Side Note

I'm always curious about who actually reads this here blog. If you wanted to leave a comment and say "Hey, I do!" or something like that, that would be awesome. You could even ask a question or write a haiku if you feel so inclined.

Really though, I'd love to know who my Minnesota visitors are. Homenum revelio!

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Fire awaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaay.

That Eddie Schwartz sure has a way with words. And that Pat Benatar sure knows how to sing those words.

Today I got hit with a lot of somebody's best shots at reminding me why it's so awesome to be alive.

I was hit with the realization that graduation is a mere thirty nine days away, and I'll be leaving Laie and the island ten days after that, with no idea of when I'll be back. As sad as that may be, it helped me reflect a bit on these past three years and how much I've loved being here. There are so many places and people and foods and experiences I'm going to miss when it's finally time to leave. It's been good times, that's for sure.

There are so many people I am so lucky to have in my life, and sometimes it takes a little technological magic (know as Skype) to remind me of that. Yesterday I had a magnificent chat with one of my Maryland favorites and today I had some Skype and gchat magic happen with the fam-jam (in three different states!). Going back "home" after Jerusalem hasn't been something I've been dreading, but it also hasn't been something I've been looking forward to immensely either. At least for now, that's changed.

And finally, I was hit with the realization that my plans for the next couple of years, however nascent they may currently be, are one of the few things providing me any form of motivation or scholastically related happiness at the moment. I'm excited to see how it all turns out, and that's quite the improvement from the way I've been feeling about it all for the past few months.

Strangely, my photo collection is lacking in the gun/shooting device department, so here, have a picture of a beautiful sunset.

Summa-summa time. Part 3b.

Evidence that we did more than just stare at all that good looking produce. Check out the strawberry juice stains on that cute girl on the left. 

Summa-summa time. Part 3.

These are not going in any sort of chronological order. It's more of a "Well, I can say something about that picture right now." order.

As my aunt dropped my off at home the night I arrived in Maryland, I looked up at the house and stared. Then laughed. Then stared some more. My mom and step-dad had strings running from the roof to the ground, all across the front of the house, ostensibly for beans, but at this point they were completely bare.

I laugh at how eccentric my parents are. Often, in fact. However, I admire them for how dedicated they are to their lifestyle, and certainly appreciate the bounty it provides. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that there were no more than a handful of meals we shared this summer that didn't have something from their garden. I would often walk into the kitchen to find my step-dad in the midst of canning tomato sauce or jam that they were putting away for the winter.

We ate tomatoes, figs, apples, strawberries, artichokes and beans (oh the beans!), along with the multitude of herbs they have all around the yard.

If you haven't eaten a fig straight from the tree, you do not know what you're missing in life. 

True Love

I took engagement pictures for a couple of friends around this time, two years ago.

In the time since then, they've spent time in three countries and keep having their wedding plans foiled.

They're finally getting married tomorrow. Congrats Amanda and Iriapa!

Summa-summa time. Part II.

Along with one trip to Gunpowder Falls, I made it up to Patapsco Valley State Park a few times this summer, dragging along whatever friends or siblings were willing to accompany me. (I guess, more accurately, a friend who was preparing for a family hiking trip to Yellowstone invited me along, and then we kept going, bringing along whoever else was interested.)

We kept up the theme of getting terribly, horribly, hopelessly lost two or three of those times. One of the days, we planned to do the five mile loop and estimated it would take about two hours, then spent five hours wandering, before a mountain biker sent from heaven shared his water with us and pointed us back in the same direction we'd just come from in order to make it back to the car. The other times we stayed in the same area and just never quite made it to where we wanted to be, with no idea of where we actually were.

My last trip, I went up with a friend before he headed back to school and we wandered around a bit, then got soaked in an incredible downpour on the way back. Then there was that one time I was viciously attacked by a wasp and had to resort to the removal of clothing in order to get it off me.

