Another Partner in Crime

Now that Jolene is officially enrolled in college, Kris and I will have another Partner in Crime—another person to join us when we attend university functions; someone new to drag to class-required activities. I was a reluctant Art Museum attendee with Kris for her Art Appreciation class; she grudgingly went to an orchestra performance with me for my Music Appreciation class.

Neither one of us really appreciated the other’s class requirement. She refused to attend my other musical requirement after that. (Hah! She’s taking Music Appreciation this fall, now she’ll have no choice.)

Maybe Jolene can hang out at the library doing homework with us now. It’s so hard to stay there and do homework by yourself, although we probably distract each other more than not. And now, Jolene can get into the same free stuff that Kris and I can get into with our Student IDs.

If Sara were here, we could be the Quad Squad on campus. Maybe we’ll have to be something like the Tranquil Triad instead.

It’ll be great!!

Picking Professors

My method of picking classes has been to look up the classes that I need to take, find classes that fit my desired schedule, and then research the professors on www.profeval.com. I have used this method from the very beginning and have had fairly satisfactory results in finding good professors. If given the choice of taking my professors again or not, I would probably take all of them again except for two. I took a risk once and picked a TBA professor for speech. God blessed me with a great professor.

So, this evening found Jolene and Kris lounging on my bed. Bright and early tomorrow morning (6:15, if Kris has her way), Jolene will be headed up to Western Kentucky University to attend her Orientation, take her Math Placement Exam, and sign up for classes to start attending the University in the fall. She came over this evening to discuss these very imminent events.

Jolene was supposed to help Kris study for her Medical Terminology test while I looked up potential classes and professors for Jolene. I looked up various classes then opened another browser to start up Profeval. I clicked on the shortcut to the website and…nothing. I clicked it again. More nothing. I refreshed. Same result. I began to feel Great Despair.

Kris helpfully suggested that I restart my computer. Once before (mere days before signing up for classes) we had problems with the website not working. We moaned about it for days. I’m not sure if someone suggested that I reboot or if I just happened to and the website came back up immediately. So rather than wait days, I went ahead and rebooted. I started things back up and clicked on my Profeval link and…Nothing!

How could I possibly do effective research without Profeval? I started up browsers with www.RateMyProfessors.com and www.PickAProf.com to see if I could find any information there. Almost nothing. I messed around with potential classes, copying and pasting them into Excel to organize and manipulate them more effectively. Every few minutes, I would stab at the Profeval link to see if anything had changed since a few minutes before. Nothing changed.

I asked Kris to go reboot her computer to see if that would have any effect on my stabs. She said she would go do it but “You have to pray while I do it,” she said. I agreed. And I prayed. I begged and pleaded. I prayed out loud. I prayed silently. I prayed reverently. I prayed conversationally. While she was gone, I decided to try to meet God half way and reboot my computer again, hoping that the combined reboot would have a better result.

Two reboots later, I started up my browser and, again, stabbed at the link. Nothing. I tried all the tricks again with the same results. Despair. I woefully looked at Kris and Jolene lounging on my bed and reported to them that God had evidently said “No.” I abandoned that browser and went back to looking at classes.

Sometime later, I was clicking around and happened to click on the Profeval-not-responding browser. I stabbed at the link once more, just for old times sake. TADA!! It worked just as slick as you please. I managed to alarm Kris and Jolene with my jubilance. I guess God didn’t say “No”, he just said, “In a few minutes.”

I started researching professors and discovered that the process just doesn’t have the same appeal that it does when it’s your own schedule that you’re researching. The available classes are so limited by now because all the existing students have already enrolled. We just came to the conclusion we’ll leave it up to the advisors and if Jolene gets cruddy classes, then so be it. She’ll have more clout next semester. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.

Here They Are

Today I received the official College Retreat photo via e-mail. It prompted Kris to download her pictures from the Retreat, and lo and behold, her picture was better than the official photo.

