Unexpectedly Unnerving Experiences

I was looking at a picture from a visit to Spring Grove Cemetery back at home, and it reminded me of a rather unsettling experience I had immediately after taking that picture. What follows is an explanation of what happened along with several other things I find oddly unpleasant.

First we have car washes. I hate car washes. Being moved slowly through a dark tunnel with all sorts of bristles and brushes and floppy things attacking my car makes me incredibly nervous. It's even worse if I'm in the front seat. I don't mind Mike's Car Wash, but that's because they make it child-friendly. It's white and well-lit on the inside with stuffed animals chilling around. For practical reasons, it also shoots liquid and soap at you rather than attacking you with large, frightening, apparati.

I also hate having my blood pressure taken. Anything that restricts blood flow makes me queasy, but one would think such a little thing as the blood pressure cuff shouldn't be a problem. The worst was when we did a lab in A.P. Biology involving taking each other's blood pressures. I decided to face my fear and permit my classmate to take my blood pressure. First he pumped it fuller than he needed to. I started panicking, and he fumbled about for a few seconds (it seemed like forever at the time) before finding the release valve. I was not a happy camper.

This next one is probably the only one that has a good chance at being genuinely unsettling to others. If you don't like needles, skip to the next one. My brother once had me try to re-pierce his ear. It was terrible. He gave me a needle or safety pin or something and told me to just make it go through. I have no doubt that he would have withstood whatever pain I might have caused, but after a brief try I just couldn't continue. You see, I felt the pin ripping through layers of skin. Little vibrations or something came through the pin and I felt it. It was terrible.

And now we move on to a surreal, H.G. Wellsian sort of experience. Just north of Purdue on I-65 is the Fowler Ridge wind farm. Hundreds of wind turbines stand in military-like ranks on hundreds of acres flanking the highway. In the daylight, they are impressive and intriguing. I'm sure they might intimidate some, but mostly they just look neat. It's a different story in the dark. Each of these windmills has a red light on top that blinks to warn planes. That wouldn't be too bad all on it's own; I could just pretend they were red fireflies or something. But they all throb on and off in unison in a steady beat. It's eerie. Not the thing you want to drive past at 5:30 on a dark December morning.

Sometimes if you're driving and making a turn, you can't immediately see the lane you're planning to get into. I'm sure we all know of an intersection or two like that. I always have a moment of panic in which I believe I'll somehow end up on the wrong side of the road. I will highlight two such turns: the turn left from going north-west on Northwestern to going west on Stadium, and the turn left on the East Ronald Reagan entrance ramp in Colerain.

I've saved the best for last: being slowly approached by a flock of walking Canadian geese. Josh and I were at Spring Grove Cemetery walking around and taking pictures one fine afternoon. I saw several geese down by a pond and decided to take a picture of them. They even turned to face me, much to my delight. My delight quickly turned to dismay as they stretched out into a line facing me and began to slowly advance. At first I believed they were just going to cross the street or something, so I turned and walked in a different direction. The line shifted to follow me. Josh offered the rational explanation that they were probably just hoping for me to feed them, but that didn't help me out much. I think in the end we ended up semi-leading them to some other people, but I don't remember for sure. I just remember that it was creepy as all get-out. I haven't even seen Alfred Hitchcock's Birds and I was afraid. As far as I was concerned, they were closing in for the kill. Josh didn't seem to be bothered by it, but just ask him and he will verify that I was irrationally terrified of those birds.

Here they are, gathering to scare the living daylights out of me.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

In my opinion, the most wonderful time of the year starts at Thanksgiving and reaches all the way through Christmas. Things changed a little bit since I've gone off to college, but a lot has remained the same.

Tradition starts the day before Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Preparation Day, on which we do most of out cooking and cleaning on that day. As of four years ago, it is tradition that I prepare the turkey. This often involves doing strange things with it to make my mom cringe. It started when I discovered that the liver has a fun consistency. Now in addition to playing with the liver, we investigate the kidneys and heart, wiggle the neck around, massage the turkey's skin, and tickle its armpits.

Thanksgiving Day itself probably has more traditions than any other day in the Gast house. I get up at 7:00 or 8:00 am to start the Thanksgiving puzzle. More people trickle out of bed as the morning goes on. By 9:00 when the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade starts, pretty much everyone is awake. My dad or Rachel starts making cinnamon rolls, and we watch the parade and work on the puzzle. After the parade, sometimes we leave the TV on to make fun of the dog show. Ronda usually arrives around noon to help us finish the cooking. I always take care of the green bean casserole, and usually forget to add seasonings unless my mom reminds me. Uncle Andy along with Abby and Theresa get there sometime in the early afternoon and bring with them cocktail shrimp to snack on alongside Ronda's famous chip dip. At 4:00 we start dinner. Around 4:30 Uncle Mike arrives and we subtly make fun of him until he leaves. Things die down over the evening as friends and relatives leave one-by-one. Once it's dark, the Christmas lights come on for the first night of the season.

The next day is Christmas decoration day. We leave the house sometime in the late morning and head out to a tree farm in Morrow to pick out the perfect Christmas tree. It used to take us hours. Now we're becoming more and more efficient. I think we had our tree in 10 minutes last year. This year it took about 20 if you count cutting it down, but that's still not too shabby. After we've picked the tree we each get a new ornament to put on it. For a while we went to Elder Beerman's, then switched to Delhi Garden Center, and now we just get them at the tree farm. Many of us have gradually drifted from picking ornaments we actually like to picking the strangest ones we can find. The tree is weirder and weirder every year. As we drive home with the tree inside the van, we listen to Christmas music stations. Once we get home, Mom puts in the Oakridge Boys or the Partridge Family Christmas CDs. The day usually ends with watching the first Christmas movie of the season.

Christmas traditions are much more varied and have changed quite a lot over the past decade or so, so I'll just describe what we do now. On and off we participate in Advent, whether it's on our own or with the whole church. The weekend before Christmas my mom's side of the family gets together. We have a four-year location rotation between my mom, her sister in southern Michigan, her brother in Indianapolis, and her parents in northern Michigan. This year we'll be at Aunt Wendy's house. Every year we do something different together and then eat and open gifts. Christmas Eve we go to church, and Rachel and I usually play in an orchestral ensemble.

Christmas day, nobody is allowed to leave their room until 6:00 am. At that time, we can open our stockings. Everyone has to be awake by 8:00 am for official gift opening. When Cathy and Chris Gowen are in town, they join us. After we open gifts, we eat Panera bagels or cinnamon rolls for breakfast and hang out around the house until lunch time. Around 1:00 in the afternoon we head over to my dad's parents' house in Kenwood and repeat the process with his side of the family. When we get back home in the evening, we often watch a Christmas movie together.

I like tradition. I'm no Reb Tevia, but I like knowing that certain things will be roughly the same every year. I don't mind adding new things, but I am not a huge fan of taking away old traditions. I guess it goes along with being a person of habit. I wonder how things will grow and change as our family grows and changes. One day all seven of us kids will be out of the house. Will we live close enough to get together? Will we have our own kids to add to the mix? Will we still get up to do puzzles on Thanksgiving or open Christmas stockings at 6:00 am? Who knows. Only time will tell.

This is one for the good days. I have it all here in red, blue, green...

It's time for another happy list! This one, too, came from Sara, Courtney, and me during AP Calculus our senior year. The title came from a fantastic song ("Videotape" by Radiohead) and refers to the pleasant memories from Rahn's class and the fact that we used three different colors of pens (they were red, blue, and green, unfortunately). Courtney's additions are in courier, Sara's are in georgia, and mine are in trebuchet.

• creating a new world (after watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with magical creatures and wars and magic and somehow create a best-selling book out of all of it :D)
• picnics at Winton Woods
• swinging (especially at nighttime)
• finding random words in Japanese
• watching the sun rise or set
• odd but pretty names
• doodling
• the color combination of these pens [1]
• untrodden snow
• delays [2]
• the sound of a waterfall (or any other body of water)
• birdsongs
• soft thunder storms at night
• coral reefs
• fall colors
• taking pictures
• splatter-painting
• June 4, 2009 (only 17 weeks from today!) [3]
• books that suck you in
• knowing 3 of 17 weeks we aren't here! [4]
• multiples of 3
• budding flowers
• fresh-baked cookies
• the wind
• color guard
• JESUS!
• tea (it's kind of hard to follow yours Sara - it kind of wins)
• music (any kind - it's all great)
• dancing down hallways (Shantytown...haha)
• working with charcoal (or any other messy art medium)
• all cello bands (Apocalyptica, Breaking of Reality...)
• acoustic guitar music
• reading beside a fire while watching snow fall

[1] Courtney had lime green, Sara had teal, and I had purple.
[2] Snow delays, that is. We had gotten one that morning if I remember correctly.
[3] Graduation Day
[4] She was referring to the trips and breaks before graduation.

Colombia: a Few Key People

I didn’t know whether to group Mark and Theresa with the team or with Colombia people, but I’ve decided to put them here. Theresa is a Colombian, so that works, and Mark lived there for a while, and they weren’t exactly part of our NHCC team, so I think they fit here better. Without further ado, here are some of the people we were around the most. They are listed in alphabetical order by first name.

