And the adventure begins...

I start driving down to Pasadena with my dad and sister in about six hours. Wow. The next few weeks are going to fly by. My dad and sister will drop my stuff in storage in Pasadena after we arrive there on the 30th, and I'll be staying in someone else's place since my roommate and I don't have an apartment yet. Orientation starts on the 31st of August, I'll be job hunting in any free time that I have in that period, and then we leave for our 20 day trip to Manila, Philippines on the 6th of September. Why are we going to Manila? Part of the goal of the trip is to give intern participants a first (or additional) look at what poverty looks like outside of America. We get to interact with a couple who work for Servant Partners and live within a slum community in Manila, which will help to develop our vision for possibilities of what living and working among the poor could look like. Personally, I'm excited about the trip for several reasons. First of all, I love traveling to new places, and the Philippians is especially special to me because one of my good friends grew up there (although not in Manila). I'm excited to experience a small piece of her past. Secondly, my experience in Calcutta, India with InterVarsity's Global Urban Trek was really challenging and hard, and I feel like at points I shut down into survival mode and didn't always respond to what was happening as I would have liked in retrospect. I'm hoping for another chance to respond differently to the people and situations I'll encounter in Manila. If you are a praying person, please pray that our team will have a safe trip and be open to learning, especially learning how to give and receive love within the community of urban poor we'll be interacting with in Manila. Please also pray that these next few weeks will be a solid time of relationship building and friendship development among our intern class. Thanks! I'm not sure how regularly I'll be able to post for the next few weeks, but I shall when I can.

Rest

This last week at home has been really stressful for me. With my family moving back into my grandparents' house from Thailand, the house (including the room my sister and I share) is so full of stuff that there's practically no place to unpack anything to. My boxes from Salem haven't yet been unpacked because there's no room to put anything except on my bed! So I haven't packed for Pasadena yet, I'm studying for the GRE and taking it this Tuesday, and I have been feeling a little lost and panicky about not having a job or even an inkling of a job for this fall. Add onto that the crunch of limited time to spend with my family and the general sense of loss and uncertainty that comes with most transitions, and I was feeling a little overwhelmed earlier this week.
And then I went backpacking overnight with my friend Cate. :) We hiked up into Jefferson Park and camped in an absolutely beautiful part of the woods with a view of Mt. Jefferson. I loved chatting with Cate, squishing my toes in the mud, splashing on the edge of what felt like our own private lake, and just sitting and listening to the silence. I think it was the first time in several weeks that I felt thoroughly and overwhelmingly happy. Thank God for good friends who take you adventuring, for mountain meadows and forests to quiet your soul, and for family to come home to. :)

Queen of the Spatula Killers

Poor spatulas. The last couple days have seen some tragic plastic cookware deaths at my hands. The first time it happened, I was cooking a hamburger on the gas stove in our apartment, using my roomie Amanda's hefty, solid spatula. The burger was cooking slowly, so I put the spatula down and went over to the other side of the room to do something else. I was jolted a few minutes later by the sound of the smoke alarm going off, and as I ran back to the stove through the clouds of smoke filling our apartment, the first thing I saw was that the plastic spatula was on fire! As I grabbed the flaming spatula and doused it under the sink, I saw that the top half of the plastic end was gone. Whirling back to the stove and turning the gas off, I suddenly noticed the other half of the spatula top beginning to solidify onto the edge of the pan. I managed to pry most of it off, but there's still a little bit of plastic stuck permanently onto the pan.
You would think that this would teach me to watch my spatulas at all times while cooking, but unfortunately that lesson didn't save me from maiming another spatula, this time at my grandparents' house. I was frying up falafel balls, and I needed something to turn them over with, so I was using a wooden spoon and a plastic spatula together to do the job. There was a small amount of white stuff floating at one end of the pan, which thoroughly confused me, so I poked at it with the spatula. More white stuff floated off, this time from the end of the spatula, and as I lifted the spatula up, I was horrified to find that the end of it was melting off into the oil in the pan! I ran it under water right away, but while this re-solidified the end, it also thoroughly embedded black bits of gunk into it. So...I'm beginning to think that I should never cook with plastic implements, lest my bad luck continue. I'm cooking dinner again tomorrow night, so we'll see what happens! :)

Even though I spent my summer at Willamette, such a familiar place, there have been so many things that happened, both good and bad, that I didn't expect coming into the summer. I didn't expect the amount of time that I'd spend working outside of regular work hours. I didn't expect to get through so few of the books on my to-read list. I didn't expect to go to a drive-in movie for the first time, or the changes that took places in friendships, or a surprise party, or the crazy fun festivals in Salem over the summer. I've got such mixed feelings as my time here in Salem is quickly coming to an end and I look back over this summer and these last four years. Mostly I think I'm in denial about the transition. How does one grieve well? not staying so wrapped up in the past that one can't engage with new people and places, but also allowing time to work through emotions of transition and not burying them to cause problems later. Despite all of the moving in my life, I still have not figured this one out.