There were a number of people that wanted to have a picture taken with their camera, so we had to hold our places for a while. After smiling for the first six or so cameras, there was no longer anything to smile about, so several of the guys tried their hand at telling jokes. I think that someone may have just said the punch line because there was obviously something to smile at.

It was a wonderful bunch of people to hang out with for a weekend. I think it would have been great if it had been one day longer, but if it had been even one day longer, it would have kept a bunch of people from being there due to schedule conflicts.

There were a variety of majors present including: Nursing (a bunch of ‘em), Doctors, Dairy Science, Finance, Accounting, Chemistry, Veterinarian, Geography, Statistics Research, English, Music, Education, Health Care Administration, Occupational Therapy, and possibly a few that I missed. There was a lot of potential in that group. I am pleased to have met them.

Red

I was at a family gathering last night. During the course of a conversation, one of my aunts mentioned that her redheaded daughter was teased about her hair a lot as a child. Three of us redheads were sitting at the table and nearly got whiplash from nodding our heads knowingly.

I’ve had to wonder, what’s up with that?? Why is it that redheads get teased about the color of their hair? If I happened to get upset about something, there was the ever-reliable “Watch out for that redheaded temper” stigma. I’ll admit, I’ve got a temper, but so do people with blonde, brunette, black, or you-name-it colored hair. It’s not like other people don’t get mad or upset but somehow it’s really noticed if you have red hair.

I hated the color of my hair as a child. People always wanted to know where I got my red hair. How does a little child answer a question like that? I would dream of having hair of a different color. If Anne of Green Gables hadn’t failed miserably in her attempt at changing her hair color, maybe I would have tried it. (I remember the first time I heard of Anne of Green Gables. There was an old bookstore in a mall that had basically been closed down except for this bookstore. We loved to go there and buy comic books. One day the proprietor, who looked suspiciously much like the Quaker Oatmeal guy, looked at me and told me that I remind him of Anne of Green Gables. I’d never heard of her before and didn’t have a clue why I would remind him of a character in a book. He proceeded to give me the book. I don’t think that I ever read that particular book because it was a very unattractive, uninteresting-looking paperback with browned pages. It wasn’t until years later that I actually read the book.) Then there was the fun of being called “Red” occasionally.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the freckles. There’s the “You were standing in front of the horse eating bran flakes when he sneezed” variety and the much better “Angel kisses” or “A nose without freckles is like a night without stars” variety. While the second variety was always the best thing to use if you had to talk about them, it still highlighted the fact that, indeed, you had spots all over your face, arms, legs, and any other place the sun could scorch on a regular basis. It’s a tan that puddles, kinda like oil and water.

I have come to terms with the color of my hair as an adult. I’ve developed the “water off a duck’s back” mentality. The freckles on my face have either faded to a certain degree or blended the majority of themselves in to a large freckle with a slight variation in shades, but I’ve come to a sort of acceptance of them as well. They are the facts of my life.

Yes, I’ve come to terms with the color of my hair…just in time to watch it change colors. For anyone that knows about the blending of colors to create other colors, I think it normally takes red and yellow to create orange, but in the hair realm of things, Red + White = Orange. That is the unfortunate destiny for the redhead. It’s very subtle at this point and many people can’t tell because of the variations and highlights the sun puts in my hair, but when I comb my hair, it’s there. I’m too young for this.

Of all colors, I think orange is my least favorite. Dad always had an aversion to the word “hate”; therefore, I strongly dislike orange—with a passion.

I'm Sure

There are a lot of things that I don't know and many things that I'm not sure of, but some things I do know for sure:

Roller coasters are not my thing.

I can handle circular motion better than vertical motion.

I think Kris might concur.

It Takes A Man

I try so hard to be self-sufficient…but sometimes it just takes a man to get the job done!

So, we’ve had this air-conditioning problem of the cooling part just quitting. The first time it happened, I called the guy that installed it and left a message for him. He called me the following morning and said that he was too busy to get there but he would send an acquaintance of his to look at it. James arrived the same day and when he turned it on, it began to cool just fine. So he told me that it’s working and to let them know if it quits again.