Alejandra is the middle daughter in the preacher’s family. She is reserved, and polite, unlike her younger sister. Her goal is to learn English well enough to move to America. She hopes to go to school here at the very least, and hopefully find a job and live here permanently.

Andrew is an interesting character. He’s 27 (not 22, like he told us on the shuttle ride away from the airport) and is well-versed in American music. It seems that every time we go, he will pick a new American girl to be attracted to. Last time it was Katie Zalar (who he called Jessica). This time, once he realized “Jessica” wouldn’t be there, I was chosen. That was rather awkward.

Ashlee the red is a little girl with bright red hair. Her mom helps with the kids at church, so she was around us a lot. She is adorable and she knows it. She knows exactly how to act to catch and keep attention. She’s a lot of fun.

Ashlee the not so red is a girl from El Paraiso who does not have red hair, but she is friends with Ashlee the red. Her mom sings at church. Last time we were in Colombia, I sat next to Ashlee during one of the church services, and she taught me some words in Spanish and laughed at me for not being able to roll by rr's.

Didier is quite the little stinker. He is 12 years old, I believe, but he acts like he's eight or nine. He likes to annoy people. He called us fat, ugly, and stupid in English and Spanish, and added a gwop every now and again. I got to drop an insect on his head and make him squeal. That was pretty fun.

Francisco mostly worked with the guys at the construction site, so I didn’t get to know him well. He took a while to get comfortable with us, but by the end of the week he was laughing and joking with us. He constantly helps at the church. Part of his motivation is the fact that his wife had left him without explanation a few months before, and he is trying to keep himself occupied to avoid going insane.

Fredo is a kid we spent a lot of time around last time we were in Colombia. He asked us to call him Freddie. He was a sort of shy, active kid, probably 11 or 12 years old. Now he has grown up, and asks people to call him Sebastien. Who knows why. He took a liking to Rachel, much to her embarrassment. Instead of running around playing games with us like last time, he had his hair constantly slicked back and avoided getting dirty.

Gloria was one of our returning cooks. She’s a sweet, emotional, older woman with a huge family. And she cooks fantastically. It was a joy to be around her all week again.

Joanna is one of the moms in the church. She helped cook for the kids and VBS and organized almost all of our basketball games. Despite the fact she is only about 4’ 5”, she is quite skilled at basketball. She has an adorable little daughter named Valentina who we called Luna.

July is a girl at El Paraiso. She’s probably 15 or 16 years old. Last time we became very close friends, but we didn’t see each other often enough this time to get far past the awkward getting-used-to-one-another-again stage. She made the two bracelets I always wear now. Last time she gave me a ring, but this year I passed it on to another girl, much to my immediate regret.

Liana is close to my age. She mostly sticks around Los Alpes, but is sometimes found at El Paraiso. She sings and plays guitar and piano at church. She is learning English and likes to try to talk to me in English. She was the first of the Colombian girls to find me on Facebook, so I’ve been in touch with her since this past winter.

Mark is a CCU graduate who was a missionary in Bogota for fifteen or twenty years. NHCC was one of his sponsor churches, and that’s how we got the link to Colombia. When he worked in Bogota, he helped plant and preach at two churches, but his goal was to eventually put them in the hands of the native Colombians. Five years ago he and his family went moved back to the U.S. and he has visited a few times.

Martha was another returning cook from last time. She’s younger and full of vigor. Her kids are Fredo, no-nonsense Paula, and the energetic but shy twins Brandon and Johann. She’s a fun person to have around.

Oscar is the preacher at all three churches we worked with. He is extremely tall for a Colombian, or for an American, even. He is not incredibly talkative until you get to know him, but from what I can tell he leads his congregations superbly. He is also the head of a wonderful family.

Patricia is Oscar’s wife. She teaches the women and children at church. She also does lots of crafts and sewing to sell and give to others. She is trying to learn English along with Alejandra. She is a lively, loving, and enthusiastic woman, and I love being around her.

The other Particia was the new cook on the team. She is quiet, but always in a good mood. At the end of the week, we learned that she was born with Down Syndrome, but had been cured. Given that Down Syndrome is a genetic anomaly, I can see no explanation for this short of a miracle. She still has some problems and will probably never learn to read, but looking at her you would never guess she had had this disease.

Samuel is Oscar’s grandson. His mom is Yennifer, Oscar's oldest daughter, but we didn’t see her enough for her to get her own blurb. Sammy is one-and-a-half, and he’s one of the most adorable kids ever. He even blows kisses when he says good-bye. He had us all wrapped around his finger for the entire week.

Teresa is Mark’s wife and a native Colombian. When she left Colombia, her goal was to avoid going back, but you see how that worked out. She helped Mark with the churches and led the women down in Bogota. As our only team member who speaks Spanish as her native language, she was an invaluable help, especially at VBS.

Valentina is Oscar’s youngest daughter. She’s Allison’s age and causes a good deal of mischief. We taught her enough English to insult people, and she’s an expert tickler. She and Luke picked on one another quite a lot, but it was in a friendly way. She hasn’t learned much English at all, so even though we spent the entire week around this crazy kid we did very little talking with her, and yet we had no trouble communicating.

Colombia: The Team

I’m not very good at relating events in chronological order without forgetting countless details, so I’m going to try reporting on Colombia in a different format. I will describe our trip by describing related chunks of people and places interspersed with anecdotes. First I will introduce the team. There were twelve of us in all: six teens and six adults, seven returning members and five new members, eleven NHCC members and one brave friend from another church. They will, of course, be introduced in alphabetical order by last name.

Jim Chandler: Jim joined us in Colombia for the first time this week, but he was by no means new to missionary work. He spent a good portion his adult life on the mission field in Spanish-speaking places. He was therefore fluent in Spanish and did all the sermons for the week in Spanish. Surprisingly, I understood pretty much everything he said, but I think he spoke with a bit of an American accent. He left a day early due to the death of his father. He knew when he came that his dad may very well die while he was in Bogota, but he came anyway. That takes a lot of strength.

Allison Gast: This was Allison’s first time on a plane or in a different country. She is the second of my four younger sisters. Despite the fact that she knew maybe five words in Spanish and has a tendency to be a very picky eater, she did very well. She was active in VBS, tried most of the food, and didn’t complain. She also integrated well into the team, despite my fears that she would fade into the background.

Jonathon Gast: Jonathon is my younger brother (I’m going to pretend that more than one person reads this and that they might possibly not know my family). He was another second-time team member. He returned to the VBS side of things and helped run the outdoor games.

Maria Gast: Hey, it’s me. I was returning for the second time. I was in charge of planning VBS and teaching at the women’s group. All went smoothly, thanks to plenty of prayers and reminders to chill and not stress over little things.


Raqchell Gast: Rachel is the oldest of my younger sisters and is also a returning team member. She once again oversaw the face-painting at VBS with the help of Brooke. She and Valentina were attached at the hip for most of the week.

Tony Gast: Tony is my dad, and he, too, was a returning team member. He ran the outdoor games for VBS and was always present when basketball was played. He helped Bob get all the travel plans coordinated.

Bob Kline: Bob (also a returning team member) was in charge of coordinating travel plans with the help of my dad and was our primary communication link to Mark. He was also the head of the construction team. He worked with the preacher's wife and daughter to improve their English, and in the process he learned a little more Spanish.

Brooke Nichols: Brooke is the NHCC preacher’s daughter, and was yet another team member who was there in 2008. She did face-painting with Rachel during VBS and was a constant source of comic relief throughout the trip. We may never know how much of her cluelessness was genuine and how much of it was calculated, but it brought smiles to our faces in either case.

Luke Nichols: Luke is Brooke’s older brother. He was also a returning team member. He worked at the construction site and made very little effort at all to learn proper Spanish. He liked to pick on other team members in a good-natured way, and got at least as much teasing as he gave. He brought “$w@ggg” to Colombia and left with the nick-name El Caballo.

Brit Royse: Brit was our brave non-NHCC team member. He knows Jim from work and decided to come along with us despite the fact that Jim was the only one of us he had ever seen until a few weeks before we left. He was quickly accepted into the team-family. He worked at the construction site and was one of our better-learned Spanish speakers. He chose the name “Flava-Craze” and may be teaming up with El Caballo to bring $w@gg and jerk dancing to Bogota.

Bill Sporing: Bill wanted to come last time, but that didn’t work out. This time he was determined to join us, and I’m glad he did. I didn’t get to know him all that well since he worked at the construction site, but from what I saw he was a great asset to the team and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. With the hat he bought at Monserrate, he could have passed as a Colombian native if you looked past the fact that he could scarcely speak a word of Spanish.

Keri Sporing: Keri is Bill’s wife, and I’m so very happy that she got to come this time around. She did crafts with me at VBS, and she was great with the kids. Not everyone who came last time worked well with the cross-cultural aspect of VBS, but Keri was very well suited to the task. She overflowed with compassion for the kids.

