It provides us with a few months margin (and free rent!) while we start to set up our lives after our wedding.

3. That being said, I am still frantically looking for jobs. I guess the fact that I've been working for the past 10 years makes me somewhat hesitant about being jobless. I nearly drove myself to a panic attack, worrying about jobs and such today. Finally, I had to set my phone down and stop checking my email compulsively to see if I'd heard from potential employers. This was good. I read a book. Took a nap. Then woke up and started frenziedly applying for more positions. Ah, well. It was a nice reprieve.

4. Why is it so hard to trust God? Or, why am I finding it so hard to trust God right now? Nothing in my life has ever lead me to believe I can't trust him...every experience adds on to all the reasons I have to believe his promises, and yet when stuff like this arises: situations full of uncertainty, it's like I'm back at square one. My "little faith" bothers me so much. I have been trying to meditate on Proverbs 3:5-6 and let it calm my heart. Still! Oh the inconveniences of being human!

Confessions:

I live in a house that is over one hundred years old. At night, when everyone else is sleeping and I run water to brush my teeth, I can hear the old pipes creaking and rumbling. It took me a long time to realize that the noises I was hearing were the pipes. But now, I pretend that there's a basilisk in my pipes, and it makes me really happy at 1:00 o'clock in the morning to imagine a mythical creature living in my house's pipes. It brings me that much closer to Harry Potter. It makes my life feel a lot more exciting. I'm glad that at 23 my imagination is still running smoothly!

Big News!!!

Tonight at Target, we registered for the most important item on our entire registry:

Great Day:

8:32 a.m. -I read Till We Have Faces while Riley sleeps.

11:48 a.m. -Bubbles skitter in the wind, or pop with a splash as they are pricked by stalks of grass.

4:05 p.m. -Claire asks me how mermaids go pee-pee.

5:27 p.m. -I dance to Belle and Sebastian in the car, while driving to my third babysitting job of the day.

7:11 p.m. -Jonathan tells me he likes me!!

7:30 p.m. -Thomas asks me to lay my hand on his hand and pray that his guardian angel will "fight all the bad stuffs and protect me." So I do.

8:23 p.m. -I get home, take a long hot bath, and continue reading my book.

!!!

I'm back in the swing of things here in California! Well, mostly. I stopped by Stater Bros. on the way to work today to pick up some groceries. I picked out all my favorites: French bread, pepper jack cheese, edamame, cinnamon gum...and then I got up to the cashier to pay, and I didn't have my wallet. Lame! I was so sad, I had to leave before the cashier could see the tears in my eyes.

It's great to be back with Claire and Nicholas--I kissed Nicholas about 300 times just to make up for all the kisses I missed while I was gone. Claire and I played outside with her new watering cans and the hose. I got really into it--I pretended the dry parts of the lawn were countries who had never heard the word of God, and that the water was the Good News. So I kept filling up my watering can from the barely trickling hose and shouting, "Bring the Gospel to the nations, Claire!! Bring the Gospel!" Poor child.

Lauren, Adria, and I met up at the Fullerton Farmer's Market today, and bought all kinds of lovely flowers and vegetables and fruits. (And I ate so many of the avocado samples that I thought they were going to kick me out of the market.) The corn on the cob there is SO good, especially doused in lime juice. Amidst the heaps of cauliflower, bell peppers, Persian cucumbers, green beans and strawberries, Adria declared that if she ever gets married she is going to carry a bouquet of vegetables.

We bought flat bread, hummus, green beans, potatoes, strawberries, and renunculus (sp?) and took them back to Adria's apartment for a dinner party!

I love my life, especially this day. But I do want a couple things:

1. Sean to get home from Hawaii.

2. Sleep because I am working for 12 hours tomorrow!

Be a man, Allan!!!!!

In a couple hours I'm going to catch the commuter rail and head to Boston to catch my flight back to L.A. I am simultaneously happy and sad. I've been having such a great time with Megan, and I feel so at home here, that it's hard for me to reconcile myself with leaving. At the same time, I am flying back to a very full, wonderful life: thus, I am happy.