All in all though, the park is full of fun memories- bounding up hills and exploring the train tracks and picking wild raspberries and stopping to do yoga and take pictures when we couldn't figure out which way to go.

Not to mention, it's beautiful! Check it:

 

If you look closely, you can see the deer on the train tracks. There was a family of them that we saw a couple of times. 

I was so excited to have my little brother back. He came along and was the official raspberry picker. 

This is the vicious wasp that attacked me, after I'd thrown it into the water. Not long after this photo, the other bugs you see attacked it. What goes around, comes around, sucker.

One day, as we were leaving, we turned the wrong way on Ritchie Highway and ended up in Baltimore. Lucky for us, it just so happened to be July 11th, so we hit up every 7-11 between Arnold and Baltimore. These aren't even all of our cups. No regrets. 

I admit, I'm a bit of a poser sometimes. These tunnels are all over the park and if I ever have to pick a place to park my homeless rear end (as a soon-to-be-graduated Anthropology major, that seems to be a growing possibility), this is it. 

Hopefully, I'll get my summer postings done before I graduate (IN SIXTY DAYS), so I can write about other things without feeling guilty for not being somewhat up to date.

Summa-summa time.

This summer was bundles of fun, and I took plenty of pictures and obviously never posted any of them. I'll remedy that a bit, starting right now, with some photos from the Gunpowder Falls hike I did with some friends. 

Some day, I will learn that things will never, ever, ever go like I think they will, especially if it involves reading maps, but that day is not today, and it definitely wasn't the day we went on this hike.

We were (over) prepared for a fifteen mile hike that was supposed to hit some nice falls at some point, but we never made it and ended up just turning around after we'd been out for a couple of hours, but it was lovely all the same. I grew up fully ensconced in typical suburban America and never did much exploring outside of a ten or fifteen mile radius from home, so seeing this part of Maryland was like a whole new world! 

I may have a slightly obsessive personality. Evidence: I spent a minimum of an hour trying to google this flower. If you haven't had occasion (or interest) to do so yourself, trust me, it's not exactly an easy task. Bugs may be even harder to google. This is a lanceleaf tickseed flower. 

We may have hopped off the trail a couple of times to climb around on whatever we thought looked interesting and non-life-threatening. If my friend Jessie sitting there on that little pebble gives you any idea of the scale, these were no tiny rocks. 

These were all over the place and I loved the shape from the back. Mountain laurel is indigenous to the Eastern US and is sometimes called Spoonwood, supposedly because Native Americans used to make their spoons out of it. I'm not sure if I believe that or not because it's poisonous. So: If you find some, look, but don't eat.  

This reminded me of Lord of the Rings. But I haven't seen the movies more than once each, nor have I read the books, so that may just be a me thing.

Crouching Lion

Crouching Lion hike is only a few miles down Kamehameha Highway from BYUH, but I hadn't made it out to hike it until a couple of weekends ago some friends graciously permitted me to join in on their fun. It took a little longer than planned, I ruined my shoes, got covered in scratches from prickly ferns, had mud all the way up past my knees and walked a little funny for a few days afterwards, but it was so worth it. The views were incredible and we laughed more than we cried, so we'll call it successful. 

Although, if you were wondering, jumping in the ocean after being viciously attacked by menacing ferns hour after hour is not at the top of my list of activities to repeat. It burns a bit.  

Bon Voyage!

Today my little sister is fleeing the country. I'll dedicate this post to her, because she's off on an incredible adventure. I'd say I'm jealous, but I'm still busy enjoying the fact that I have three months left here on this beautiful rock and then I'm finishing off my undergrad with a semester in Jerusalem, which will undoubtedly be quite the adventure in and of itself.

So basically, seester, have a grand time. Be safe (but not too safe), and we'll share our stories when we're back in the same town, on the same continent. You asked me to post beautiful pictures, and I can think of no picture more appropriate than this one in honor of you today.