Pennsylvania

I’ve already enumerated most of my Pennsylvania adventures to my only consistent reader, so I won’t go into great detail here. Plus, I’m sure I've already forgotten countless little events. I’ll just give a generalized account of my attitude going into the trip and the turn-around that had occurred by the time I headed home.

The Thursday before I left I considered calling Adrianne and canceling my plans. I was insanely stressed out. Traveling always stresses me out, plus I was driving eight hours by myself to a place I had never been before to spend a week with a family (at this time I still thought that just meant immediate family) I barely knew (except for Adrianne). Plus I was still pulling together last-minute preparations for teaching VBS and the women’s group, NHCC’s VBS was lurking around the corner, I would soon need to put together a lesson for all of Joshua for the high school girls, etc. And then there was the whole wheelbarrow injury. I was just way too stressed out and terrified of driving alone for eight hours. But I decided to go anyway.

I arrived almost uneventfully. I started driving at the secondary dip in my Circadian rhythm, which was a horrible idea. I had to stop three times in the first two or three hours because I had a hard time staying awake. Once I came back to my normal self, the driving went smoothly. The toll road confusion worked itself out just fine, and I only sort of got lost. When Adrianne took me to the cottage I was in for another surprise. I had expected to spend the weekend with her immediate family, but it was actually an extended family get-together with her dad’s side of the family. I don’t have the most pleasant, close-knit extended family, so I was a tad bit nervous about hers.

Within less than a day, my opinion of the trip had been turned on its head. Adrianne’s family were some of the nicest, most welcoming people I’ve ever met in my life. By the end of the weekend I was completely at ease. They made me feel like I was just another cousin. They were different from my dad’s family by how they interacted pleasantly with one another rather than everyone retreating to their own interests and picking on one another at every opportunity. They were different from my mom’s side of the family in their ability to completely relax without an itinerary or competition. I spent the weekend eating, chatting, playing cards (without keeping score), and enjoying the company of enjoyable people.

I headed back home from Adrianne’s house (I unexpectedly got to see her house and hometown after all) a refreshed and relaxed person. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more relaxing weekend in my life. Not only did I get to be lazy, but I got to be lazy socially or non-socially as needed. I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend in the midst of an incredibly stressful few weeks.

Happy Lists

Last year several happy lists emerged from Mr. Rahn's AP calculus class. There were some days when Courtney, Sara, and I simply couldn't listen to calculus anymore, so we passed around sheets of paper and listed things that made us happy. Here's the original list. My additions are in the Trebuchet font, Sara's are in the Georgia font, and Courtney's are in the Courier font.

• •    soup
• •    blue eyes
• •    reading a good book on a rainy day
• •    this pen*
• •    a hillside when its leaves change color
• •    Benny and Joon
• •    the scent of fallen leaves
• •    books/movies that make you cry
• •    chocolate, anytime, anywhere
• •    the wind
• •    perfectly golden roasted marshmallows
• •    doing random things at random times without caring what other people think about it (ex: taking jumping pictures in the rain during lunch)
• •    singing in the rain (both the musical and the actual activity)
• •    singing in general (the girls 100 building bathroom, best acoustics EVER)
• •    feeling good for no reason
• •    climbing trees (especially if I get covered in sap)
• •    trying on clothes at stores and striking poses in the mirror
• •    maria's hat**
• •    the oscillating universe (both the awesome dance move and the woefully obsolete astrophysical hypothesis)
• •    decorating Christmas trees (the good-smelling kind in your living room and x-mas tree shaped cookies)
• •    going through the day with a good song stuck in your head and dancing to it at random moments
• •    walking barefoot in nice, cool mud
• •    the smell of an herb garden
• •    the dog at Imago
• •    Imago in general
• •    harvest moons on midnight-black nights
• •    Halloween
• •    Reese's cups
• •    being in love
• •    being in love with someone who loves you back
• •    playing "Adagio" on the piano
• •    playing any piece in 6-8 time
• •    not playing class music
• •    bubbles
• •    saying "je ne sais pas"
• •    swinging
• •    prismacolor colored pencils
• •    the color of KMnO4
• •    photo booth pics!
• •    separation of photosynthetic pigments on chromatography paper
• •    cozy sweatshirts
• •    caution tape and duct tape
• •    gaff tape and glow tape
• •    the Festival of Lights
• •    any shade of green

* The pen I was using was my teal G2 pen.
** I was wearing my colorful stocking cap from Colombia.

Lost, Again

Along with the question theme (see the short post down the page from this one), relating my misadventures in navigation will likely continue to pop up in my blog now and again. I think almost every driving fail story I have is on here at this point. If not, I'll add the rest in the future. I'm sure new adventures will show up as long as I drive new places.

The adventure I will relate today takes us to the land of Price Hill. It is a rather peculiar story for the fact that it is not my fault that we got lost. Nonetheless, we were lost, and I was one of the drivers. The tale begins at Finneytown High School where several of us young female types met to ride down to Imago Nature Reserve in Price Hill for an afternoon of helping children with art. The minivan filled up with Beth as its driver and five freshmen and sophomores (my sister was among them) as passengers, and Marcy filled up with the three '09 girls who had been to Imago dozens of times. Contrary to reason, the minivan led the way. Beth had printed directions, so we assumed we'd be fine following her. To be safe, Courtney, my level-headed navigator got out Janet the GPS and we had Janet map the way in case we got lost.

In an effort to avoid highways as much as possible, we took a route we were less familiar with. Before the real craziness began, we had already turned around once and gone under a super creepy bridge. I made sure the windows were rolled up and the doors locked before anything got weird. Just when I recognized where we were and was sure of how to complete the journey, Beth switched out of the left turn lane and went straight. Not wanting a van full of high school girls to be lost alone in Price Hill and hoping that Beth just had a new set of directions, we switched lanes and followed them. I would like to note that due to the low levels of traffic, this was done without danger of collision.

Anna, my communications coordinator, borrowed my phone to call Raqchell and set up a connection between the two vehicles. It was determined that Beth did not know where we were. Neither did anyone in my car. All we knew was that this wasn't the most pleasant part of town. After much talking (far too much talking, in my opinion), Beth finally turned down a relatively innocuous side street. We took the lead with Courtney navigating via Janet. We learned Beth's phone also had GPS capabilities, so even if we were to lose them they would be able to get directions. It was well that this was the case.

Almost immediately upon returning to the main road, things got confuzzled once more. Beth was not directly behind me. I tried switching lanes to let the irritated driver behind me pass, but evidently he had already switched lanes to pass me. I narrowly avoided collision. Once he had passed me, I switched lanes. This time I checked for other cars rather thoroughly. Unfortunately, the lane I switched to doubled as parking. I signaled to get back into the other lane, but Beth accidentally passed me. Anna immediately got Raqchell back on the phone. We decided both cars would follow their navigation devices and that we would meet up at Imago.

Janet told Courtney to tell me to turn right on White Street. I did just that. As I turned the corner, I was confronted by the steepest road I had ever seen. Bogota roads had nothing on this hill. Considering the fact that Bogota roads climb up mountains, you can get an idea of how steep of a downhill grade greeted us on White Street. Courtney gasped, I shouted "oh dear" (or something like that), and profanities began to stream from Anna's mouth. To make matters more terrifying, all that I could see at the bottom of the hill when I turned was a huge abandoned building that had clearly been a grandiose school back in the day. I am not ashamed to admit that I was scared. I am not often scared, but I was definitely frightened turning onto White Street. Fortunately the hill was short. A little bit of street looped around in front of the former school, so I pulled onto that to collect myself. A more thorough look at my surroundings revealed that White Street was a residential street. Once you managed to pass the uber creepy super massive building I was stopped in front of. My calm restored, I mentally prayed, determined that my best bet was to follow Janet's directions, and continued down White Street. It was a very hilly street, but it never got nearly as bad as it had been where I turned off of the main road.

The next few turns took us into increasingly unpleasant parts of Price Hill, but that didn't last long. A turn or two brought us into the slightly better parts of Price Hill that we recognized as the route to Imago. Anna's memory eventually disagreed with Janet. After a moment of deliberation I circled the block and trusted Anna. She got us there just fine.

We called Raqchell to see how the van was faring and discovered that they were safely into recognized territory. The following hour of crafts on the forest trails provided much-needed relief from the tension of the drive. I got back to Finneytown without incident. I knew the way, but I kept Janet out just to be safe. It was not until several hours later that I fully calmed down. I considered asking for a big hug when I reached the church. I probably should have, but I was afraid I might have a meltdown. I think what really unnerved me on this misadventure was the fact that I was also trying to keep a van full of dearly beloved high school girls safe in addition to getting myself to the destination. The terrifying turn onto White Street didn't help any, but that alone would not have been enough to leave me shaken for hours after the fact.

My Inanimate College Friends

Several months ago, I described some new human friends from college. I will now take the time to describe some of my new inanimate friends along with a few I brought with me from home.

Arphaxad is no longer with us. He was a wandering Jew from last semester's horticulture class. I managed to kill him within a few weeks of bringing him back to my dorm. The soil he lived in retained water too well, so he succumbed to root rot.

