Further Up and Further In

Why is it that I never feel like blogging all about the events that I anticipate so much?

I had a great weekend in Charleston, filled with sun time, beach time, ocean time, downtown Charleston time, seafood time, good church time, Mother’s Day time, ice cream time, walking on the Battery time…tons of great stuff. And yet I just don’t feel like recapping all of it. Maybe because I know that if I get into all of it I’ll just go on and on and ON and on and write an entry to rival the length of my entry about my trip to Orlando. So maybe I’ll just put in a few notes, instead of narrating the entire trip from start to finish.

In no particular order:

- Man, I love she-crab soup. I don’t know if I’d had it before, except maybe from one of the sample people at Harris Teeter. But my mom got some at dinner on Saturday night, and I had a bite, and then I got some of my own. I also had a crab cake sandwich, which was pretty good, and which usually would have been my favorite part of the meal, but dang, that soup, it was AWESOME. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. (And you know how you get such a huge appetite after being outside in the water all day? I was insanely hungry by the time we got downtown and ate, and somehow I was happy to have something hot and sort of stick-to-your-ribs even though it was hot outside.)

- Isle of Palms is GREAT. This is the third time I’ve been now, and it’s just been lovely each time (except for the first time, with the sun and my stupidity resulting in me getting sun poisoning on my face…eww. But even so it was still lovely). It’s a really clean beach, and since our friend Leven tipped us off to the free parking a little bit farther down from the public area of the beach, we were able to get a nice spot without eight other blankets’ worth of people breathing down our necks. Seriously, it was crazy – the tide came up REALLY far, and since the storm the week before had apparently deposited a huge amount of…I guess it was reeds, or something, on the sand, you could only move your stuff so far up the beach before you were either on the reeds (uncomfortable) or on the dunes (slanty). We had enough space that we could keep moving back as the tide came in, but when we took a walk down toward the pier later in the day, we saw people basically all on top of each other, with some peoples’ stuff just IN the water almost. I mean, not floating away, but coolers being lapped by the waves, chairs in the water, that kind of thing. INSANELY crowded.

But the water was perfectly cool-but-not-too-cool, and we got in and enjoyed it immensely. Lots of bobbing around just past the breakers. Except when Rachel and I saw two…fins…on unidentified marine creatures, and weren’t sure enough that it wasn’t something disagreeable to stick around. Actually we pretty much ran squealing out of the water and stood on the beach shaking, but whatever. (I know it wasn’t a shark, ‘cause don’t sharks travel alone? And there were definitely TWO fins. And they weren’t big enough to be dolphins, I don’t think, unless my depth perception is WAY off and they were much farther away than I thought…the fins looked like they were about six inches tall, big enough that whatever they were attached to was certainly no minnow, but not big enough for a nice safe fun dolphin. Unless it was two BABY dolphins, in which case, AWWWW! And so sad that we couldn’t play with them.

At any rate, we had phenomenal weather, which was especially wonderful given that all week the forecast sort of hovered around “partly cloudy, with a 40% chance of thunderstorms.” It was clear and blue, with hardly any humidity, and about 80-85 degrees. See? Lovely.

- Sweet cream ice cream with raspberries mixed in, from Cold Stone, is the nectar of the gods. I never order mixins (or whatever they call them at Cold Stone) – I don’t like chewy or crunchy things interrupting the smoothness of the ice cream (same way I don’t like nuts in my baked goods – the interruptors themselves aren’t necessarily abhorrent, I just would rather my baked goods or my ice cream to be…uninterrupted). But my mom ordered hers with raspberries, and I didn’t even know they HAD raspberries, and hot damn, I am ordering that more often because it is GOOD. It is SO good. It is especially good when you’re eating it in the hot sun, walking around downtown Charleston and looking in the windows of all the cute shops.