Focus.

A little something I'm lacking lately. Luckily, it's summer, so it's not tooooo important. Except when I adventure around the jungle/garden/backyard with my camera.

This was the first time in months, and certainly since I've been back in Maryland, that I've gotten my DSLR out. For shame, self. I do still have some photographic proof of rad adventures I've been on that might get posted sometime. No promises though.

My deepest fear...

...is not that I am inadequate. It is that I will leave for the summer before the mangoes on the tree in the backyard are ripe.

 

I might be referencing this quote, attributed to various people and apparently quite popular among my peers.  

Hello again, and happy mother's day. 

At this moment, the little girl in the picture below is hiding in my closet.

Scratch that, she just jumped out and yelled "Boo!" at me. Ten times.

  

While she was looking out the window right now, she asked if maybe we shouldn't clean the mango picker because someone might have sat on it naked. 

Do you know what a mango picker looks like? 

Check it:

If you've Skyped with me while I've been living in this house, you've probably spent a minute or two with her coming to sit next to me and staring into the camera, not saying anything. I think that might be the only time she isn't talking. She's a pretty great source of entertainment and comes in on a daily basis and says something along the lines of "Hey, my mom knows I'm here. ...wanna watch some bideos?"

Attending college, my interactions with small folk are pretty limited, and I'm glad to have her around. Even if sometimes she knocks on the bathroom door and tells me that I'm brushing my teeth too loud and her baby brother is trying to sleep.

There is no need for paid entertainment with a precocious, outgoing four year old around, that's for sure.

Well lookee here.

It's a crab. A rock crab, maybe? It's certainly more colorful than the (sand?) crabs that frequent the beaches that I frequent.

After popping over to look at my actual blog site, I realized I have new followers! Hello!

As Promised.

Those nerd-tastic photos that were anxiously awaiting posting are here, for your viewing pleasure, now. You will now gain some insight into what went through my head in the hours and hours I spent going through shelves and shelves of books for my current work project. (Also, I send my apologies to the poor library workers who had to reshelf all of those shelves and shelves of books, over the weeks that I was buried in the stacks. Universe, make sure that apology gets to the right person, por favor.)

  

I would look at the cards in the back of the books (For entertainment, naturally. A girl's gotta get her kicks somewhere, right?) and wonder about who checked out the books before. Given the subject matter, it's almost a guarantee that it was for an assignment- this stuff isn't light reading. 

People were reading this book before I was a twinkle in my father's eye, as they say. I wonder where they were from and where they are now. Would they remember checking this particular bit of paper and binding out? I also wonder about the timing- the spurts of interest and the years lapsed between check-outs. Wouldn't it be a bummer to be a book that just sat there, languishing for years in between times that people decided the information on it's pages was worth reading? Sad. (...I might have a habit of over anthropomorphizing objects. Maybe.)

...Now that I have firmly established what a nerd I am, on to the next!

 

I thought that in light of recent world events, this comment left by some unknown reader was appropriate. Also, I think the words that are visible on this page are entertaining. Hope you do too!

Snapshots

I might have declared this week my unofficial spring break, and spent hours in a swimsuit everyday. There is a distinct possibility it might also have been worth it, now that I'm jumping into the last three weeks of the semester and start exams and presentations Monday. 

On Tuesday, I went and did the Laie Falls hike with a couple of friends and took some pictures along the way. 

If I could identify any of these for you, I would, but my Hawaiian flora knowledge is sadly lacking. The third one might be a close up of a Cook Pine tree. Maybe?  