Last night I made a wedding website on The Knot. Now I feel like my wedding is even more of a reality...especially since it gives you that little count down thing. 80 days, and I will have a different last name! Megan and I had a wonderful lounging day yesterday...Or I guess I was the one who did the most of the lounging while she worked and went to classes, but I did go to one class with her. I napped, worked on a bunch of wedding details (this event might actually come together, believe it or not), and read Things I've Been Silent About, by Azar Nafisi (so good). We had Annie's Mac and Cheese for dinner, and watched Jeopardy, LOST, and an Office Marathon on TBS--Consequently I have been singing all day, "Ryan started the fire!"

Today we went on a walk in the woods--I wanted to go one more time before I had to leave. Sean's been sending me pictures of sea turtles on the beaches of Oahu, so I've been desperately wanting to see a turtle myself--And today, while we were walking in the woods, I found a little turtle right in the middle of the path. I screamed, and nearly scared Megan to death, but it was very exciting! We almost met a horse on the trail whose name is Dustin Hoofman, which makes me really, really glad since I am a devoted fan of The Graduate.

On Monday, Megan and I took the commuter rail into Boston, and then the T out to Cambridge where--with all the good fortune in the world--we stumbled onto the best tour of Harvard ever given in the history of the world. The guy leading it was this dynamic, hilarious history major wearing a shirt reading, "HAHVAHD," and he told the funniest stories so that by the end we were hanging on every word. I saw the windows of the rooms where John Adams, John Hancock, and Sam Adams lived...as well as the dorm where JFK and Teddy Roosevelt lived while at Harvard. So much history! We also learned about lots of Harvard legends, rituals, and secrets...Primal Scream being our favorite. By the end of the tour, I was happy to tip him the requested 10 dollars, and I walked around laughing unstoppably for the next hour. I bought a Harvard magnet for my collection, and then Megan and I had lunch at a bar called Grendel's Den. I had to eat there, just for the name. We ordered the Cheese Fondue for Two--Neither of us having ever had cheese fondue before, we figured Grendel's Den was the appropriate place to try it. My words upon tasting the said entree went something like this, "I have found love....I have come home."

After that we took the T to Beacon Hill, and walked down Charles Street until we reached Boston Public Gardens, and I got to see Make Way for Ducklings! We walked through the Gardens and the Boston Common, and everything was so green, the flowers blooming, Spring coming, the trees swaying in the breeze--It was so pretty that it literally hurt. We picked up the Freedom Trail and followed it all through Boston, seeing many amazing historical sites along the way, until we reached Old North Church--the church where Paul Revere saw the lanterns, "One if by land, two if by sea!" I've been there before, but I think that this time I had more of the capacity to appreciate it. There was also a statue of St. Francis preaching to the birds in the garden outside the church, and I gave him a kiss on the cheek.


Well, I've got to go pack!

"A king dreaming of sunshine...and a wolf."

HAPPY EASTER! CHRIST RISEN!

And my heart and my life are bursting with happiness!

Today was so beautiful, even though it started at the incredibly early hour of 6:00 a.m. We went to a sunrise service on the beach, and stood, shivering and singing in the cold morning light, with our feet making gentle impressions on the soggy sand. In the Eastern sky, glorious oranges and pinks flamed with beauty, and in the Western sky the tissue paper moon clung stubbornly to the day. "Sing ye heavens, and earth reply..." And it was not hard to imagine the sun, and the gray sheet of ocean, the sea gulls, and the moon all celebrating the joy of resurrection.

Creation knew about Resurrection long before Jesus ever actually died on the Cross and rose from the dead. C.S. Lewis said that the very lengthening of the days during Spring--the returning of light--and the blossoming of all the flowers and trees that died during winter--foreshadow and affirm the Resurrection.

So I stood there, hardly able to conceive of the goodness and the wonder and the beauty of living in a world where the Resurrection is a reality. Not a fairy tale, but the essential truth...the foundation upon which all things exist.

The Bible says that man's days are like grass, that we are dust. We flourish like a flower of the field, the winds blows over us, and we are gone, and our place remembers us no more. And yet, as I've wandered these New England woods and towns the past few days, I am convinced that even the short life of these flowers does not take away from their beauty. They are beautiful in their time. And man is not simply made of dust, but of the Breath of God.

In church, sitting on the worn wooden pews and trying not to fall asleep, I was filled with the warm realization that Christmas and Easter make my life bearable, worth living, actually valuable, and wonderful...As long as Christmas and Easter endure, as long as their Truth remains among us, we will have hope.

