is off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Ounce!

ahem. yes. it's been a little while.

I can't tell you how many times I've opened a page to start a new post and just haven't gotten to it. life is crazy. which is why I'm taking a vacation.

*is extremely excited*

this time tomorrow I'll be at our family condo in eastern WA. all by my onesy. maybe doing a puzzle, or watching a movie, or eating cookie dough, or soaking in the jacuzzi, or journaling, or reading something that has nothing to do with school, or SLEEPING (I'm really excited for this one), or cooking breakfast. because who says you can't have breakfast at 9:30 PM?

so yeah. I've been working my tail off to get all my homework for the week done so I don't have to take anything with me. if you're taking two natural sciences and a social science, you know how hard this is to do. but I've just about done it (one more assignment to finish up tonight, and a quiz to take in the morning before I leave). then I head to Safeway to get gas and the season's first satsumas, and I'm off! I'm not even bringing my laptop. because I need to relax, and I can't do that if I have my laptop. no, I'm bringing the heating pad that makes my back feel good, and aromatherapy oils to burn in the diffuser, and wonderful-smelling bubble bath, and a giant quilt and down comforter. lots of books and lots of blank paper. and movies. and FOOD. lots of that too. :P



other than planning and preparing for this trip, I've just been busy extricating myself from the many commitments I foolishly made this month. things are starting to settle down once again. I'm loving work, and may soon start working three days a week at Menchie's (yay!). teaching is also going well. Bath and Body Works is not going so well, mostly just because I never get any hours there (or if I do, I'm on call and I end up not needing to go in). if I'm able to work three days a week at Menchie's, I'm going to quit Bath and Body. I spend more time just working out all the glitches in the scheduling there than I do actually working, and it's stressful, frustrating, and ridiculous. it's not worth a maximum of one shift per week.



last weekend on worship was incredible. I still can't quite put words to it, but the best I can say is that I've never felt such love and care from and for people as I did with my worship team. we have truly become family to each other, and it's the biggest privilege in the world to play together every three weeks. it's amazing to see how these relationships have developed, how much we care for each other all the time, not just when we're on worship.

we have this little ritual, after we finish playing the set before the sermon, we all hang out for a couple of minutes behind the church while my friend Bret has a cigarette, and we talk about how the music went and what things went terribly wrong, and what we could do better. then we usually walk around to the front of the building and either sit in for the sermon or hang out in the foyer until it's time to play the set that comes after the sermon. last weekend we were behind the church just talking about everything and nothing, and ended up spending the entire sermon out there without realizing it. we'd been talking for nearly half an hour and it felt like five minutes, no joke. I think heaven will be a little bit like this. except even better, which I can't imagine yet.

I feel like every day I'm growing up. and it's not necessarily a successive thing either - I don't get farther along every day. sometimes I feel like I'm growing up today the exact same way I did yesterday. it feels new again too, and a little scary but a little exciting as well. Roger says that our journey through healing our hearts is like sweeping with a broom - you are moving somewhere, but with each sweep you cover a lot of ground you already covered. but I think I am learning that repetition is a good thing. I am learning a lot about marriage, which makes me wonder if I will ever be married. I am learning a lot about love; what it is and what it isn't. and sometimes it even changes around, so you really have to know your situation and the people you are with, and what is best at a particular time. for example, sometimes loving someone means giving them advice and godly council, telling them what they should do and how they can improve. sometimes it means just listening. a very wise person has been doing both for me lately, in some hard circumstances. but sometimes love means staying out of it. sometimes love and affection are opposite things, because someone has to work through their own issues and not have a friend who might enable them to take an easier route. sometimes the right path is the hardest one, and you have to walk it alone - knowing that your friends do love you (in the sense that love is deliberate action, or deliberate non-action in some cases), and are praying for you, but can't help you learn what you have to figure out for yourself. Bret says that sometimes ideals get mixed up with preferences. Meaning that what we really want deep down because we know it to be right, gets mixed up with what our flesh wants. and that's when we have problems and love gets tricky.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense - perhaps you have to be inside my head. there are a lot of things I would love to share that would make it all make sense, but I just can't, yet. maybe someday. God is doing some amazing and incredible things though, and I thank you for your prayers and even more for your friendship, even when I'm the friend who drops off the face of the earth.

alright. now I'm going to finish homework, and finish packing, and then go to bed, because the sooner I go to bed, the sooner tomorrow will be here!