Things worked just like they should have for about five days and the A/C quit working again on a Friday evening, just in time for the weekend. I called and left a message for the installer again and he called me back that same evening. It seems he is a firefighter and works a 24-hour shift every-so-often and this was his every-so-often. He said that he would try to get ahold of James again to see if he could come. James could not come since he was in an entirely different state for the weekend. So the installer gave me a number for a local guy that might be able to help me. And thus began a pattern of me calling and leaving messages, one for the local guy and several the installer for the next week or so. It was as if my messages were ending up in the same space that lost socks go.

I didn’t get too aggressive because we had figured out that by leaving the A/C off for a period of an hour or two, we could turn it back on and get cool air again. But I did want to be put in line for a repair. I’m an understanding kind of gal, and I knew that this is their busy time of year. But I wanted my turn!!

I finally called James myself. The only reason I had his number was that I copied it from Caller ID the one time that he had called me at work. James was very kind and said he’d be happy to come check things out but managed to schedule his visit during a time that the A/C was working. Evidently his diagnostic skills aren’t too great if it’s not currently malfunctioning. He told the renters upstairs to take their filters out and see if that would make a difference and call if they have any more problems. Sounded like a bad experiment to me, and a few days later, no A/C. I called James again and he said he’d come look at it but never showed up. Are all A/C personnel like that?

When I arrived home last weekend to find a message on my machine from the poor renters upstairs, who bear the brunt of this malfunction, stating that the A/C had shut down every day for the past week, I’d simply had it! I talked to Dad the next time I saw him and asked him if he could please go to bat for me on this one, as I was having no luck. He was righteously indignant at the treatment I’d received and was willing to go hunt the installer down and demand justice. I encouraged him to start with a phone call, as I was suspicious that a phone call from him was all it would take.

Dad called the installer the following morning, and once again, he was working his 24-hour shift. He said that he’d be happy to show up the very next day. While he didn’t exactly follow through on that promise, he did show up Wednesday morning. He called me at work to explain what troublesome part had been causing the problem and apologized for not taking care of it sooner. I hate apologies, both giving and receiving them, especially when they have long explanations. A simple “I’m sorry” would have done the job nicely and we could both have moved on with our lives, but it had a lengthy explanation attached. Do you think that I could stick to my guns and make him squirm? Nope, I was very understanding.

It just shouldn’t have required a call from a man to get some service. I would have thought that a damsel in distress would be reason enough to come calling but obviously it wasn’t. I guess that there are times in life when it simply takes a man.

One Year Down, ?? To Go

My Junior English class was a success. Now I am, Glory Hallelujah! and Praise God!, done with my English requirements. Other than learning the MLA format and documentation style, I still don’t really feel like I know how to write papers.

I was recently talking with someone that said they cannot write a paper without having an outline. Someone else said they write their paper and pull the outline from the written paper. I’m not sure if I can even do a proper outline. Luckily, I didn’t have to submit an outline with my research paper. My paper-writing process is much more disjointed than I’m sure it should be, having just completed my English requirements.

My research paper was written over the course of five days. I spent a lot of time prior to writing it researching gambling and looking for better sources. I started writing the paper on Sunday evening. I wrote on Monday evening, Tuesday evening, Wednesday from around 2:00 to midnight, and was still tweaking it periodically on Thursday at work before turning it in on Thursday evening. When I write a paper, I have to write for a while and then just walk away from it to clear my head before having another go at it. After writing my rough draft, I started a new document and cut and pasted from the old document, rearranging and editing and tweaking all the while to come up with a hopefully passable paper. I would estimate that I had between 18-22 hours in that paper.

My presentation was, well, kind of off the cuff. I never thought that I’d pretty much wing it for a presentation but that’s exactly what I did. I had made some note cards with some points I wanted to be sure and make but I just got up and started talking. Oh, and the overhead that I used? About ten minutes before I left for class, I composed a list of the bad things that come from gambling, both winning and losing, and printed it about 5 minutes before I left for class. I sure was hoping the ink was dry when I packed it up.