After church, we came home and I took a luxuriously long Easter nap, and then Megan's friend Amy picked us up and took us to Lynn, where Gordon has a dorm in the city. Angela, her sister Heather, Anna, Andrew, Amy, Megan, and I shared a lunch of pasta, salad, garlic bread and brownies, and played Bible trivia games, Cheats, and telephone pictionary (hence, the title of this blog). Telephone pictionary sent me through roof with laughter, and settled me into a joyously happy mood that I've had the rest of the day, because I laughed until the tears were running down my face, and I just couldn't laugh enough.

Megan and I got back to Gordon around dusk, and went for a walk in the woods to Gull Pond, talking about life and God and listening to the tree frogs and throwing rocks into the water. When night finally settled we sat on the dock at Coy Pond and I told her stories about the preschoolers in my Sunday School Class at Blessed Sacrament.

We ended this most lovely day snacking on salt and vinegar chips and looking at pictures on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com --a site I most highly recommend. (I also retook the Harry Potter house quiz, and am still decidedly Hufflepuff.)

Tomorrow we're going to Boston!

"Jesus came up from the ground so dirty,
with worms in his hair and a hand so sturdy,
to call us his magic, we call him worthy..."

"Yeahhhhhh...."

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life, which surprised me, really, because I only got three hours of sleep the night before. In my experience, nights with three hours of sleep are not usually precursors of great days, but yesterday proved to be a delightful exception. I went to bed at 12:30 a.m. and woke up at 4:00 a.m. when Sean texted me to say they'd finally landed in Honolulu. He also informed me that he won the Halfway to Hawaii Contest--meaning that he correctly guessed the time at which the airplane was exactly halfway to Hawaii, and thus won a bottle of wine. I AM SO PROUD! After that I couldn't fall back to sleep--probably because I'd been binge sleeping all day Thursday and a lot of Friday. My body was basically glutted with sleep, and could take no more. At least, that's the only possible explanation I can come up with for why I found myself so uncharacteristically wide awake through the wee hours of Saturday morning. I waited til 6:30 a.m. and then got up to take a shower and get ready for the day.

Megan's friend Sarah picked us up and took us to the train station where we took the commuter rail to Boston's North Station. There we caught another train and started rolling out of Boston's massive industrial landscape toward the woods, fields, and ponds of Concord. There's nothing quite like an old friend. We flew down the rails, munching on tortilla chips and laughing about old Mark Lowry comedy videos. Example: "What happens when two women love the same man, and that man is UGLY?"

Forty minutes later we alighted in the unwittingly charming town of Concord, Massachusetts. Shouldering our bags, we followed the directions of Megan's hand-drawn map, and walked to the downtown area, which was filled with old bookstores and antique shops, and a million other quaint distractions, but we had only one purpose: Orchard House. We walked briskly down Lexington, a road lined with beautiful New England houses, so stately and inviting at the same time, and yards filled with daffodils, crocuses, and forsythia...and then we rounded a corner and there it stood. Megan grabbed my arm and we stood there for a moment in disbelief, but then we went and immediately signed up for a guided tour of the house. It was so unbelievably awesome! We got to see the desk where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, we got to see actual paintings done by May Alcott (Amy), we even got to see the big old barn that Bronson built to host his Philosophy meetings in the back yard. They had music from the Little Women soundtrack playing throughout the house, and it was like a dream come true.

During the tour, we befriended Riley, an 8th grade boy who was tagging along with his parents for a sight-seeing trip in Concord. He and I went to sit outside after the tour was over, and I asked him if we could get a ride with his parents back to downtown, since we were starving for lunch. So these friendly strangers took us back to town, and we ate lunch at a bustling cafe, and then explored a couple used bookstores and antique shops, where I inevitably found some treasures that I simply had to make my own: Most notably, a small copy of King Lear printed in the 1800's with which I immediately fell in love, and some old, handmade Concord lace which I am going to wrap around my bridal bouquet.