Chester is my swedish ivy from last semester's horticulture class. He is neither swedish, nor ivy. His species is a coleus, a relative of mint, that hails from Australia. A month or so ago, he suffered from some sort of fungus that attacked his leaves, but that seems to be mostly cleared up. The encourage bushy growth, I recently removed the top few nodes from both of his branches and am currently attempting to root them in water. His clonal progeny will, at least for a time be referred to as Edith and Martha. Once they are potted with Chester, I will probably just refer to them all as Chester.

Drew is a little snow man who lives in a little snow globe. I got him from La Phoque Volant de Neige a few years ago, and I brought him along with me. He's a cheery little fellow.

Edith is one of Chester's clonal progeny. She is sickly. I had to cut off one of her leaves yesterday because it suffered from her father's fungal malady. She is also smaller than her sister, and has not recovered as well from the cold shock.

Felice is an angel ornament thing. I don't remember where she came from, but she originally belonged to Julia. She creeped Julia out, so now she hangs from one of Stephens branches and watches me work.

Gretchen is my goldfish plant. She is growing quite quickly, but would love some more sunlight. Unfortunately, I can't get that to her at the moment. When it gets warm again, I'll take her and all my other sun-loving friends out to the courtyard for a picnic.

Harold the sunfish pillow is my dear friend, and quite a gentleman. He escorted Julia and I to watch Star Trek on Slater Hill on the first weekend we were at Purdue. He has continued to be cordial and comforting over the past several months. He and Arthur Mahi are close chums, but they don't get to see each other nearly as often as they like. Fortunately, they can communicate telepathically.

Holly is a geranium. I wasn't trying to be clever or anything when I named her, that's just her name. Sometimes names are weird like that. When it gets warmer and sunnier, I hope to see her crimson blossoms return. She is also from my first semester horticulture class and will definitely be invited to the courtyard picnic.

Ivan is now living at the Gast manor in Cincinnati. He is a poinsettia of the red silverstar variety, and there is no way I could hope to keep him alive in my dorm room. Much to my surprise, he is still alive. My mom isn't well known for keeping potted plants alive, and poinsettias are rather easy to kill.

Janet is my GPS. She has an Irish accent and says "motorway" instead of "highway." She leads me from home to here and back, despite my efforts to defy her. She has never yet led me astray, except for when I ignore her directions. And that's really not her fault. I'm just mildly stubborn, even though I know I have no sense of direction. Whenever I will have to make multiple turns/entrances in rapid succession, she is always sure to tell me which lane I need to be in and what the next few steps will be. Her knowledge is invaluable, once I get to 65. I don't trust her in West Lafayette/Lafayette.

Liam is my and Julia's refrigerator. He politely houses all our perishable victuals and holds up our racks of non-perishable goods. I under-appreciate him sometimes. I really don't know where I'd be without him.

Maggie is dead. She was a maidenhair fern from the hort club call-out. I sort of forgot about her, so she died. Her remains are decomposing in the courtyard. I have little else to say about her. We did not know one another for a very long time.

Margot is a silver-nerve fittonia. They're supposedly very picky tropical plants, but she seems to be very happy with me. She does have some curious mannerisms though. I under-watered her during her first few weeks in my room, and she stuck her leaves straight up in the air. When I watered her, they settled back down to normal within a few hours. She has no qualms about telling me exactly what she wants, and she recovers well after her little fits. She is also from my previous horticulture class.

Martha is Edith's twin sister and Chester's clonal daughter. She is not sickly like her sister. On the contrary, she seems to be quite robust. Like her sister, she is also sitting in a cup of water waiting to grow adventitious roots.

Millie Maude Mae is a darling little stuffed millipede made by Jenny's mom as a gift to me before I left for college. Jenny decided she would find or make me a stuffed millipede after CIY past summer when I explained to her, Ellen, and Samie how much I adore millipedes. She is the perfect size for cuddling while I use Harold as a pillow.

Nadine is also dead. She was Maggie's companion. She was also a fern from the hort club call-out, but I don't know what species she was. She now lies at peace in the courtyard with Maggie and Arphaxad.

Nigel is another dear old friend who I brought from home to college. He is a little foam pumpkin that sits in the hutch over my desk. We became friends when we were crewmates together on the Airship Brutus. Good times were (sometimes) had by all. He had to leave his best friend Bruce behind in order to come to college with me, but he's handling that well.

Seamus is back at home. He's a burro's tail succulent, and evidently those are persnickety to the nth degree. He was pouting here at school, so when I took him home with me over winter break I left him in the kitchen window sill of the Gast manor. There he basks in sunlight and consistent temperatures without being bothered by anything. He much happier back there than he was here.

Stephen is a fake ficus. We go way back to Ms. Althoff's survey of art class in my freshman year of high school. He always sat back in the corner with the other fake trees and collected a ridiculous amount of art dust. This past year I rescued him from certain doom and brought him to live with me at Purdue. He lives at the foot of my loft and greets me every morning as I climb out of my bed.

Wallace is dead, but I can't bear to part ways with him. He is a grass chia head that I made at the botany club call-out. With his different-sized eyes, unruly dessicated hair, and discolored scarf and glasses, I just can't let him go. He remains next to Nigel surveying the room.

William was an english ivy. He was english, and he was an ivy. He was also from my propagation lab in horticulture class last semester. He rooted well, but was unable to form an adventitious bud from his leaf. As I learned this semester, this is because his petiole cells are only pluripotent rather than totipotent.

I believe that's all for now. I hadn't realized I had so many inanimate friends with names. I still haven't named my laptop, viola, or coffee maker, and I'll be getting more and more plant friends as the semester goes on, so a second list may be necessary near the end of the semester.

H1Z1 Outbreak Journal: Day 3

I woke up knowing that I needed to eat soon or die. I encountered no meals on my way to class, but I heard about the desperate acts of some of my fellow zombies. They hid in the second level of the parking garage at University and Second and jumped out behind a group of humans. It was a total massacre.

After my next class I headed to the place where I knew I could find an encampment of the infected. They were indeed there, and they were more organized than before. Whenever a zombie catches a victim, he shares his feed with the two zombies closest to death. The community takes care of its brothers. The only remaining humans are all either cowards or cunning. Or both. We almost had a few of them, but they all escaped. I was going wild with the need to consume brains when a fellow patient came running carrying a fresh victim. Another famished companion and I immediately devoured any brains that remained in the human. With my stomach full, I stuck around for a while, but the corner of my brain that remained human reminded me of my school duties. I wished them all happy hunting and took my leave.

This evening I left campus to go to a debate at IU. I was concerned that I might become violent while crowded into a car, but for some reason I was fine. I sat next to Julia, who also has H1Z1, and none of the guys lived on campus. The disease is very localized. You can't contract it unless you live on campus, and those with the disease don't find the brains of those living off-campus to be very appealing. This was a great comfort to me, because I also feared that I would be hostile toward Josh and my other friends from Cincinnati. Fortunately, I felt exponentially more "human" as we left campus. By the time we reached IU, I could barely detect my unnatural urges for human brains.

Once again, I couldn't help my fellow zombie's with tonight's mission. Maybe tomorrow will be different. We'll see.

New People

Here are some of the people I've met who I have or likely will become friends with.

Julia is my roommate. She's an engineering major from Dayton, and it would have been hard to find a better roommate. She's adorable and we have a lot in common. We're both geeky, goofy, artsy, environmentally conscious Christians. We also have similar sleeping habits, which is nice when you're living with someone.

Justin was in my orientation group. He's from somewhere in Indiana, and he hasn't chosen a major yet. Whenever we got bored at the free-for-all scheduled social events during orientation we ended up talking to each other. He loves free stuff whether he'll ever use it or not. By the end of the week he had acquired fifteen cups, three water bottles (including the engineering one...even though he's not in engineering), three backpack bag things, and much more.

Aurash was also in my orientation group, and he's also an engineering major. He's from Texas and his parents are from India, but he has no accent whatsoever as far as I can tell. He wears Threadless shirts - a good way for anyone to instantly improve my impression of them. We also share music tastes and played in orchestra in high school.

Kevin went to high school with Justin who introduced us when we were sitting around at our night of fun and frivolity at the sports/recreation facility (co-rec or RSC). He is yet another engineering major from Indiana. He's sweet and nerdy and has some sort of slight to moderate physical disability that I couldn't identify. If all goes according to my plans, when I join the orchestra in the spring and he'll be there in the oboe section.

Margaret is a public horticulture major I met at the ag picnic. She seems sweet and hopes to operate a botanical garden someday. Since she's in the landscaping/horticulture department, we'll probably have some classes together.

When I met Margaret I met the guy who is the only other LAHD (landscape horticulture and design) student I found during the entire week... but I forgot his name. He was originally going to come here on a football scholarship, but then he blew out his knee and permanently ended his football career. He looked into horticulture and forestry, chose LAHD, and likes it so much that he doesn't regret that he had to give up football to find it.