We all had to write a little blurb critiquing our classmates’ presentations. The young kid sitting to my left side left his tablet open on his desk when we had a break and I could read his comments about my presentation. “Seemed kinda tense, but was still interesting,” he wrote. Uh, yeah! “Kinda tense” would be putting it kindly. I could feel that my face was, oh, probably cherry colored, but how in the world can a person control that?? And the tremor in my voice?? Public speaking is not my love language at all. In spite of my deficiencies in public speaking, I managed to get a perfect score on my presentation (shows how easy she was on us). Everyone seemed interested in the subject, particularly in the examples that I gave, and we had a nice little discussion after I was finished with my presentation. Overall, I was satisfied with it. Oh, if you ever want to read up on gambling or need a source, I would recommend Gambling in America by Earl L. Grinols.

At the break, some of us were discussing how we go about writing our papers. A lot of them waited until the day/night before it was due to write their papers. I would consider myself to be a procrastinating perfectionist. The guy sitting just to my right said that he too is a procrastinating perfectionist. In fact, he started writing his paper at 10 PM on Wednesday night and wrote until 7 AM. He had to be at work at 8 AM and worked until it was time to come to class. He admitted to falling asleep several times during his 30-minute drive to class. The poor guy thought that the paper had to be 10-15 pages long instead of 7-10, so he ended up writing a much longer paper than he needed to write. Maybe I'm not as much of a procrastinator as I thought. I just hope that I never have to pull an all-nighter because I don’t think I could do it.

And so ends my first year of college.

Got Sausage?

Today was my day to stay at home with Mom’s old lady and cook Sunday lunch. Mom had kept a recipe for a breakfast casserole from the newspaper that she wanted me to try. She also wanted me to make a cake to go along with it.

As I read over the recipe after the others had left for church, I noticed that it said that the casserole could be prepared up to twelve hours ahead of time and refrigerated. That suited me just fine. I decided to go ahead and prepare the casserole and stick it in the fridge. Then maybe I could actually sit down and relax for a bit before the after-church stampede arrived. I was blissfully ignorant of things to come.

I put the casserole together and stuck it into the fridge and was in the process of mixing up the cake when the phone rang. I never enjoy it when the phone rings on a Sunday morning while people should be in church. It’s almost never good. I glanced at caller ID and saw that it was Dad’s cell phone. The thought that instantly flashed through my mind was that something disastrous had happened. I mean, you just don’t normally get a call from Dad when the sermon should be in progress, unless something bad has happened.

I answered and he told me that a couple we had met many years ago while I was installing church pews with Dad had arrived at church and that he would probably be bringing them home for lunch. He was hoping to prepare me just in case I didn’t think I would have enough food.

I didn’t have a clue! The lunch that was perfectly fine for family suddenly was inappropriate for company. I looked through the freezer for something additional to make but nothing really struck me. I decided I would wait until Mom got out of church and then call and consult her. I finished up my cake, cleared off the table, and cleaned up my mess from my morning cooking. I did a few other miscellaneous chores around the house as well. I was trying to set the table, make tea, and find biscuits to make when Kris and Jolene arrived at home.

I still was unable to reach Mom, but suggested making something like green beans or corn to go along with the casserole. Kris was horrified and was quite adamant that “You don’t serve corn with breakfast casserole!” She decided that some sausage gravy to go along with the biscuits would be in order. She and I went scrounging around in the freezers in the garage, and in her pursuit of ground sausage, she found some smoked sausage links as well. She latched onto those and decided that we would make some of them too.

While I was out in the garage, Jolene had discovered the tea that I was brewing when they arrived. I had forgotten to set the timer, so she took for granted that the tea had been brewing too long and finished making it. She didn’t realize that I had just started brewing it when they arrived, which resulted in some rather anemic tea.