- Redeemer Presbyterian Church (I think that’s what it was called?) in downtown Charleston is a super cool church. Being as critical as I am, theologically and worship-music-ally and ecclesiastically, it’s rare that I walk into an unfamiliar church and don’t feel any discomfort at all during the service, but that’s how I felt at Redeemer. It helped that we bumped into some of my church friends (and an old boss! All in the same family) from Charlotte down there, visiting their daughter, and ALSO discovered that one of the RTS students goes there, AND discovered that the people in front of us knew Leven, the guy in whose house we were staying (it was his church, too – he couldn’t go, he had to work, at SIX-THIRTY AM after getting in from CHINA at ELEVEN AT NIGHT, poor guy). But it wasn’t just that the people were friendly and/or familiar. The music was really well done – the senior pastor was also apparently the worship leader, and he played the piano, and there was a choir made up of mostly people my age (which is kind of rare in a church choir, huh?), and a guy on an unamplified guitar, and maybe someone on djembes. And on a few songs, someone on a trumpet, and someone on a recorder. But…having the choir basically lead the worship was really cool. I was afraid it would be cheesy, but it was pretty awesome. Their harmonies were good, and they just sounded…sincere without, again, being cheesy. The sermon was good, and the liturgy was good, and it was just…I really liked it a lot. We’ll DEFINITELY have to go back the next time we’re in Charleston. And oh yes, there will be a next time.

- How in the WORLD did all those old-timey ladies wear SO MANY CLOTHES? It is HOT down there. Even right on the battery, even in the face of a storm, with a nice stiff breeze, it’s HOT. In May. Can you imagine living in one of those houses farther back inland, without the benefit of the sea breeze, in July? No wonder so many women fainted all the time. They weren’t pansies, they were getting constant heat exhaustion!

Those are about all of the just random thoughts I can come up with, but I think you can get a good idea of what the trip was like from those.

Unless someone WANTS a thirty-five page essay on the minute-by-minute details…no, I take it back, I won’t write it even if someone wants it.

I came to some interesting realizations this past week.

They’re probably “duh” statements to everyone else, but a lightbulb really went on for me about a few things. And it’s helped me be so much more content and less frustrated with other people. (It’s really the same realization applied to two different situations, now that I think about it.)

The first one was this. I realized that just like I can’t understand people who don’t care anything about their appearance, there are people who can’t understand ME because I don’t care what kind of car I drive or what my car looks like.

And I don’t. I was thinking the other day, “Why do people spend so much money on a status car? Why does it matter what it looks like as long as it works okay?” Now, I would like to insert a disclaimer here that I’m not saying that I wouldn’t care at ALL if my car was a puke-green rattletrap with a bad paint job, but like, I don’t care that I have a ’98 Chevy Cavalier instead of something newer or cooler. I just don’t care. I’ll admire a cool car that someone else has, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest that I don’t have one.

The people that WOULD be bothered by that probably think I’m nuts. “How can she not CARE?? Doesn’t she realize the image she’s projecting by driving something so pedestrian and boring and old??”

And I have a similar lack of understanding towards people who don’t care about their personal appearance. On top of that, if I had the money, I would willingly spend $200-$300 on a Coach purse, because I love how it looks and it’s sort of a “status” thing. (I have a fake Coach right now, not a knock-off made to look real with the logo and everything, but a purse that took a Coach design and changed it some and isn’t trying to look like it’s real but is sort of…channeling the design, if that makes sense. I get embarrassed a little bit when I’m in line in a store, for example, and there’s someone in front of me who has the actual Coach purse that my purse got the design idea from, and I have this urge to say “I know mine’s not real, I’m not trying to pass it off as the real thing.”) So it’s really sort of the same thing as spending a lot of money on a ‘status’ car, for the image.

The other realization I had was in relation to music and movies. On the board, some people were discussing how much they didn’t like X-Men 3 and Spiderman 3, and which one was worse, and why they were both bad, etc. I really liked both of those movies (though, as I said on the board, I never read the comics, so inconsistencies with the ‘real’ storyline don’t bother me – they’re just fun movies). A lot of the complaints people had were with things like continuity – there’s one scene in X-Men 3 where in one shot it’s daytime and in the next shot it’s night-time, completely inexplicably. And a lot of people are mentioning the bad acting in Spiderman 3. And…I didn’t notice any of that. Now that I think about it, I remember the day/night thing in X-Men 3, but I don’t think I can even recognize good acting when I see it (only rarely), and can only recognize bad acting when it kicks me in the face. It’s just not something I care about. I end up liking a movie, or not, because of the story, because of what it said and the themes and sometimes the likability of the characters, not because of the cinematography or the acting or whatever. (Though I know from seeing stuff that people say is good cinematography or acting that I do tend to enjoy movies that have that…I just don’t notice it and BAD cinematography or acting or lack of continuity or whatever won’t keep me from enjoying a movie.)