I actually met Michael earlier in the week when I went to an interest session about the honors programs. When I first saw him, for some reason I sensed a "pretentious jerk vibe," but that proved to be a hasty and inaccurate judgment. He's majoring in horticultural science, so we had a nice discussion about aeroponics while we waited to go hiking on the honors retreat. We continued to talk along the way and made jokes about the designer who didn't make the canyon trail handicap accessible. He might be in the orchestra as well, so I'll be seeing a lot of him in the future.

I also met Kayleigh at the honors interest session. She's majoring in biochemistry in the college of ag. I knew the minute I saw her that we would likely become friends, but that it might take some effort for us to get to know each other. On the honors retreat we got off to a good start working on a jigsaw puzzle together.

Elizabeth and I literally ran into each other finding seats during the opening ceremonies of the honors retreat. Later we ended up sitting next to each other at dinner, and we discovered that we have a lot in common. We both like horses but not the all-too-often snobby people that ride and show english, we want to do volunteer work with the environment, we enjoy being outside, we like taking pictures, and we're awkward around people. Since the retreat we've eaten together twice, and we're bound to continue to interact. Her major is engineering, and she's from the Chicago area.

Allyson became my Facebook friend back in January, but we didn't meet each other until the honors retreat. She's from Indianapolis and is majoring in food science with a minor in dance. Since we're both in UHP and ag honors, we'll be seeing a lot of each other. She's friendly and just a bit sarcastic, and I love sarcasm in moderation.

Kilian was helping Kayleigh and Mary (she's next) with the jigsaw puzzle when I met him on the honors retreat. He's in engineering - hopefully aerospace, so he likes to call himself a future rocket scientist. Since he's in UHP and the orchestra (violin I think?) and will be attending the call-outs for the outing club and the medieval club, I predict that we will have plenty of opportunities to continue becoming friends.

Mary was the other girl who helped with the puzzles. She's going into pre-vet if I remember correctly, and that's pretty much all I know about her right now. She's very shy, but nice.

Dr. Chris is the person in charge of the UHP. He's a retired entomology professor who never misses an opportunity to encourage us to consider entomology. I instantly took a liking to him because he reminds me so much of Uncle Reggie. He's an enthusiastic, intelligent, friendly, old man of Chinese heritage. I hope to talk to him about entomology. Maybe he knows more about millipedes.

Whenever we go to a meal, Julia and I look for a lonely person and sit with them, and that's how I met the next two people. Wa is an exchange student from China who is here to study psychology education to become a professor back in China. She was so adorable! She's struggling with English and very nervous about it, so she asked us the words for a lot of thing at the table and then wrote them down in a little journal.

Just a few minutes ago we got back from lunch with Jeff. He's from Indiana and he's majoring in economics and will hopefully go on to law school afterward. It was awkward at first because it took us a while to find anything we had in common, but then we discovered that all three of us did theater in high school. The ice was finally broken and we had a nice little conversation about theater in our tiny high schools. I might try to find him later for the opening convocation I'm supposed to attend about our summer reading. Julia has an engineering honors thing, but Jeff and I are both scheduled for the same convocation and it would be nice not to go by myself.

Midnight in Lockland

On Saturday night, I was in West Chester for a graduation party. Much to my delight and relief, I arrived without trouble. However, the ride home was a different story. As is my custom, I wound up rather lost in an unfamiliar area.

Around 11 PM I left West Chester with Amy and Joe. As you know, I absolutely despise driving on highways. Driving on highways in the dark is worse. Driving on highways in the dark on a route I've never taken is even worse. Driving on highways in the dark on a route I've never taken while wearing my glasses rather than my contacts is nearly the worst possible driving scenario I could imagine. Fortunately, I had two friends with me, and it turned out that Amy is excellent at getting un-lost and keeping me from freaking out. Joe didn't do me much good, but at least he didn't make anything worse. Before I even hit a main road, I had to pull over to calm myself down. I convinced myself that although my glasses didn't give me perfect vision, they were plenty good enough to allow to drive safely. I also called my dad to ask whether or not the headlights ever got fixed. They hadn't, which meant that my brights are the equivalent of any other car's normal headlights. I was afraid that I'd have to drive without my brights, and without them I can only see about ten feet in front of the car - and that's not an exaggeration. Amy helped with the calming down. After a few minutes and a switch of CDs (it was decided that Rimsky-Korsakov is much more calming than Apocalyptica), we were ready to go.

Merging onto 75 made me nervous, as usual, but as usual nothing bad happened. There was no cataclysmic ten-car pile-up. I'm getting more and more used to merging. The only real problem on the highway came when I couldn't find the white dashed line between my lane and the one next to me. I was not okay with that. After a moment of investigation, Amy discovered that I was still in a real lane. The dashed line had just been covered by road sealant stuff.

We were nearly home when I made a horrible mistake. I wasn't sure which exit to get off at, so when I saw the sign for the Lockland-Reading exit, I chose it. I've driven around in Reading plenty of times and Lockland a couple, so I was confident that I'd be able to find my way home. I was familiar with the intersection I found myself at, but I didn't remember exactly how to get home. I tried a couple possibilities, but I didn't seem to get closer to anywhere familiar enough that I could easily get home. We got into shadier and shadier parts of Lockland. Eventually it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to lock the car doors. When I talked to Kirby the next day, she informed that one of the streets I had spent a lot of time on was one that George had told her to never ever drive on at night under any circumstances. I thought about calling George since he lives in Lockland, but I decided against it. I'm not sure why. It would have been much wiser to call George. I suppose that my reluctance to ask for directions is part of what makes me Man-ria. I found my way back to the intersection we started at and pulled over to get out my GPS. It hadn't even occurred to me to use it until that point. We plugged it into the car and everything, but we couldn't get it to turn on. Amy and I both tried everything we could think of, but to no avail. We even looked for the instruction manual, but couldn't find it.

At Amy's insistence, we abandoned hope of finding our way through Lockland and got back on 75-south. The next exit we saw was for 562 - the Norwood Lateral. Amy and I thought that would get us back to Ronald Reagan. We were wrong. Our first mistake was that we got on going the wrong direction. We took the first exit we found to switch directions. The place where we got off was even shadier than any place we had encountered in Lockland. We spent about 100 yards on that road before getting back on 562 in the opposite direction which took us onto 75-north. Amy called her dad and was asking for him to Map-Quest the way home when I saw a sign for Ronald Reagan. The transition from 75 to Ronald Reagan to Galbraith was uneventful.

Instead of turning left on Galbraith like normal, Amy recommended that we take a short-cut to her house. So we turned right and took Congress Run. Up to this point, the inside of my windshield had gradually begun to fog up, and none of the usual methods were working to clear it off. I even tried wiping it with a towel, but that didn't help either. So I was stuck driving up Congress Run at night with a fogged-up windshield and without real brights. Congress Run is an insane street. Driving on it is an adventure - an adventure best reserved for sunny days. It's incredibly steep and narrow with hairpin turns screened by thick vegetation. It provided an entirely different sort of adventure than Lockland, although it was still an unpleasant adventure. After taking at least three times as long as it would normally take to drive down that street, we arrived at Compton and made it to her house without trouble. I dropped her off, drove Joe home, and returned to my home around 12:30 AM. What should have been a 20-30 minute drive turned into what may have been the scariest hour and a half of my life. I am now more determined than ever to learn how to get from place to place on the highways.

Appalachia Part V: Thursday

I now arrive at the conclusion of the Appalachia Adventures series. Soon I will be able to move on to other topics.

On Thursday morning, according to custom, we got up at 6:00 AM. It took some of us quite a while to get going. We pranked one of the guys' vans in reaction to their pranks, but ours wasn't nearly as good as theirs. Since we didn't have much time to plan or gather materials, we (by which I merely mean two of my friends and nobody else) used what we had: feminine products.

At the work site our roofing plans were foiled again because it was raining again. I helped put in some more dead-wood and insulation and watched a few people work on the siding, but there was nothing else to be worked on in the rain. Ivan (one of the carpenters) did his best to find little odd jobs for me to do since he could see that I wasn't very happy about sitting around not helping, and I thought that was very sweet of him.

During one of the long periods of time in which we had nothing to do, Boone told the tale of the truck wreck. A semi full of coal was careening around a curve at about 80 mph - on a wet road, might I add. At the same time, another semi was coming around the bend. The coal truck swerved to avoid the other truck. It clipped the other semi and then collided with the mountainside. The other semi suffered some damage, but the driver was uninjured. The coal truck, on the other hand, didn't fare as well. The cab was completely crushed and rescue crews spent the entire day picking up pieces of the driver that had been scattered along the road. At least he would have died instantly. We drove through there only about five or ten minutes after the accident. If we had left our site exactly when we were scheduled to, we could have been part of that accident.

We bid our final farewells to the carpenters and left the site at lunch again that day to go back to the cabins and pack. Everybody was ready to leave on time, but we couldn't go until the woman in charge of the organization came by to check that we were cleaned up and give us our COAP (Christian Outreach to Appalachian People - the organization we worked with) shirts. She was running more than an hour late, but we got to leave eventually.