Things to Be Thankful For

Last night, I was sitting in my room contemplating whether or not to do homework (it's all part of the process, you know), and courtesy of facebook updates, found out about the earthquake that had hit Japan, not even an hour after it happened. Along with that news came the news that we were under tsunami advisory with it expected to hit around three in the morning. You might recall last year's Tsunami Tsaturday. I did a little news-searching and received a plethora of texts from friends and eventually decided to pack up and head for the hills, along with everyone else in the house. I contacted family (and won a prize for favorite child in doing so. FINALLY.) and spent the next five hours sleeping in the backseat of the car, trekking up and down the hill a couple of times, demonstrating yoga positions for my roommate, texting, and hoping and praying that nothing would happen. Eventually, around five am, we headed back home and jumped (that might be an exaggeration, we were too tired to jump, but I did have to climb through a window) happily into bed.

This time around, I have no feelings of "Well, that was a waste!" like I did last year. I am just glad to be home safe and am thinking of all those who aren't. One of my good friends lives in Tokyo and can't get back to her family because the transportation isn't working. Other friends have lived in Sendai and are waiting to hear back about people they knew.

There are so many things to be thankful for with this situation- that the tsunami didn't come, that we have the technology to tell us about these things, that communication enables us almost instant contact with the world, that there are so many people who care about me and want to check in and make sure everything is okay.

Also, that it calmed down enough that I could still get some beach time in this afternoon. ;) It's hard to not be selfish in a situation like this and think about all the things that could have happened but didn't. I hope I'll appreciate all of those, but still keep in mind everything that did happen in Japan and elsewhere. The clean-up isn't going to be fun, and I know people's lives will be different for a very long time.

When will my reflection show...

I hope you realize that by whatever path you used to get to this blog, you were signing yourself up for some fantastic nineties pop-culture references. If you didn't catch the one from the title, you are missing out and need to grab a bean-bag chair, a bowl of stove top cooked popcorn (which is obviously far superior to the kind that comes in a bag, covered in radioactive orange grease) and a copy of Mulan and study up, because clearly a vital part of your education is severely lacking.

This is probably the last of the old-school projects, but there may be a couple more to excavate, we'll just have to wait and see.

There are some nerd-tastic pictures anxiously awaiting being shared that I've taken in during my many hours spent in the library as part of my latest project for work. If that statement right there doesn't move you to the edge of your seat, you should probably check your pulse, because you might be dead, or at least mostly dead. (See, there I go, another pop-culture reference, even if this one is late eighties. I am full of them tonight.)

Annnnyways. Have a beautiful week. I would tell you to spend it on the beach, enjoying sunshine, but that isn't feasible for everyone.

Also, just for fun, read this. It apparently also a night for wikipedia links.

Blue Like Jazz

Alternative title: Super Saxy

Another old school art assignment, albeit more interesting than the last one. I repeat the "Don't judge me." sentiment, even though it's inevitable.

The title of this post came from a book a friend recommended to me a couple of years ago, surprisingly enough entitled Blue Like Jazz- Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller. I like it. You might too. I tried to flip through and find a quote that might entice someone, somewhere to read it, but hadn't underlined any of the stories I remembered. Bummer.

And that is that.
 

Chocolate, Vanilla, Choose.

Pretty early on as a nanny, I learned that posing open-ended questions such as "What do you want to do after school?" or "What do you want to eat?" to the oldest boy would result in ten minutes of us staring at the menu or going through possible options before he would make up his mind, an inevitably he would change it two more times before it was for sure.

The only real way to prevent mulling over decisions for longer than the activity would take was to offer a few suggestions and make him pick one of those, and provide a general time limit and go from there. 

One of the things I hate most is sitting around going "Whaddaya wanna do?" "I dunno, whudduyuwanna do?" I'm guilty of it, for sure, but isn't doing anything better than that? 

Right now, I'm kind of at that "I dunno, whudduyuwanna do?" stage. In a big way. 

My summer plans are up in the air. Am I doing research on an even more tropical island paradise than the one on which I currently reside? Should I spend some big bucks and fly home and take a rad course through the university out there (why yes, I would be helping to excavate one of the places where Frederick Douglass was once a slave, thanks for asking!), do I want to bum around here and enjoy my last undergrad summer? 

