Observations After Being Overseas For Six Weeks

Our whole family is back home at last - Jamey and Jason and me from East Asia, and Grace from Thailand (she has started her own blog to tell about her summer, quite well-written, I might add, at isaiah3510.blogspot.com).  I really recommend some overseas travel if you can do it sometime.  There's nothing like it to make you appreciate your home, think about what is really important, and even gain some perspective on things that you/we could do differently.  We arrived safely in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening, July 29 after a very long flight, and took the shuttle to a hotel very close-by, where we stayed for another day to make sure that our students could finish with closure and get a head start on jet lag recovery.  I have this little ritual of thinking of things that I am thankful for in the mornings, and here are my 5 items from July 30th: 1. Jamey (it was his birthday that day!), 2. Fresh air (mind you, we were right by LAX), 3. Non-smoking hotel rooms, 4. American plumbing,  5. In-n-Out Burger.
This was our third summer trip to East Asia (I will mention at this point that while we did not spend much time in Beijing, we were able to do a quick tour of the Great Wall and Forbidden City and a few other sites on our way home, since we flew out of that airport, and that is where these pictures were taken), and while I do love America, there are many things that this amazing culture does that are super impressive, like caring for and respecting the older generation, showing generosity, and hospitality.  A couple of stories from the summer:
We wanted to send a few post cards out, but it is difficult when you don't know the language and the addresses must in part be written in characters.  So Jamey asked a student he had basically just met if he could help him out, and that student eagerly gave up an afternoon, during his finals week, to help him (30 postcards. Why so complex? No idea. Not wrong, just different!)  This same student also helped Jamey find and purchase a bike so he could get some early-morning riding in.  Two of our students, Stephanie and Cassie, and I were eating lunch in one of the cafeterias, when Cassie needed to use the bathroom, so we thought we would use our newly-acquired language skills to ask a couple of students sitting by us if they could tell us where the bathroom was.  Well, as often happened, they had no idea what we were trying to say (this was sometimes frustrating because these are not dumb students - Cassie goes to Cornell and Steph to Cal Poly, and we really did pay attention in our language class), so we pulled out our trusty paper of translated menu items and common phrases that some wise friends had given us, and pointed to, "Where is the water closet?"  The girls read the translation and nodded, and then stood up, and motioned for us to follow (leaving their half-eaten lunches on the table).  "They are going to walk us over to it because they don't speak English.  How cute," I thought.  Then they walked down the stairs. "Hmmm, it must be on the first floor."  Then they walked out the door.  "Hmmm, it must be along the side and you enter from outside.  No wonder we couldn't find it!"  Then we followed them across the basketball court ("Wait, where are they taking us?") and inside one of the dorms and down the hall.  Those sweet girls left their lunch on the table to walk three strangers to their own room so that one of them could use the restroom.  As we waited for Cassie, Stephanie and I got to look around this small room that was shared by 6 female students.  Each girl had a bunk, with a mosquito net, a very small section of closet, and a shelf.  But they were all there and made us feel like we were celebrities who had just shown up in their room. This is pretty much how we were treated all summer.  Seriously.  You could get used to that.
I also think our language teachers were incredibly gracious to us as they had to listen to us absolutely  butcher their language day after day.  To say it is 'complex' is a gross understatement - one student kindly explained to me that if I want to be able to read a magazine, or a newspaper, I will "only need to learn about 9,000 characters!"  I'm pretty sure I won't be reading any of those items any time soon.
So, in our usual fashion, we've had an amazing and wonderful adventure, and realized that there really, really, really is no place like home.  Now please excuse me while I go cook what Jason is calling our 'ordinary American dinner' of chicken on the grill, a salad, and an assortment of fruit and veggies from the fridge (#6 on my thankful list).

The Roller Coaster That Was This Spring

I am currently taking a break from packing and preparing our house for tomorrow, when Jamey, Jason and I head out for 6 weeks on a summer mission to East Asia.

The boys on a Father's Day mountain bike ride at Montana De Oro

Generally, I don't at all like leaving home for more than a couple of days, but I must admit, I'm kind of looking forward to this trip.  Last week, we had to put our beloved Max down (we absolutely knew it was time).  This was the same day that we dropped Grace off at the SLO airport to leave for her own summer mission trip to Thailand.  From fear, to excitement, great happiness to extreme sorrow, we have experienced it all over the past few weeks!