We finally finished making lunch and sat down to eat our Sausage Breakfast Casserole, Sausage Gravy and Biscuits, and Smoked Sausage Links. Notice a pattern here?? Dad asked the blessing on the meal, and we started passing the food. I was sitting on the same side of the table as the couple, and Kris, Jolene, Martin, and Mom sat opposite them with Dad at the head of the table.

The first item to reach me was the sausage links and I noticed that the lady just passed them on without taking one. She took a biscuit, but passed the sausage casserole along as well. I began to get just a bit suspicious when Dad made some sort of comment about the breakfast casserole and hoping it wouldn’t upset their metabolism to eat breakfast at lunch. I think she made a comment about it being fine “except that I’m a vegetarian.”

Oops! Let’s review…Sausage casserole, Sausage links, Sausage gravy. Hmmm…not a vegetarian meal. So much for not serving corn with breakfast casserole! Mom tried to convince her that she could “cheat just once, on a Sunday.” I wanted to go hysterical. Who ever heard of trying to convince a vegetarian to “cheat”? So the poor lady ate biscuits with strawberry jam for lunch and assured us that she would be just fine.

We had tried so hard! I knew better than to make much eye contact with Kris or Jolene. I could see the desire to laugh uncontrollably in their eyes and twitching mouths. Kris seemed to do a pretty good job, but Jolene wasn’t quite as good at it. My own napkin hovered around my mouth for a portion of the meal, lest Jolene should catch sight of my own twitching mouth and lose control.

Fortunately, we had desert, so the lady had a nice-sized portion of cake and ice cream to sustain her until she could make it back to the safety of her parents’ church where “Oh, yes, they definitely know I’m a vegetarian.”

The College Retreat

Wow! I’m not sure that I can really convey my thoughts and feelings about my weekend at the Faith Builders Mennonite College Retreat. It was a really good experience.

It all started with Sara renting a car in Chattanooga, since we’re all car poor. We’d have had a better chance of spending the weekend beside the interstate than at the retreat if we’d taken any of our cars. She rented a Pontiac Vibe and drove up on Thursday evening and spent the night at our house. We got up around 4:15-4:30 on Friday morning and left for Franklin, PA.

Once upon a time, I would have considered buying a Pontiac Vibe, in all its cute ugliness. Or ugly cuteness, not sure which. But no more! It had the oomph of a hippopotamus when going up hills. After driving it for four hours, I had a backache. Of course, that could happen in any car. The back seat was not comfortable for lying down. There were some other quirks that sealed the dislike of the vehicle; I just can’t remember what they were. Anyway…

Our first stop of the day was the Bowling Green Airport. Since Kris and I had not been with Sara when she rented the car, we had to stop at the Hertz place in Bowling Green to show our drivers licenses and be put on the approved driver list. When we arrived at the airport, there seemed to be no one around, not surprising considering the size of the airport. We looked around for a bit and finally a guy came in from outside and asked if he could help us. We told him what we were there for, and he said we’d come to the right place. He’d never completed the procedure that we were there for so he had to call someone to find out what he needed to do. It took a little bit but we finally accomplished our mission, and after getting some breakfast, we hit the road.

Our trip was fairly uneventful, except for the fact that we had bad luck in choosing exits with decent looking places to use the bathroom. We rejected several exits before finding a bathroom worthy of use.

The whole prospect of meeting new people had been gnawing at me for several days. It seemed that the closer we got to The Castle where the retreat was to take place, the funnier my stomach felt. As we entered the town of Franklin, Kris suggested that we just abandon the whole project and go back home. Rather than succumb to the chicken feelings within, we forged our way up the mountain to The Castle. I was imagining coming to the retreat to find a bunch of Brainiacs discussing Theories of Who-Knows-What or expounding on the Hypothesis of Never-Heard-Of-It. There may have been some of that going on, but for the most part, the people were surprisingly normal.