Then I realized…maybe some people are like this about music. I’ve had several rants about American Idol lately, how I hated that people were making a mockery of it by voting for Sanjaya, and how as a singer, it’s really hard to see the people who are deserving of winning it not be recognized and honored for their talent. And it bothered me that other people didn’t always see it that way, that they didn’t care whether the person had vocal ability, but cared more about whether they were a good performer or had a good personality or whatever. But then I got it – maybe these people feel about music (vocal ability in particular – everyone has an opinion about music, it seems) the way I feel about cinematography and continuity: they just don’t care if it’s good or not. Other things are more important to them. Maybe they don’t have the background to be able to tell if someone is vocally excellent, the way I don’t have the background to be able to tell if a movie is skillfully shot or edited. Maybe not caring about those things helps them enjoy the performance as a whole more than I can, because I’m nit-picking about the flat note there and the shrillness here.

Both of these realizations were very helpful to me. It’s nice to begin to understand other people a little bit better, you know?

An interesting realization came to me just now while listening to my iTunes on shuffle. I never do that – I’m always afraid that tons and tons of live stuff will come in, with tons of talking, which I can’t stand at work (too distracting). I decided to live on the edge, though, and the mix iTunes chose for me has actually been kind of great. So far (and Alisa, yeah, I totally admit that I’m stealing this idea from you, because I like it a lot!):

Piano Man, Billy Joel
Blessed Be Your Name, Matt Redman
Received, Shane Barnard
Catch 22, Andrew Peterson
Truth No. 2, Dixie Chicks
Free, Patty Griffin
Ticket Home, Sandra McCracken
In The Light, dc Talk (hmmm.)
When You Say Nothing At All, Allison Krauss + Union Station
My, Oh My, The Wreckers
Three Fine Daughters of Farmer Brown, Eddie From Ohio
Brown-Eyed Girl, Everclear (I love the Van Morrison version, but I love this one too)
Head Over Heel, Sandra McCracken
Creepin’ In, Norah Jones & Dolly Parton
Walk With Me, Caedmon’s Call (this is turning out to be a pretty good mix!)
O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion, Handel’s Messiah (I almost skipped it, but remembered that I actually really love this)
Isn’t It Love, Andrew Peterson
Out Of My League, Stephen Speaks
Mystery of Mercy, Caedmon’s Call
More Love, Dixie Chicks
Judas Kiss, Sandra McCracken
Thy Mercy, My God, Sandra McCracken (hmmm, I’ve got a lot of her on here, I think)
If You’re Gone, Matchbox Twenty
In My Own Eyes, Brandi Carlile

Anyway, I realized that when songs by my favorite artists come up in the shuffle, I get excited, even if they’re not my favorite songs by those artists. For example: I don’t love Ticket Home, but I do love Sandra, and I got excited when it came up, as if Sandra was being played on the radio, or something. Which is good, because it makes me listen to the songs I don’t listen to as much (Free is another one of those – no problem with it, just not a favorite), and then I discover I like them more than I thought I did.

Now I’m wondering, maybe iTunes chooses from the songs I listen to most? Or something? ‘Cause nothing has come up that I really hate, or just never listen to. (I don’t really have that much stuff that I really hate on this computer, anyway, or in general, but you know, there are some songs on albums I’ve ripped to this computer that I just really don’t like. And none of those have come up yet. Fabulous! I need to do this shuffle thing more often.

*****

Yesterday, with all of the call-room furniture and all of the furniture in what will be Angela’s office spread out in the hall, students kept asking whether we were having a yard sale, and whether they could just take a rejected lamp and/or a computer. At one point, the carrels in the call-room were moved halfway out into the hall, and to even just walk down the hall you had to lose at least fifteen pounds so you could squeeze through the gap. Good thing we didn’t have a lot of prospective students visiting yesterday (well, one, but the carrels were back in the call-room when he came), or they would have felt less-than-welcomed.