My van was almost empty because I chose to ride with the teacher that everyone else was fed up with. We listened to 80's music and enjoyed some gorgeous clouds all the way home. Upon arriving at school and finding my luggage just in time for the college group study, I was called and informed that I would be picked up by Josh. By this point, most of my female friends had heard about this Josh guy of whom I was (and am) rather fond, so they were pretty excited to hear that he would be picking me up and they would get to see him. When he arrived, three of them decided that they would each carry one of my belongings as an excuse to walk over to his car. Unfortunately, it did not even occur to me until much later that they were hoping to be introduced to him. I'm not very good at that sort of thing.

So there you have it, Princess Gwendolyn Maple's Appalachian Adventures in five unnecessarily lengthy episodes.

Appalachia Part IV: Wednesday

Just like on Monday and Tuesday, we got up early. Each morning there was less shine in our rise-and-shine routines. It was overcast and rainy on Wednesday, so we took even longer to get up and going.

Thanks to the rain, we couldn't work on the roof, so instead we had to find jobs inside the house for everyone. At first I got to help cut and install insulation. Fiberglass is no fun, but I managed to get far fewer fiberglass splinters than most of my comrades. After the insulation was done I got to climb up in the rafters and nail dead-wood into place. Dead-wood provides something for drywall to be anchored to.

The morning passed uneventfully. Instead of eating at the construction site and continuing work after lunch, we all headed back to the cabins to eat lunch and go sight-seeing. On the way to the cabins we passed a horrible semi truck wreck. We would learn the tale of the accident the next day.

Most us packed into the vans after lunch to visit the Coal Mine Museum. I made the mistake of riding in Ms. Owen's car. She drives like a madwoman. The museum was fascinating, but rather depressing as well. There were all sorts of stories about cave-ins and mining injuries.

One of the workers at the museum recommended that we visit Raven Rock in Kingdom Come State Park. Raven Rock was a ledge elevated a half-mile above the valley below, and the man told us that standing on the edge made you feel like you were flying. We decided that sounded like fun, so we drove off to the park. The winding roads up to the park were treacherous, and Mrs. Rivet in the front van decided that it was her turn to drive like a madwoman. Leah was about ready to puke or cry by the time we reached the parking lot up in the mountains.

From the parking lot, we hiked about a mile up steep trails (or, in the case of Maddy, me, and most of the guys, straight up the mountainsides with no interest in wimpy trails) to get to the place where the confusing signs told us we would find Raven Rock. Despite the fact that I hadn't had any sort of exercise in months, I managed to be the first girl to the top and took only one tiny break of about thirty seconds. I was breathing a little hard by the time I reached the top of the trail.

Unfortunately, we didn't see anything resembling Raven Rock. Everyone else in the first group turned around and headed back down the path, but I was determined to look around until I found this ledge. Eventually I succeeded. I shouted back to Courtney and Maddy - the only two that had stuck around from the second group - and they joined me. There was a pier-type thing with railings built onto a rocky outcropping on the side of a cliff. We walked to the railing at the end of the pier and looked out over the edge to see the half-mile drop straight down. It was breathtaking. Literally. For several seconds my head wouldn't stop spinning. It was awe-inspiring, even though the trees hadn't yet woken up from their winter slumber. Some day I'll go back when the trees are clad in summer leaves, autumn colours, or wintry snow. Near the ledge was a bench, and we decided to take Titanic pictures on it. It was a very blustery day, so the wind swept our hair back like in the movie. As we left Raven Rock we saw two ravens flying overhead. I have pictures of all these things on Facebook.

When we reached the top of the trail we realized that we were alone, we had no idea where anyone had gone, and our cell phones didn't have service. We started off down the trail in hopes of finding the others at the bottom. Partway down we heard familiar voices in the distance and followed them to discover our friends. They had apparently called our names for quite some time before giving up, and some of the girls were deeply distressed. Fortunately, Mr. Volz was able to reason that the three of us would be together and that we would take care of ourselves. In lieu of the real Raven Rock, they had found a bald mountainside. It was extremely windy up there, so much that one of my friends encouraged me to sit down because she was genuinely worried that I would fall over. I had no such worries, so I trotted on down through the rocks to where the guys were investigating a cave. Just as I got there, the clouds that had been steadily gathering took on a more menacing appearance, and we decided that the side of a mountain was not the best place to be in a storm. The guys and I decided that it would be quicker to skip the paths and take a short-cut. I know that this is generally not the best idea, but we made it through just fine with the exception of a few minor scrapes and scratches. We were back in the vans and partway down the mountain before the rain hit. I was sad not to be out in it, but I am forced to acknowledge that some things are unintelligent and unsafe and should probably not be done no matter how fun they seem or how completely unfrightened I feel.

We arrived back at the cabins without event. Here, my list of happening says "explosions." I have no idea whatsoever what that was referring to, so I'll skip to the next stuff. Several of us played cards after dinner again. First we played BS. I am atrociously horrible at that game, but my efforts provided amusement, so I consider that to be time well spent. I vanquished all challengers in a game of ERS once I was done failing at BS. When all the weaklings had given up, my friend Courtney and I decided to play a more extreme version of ERS. In our version, one must smack one's own forehead before smacking a sandwich. It added a whole new dimension to the game. We were both running on caffeine and adrenaline sans sleep by this point so we sort of frightened the few people who ventured out onto the porch where we were playing. It was great fun.

People stayed up late as usual. All but one of the guys had gone down to Sleepy Hollow and most of the girls had gone to bed when the guys played a prank on us. I must commend them for their work, because it was quite a nice series of pranks. They squirted ketchup onto pigs' feet (they found some at the local grocery store), tossed them onto the porch, knocked on the windows and the sides of the cabin, and left a ketchup handprint on the back window. Five or ten minutes later, they got into one of the vans and propped a stick between the steering wheel and the seat so that the stick was stuck pushing the horn. It was nicely done. But of course, we had to retaliate. Before going back to sleep we planned our prank for the next morning.

Appalachia Part III: Tuesday

Sorry for the long silence. I have about six posts partially finished, so I should be putting a lot more up in the near future.

Tuesday morning started at the early hour of 6:00 AM just like Monday did. It took a few more hits of the snooze button to wake everyone up, and the PBJ sandwich-making brigade was a little slow to get moving, but we were at the work site by 7:30. Once again, the natives were running a little behind schedule. It was chilly outside in the mountain morning air, so we stayed in our cozy vans until the carpenters arrived.

When the carpenters did arrive, the roofing team had to sit around doing nothing until the sun dried the dew off the roof. As the house was near the bottom of a valley, it took some time for the sun to reach us. In the meantime, I sat in the open trunk of a van and did nothing. I hate doing nothing while other people are working. It drives me insane. However, I didn't have many options so I just had to deal with it.

Once the little rays of sunshine finally hit the rooftop of our little valley house, it didn't take long for the tar paper and shingles to dry off enough for us to walk safely on them. The morning was spent nailing on more shingles, frightening 2x6 supports, and rain guards. Thanks to my perfectionism and shingling skill (it really doesn't take much to become a skilled shingler, but I'm proud of my new-found ability nonetheless), I was promoted to row-starter. The first shingle in a new row must be lined up so perfectly that it splits the one-eighth-inch mark of a chalk line in half. I've finally found the one thing that really does require absolute perfectionism.

Lunch brought a few items of interest. A wandering beagle found and befriended us, and we named him Shiloh after the books about Shiloh the beagle. Evidently it's common for Harlan dwellers to let their dogs roam the community during the day. The dogs almost always make it back home in time for dinner without trouble. Towards the end of lunch, a man a few doors down the hill from our site walked out of his house carrying a rifle. Billy voiced the opinion that the man looked to be a little messed-up, by which he seemed to mean drunk. The man proceeded to shoot the rifle at some unknown object. Nobody in the neighborhood was disturbed in the least. We found that a little odd.

The afternoon brought more shingles, bigger blisters, and little else. As the roof crew climbed back down the ladder, I realized that I hadn't used sunscreen the entire day, and to my surprise I hadn't sizzled like an egg on hot pavement. It was a pleasant surprise.

Back at the cabin, I decided against an early shower in favor of taking my camera, Orthodoxy, and The Great Omission on a hike up to the rock formation on the ridge near the cabin. This time I had the rock to myself, and it was marvelously tranquil and absolutely lovely. I benefited from the break from people and noise. Todd was right about the benefits of silence and solitude. As much as I loved many of the people I went with, I can only stand so much non-stop human contact.

I came back down to discover that my friends from the other work site and my one friend from my site were going on a walk down the mountain into Sleepy Hollow where the boys' cabins were. I think one of the girls wanted to play basketball, but I don't fully remember the reason for the trip; we never actually made it there. The road from the girls' cabin to the boys' cabin zig-zagged across the grass-covered face of the mountain. We speed-walked most of the way down the road, and then realized that we needed something back up in the cabin. Charity and I decided to hike through the grass straight up the mountainside instead of using the road. We made it, but she was on the verge of asthmatic breathing problems, and I had a hard time not slipping thanks to the fact that my foam flip-flops had gotten soaked. Once we did whatever we needed to, we speed-walked all the way down almost to the boys' cabin. Just as we started down their driveway, one of the teachers pulled up to pick up some of the guys. and he told us that it was dinner time. He offered to give us a ride, but I decided that I wanted to see if I could run up the road and beat him. After about 100 yards, I was the only person still in favor of that idea, so instead we sat in the middle of the road and waited to be picked up. We opened the trunk and all squeezed into the back and sang along to The Killers on the way up the hill/mountain.