The Castle is a nifty place located on a mountain above the town of Franklin. It is a huge place. There were bedrooms everywhere! I think that most of the guys slept in the same dorm room since there were significantly fewer guys than girls. The girls also had a dorm room as well as bedrooms off a hall that went back into what they referred to as the servant’s quarters. I think the guys only had one bathroom and the girls had three bathrooms. One thing that helped keep the girls from jamming up in the bathrooms was the fact that most, if not all, bedrooms had a sink in it. And there was no curfew, so people went to bed as they pleased instead of stampeding to the bathrooms all at once. The bathroom situation actually went smoother than I thought it would.

When we arrived around 4:30 EST, we were fortunate to be greeted by cousins that had been on the planning committee. We registered and took our bags up to our rooms. We then went out back to wait for supper, which was to be served at 5:00. After supper, we all gathered in the living room, which had been set up as our auditorium.

Introductions were strikingly like those of a normal college setting. In this case, everyone had filled out a slip of paper when they registered with their major, place of residence, and one interesting fact on it. They passed the papers out, and everyone had to go looking for the person whose paper they had. I was lucky enough to have a person who was from Virginia…seemingly half of the people there were from Virginia. After everyone had a name to go with their paper, we sat back down and had to introduce the person whose slip we had. It was an effective way of mixing people up and breaking the ice.

They had a guest speaker to speak to us on Friday evening and again on Saturday morning. On Friday evening, he spoke on knowing who we are and where we are going, and on Saturday morning, he gave another presentation. It did my heart a lot of good. My nugget for the morning was “All life is ministry.” I can try to impact the place that I’m involved in, even if it’s only an office environment. Another quote he used during both presentations was

“We believe that an individual’s talents are God-given;

therefore, no one should be praised if he is an easy learner

nor condemned if he is a slow learner. These differences

in talent are God’s will, and there is a place for each person

God created.” ~J.A. Hostetler.

I guess to sum it up, it’s okay to be yourself. God has a purpose in mind for everyone. My head heard it, now if I can just get my heart to believe it.

The coordinators split us into pre-assigned small groups with designated group leaders. I think that all of the group leaders have either attended college or are college graduates. The small groups met four times over the course of the weekend, with the first meeting being more of a get acquainted kind of meeting. They assigned a location to each group.

My group got lucky with the location we were assigned. We were sent to the Prayer Tower, a room in a tower on the fourth floor. The room had windows on three sides and had an excellent view. The Castle does not have air conditioning so the open windows were helpful in at least allowing a breeze through.

The purpose of the small group meetings was to allow each person to have twenty to thirty minutes to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. Our group leader introduced himself as a professional counselor. I was thinking to myself, “Oh boy! He’ll have a field day with me.” And he did.

The prospect of having a window of time in which to talk about whatever, along with the general nervousness of meeting new people, wreaked havoc on me. I really hated it, but the entire weekend I was afflicted with Dry Mouth Syndrome, although it abated itself somewhat after my sharing time was over. I never was able to complete an entire meal. By Sunday afternoon, I was beginning to relax, but then it was time to leave. Go figure!

I managed to make it through my session of sharing, but not without losing my composure, much to my mortification. Our group leader was very good at what he does. The prayer that he prayed would have had me in tears if I hadn’t already been there. It was a good experience for me, even if it wasn’t easy.

My mind has been working furiously ever since the weekend. I’ve been replaying conversations in my mind. I’ve been second-guessing myself. It’s a little freaky that there are people that know some of my inner workings.

The thing that was so unique about the retreat was that it was okay to voice your uncertainties, doubts, worries, and concerns because a lot of them had experienced or were experiencing the same feelings. People understood the feelings, the busyness, the loneliness of a college student. I’m lucky that I have sisters going to college and that we can hash out the things that happen during the school year. A lot of people don’t have someone that really understands. There was plenty of encouragement and affirmation doled out to those who needed it. People were encouraged to dream. It made me wonder if accounting is actually my dream or should I go into the dental field? Lots of food for thought.

It was really a great weekend. Kris thinks that I got my Love Tank filled.

I think…maybe she’s right.