Some of the guys just came and helped move some of the stuff back in, though, so that’s nice. Now I have to get all of the books out of my boss’s office and put them back on the shelves. YAY! Perfect Friday afternoon activity, if you ask me.

One of the things that amused me greatly about all this furniture in the hall is that there was one desk/table type thing (a very 80s-looking thing, with a medium-dark fake-wood top and chrome legs…classy) in the hall that was missing two legs. Like, both on one end. So it’s sort of…kneeling on the ground. I told Elizabeth it reminded me of a kneeling donkey, and she looked at me funny and then said in a VERY exaggerated British accent “Oh it’s a WOUNDED donkey! It’s KNEELING in the hall!” You probably had to be there, but I keep chuckling as I walk by the kneeling-donkey-desk. It really looks like that to me, y’all. If I had a camera I’d take a picture. Maybe I can draw one on Paint.

Okay, it’s harder than I thought to get the angles right so you can really see what it looks like. Hmmm.

All right, there we go. Please feel free to laugh at my horrible lack of artistry, but you get the idea.

Now, doesn’t it look like a kneeling donkey?

It doesn’t?

WELL LOOK AT THE TIME.

(I made up that word - like it? My post is full of abrupt topic-shifts and endings here, so it works, I think.)

I’m currently eating a little…I guess it’s a lemon tartlet? left over from coffee chapel this morning. (I just looked over my archives and it looks like I haven’t written about coffee chapel, which is kind of shocking to me. It’s a very important part of my work-week! So let me back up a little bit.)

Coffee chapel is a half-hour time of fellowship over coffee and donuts that’s built into the Wednesday morning class schedule. On Tuesdays, we have chapel from 10:00-11:00, and on Thursdays we have prayer chapel from 10:30 to 11:00, so it was only natural to name our coffee fellowship time on Wednesday a ‘chapel’ time too. I mean, the guys probably talk about God and stuff when they’re fellowshipping, right? So it totally counts.

I usually help Tari and Jennifer get everything together about 45 minutes beforehand. Tari gets a really good deal on donuts from the Entenmann’s outlet in Gastonia, so what we do most of the time is put out several boxes’ worth of various donuts (chocolate-covered, cake, glazed, powdered) on trays, cut up some danishes (usually cheese and raspberry), put the trays out, make about 10 pots of coffee (from Caribou, which is a Wednesday-only specialty), put out all the fixin’s, put out some hot water and tea bags, and then wait for the hordes of students to descend upon us.

Jennifer and Tari and I have developed QUITE the competition over who gets to serve the most coffee. Instead of having the students serve themselves, we will ask them what they want (“Caf or decaf?”) and then fill their cup for them. Sometimes the competition gets a little stiff, and all of us will have a completely full cup of hot coffee ready to thrust at the next hapless student, who has to decide which of us is least likely to dump coffee on him if he refuses our offer. (Each of us have loyal customers who order coffee only from us – mine is graduating, though, so this was my last week of having a constant, guaranteed customer.)

It’s really nice that it’s built into the schedule, because it allows the students time to talk about what they’re learning, or just catch up with each other, or ask questions of professors. Sometimes wives and kids will come, too – on nice days, it’s common to see a bunch of strollers parked outside the lobby and lots of kids running around.

This morning’s coffee chapel was different because instead of the usual Entenmann’s donuts, we had some leftovers from the dessert social Women of RTS had on Monday night (which I very horribly FORGOT to go to!). There were mini cheesecake bites, the aforementioned lemon tartlets (and what looked like some raspberry tartlets, too), some cookies, and the piece de resistance (I can’t make those accent thingies work right!) – cream puffs

Oh, how I love me some cream puffs. As I told several people this morning, mini cream puffs from Sam’s were the only dessert that I required we serve at our wedding reception (in addition to cake, of course), mostly because I wanted an excuse to have some. These things are SO. GOOD. I may have had…well, a rather large number of them this morning. Ahem.