Dinner was a delicious grill-out followed by some cards. Between cards and bedtime I sat around the fire with people I didn't normally talk to, and it was actually very nice. I heard lots of interesting stories and had some lovely conversations. It would be nice if I could remember any of them, but right now I'm proud for remembering this much (I haven't really remembered all this for this long. I made lists on the way home. If I had actually remembered this all several weeks after the fact, I'd be shocked).

Appalachia Part II: Monday

On Monday morning my side of the cabin woke up at 6 AM. We were supposed to be completely ready to meet our carpenters (our experienced leaders for the week) by 7. I was disappointed in my fellow females when I saw how many of them brought unnecessary amounts of makeup and hair products and appliances. Seriously? We were going to be doing construction. Not trying to win a beauty pageant. Nobody really cares much at all about how you look. I think it's an addiction.

We split ourselves into two groups: landscaping and roofing. Landscaping sounded more interesting, but very few people were gladly volunteering for roofing so I joined the roofing team. Our carpenters didn't arrive until 7:30. We had been warned that people in Appalachia don't operate on strict schedules. The truth of that statement quickly became apparent. It was nice to work around such laid-back people. Our carpenters were named Boone, Ivan, and Bill. Boone was the head guy, and he loved to play tricks on us. I think Ivan may have had a slight mental disability, but he was very sweet. Bill (who we later nick-named Bad-Ass Bill) was only eighteen, but he was described by the owner of our host organization as a "carpentry genius" and he deserved that title. The first thing we noticed about our job site was that there were chickens everywhere, and that they liked to call all day long. I didn't mind, thanks to my extended exposure to non-stop rooster crowing in Colombia, but some of my classmates quickly became irritated by the birds.

Our first task was to get the 60 lb. packages of shingles from the front of the house to the top of the roof via a ladder behind the house. The girls carried the shingles to the ladder - or rather Charity and I carried them to the ladder (and managed to cut ourselves on them) with occasional help from the other girls who couldn't carry the packages alone. Once we got the shingles to the ladder, the guys got them on top of the roof. A few of them took turns hoisting the shingles over their shoulders and carrying them up the ladder. At the top, another guy would drag the bag off of their shoulders (the ladder guys had scarlet, shingle-burned necks by the end) and carry it to the peak.

At one point, Boone decided it would be fun to put a rubber snake under the shingles to see if any of us girls would squeal in terror. At the time, only Charity and I were carrying shingles, and it didn't bother either of us at all. Finally some of the other girls decided to help. Sure enough, when the shingles were lifted, squeals erupted. It took one girl several seconds to realize that it wasn't real, even after it was clear that it wasn't moving anywhere. With permission from Boone, I stowed the snake in my pocket for later pranks.

When Charity cut her knee open on some shingles, we discovered that one of the vans didn't have a first aid kit and that the other did... but Mrs. Rivet had locked the keys inside. I don't know how we finally got them out, but eventually we did, and Charity got her band-aid. It was a shallow cut, but it just wouldn't stop bleeding for a while.

By this point, the prep work was over and we were ready to get up on the roof and get to work. First we had to nail 2x6 boards under the angled edges of the roof. This involved reaching over the side of the roof to hold the 2x6 perpendicular to the roof and flush with the edge. While reaching over, we had to be sure to keep our weight about 1.5 feet away from the edge because there was nothing supporting the roof until that point (if that didn't make sense, I can draw a diagram sometime). That part made even me nervous, and I have an unnatural lack of fear of heights and falling.

Next we nailed in drip guards along the edges. I got to do quite a bit of that because it didn't make me at all nervous. After that, we were ready to begin the actual shingling. Unfortunately I didn't wear gloves. The resulting blisters have been seen on Facebook. Fortunately I did remember sunscreen. I managed to avoid sunburn altogether.

Once lunch time rolled around, we realized that all our sandwiches were with the group at the other work site. I went with one of the teachers and a few others to go rescue our sandwiches and bid good-day to all my friends at the other site. I only talked to one or two people at my site, so it was nice to see the others.

After lunch we went right back to work. By the end of the afternoon, I was one of the best novice roofers. Upon our return from the sandwich site, Mrs. Rivet had given her keys to one of the girls so she wouldn't lose them. Well... the girl lost them instead. We spent several minutes looking for the keys before discovering that Boone had found them on the ground and picked them up partially as a prank and partially to make sure that they weren't truly lost.

We made our way back to the cabins. Much to our delight, we discovered that the running water had been restored! Showers for all!

Shortly after returning, I set out for the rock formation with some of the guys. I didn't know they were going. I found them there when I arrived. My hopes of peace and solitude were ruined, but at least the guys weren't at all obnoxious. I still got my peace to a certain degree. Atop the rock were all sorts of lovely lichens and mosses as well as some stubborn beech saplings growing out from between layers of the rock. The view was nice, too. When I first climbed up, I used the same method the guys had used. It didn't work to well with my über short legs. Once on top of the rock, however I found a crevice I could fit into that led to another small opening in the underside of the rock. Once I dropped through that hole, I easily walked out from beneath the rock without even having to stoop. It wasn't too hard to climb back up either. It was perfect.

That afternoon I decided to be a good student and work on some calculus. That was pretty much the only homework I did for the entire week. I probably should've done more, but it was nice to have a break from school for a few days.

We had a nice, simple spaghetti dinner outside in the cool spring evening. Following dinner, Courtney and Anna decided that yoga would be a fun idea. I reluctantly joined them. We went behind the girls' cabin to avoid awkward looks from out classmates. Unbeknownst to us, someone was washing dishes right in front of the window on the back side of the cabin. Mr. Muchmore was amused by the contrast between Courtney's yoga and the pitiful attempts of Anna and me.

We lit a campfire as the sun began to set and roasted marshmallows. Campfire + marshmallows = a delightful combination. As the fire began to die down, we headed inside for the night.

Just Because

Once upon a time, there lived a woman named Julia Grover and a man named Rupert Follehomme. Julia was a computer scientist who had been raised by her loving grandparents after her parents died in a tragic incident involving a trumpeter swan and a jet-ski. Rupert was a madman who had once controlled an evil society. Through a chaotic and confusing series of events, Julia and Rupert met. They knew from the moment that they set eyes on one another that they were soul mates. Julia even forgave Rupert for murdering her grandfather.

Many years later...

Julia and Rupert have had a son. His name is Eugene. He is now eighteen.* Eugene is driving drunk and hits his parents as they frolic down the street hand in hand. Julia dies, and Rupert joins MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). He convinces Rick Astley to join MADD as well.

Then a meteor hits the earth and the dinosaurs return. Humans die by dino or meteor, go to live with Hitler in the center of the earth, or join Eugene in trying to repopulate the world. Eugene realizes the futility of his goal and instead plots to overthrow Hitler. Just in time, the Brigators show up from the past and help him defeat Hitler. After his victory, Eugene sets up a new order in the center of the earth, and everyone lives happily ever after, including the small clan of civilized sasquatches that they allow to take up residence in their subterranean world.


*Everything after this point is verbatim what I originally wrote down from our ramblings except for the fact that Julia and Rupert now have names.

Adventures in Rural Indiana

Once upon a time (by which I mean more than a month ago by now), four brave adventurers set out on what was destined to become a memorable journey filled with curious sights and experiences...

Here's what I remember about the Indiana trip that Anna/Betsy, Seth, Josh, and I took a few weeks ago. The events within each paragraph are probably not in the proper order, but all the events in one paragraph followed those in the preceding paragraph and came before the ones in the next.

This particular telling of the tales of that day will start with my brief exploration of the UC campus led by Josh. Among other things, I got to see the office of Mr. Man (I'm wanting to say his name was Man D. Kwon, but I don't know if I'm remembering that correctly), some telescopes atop the astronomy and physics buildings, interesting architecture, and the unnatural community of dorms in which my guide lives. The trees were unnaturally straight (even the redbud!) and still had an unusual percentage of their leaves, and the grass was eerily green. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit the wizard's tower.

After we picked up Seth and Anna/Betsy, we left UC and got on the highway. The grass beside one of the earlier highways was strewn with garbage galore. It was depressing. I avoided looking at it. We passed one of those houses with horrible kitschy lawn ornaments covering the front yard. At one point, Seth spotted what appeared to be a real monkey sitting on a picnic table. Throughout the trip we played roadkill bingo. Or at least I did. I saw (and circled in red pen, incidentally) a squirrel, a rabbit, a tire, a groundhog, a dog, a raccoon, a cat, and several mysterious masses of mangled flesh in addition to smelling a dead skunk.

