Souphouse pictures from the reunion/graduation in May! The usual...couches, smiles, knives...

I write a minimum of a thousand words a day, and yet somehow I never seem to have anything to write here...maybe I'm too picky.

My arbitrary deadline of August 7th marks the end of four full months in the States. It's fast approaching and the visa stuff isn't. The Secretary of State sent all my papers back this week because they said the notary was not registered in the right county. I call, and it seems that the incompetent who processed the papers didn't consider that there could be more than one person with the same name...so I have to send everything back and they'll do it right. We hope.

It's just me and Dad at home this week. My PA grandmother had cancer surgery last week and Mom and Ellen left to help them out for a few days. That leaves me to be the frontier woman, taking care of the sheep, goats, chickens, playing pyro with the garbage, fun stuff. There are some serious advantages to living in the country...

Ben (www.beninrio.blogspot.com) is freezing in Argentina. Why do I not feel sorry for him? I'm such a grump... get me out of Indiana!

July 13

It's fair week in Spencer. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm not showing sheep, or goats, or stressing over the last minute details of a 4-H project. No fair-week crushes, sleeping on the milking stands, making fun of the queen and her entourage high-heeling it through the pig barn... I still have time to catch the demolition derby if I want to. It's on Saturday and my brother and sister are even bringing friends to see the show. I guess other places don't have as much fun as we do!

Instead of hanging around at the fairgrounds, I'm helping out at my dad's office. His secretary always has the week off, and he likes to have someone around to answer phones. So that someone, me, is using free DSL all day and working her way through Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." Anyone else out there actually make it through the first couple of chapters???

Did Joyce know that he was writing a book for the internet age?? Every couple of sentences I have to google a name or a phrase, with only a 30 percent success rate. In spite of understanding nearly nothing, I love this book. First sentence:

"riverrun, pas Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

It actually makes more sense than this one:
"The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy."

Yeah.

I'm trying to put all my good pics on the web, so keep checking back...

Some pictures now that my computer works...

Here's the "massive" truck we hired to move last year...and the excellent packing job.

Take a good look at the lovely phone lines outside our building. We think there's so many that when someone moves, they just put up a new line because no one knows which is which!

Oh, and here's a view from Rich and Rebecca's roof, on a not-so-sunny day. If those clouds weren't in the way, you'd be able to see the Cristo Redentor statue in the distance...

minor ravings of the good kind

I’ve been reading a book by Eduardo Galeano called Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. He’s from Uruguay and the book is a wild, hallucinogenic trip through modern and ancient history under the lens of the southern continent. It’s provocative, disturbing, inflammatory, and thought-provoking. To me, there aren’t a lot of better reasons to read something...the only thing that could make this book better (or worse, depending on your point of view) is if all he said was true. But that, too, depends on your point of view. If you can find it, it's worth a try...but I think it's out of print now, so good luck.

I got back from Chicago with a stack of things to do. (Read about Chicago below, if you're interested.) In just two days, that’s been greatly reduced. So here’s what I’ve got so far: the work visa is out, the missionary visa attempt is in. The bad news is that I’ll have to go to Chicago again and then on to Miami...the good news is that this visa doesn’t have the wait the other did, so they should issue it within two days once I apply. I need my YWAM transcripts though, so I have to wait for those to come in...

Over the past week, I’ve been almost paralyzed by the fear of not being able to get back on a reasonable schedule, of being in Indiana for a much longer amount of time. The thought of six months or more in the States is abhorrent. Not because it is terrible here, or because I hate my family, but because it makes me such an alien (in the not-fitting-in sense). I have to start things all over that I thought I was done with...among other things, life’s just too complicated to do in multiple continents.

And then I remember all the little things I tend to forget, like how much I appreciate green. There just isn’t this much color in the city. It’s about six-thirty here, and the sun is low enough that it is backlighting the hills and trees. There’s so much humidity in the air, it hangs like fog, a mist shading the woods, which are lit up in about fifteen different shades of verde. It’s very pleasant. I’ll miss this when I’m gone. And hummingbirds...two of them just went flirting by about five feet from my face a second ago. Startling. Lovely. You don't get hummingbirds in the favelas!

Warning! Chicago people are being bragged upon...

Other than finding out that my visa wouldn't be accepted and that I was short a document that my sponsoring organization didn't even have, Chicago was great. I spent a couple days with M, a friend from college who lives in the suburbs. She fed me Thai and Caribbean food, took me to the youth group she’s a volunteer with, and we engaged in interesting conversations about everything that popped into mind. M is sweet and intelligent and wise. She’s had some intense life experiences –you can see the fingerprints of God all over her. It’s going to be interesting to see where God takes her. I have a hunch it’ll be something international...And to top things off, she let me snoop through her bookshelf! While I was there, I read this book by a supermodel named Waris Dirie (I think) called “Desert Flower.” Shocking and sad, it chronicles her life as a woman in Somalia and England and America, complete with horrific tales of female circumcision and near-slavery. Easy reading level, but not an easy read. Anyhow, after crashing at M’s place, I still had a few days to kill as I waited to hear from the office and my staff members in Brazil about what my next steps should be, so I spent the rest of the time with my friend Scott A and his family. They’re great people. This is the second time I’ve come practically unannounced and they’ve always been the greatest hosts. When I think about hospitality and having my own place, people like the A’s are my role models. They really made me feel at home. As much as I love people and socializing, I am always afraid of being an inconvenience. I was worried that being without a vehicle and so forth, that I’d be a bother. I knew that they had plans and so I was perfectly ready to spend a quiet weekend alone at the house. Instead, they treated me like a family member. I was invited out to dinner with family in from out of town, taken out to lunch and a movie, introduced to scores of friends at a party in the city, and driven wherever I needed to go. We had great conversations (again!), played frisbee, wrestled with the dog, and were generally lazy. I had so much fun! In addition, one of Scott’s friends was driving to Indianapolis the next day. Instead of spending serious amounts of time and expense in plane fares, I rode home for free with two fun new friends and travel companions: Courtney and her adorable kitten, Felix. After all the disappointment about the visa, the weekend was a welcome treat. Thank you all. You were wonderful to me.