I think this is going to be a cooking-heavy week for me. I cooked up some taco meat last night (which reminds me of that awesome commercial for…I don’t even remember, something ESPN-related, I think? Anyway, where they’re playing Pictionary, and the person is clearly drawing the University of Texas logo [or is he drawing Bevo? I don’t remember], and they want the other guy to guess “Hook’em Horns!” or “Longhorns!” or “Bevo!” or whatever, but as soon as the guy [who is wearing a Texas A&M shirt] realizes what it is, he just refuses to give the right answer, and says stuff like “Cow” and then mutters “Taco meat.” It’s AWESOME. Maybe you have to see it yourself though), so that the work for having tacos tonight would be mostly done, and also so that I could have taco salad myself for dinner last night and lunch today. (My recipe, as opposed to Brandon’s family recipe, for taco salad is as follows: crush up a whole bunch of tortilla chips, enough to cover a dinner plate. Sprinkle shredded cheddar cheese across chips. Toss a few spoonfuls of seasoned taco beef over the chips and cheese. Top with half of a diced tomato and several generous spoonfuls of salsa. Mix well. SO good.) Then tonight after dinner, I’m going to buy some groceries for and make chicken tetrazzini, Brandon’s mom’s recipe, for us and for Shannon and Nat, since they just had a baby (by C-section!) and Shannon is still recovering and Nat is about to enter finals here at the seminary. And then I might also make Puppy Chow this Friday with my mom so that Brandon has something to munch on while we’re gone (though that might not be necessary, ‘cause my mom mentioned making an entire turkey breast just for Brandon and bringing it down. Turkey and Puppy Chow, ideal brain food!).

(Apologies for the abrupt topic shifts here…I don’t have any specific point to this post. Unlike most of my other OH-SO-COHESIVE posts.)

Have I mentioned that they’re doing some construction in and around my office? Because they are. Knocking down a wall, even. The secret hallway has finally been revealed, and a doorjamb installed, and the adjoining office to mine has been painted. For the past several days. They’ve kept the door closed, but the fumes, they are still reaching me. I’ve been having lovely visions of dancing pink elephants and flying unicorns, though, so I’ll be a little sad when they’re done painting. They’re also going to install new carpet in both adjoining offices, which means that the ‘call room’ (where the student workers…work) needed to be completely emptied. The workmen said they’d move the furniture, but one of my workers had to empty all of the shelves and stack everything up in the hall and in my boss’s office. The chaos around here is really quite something, but I know it’ll be worth it once Angela moves in next door and the call room is revamped and everything. We’re actually getting new furniture in there, too, to make it look a little less un-decorated and messy.

Alright, time to go back to hoping and praying that the weather will clear up for our Charleston trip!

I have chocolates in my candy bowl today.

This is a big deal because I swore, over and over, that I would never have chocolates in the candy bowl. (I think I’ve written about the candy bowl before – it sits on my desk, right by the door, and students come by and grab a piece of candy and say hi to me, and make me feel generally very popular.) I knew that if I had something that was appealing to me, I’d end up eating the entire bowl all the way down to the bottom, and then not only would there be no candy for the masses, I would also be a humongous pig.

But then! Then we bought a bag of assorted Easter candy a few days after Easter, for something like seventy-five cents, and it had mini Kit-Kat bars, mini Reeses cups (one of my favorite things ever – don’t like the big ones, but the mini ones are delectable), and caramel Hershey’s kisses. We’ve eaten everything but the kisses, because neither of us really like caramel all that much. I’ve been meaning to bring them to work for days, and finally remembered, and have a feeling I will be VERY popular very soon.

I pretty much hate caramel, actually – “not liking it all that much” is kind of a mild way to express my distaste for caramel flavors. So it’s actually quite safe to have them on my desk, because I have no desire whatsoever to eat them.

If it were mini Dove dark chocolates, now, that would be a serious issue. But caramel kisses are okay.

I’m hoping it doesn’t stay sort of half-heartedly dreary out. Sunday and yesterday were GORGEOUS, and now today it’s…eh. It’s not bad, it’s just not that great. Probably because of the storm off the East coast right now. At least it’s not raining. It rained enough last week that I started to just feel sort of soggy around the edges, especially with my cold, and was very excited to see the sun come out during church Sunday morning. I did still get to ride on Saturday (the barn is really a lovely place to be in the rain) – there’s a covered arena there that’s big enough to do some good bending work, serpentines and things. I actually did a warmup and started to head out into the big uncovered arena when Gianni felt the raindrops and turned right the heck around and back under the shelter. He’s usually not quite that obviously disobedient, but I didn’t mind because I definitely agreed with him.