I don't have a dang clue. 

Have I mentioned that I graduate this year? It's happening. Do you know what the single most common question I get when that comes up in conversation is? I bet you can figure it out. It goes something along the lines of "What are you going to do now?" 

Besides scaring the living bejeebers (that's the anatomically correct term, btw), it reminds me that there are no concrete, or wood, or cotton, or rubber plans. There are a million options floating around that I think would be fun, or interesting or actually help me on some sort of career path (Wait... am I supposed to have one of those? Right now? Are you sure about that?), but narrowing those down is simply not working currently.

What I've been leading up to with all of this is:

If someone could make my life, or at the very least, my summer, a chocolate-vanilla-choose situation, I'd be much obliged. Please and thank you.   

Elementary, my dear Watson.

After that last post, I decided I wanted to post more of my old stuff. Sadly, any of the physical manipulations I did are currently inaccessible (and not nearly as cool via the intar-webs), so the only ones I have are those that I emailed to myself.

Here's a keyboard:

Taken with the same camera, for the same assignment.

My last year of high school, I took the AP 2D Portfolio class. There are two parts of the portfolio, breadth, in which you show off your skillllllz and ability to do different things, and concentration, where you pick a theme and go with it. All of the ones I'm going to be posting are concentration pieces, because all of my breadth was done on film.
They're all pretty basic and not too exciting (and this is the least exciting of all of them), but a post is a post, yes?
Mainly, this is a chance for me to look back at what I was doing back in '05 and '06. Don't judge me.

Old school.

While home, I went on an archeological dig through the boxes of my high school past. I found all my old binders of film and prints and various projects. My intention was to scan all of them, or at least the ones that don't make me cringe when I look at them, but that didn't happen.

This may or may not be one I sent as part of my portfolio. Who knows. It is contrasty and was taken with a digital camera that would be considered a dinosaur by anyone, but I remember the fun I had working on this piece and on the rest of them, and isn't that the important thing? (We'll go with that, yes?)

I miss photo classes. And music classes. I should probably do more of both of those things than I am.

It's a dalmatian plantation!

Title in honor of the fact that this is my 101st post. Please smile and pretend I am clever, even though that may be far from the truth.

I am back on this lovely rock in the middle of the Pacific and appreciate it so much more now that I got my much needed break. Home was great. Beyond great, in fact.
I got to spend time with my family and friends and go adventuring. I tried new things. I shot zombies (...okay, so I shot one, and it was paper, but with real bullets!), I went ice-skating and bowling and paintballing and made cheesecake and baked and decorated cookies with friends I've known since elementary school. I watched movies and read books (FOR FUN) and slept in late and stayed in my pajamas until six in the evening (no really, it was great). I saw Christmas lights galore and missed the New Years Eve fireworks because my absolute lack of any sense of direction rubs off on people who spend too much time around me.
I saw snow. I shoveled snow. I froze. I also watched with delight as that snow melted.
I wore socks every single day. I even wore a coat and gloves. I didn't even mind having to wear a coat and gloves . . . most of the time. And if we want to talk about crazy- I drove a car- that has only happened about four times since I've been out here at school.

Being at school helps me appreciate home. Being at home helps me appreciate school.
There is plenty more to say about that, and lists miles long I could make, but I think that is enough for now.

Now, I'm a couple of weeks into the semester and enjoying classes and working and not being stressed out (we'll see how long that lasts). With my go-to friend back on the mainland awaiting her departure to China, I'm making new friends and doing new things. Lots of new things. Life is good.

This has been enough of a novel. Here's a picture:

This memorial is one of my most favorite-est places close to home. I shot a series here back in high school experimenting with different film speeds and when I got my lenses summer before last this is where I came out to play with them- I might have even posted some of those pictures, but I'm not sure. The two domes you can see in the distance are the Naval Academy chapel and the State House. Lovelylovelylovely.