delayed

snooz-fest.,
originally uploaded by Waldie's World.

Yup, this pretty much sums up most people's Thanksgivings, I think. Eltriptophan-induced sleep. Except that doesn't explain why I pass the heck out after one* of our meals.

In any event, it wasn't all sleeping, I'll have you know. There was plenty of walks on the beach, eating, playing with the kids, eating, early christmas present-opening, and dog shenanigans. Click on the image or here to see the picts of our weekend of fun.

(Thanks Waldies for the good times. Always great to see you and catch up. Thanks mom and jim for the hospitality and food and you know...everything.)

*The dinners were all were so delicious and I ate too much at all of them so i can't remember which meal it was that I passed out, Thanksgiving or another one.

more is less with peace corps

quick update on peace corps just to let you know that we don't know. our regional recruiter called today basically to say that nothing will happen with our application until february of 2006. i am not really sure how that differs from what she originally told us nor do i know what that means in the grand scheme of things. but that's what we now know--february.

in february the folks in washington, dc, will sit down and look at all the couples who have applied. based on our experiences and the projects available the pc people will pick who they think would be a good fit for each project. when i was on the phone with the recruiter she was leading me to believe that this was a setback. but now that i'm thinking more about it i'm realizing that it is right on the path of what we read and heard.

but regardless, in february we will hopefully know at least whether or not we will be moving forward.

how do veggies spend thanksgiving?

vegetarians often get weird quesions at thanksgiving. it's ok, we're used to it. so to answer the age-old question, what do you DO without meat (because what IS thanksgiving without a dead bird on your dinner table)? check out this website to find out what we do to replace the void in our dinner.

thanks, kaiser for the link:)

test failure

i tried to send myself a blog posting using my email address from work this morning. but, because you do not see the post here you know it failed. oh well. but i know why! i had the wrong address. duh.

in any event, the post was pretty much this.
i'd be crabby because it's a monday, it's rainy and i'm note feeling too hot. but it's a 2 day work week (now with 1 day down), our heat (finally!) kicked on last night, and i went to bed at 9:30. so i actually don't feel so bad today!

peace corps interview

that was a painless interview. i was wrong though, our recruiter didn't forget about us. but, like last time, she called and asked for 15 more minutes to look over our file. in any event, we still really don't know anything. she's as vague as you'd expect from the government. so she told us *again* that it's a "different process for couples" "i have to speak my coordinator and see what to do next" "you have to be flexible" "there's a different process for couples" "it may take a little longer" "there's a different process for couples".

sooooo, if you ask what we've heard from peace corps we'll say....

you guessed it folks, "it may take a little longer, it's a different process for couples."

ttickets in hand. ready to go

for harry potter of course. not for the carolina clemson game that i keep hearing about even though i couldn't care less. though i guess i should care if it's in columbia or not b/c the traffic is always a pain (anyone in cola can you fill me in on that?).

back to HP. about 100 pages to read before 6:00 tonight. i've been trying to breeze through the book again in time for the movie. that's why i've been mia on the posting this week. sorry folks.

and we should be getting a call any second now from our peace corps recruiter to do our couples interview. she's 4 1/2 minutes late already. wouldn't be surprised if she forgot about it. more on that later.

el negativo

today was just one of those days where everything was either totally negative or misunderstood as wrong. i spent a large part of my day writing a negative recommendation, if that makes sense. i had to write a document about how this guy stinks at his job and is not holding up his end of the bargain. what a waste of energy! and then the rest of the day i was defending myself for something that i was instructed to do. mondays, bah!

BTW

i know i spelled "hardqore" wrong in my previous post. if you really want to know, it's an insider reference about a friend who was so HQ he ate one egg for every day of month for a whole month (as in 1 egg on the 1st, 2 eggs on the 2nd...you get it).

paint the world in technology

ok, so i was supposed to get off work at noon today. but there was a little painting project going on at one of my schools and i just couldn't resist joining in. this particular school is under construction resulting in part of our campus being cordoned off by particle board barriers. the 2 magnificent art teachers decided to paint murals along the walls of the construction to prevent students from tagging them with their own artwork. various teachers and volunteers were painting all day today but there is just so much to do that they really weren't making any headway. and it was a beautiful day in sunny south carolina, so instead of leaving at noon i decided to stay and help.

while painting i was engaged in conversation with one of my coworkers and she was talking about her husband who works in 4 richland two high schools as a german teacher. he uses distance education to teach his classes. the classrooms are all hooked up with computer systems that are networked to a distant location and then the teacher teaches the students through a system of video conferencing. now i know this is nothing relatively new, they did it in college. but i just thought it was so amazing that they're doing this on the high school level. and i started thinking, why don't people do this in developing countries to help rural schools get teachers?

now let me say that i know someone must be doing this already. and i'm sure it's not as simple as i'm making it. but "they" say that technology is what is going to bring the 3rd world out of poverty.

so i'm just saying...i'm going to look into this...

hardqore fightin'

tonight i got a butty-kicking by my husband. no! not a real butty-kicking. in mortal combat shaolin monks on the XBOX. erica and fuzzy sent it to us for free (thanks guys!) about a month ago because their now ex-roommate is the producer. but until tonight we've not even had time to unwrap it. but this evening i was able to distract chris for a few minutes to kick my butt. but then after about 15 minutes i got bored (typical me) and left chris in there for another 1/2 hour while he played alone (typical him). so now i can hear the sounds of butt-kicking coming from the back but i don't know whose butt is being kicked this time.

i'm rerun

if you had asked me to name all the peanuts characters (like the ladies did last night during outburst) i wouldn't have thought of rerun. which makes sense considering this character type is-what is it?- "often overlooked by people." i don't know if i'm always rerun, but lately i've been a little down in the dumps so i'll say it's true right now.


Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

my part?

in the wake (pardon the pun) of the newest disaster, i've been utterly horrified at how helpless i've felt to do anything. every day i've heard the numbers of the dead rise and rise and rise, now reaching upwards of 73,000 and knowing the numbers will get bigger as the himalayan winter approaches.

so thanks to a recent dog walking job (and thanks mag for passing it on to me) i've been able to send a little money. i know they say that if everyone gave a few bucks the people in need would be able to get shelter and escape some of the most harshest circumstances. but i can't help but wish i could do more. but for now i suppose this'll have to do.

it represents my personality

"it" meaning hot tomales, of course. that's what a 6th grader said to my coworker, ami, yesterday when she commented on how much he liked hot tomales. it was one of the wittiest lines i'd heard in a while. it just hit my funny bone because here's this awkward little white boy and he says hot tomales represent his personality! hilarious!

all this happened at a middle school dance, mind you. i made a booth with a guessing game and candy as a prize. it was actually more fun than i was expecting. i hadn't been to a middle school dance since...well, i was in middle school. and i was not particularly fond of them at that time. but i found it mildly amusing to be at the dance, of course compounded with feelings of compassion for the kids who were there because you know there's always drama at a middle school dance. heck, what am i saying? everything's drama in middle school period. but anyways, yea, good times. and hot tomales apparently are the new craze.

a swing and a hit

today was my first go at eucharistic ministering at st. thomas more. i found myself oddly nervous. i was thinking that because i'd done it like a bazillion times at my old church, i'd feel like an old hat. but i really was afraid i'd make a mistake. probably i was intimidated because i was worried that everyone in the church would be looking at me like, hey, who's the new EM?

but anyways, it went off without a hitch. i really enjoyed it. what i liked most which i don't remember thinking about before, was that i got to really connect with about 1/2 the people in the church. i looked them in the eye and then, as i placed the eucharist in their hands, i generally touched their hand (or their tongue for the one lady! oops!). it just felt like i was bringing the community closer to me and i really liked that feeling.

i'm up at bat again at 8:00 AM this tuesday, as it's all saint's day (a holy day of obligation, if you pay attention to that stuff).

catching up

this weekend chris and i teamed up with tricia and adam to drive up to asheville to visit michelle. it was a fun-filled weekend which include delicious home cookin' (thanks michelle and scott for the great meal!), a shortish hike in bad shoes, wonderful restaurants, a random high schooler swimming in the city fountain, my cousin hannah, a brisk view of the clouds surrounding craggy gardens, and good conversation with good friends, just to name a few.

thanks guys for the good times.

p.s. to michelle, i'd have featured a solo picture of you but i don't have a picture of you alone, so i hope this'll do;)

a year in the life

dara brown's blanket,
originally uploaded by Waldie's World.

i can't believe it, but on 10/21/05 i finally finished cross stitching this blanket. i started around christmas time last year when i found out my friends dave and maria were expecting their first child. well, almost a year later i've finally finished the blanket. dara is now over 4 months old!

so, the lesson learned is it takes longer to make a blanket than a baby. remember that when you're thinking of doing either.

whose child is this?

check out my brother's blog for a hilarous rendering of my mother and a recent unfortunate event.

peace corps interview

some have been asking how my peace corps interview went on friday, though i think i might have already recounted my impressions to most of you. but for those who're interested here's a brief summary.

the long and the short of it is that we'll definitely get into peace corps (barring any medical complications). bernadette, our regional recruiter, said that she was going to start the recommendation process before we've even finished our interviewing with her. see chris's post for more detailed info on the process (or the peace corps website). in any event, she has to recommend us to national peace corps, then they call us back with an offer. when bernadette recommends us she picks a location and a type of job she thinks we'd be good at. pc national can take the recommendation by offering us something within those paramaters or they could offer us something totally different, it's their descration based on what is available. anyways, bernadette has it in her head that we would be best suited for an agricultural assignment. now if you know me and chris at all you'll know that our agricultural experience pails in comparison to our youth work and community development experience and you might be thinking we'd be more suited to that type of work. but bernadette does not really listen so well to what we want. she wants us to be "flexible" and be "open to the peace corps experience." she says that they are in dire need of people willing to do ag work and that it is extremely difficult to place couples, leading us to believe this might be the only way we'd get into pc in the next decade.

now, i think in general an agricultural assignment wouldn't be so bad if it were in africa . we'd still be in the country of our choice; we'd still be living and working in the community and learning a lot about the culture; and frankly, all povery, social inequality, etc. in developing countries are tied very closely to agriculture. so that would be cool. BUT bernadette has given us doubt that she is really listening to our desires and chris and i are sceptical that we'll get africa. so in summation, we're still going through the process with pc, but we're really going to be sure to have some other back up programs which might be more suited to our specific desires. (our couples interview is friday, november 18th--more then.)

they're up

you got it, square dancing old folks!,
originally uploaded by Waldie's World.

finally posted the pictures from the weekend in mississippi. click on the picture to see the album.

witty title goes here (i'm tired tonight)

after 2+ years of sitting (peacefully i might add!) and not actively participating in church in terms of lectoring, eucharistic ministering or what-have-you, i've finally decided to get up and serve again. there's really no excuse for me taking so long to do it, except that i got worn out from my last church, which i admit is a poor excuse because that's why people get worn out (because there's not enough of us!). but anyways, tonight i got trained (which is a funny concept as i was never trained before) but i appreciated the training. and starting next sunday i'll be a eucharistic minister again. check out the schedule if you'd like to come at receive from me (that's a joke). i'm looking forward to it.