We ended up not turning the horses out at the end of the day because it was still raining, and there was a forecast for thunderstorms, and the horses would just be out in the middle of a field unprotected and that could be dangerous. You could tell they were all pretty restless, though, ‘cause they’d just been inside all day with not much to do. Some of them play with their food or water buckets when they’re bored (to the point that they break them, and are no longer allowed to have buckets), some crib (where they grab onto a piece of wood with their teeth and take this grunting inhale of breath – pretty strange), and some just drool all over the place (one horse in particular, it’s quite disgusting). I felt bad for all of them – I knew they just wanted to run out to the pasture and kick up their heels, and they were in their stalls. Oh well – at least Sunday was nice so I knew they’d enjoy themselves then.

I had another be-at-the-church-at-DAWN worship rehearsal Sunday morning, which wasn’t nearly as bad as the one last week because I think I actually slept Saturday night. My cold is clearing up, for the most part (there’s the odd sniffle here and there, but that’s all), and I’ve finally gotten some energy back. We went to see Spiderman 3 with Melissa and Jake on Saturday night, but we went to a super-early show, so it didn’t keep me out too late or anything (yes, I am 86 years old, and have to be in bed by 10 if I get up that early). I didn’t even take a nap on Sunday! Alisa will be SO PROUD. Hehe.

Actually, if it hadn’t been so lovely outside, I probably would have, but I wanted to jump on my chance to spend some time at the pool and get a little sun before going to the beach this weekend (which now looks like it will be a stormy and rainy experience…BOO!). Lindsay came over after a little while and kept me company. It was great to just be able to sit out in the sun and not be too hot – it wasn’t more than 75 out and NO humidity, just a nice breeze. It was even warm enough for me to get in, verrrry slowly and with many squeakings at the chilliness of the water. Once I got in up to about my waist, though, it was great, and I enjoyed standing there talking to Lindsay for quite a while.

We ended up sort of cobbling together a dinner from what we all had, which was, on her and Ben’s part, chicken salad and buns to make sandwiches, and on our part…not a lot. Hehe. So we went to Fresh Market and got some potatoes to bake, and some spinach and artichoke dip and some awesome chips. And a dessert from the bakery for each of us. The boys crawled out from under their studying rocks long enough to join us, and we had a great time just sitting around the table eating and talking. It was a very relaxing day.

Except for the fact that I got QUITE the sunburn. I was very frustrated about it, too, since I had used lots of sunscreen and re-applied a couple of times, but it turns out that sunscreen expires after a year, and mine was probably at LEAST a year old, if not two. Hence the pinkness. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be, and the part that hurts the worst is actually on my left shin going down onto the top of my foot (as opposed to my shoulders), so I’m not really in any discomfort throughout the day. I have also used what amounts to a small inland ocean’s worth of aloe vera gel in a desperate attempt to keep from peeling, but I’m not sure it’s going to work. I’d really like to be just…tan this weekend, instead of multicolored and covered in flakes of dead skin. (TASTY!) (I just grossed myself out. But I admit it IS fun when you’re peeling huge sheets of skin off…I just don’t love the mottled effect it leaves.)

Thinking about it now, I realize it was a really good, low-key weekend. Brandon got a lot of study time in, what with me going riding and being at the pool, but we also did some stuff with friends. I don’t know why, but we just don’t go out and do stuff with couples very often, and it was fun to do something we were going to do anyway – go see Spiderman 3 – WITH other people. Why is this a new concept for me? I do not know.

I really did used to be a lot more social than I am now. I know part of it is because I am tired all the time, and part of it is because Brandon has to study a lot, so we can’t do too many couple-things, because he needs the evenings and the weekends to study so he can go to class and work during the week. Maybe that’ll change a little bit next semester, since he’s only taking I think five hours this fall (WOW), and about six next spring, and then he’ll be done. He’ll be working a lot more, but that won’t be so much in the evenings and the weekends.

It just made me want to be more aware to include other people in the stuff that we are planning to do anyway, like going to Borders and having coffee and reading books, or going to the puppy store, or going to Chick-Fil-A. Not all the time, because we want to have our own dates and stuff, too, but some of the time…more of the time than we do now.