a mid-week weekend!

i had two days off in a row - pretty much heaven. on wednesday i went to austin to go hiking. i had originally planned on camping that night as well (two days in austin for just one driving trip!) but luckily my co-workers reminded me it was going to rain, so camping was probably not the best idea. however, i thought for some reason that hiking would still be ok. turns out enchanted rock is not in austin, it's actually closer to fredericksburg, which is pretty far away (at least farther than i was planning on driving that day) so i found this other place to hike instead. well, it ended up being about 30 minutes farther than i had originally thought, and i didn't find out until i got there that they were closed because of the rain and erosion. well bummer. so, i just hung out in austin like i was planning to anyways.

i had a great day traveling around to different shops, stopping at different places to sit and read my book, and just soaked up the wonderfulness that is austin. i discovered central market, which is like whole foods but cheaper. it was a pretty fun place, and i even got some baba-ganoush to try for the first time. it's an eggplant dip - kind of like hummus. i'm trying not to get stuck in a rut, so i thought that sounded like a fun thing to try. some crazy guy tried to start a big ole discussion with me about the right type of olive oil when i was at central market. i told him what i knew (which is that olive oil should be stored in a dark container because the light harms it) and he just went off on how big of a decision this was for him. i quickly chose some olive oil and walked away with a "good luck!" to him. well, i passed by the olive oil section again (central market is rather confusing...) and saw him standing there talking with a central market employee about their olive oil selections. oh the crazy people you'll meet in austin!

today i stayed at home and did a bunch of nothing. i did buy a plane ticket to colorado for christmas! i'll be in that glorious state from the 23rd of december to the 2nd of january. then i drove to austin (this time in a camp car!) to meet with the lutherhill kids who go to school in the austin area. we had a great time hanging out and chatting. oh, did i mention that the malibu was steaming by the time i got to austin? oh yeah it was, and it stunk. turns out that the cap was not put back on the radiator, and it was pretty warm after a 1 hour drive from la grange. so i let it sit for a few hours over dinner, and then hoped it would fix itself while i was eating. well, that didn't work. so i drove to a gas station and went to put in coolant, but since it's a chevy (i think that's the reason...?) i had to put in a special kind of coolant in it, and the gas station didn't have it. so, i bought the "boo" some bottled water and poored that in the radiator (after some consulatation from my padre). well, that seemed to do the trick because i am home in la grange with a car that still runs. now the beauty of camp - it's not my problem now, i just hand it over to gene the maintenance guy :)

welp...i hope you're not bored reading about my life, but that's about all that's happening right now. this weekend i get to drive to tyler, tx (about 4 hours north) to promote camp there. yep, it's a glamorous life for me!

oh, and i'm wearing sweat pants right now! can you believe it?!?! it's actually cool enough inside my house (and not from air conditioning!) to wear sweatpants. what a great day :)

tanlines and ropes course

i have a nametag tanline. is that a hospitality issue? (a little inside joke there for you rtlc folks...)

i got down to the ropes course at 9:00 am today. guess when i left? just do it. guess. 5:30 pm. no breaks. seriously, not even lunch, i didn't get to eat lunch today because we had two back to back ropes groups. it was a lot of fun but i forgot sunscreen and now i have a racoon face and a nametag tanline. HOT. i would like you to belay people in the texas heat for 8.5 hours and then tell me how you feel. i love the ropes course, just not that much. that was just part of my day. my work day started at 7:15 am and ended at 10 pm.

and today is day 8 of working straight. one more day of work and then two days off, horray! almost like a normal person....almost. i think i'm going to go camping and hike enchanted rock in austin (don't be too impressed, it's like a 30 minute hike, but it's supposed to be amazing and i've been meaning to hike it since i moved here.)

oh, and it was 92 today. poop on temperatures in the 90s in OCTOBER - freaking october.

but the good thing is my chaco tan is really coming along, and it's october. bet no one else is working on their chaco tan in october.

time for bed.

similarities

here's my "deep" thought for the day:

photographers and song writers have the same job - to take something ordinary and make it seem extraordinary. somehow with the combination of a melody and harmony and just the right performer, a description of everyday events turn into something that people pine for. same for photography - using the light and shutter speed and framing the part of the big picture just right makes something ordinary seem breathtaking.

i'm bored...can you tell?

delicious sarcasm.

i just love tina fey.

click on this.

enjoy.

you know you're in texas when...

an 8th grader says "the other day i was reading 'field and stream' and it said..."

wow.

hurricane relief

on saturday, a few lutherans headed down to galveston island to see what we could do to help. the synod announced the clean up day on monday, with the goal of about 100 people. by wednesday we had 200 signed up....on wednesday we had 300 signed up, and by friday night we had 417 signed up! i'm not sure what the actual count was, but i think we stayed pretty true to the 400 count. we had 42 congregations total show up - sometimes it was just a father son team, some just had the pastors show up, and one church brought 45 people! pretty cool.

our retreat cancelled, so we decided as a staff to go down to help out. since there were so many people, when the synod staff saw that we were coming, they asked us to help with registration. we thought sure, no problem, we run crazy registrations all the time during the summer! haha. well, 400 adults is a little different than 100 kids, but it worked pretty well. here's a picture of our high tech registration set up.

i hope this is big enough that you can see that we used a baby swing as a sign holder, as well as a water-logged bookshelf. we were resourceful! registration was run right outside of zion lutheran in galveston. we then sent people to 2 other churches, homes, and businesses of congregation members and friends. we stayed and worked at zion. here are some more pictures of the inside.

the workers ended up tearing out the entire altar. it's a little strange to see an altar ripped out, but it had to be done. the church had about 3 feet of water in it, so everything below the 3 foot mark had to be taken out.
i think the most interesting thing to me was watching people interact. we all had to wear masks , so it was very different working with people when you couldn't see the majority of their face. i would find myself smiling at people, and then realizing that they don't really know what facial expression i'm trying to make. but, it was also interesting because no one really knew who anyone was, and the masks certainly exacerbated that. a lot of people were wearing the free shirts that lutheran disaster relief gave us, so we lost another part of our identity that way. it was just very interesting to see a bunch of strangers working together for a common goal, who all having something in common, but are indeed strangers. strange, but cool.

that shows our pile of trash that we took out of the church. before the end of the day, the trash people had come and collected ALL of it. it was pretty amazing. it was hard though, because to me that pile represented all of our hard work - it was a tangible thing. when they took it away, it was hard to see how much we had accomplished. demolition is a lot different than building, and this was my first experience with demolition.

when we were finished with the church, we went over to a lady's house that other people had been working on. it was much harder to see a person's home than a church destroyed.

on our way to galveston, there are boats on the road that had been washed up during the hurricane. some were destroyed, but some were just fine, just chillin' on the bridges and highways.

seeing the boats that were washed up reminded me of my time spent in thailand after the tsunami. the biggest difference was that it took me 24 hours of plane flights to get to thailand, we didn't speak the same language, and their houses were poverty level in the us. a much different situation than galveston yesterday, where it only took us 2.5 hours to drive there, we all spoke english, and the houses were typical us houses.

Here's a picture of Bishop Mike, hard at work! It's pretty cool that even the bishop was working with us.

for a good laugh...

if you need a good laugh, check these out.

real one

funny one

i would watch the real one first, then the funny one. you can see how much is quoted in the funny one from the real one. pretty amazing.