Once we got to downtown Anderson, the real adventures started. Downtown Anderson was a very shady place. It even has a Shadyside Memorial Park, which I will get to in a moment. The GPS led us astray, and told us to turn onto this ultra shady back street. It was mildly frightening. When we tried to get off of that street, we nearly had a nasty run-in with a huge pick-up truck. Apparently he didn't have a stop sign. We decided to stop to ask for directions, so we pulled into Shadyside Memorial Park. At the entrance there were these horrid little stone pillar things. They tried to look nice, but they failed miserably. It made me sad to look at them, so I turned away. Nobody was in the park... except for some guy sitting in his car in the parking lot near the playground. Drug dealer? Pedophile? Who knows. All I know is that he fit very well into the general mood of downtown Anderson. We were supposed to be going north, but evidently we were going south. I didn't know that. Normally, the GPS shows the car driving towards to top of the screen. At the top of the screen was North Anderson, so I assumed that we were going north. However, if I had looked at the little car, I would have realized that it was driving towards the bottom of the screen, meaning that we were going south. It took me a while to notice that, so I kept objecting every time Josh tried to turn around. I'm not sure how much time my confusion added to the trip. We didn't reset the GPS with the new directions, so it kept on telling us to make a u-turn.

The return trip provided even more excitement. We became lost again. The GPS's directions had us driving in the middle of nowhere for quite some time. Maybe it wanted revenge for all the times we refused to make a u-turn, despite its protests. Most of the time, we were on hilly roads barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast. As we crested each hill, we feared that we would find another car about to collide with us. Fortunately, there were no accidents. In fact, we rarely saw any signs of real civilization whatsoever. It was kind of creepy. Due to excessive exhaustion combined with the most caffeine I've ever consumed in a day, I was slap-happy the entire time. It made the drive even more interesting for me. At one point, I burst out laughing and finally managed to communicate that I was amused by the fact that we hadn't driven on a lined road in a long time. Normally, that wouldn't have been that funny, but caffeine + fatigue = all sorts of interesting thoughts. Throughout the landscape dotted with lonely buildings and grotesque, leafless trees were little cement monoliths of mystery. They were all over the place, and we couldn't figure out what on earth they might be. There was also an old, mostly destroyed tower-ish structure. I don't remember what it was, or if we found out what it was at all. For part of the countryside ride, we listened to Captain Beefheart. I tried brainstorming for an essay while it was playing. That didn't go as well as it could have. Thank goodness Josh stopped it somewhere near track 13. I can only take so much Beefheart. We stopped for a bathroom break as soon as we saw signs of civilization. Raleigh, IN, was hardly civilization, but it was something. The greasy diner place we stopped at was interesting. They sold cans of beans. They sold other things too, but I only remember the cans of beans. There was a layer of grease on the countertop. Betsy/Anna was the only one brave enough to use the bathroom hidden away in the furnace room. As we left, we heard the locals chuckling. They were probably laughing at us city folk, and I don't blame them. We stopped again later in Metamora at the Hav-A-Bite, and that was a much nicer experience. Well, maybe not for Seth, but he said he felt much better after throwing up. Next to the bathrooms was a poster of the "little houses of Metamora." The distinguishing feature of the town was Mt. Metamora. Mt. Metamora was a large hill with a small building of mystery perching atop it. The building had a cross on the side, so maybe it was a church or a monastery of some sort. The hill was covered in dead grass with a few gnarled trees. Someone suggested that it may have been a landfill at one point. Relatively close to the time we finally made it back to the highway, there was a railroad along the road and a canal next to that. It made me smile. We were driving alongside the evolution of technology. After a while, we got on the highway. At some point during the trip back home, we saw a yard with live llamas in it. I have no idea where this fits in with the chronology of events. That's all.

Concert Week

Concert week technically started on Thursday the 4th and won't end until Thursday the 18th, but seven of the ten concerts fit between Monday the 8th and Friday the 12th, so I'm considering that week to be concert week.

The first concert was the elementary instrumental concert. Heather played in the fourth grade orchestra (the first group), and Allison played in the sixth grade band (the last group), so we got the joy of staying for the entire concert. Before the concert, I got to help tune the seventy-some stringed instruments in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade orchestras. I'll admit, I wasn't all that concerned with absolute perfection. Their instruments go out of tune quickly, and they can't play in tune to begin with, so I figured I wouldn't be adding a whole lot of pain to the listening experience by letting a few of the instruments remain slightly out of tune. The fourth-graders weren't supposed to get to use their bows, but my sister brought hers out anyway and had to be sent back to put it away. The fourth and fifth grade orchestras performed at the expected skill level, but the 9-member sixth grade orchestra should have been much better. The fifth grade band played as expected, but the sixth grade band played exceptionally well. They were actually pleasant to listen to for the most part.

On the Monday of the main concert week, we got to hear the fifth and sixth grade voices of Whitaker along with the Whitaker percussion ensemble. The songs were surprisingly un-hokey, considering the director. He's really quite a character. I don't know how else to describe him. You should see how high he crosses his lowercase t's (I'm not sure if I wrote that properly, but I'm sure that you all get the idea). As usual, the percussion ensemble played painfully repetitive songs that lasted somewhere between five and ten minutes each.

I guess it's typical for local churches and other groups to ask the high school's audition choir (Chorale) to come and sing around Christmastime. This year we're singing at two or three churches and an assisted living home, along with our annual concerts for the senior citizens of the community and the middle and high school students. Our first in a long series of concerts came on Tuesday during school. We drove over to St. Paul's Church of Christ in North College Hill to play for a group of elderly women. I called them the Widow Brigade in my head. Our first song didn't go so well, but the others went just fine. Our last song was a version of the "Ave Maria" that is evidently sung at many funerals. It actually caused several of the old women to cry. In the last song, my friend Eddie and I sing a tenor solo as a duet. He never wanted to sing it in the first place, but I think our conductor felt bad about giving both tenor solos to girls, so he had Eddie and I sing the lower one together. Since he had never intended to try out for the solo, he didn't know the words until today. The fact that he had no idea what he was singing would always make me a nervous wreck during rehearsals, so I'm glad he fixed it in time for our first concert. I felt that we did well, and several of the Chorale members told us that our balance and blend was excellent. Hurrah! I have one last thing to mention about the kind old ladies: one of them looked a little spacey and was wearing a pair of reindeer antlers tied on top of her head with a large bow under her chin. We had a hard time looking in her direction with a straight face.

Tuesday night was the high school and middle school instrumental concert. Before the concert, we did some last minute practicing. A week before, we had started looking at a variation of Greensleeves, and it wasn't coming together well at all. She told us to pull out the song, and I raised my hand and politely asked if she really thought we were prepared to perform the song. She completely blew up and yelled something about how we never listen to her or do anything she says. So we played through the last section of the song. The ending part is just the traditional Greensleeves. When we were done, she told us that we would just be playing the ending since that was the only part we could play even moderately well. I know that she's been under a lot of stress these past few weeks, but I don't still don't feel that she was justified in biting my head off. The concert started out with the jazz band, and they were excellent (as usual). They were followed by the middle school orchestra. They were not excellent. Between the middle and high school orchestras, I played a piece in a quintet with two violins, a cello, and a harp. It went pretty well...except for the fact that the first violin can't count to save her life. She came in a beat late on one of her entrances and bungled things up. She always misses that part. You'd think that she would hear that something wasn't fitting together correctly, but she never seems to notice. Until this year, she's been a soloist taking private lessons. She can't play with groups very well, but she doesn't seem to notice that. The high school orchestra did okay. We always do a lot better during actual performances than we do during practices. The high school band was wonderful like they always are. For the finale, we had the high school orchestra cram on stage with the full high school band to play a song together. The orchestra has 27 people, and the band has 70-something. And we were behind them. The cellos had a mic, but that was it. Evidently, it sounded fantastic, but I have to wonder if the strings were heard.


Wednesday evening we went to the third and fourth grade chorus concert at my old elementary school. The director has been rotating through the same set of songs since Dan was in third grade. This year she actually added a new one. We were shocked.


The final official concert was Thursday night's high school choir concert. Between choirs, we have solos or ensembles. For this concert, almost all of them were fantastic. The first one was horrible, but it just made the others look even better. Adam Weber sang "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," and he has the perfect voice and attitude for that song. It may have been my favorite of the solos. Chorale went last, and all of our songs went pretty well. The audience about died laughing during "Fruitcake," and we got a standing ovation after "Ave Maria." Both Sean and Dan (the opening soloists) and Eddie and I (the second set of soloists) blended better than we had for any previous rehearsal, and Victoria finally fixed the pronunciation on her solo. I love singing that song. I love singing in Latin in general. It fits my tone very well. If I sing a senior solo, it will probably be something in Latin.

On Friday during the day, the high school choruses sang a condensed version of Thursday's concert in the morning for the middle school and our community's senior citizens. We had to cut one of our songs, we never felt as comfortable with that one as we did with the others. In the afternoon, we sang for the high school, but the principal took away ten minutes of our concert time, so we had to skip "Ave Maria." It's somewhere between seven and eight minutes long, and our conductor didn't think that very many of the students would have the attention span to sit through it. He may have been right, but I still really wish that we could have sung it for everyone.

I have two more chorale concerts this week, but they aren't likely to be very eventful. If something exciting happens, I'll make a comment.