After our shopping expedition (and running into Riley again in the antique store, which was called "Thoreauly Antiques), Megan and I set off for Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. The cemetery is only a short walk from the downtown area, and we found it easily enough, and entered through Author's Gate, in search of the famous Author's Ridge. We had been in the old and vast cemetery for maybe a minute before I cried out, "PROCTOR!!!!!" in a voice thick with emotion. Standing before me was a large obelisk reading, "Proctor," in stone carved letters. Try as I might, I couldn't convince myself that it didn't belong to my most beloved John Proctor, and I was nearly hyperventilating with the excitement of seeing his grave. Next we found Emerson's tomb, and then the Alcott family's, then Hawthorne, and finally Thoreau. At each one we paid our deepest literary homage, and I thought that if we spread out our blanket and sat down amongst these long dead writers, I could probably write something beautiful and inspired, with the words simply flowing out of my pen. But I didn't bring anything to write on or with--just a book to read in case the train rides got long--so we found a shady spot, and sat down to rest--since by then our bodies were rapidly tiring.

After a lovely rest in the shady graveyard, we set out for our next destination: Lexington and Concord--site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, and the shot heard round the world. As meaningful as it was to see Orchard House, I don't think anything compares to the Concord battleground, where you can see the land on which the British soldiers stood and then, across Old North Bridge, the land on which the farmers and Minute Men assembled to defend their lives and fight for their freedom. I got tears in my eyes (and if they had been playing, "Proud to Be an American" in the background, I would've fallen down weeping) as we gazed on the birthplace of our nation. I kept imagining Paul Revere riding his horse like mad through the countryside, pounding the turf between Boston and Concord and shouting, "The British are coming!" and all the brave men and boys who grabbed their guns, and, with the insatiable courage which makes me so proud of my country's history, went out to fight the greatest army in the world at that time. Magnificent! I was near bursting with patriotism and pride.

We lingered there as long as we could, taking in the peacefulness and quiet, which made it so difficult to imagine the terrain filled with soldiers and guns and blood and war. We finally headed back to town, walking past the Old Manse where Hawthorne lived when he first got married, and the vegetable garden that Thoreau planted for them as a wedding gift. We dragged our weary bodies back to the train station, and caught our train back to Boston, and an hour and a half later we caught another train back to Gordon.

The best days are the ones in which you earn your rest, and fall into bed to, as Megan says, "Sleep hard on clean white sheets." Of course, the best days are also the ones spent stuffing your eyes with wonder, as Bradbury describes it. And the very best days are those spent with the ones you love the most.

Writing from the East Coast!

Yesterday morning I arrived at Boston's Logan International Airport, and Megan came to pick me up. We took the subway, and then a commuter train back to Wenham, and now I am comfortably ensconced in a charming little apartment on the campus of Gordon University. I slept all day yesterday in my airy, sunny bedroom, which I have all to myself. Last night, we ate tortilla soup and watched Made of Honor, and even though I'd slept all day, I still managed to fall asleep around 2:00 a.m. and sleep for 10 more hours.

Megan woke me up at noon today, which is a good thing because who knows how long I might have slept? After a shower, and a bowl of cheerios, Megan took me on a tour of Gordon's campus. And while she enjoyed the delightfully warm weather (after a long Massachusetts winter), I couldn't believe how unrealistically cold it felt for April. The loveliest part of our day was going walking in the Gordon woods. It rained three days straight right before I got here, so different parts of the path were flooded and the woods were filled with all kinds of marsh and swamp looking areas. I spent the walk throwing various sticks and rocks into the different puddles and ponds about us, and exclaiming excitedly over the newly blooming clumps of sunny daffodils scattered along the path. There's nothing like a still-bare winter landscape to make flowers look even more beautiful.

Tonight Megan and I made a chicken pot pie, and watched 500 Days of Summer (a movie we've both been dying to see). Aside from the inevitable strangeness of a movie that teaches belief in true love by telling an ill-fated love story, I liked it. What I liked even more was opening the Blockbuster case to take out the movie, and seeing that Sean had written a special love-note for me on the Blockbuster receipt which I'd mindlessly folded up and shoved in the case.

Right now Sean is about 35,000 feet in the air, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, in a jet that should soon be nearing the Hawaiian Islands...and I miss him.

Tomorrow, Megan and I are going on an adventure...but not just any adventure--the best kind of adventure--a literary adventure to Orchard House, home of the Alcotts! We also hope to visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (burial site of Emerson) and Lexington/Concord...where the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired. We shall see how successful we are because we do not have a car, and we are relying on public transit and our own four legs for transportation!