Grace at the SLO airport, ready to fly!!

So many wonderful things happened - Grace finished her sophomore year, with honors, in a major that she loves, and headed off to work with women and children for the summer.    And Jason topped off a great junior year in high school by being awarded an academic letter for his good grades in high school.  Jamey and I had the chance to return one more time to El Salvador to close out a wonderful partnership with the ministry there, and got to debrief a team of amazing alums who spent the past year there (and brought home the world's best coffee!).  Quite a few students that we are close to just graduated from Cal Poly and are heading out into all kinds of fantastic places.  Today, we watched the USA beat Ghana in the World Cup with about 100 other fans at Laguna Grill in SLO.  We have also discovered a family of beavers living in the creek in our neighborhood, and we have walked down to watch them swim around in the water several times this week - it's like watching the National Geographic Channel live!

Max, keeping an eye on the yard like a good watchdog

But, at the same time....I miss my dog.  I think that I hear him for a split second when I hear leaves rustle, or when my neighbor's dog barks.  I expect to hear him bark when a truck goes down the road, or see him at the back door.  And Wednesday morning, a squirrel had the gaul to sit in the walnut tree and chatter at me (I shot that thing out of the tree in Max's honor!).
And so, I think we are all looking forward to packing up clothes, games, books, coffee (and creamer!) and heading west tomorrow for a few weeks of big city, crazy and great food, language class, new friends, and adventure.
Since we will be without the internet until about August 1, I will be sure to take a lot of photos and make a note of the best stories to share once we get back.  Grace's stories, too.... We should have enough time to share at least a few before we are off to get ready for fall!

A Lovely Easter

These are the most glorious few weeks of the year in the neighborhood.  Everything is blooming - irises, wisteria, black locust trees (they drip with white blossoms that smell amazing), the honeysuckle outside my window.  On top of this, my neighbor's goat had triplets and when Jamey and I went for an evening walk on Thursday they were playing "king of the mountain".  And, to boot, I am rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Phillip Keller's A Shepherd Looks At The 23rd Psalm, which puts me in a pastoral mood for days, maybe even weeks.  I prefer the term "pastoral"  to "lazy".  I just want to sit in my chair on the deck and look across the creek at the pasture and the cows for hours....listening to baseball of course.

  And, I made blue eggs.  I saw them online and thought they were beautiful, so I gave it a try myself - the coloring requires boiling red cabbage and vinegar together (yuk!) and then soaking the eggs for about 24 hours.  I got a dozen eggs from my friend PJ because I wanted to see how the color would work on a variety of tans, browns, and aquas.  After they were colored, I put them into a bowl, snapped a photo, then put them in the fridge and gazed upon their beauty for a couple of days.  But really, there's not too much you can do with unpeeled eggs.  So, I eventually pickled half of them, and the other half got deviled.  They were just as delicious as usual at our Easter dinner.
We had nine people around the table (actually two tables, pushed together).  Two of these diners were students (well, three, if you include Grace, who spent the day with us), and one of them, a sweet girl named Ivey, brought me such a wonderful bunch of flowers.   I am bummed to say that I forgot to take a picture of the beautiful and feast-laden table.  I must have been having a really good time eating - especially the most amazing glaze on the ham .  None of us are really 'ham people', but this glaze, a "peach-reisling glaze", was soooo good I could have eaten it with a spoon (and perhaps I did....but only to make sure it was good enough to slather on the ham).

 Here is a picture of our leftovers instead - the extra ham and rolls have been made into baked sandwiches.  And you can see the roasted carrots and grilled asparagus, which I liked a whole lot, and which others politely ate to be nice.  And of course the family recipe pickled eggs and spinach salad.
Oh, and I also bought a flat of the most outrageously wonderful strawberries from the guy who parks his truck at the intersection up the road and sells fruit (maybe he has a big garden?  or a small farm?  or he's an angel?  who knows?!), and we ate a bunch of them with vanilla ice cream and homemade whipped cream.  Seriously.  It was a great meal - two days in a row.
Last but not least, after a wonderful outdoor church service on a hill (more pastoral goodness) there was our Easter tradition of the egg hunt, which has been dominated by Grace for the past, well, let's say 17 years.  I just think it's cute and sweet and hilarious that they want to continue to go hunt for eggs around the yard.  We use candy-filled plastic eggs, and here's a lesson I learned this year:  don't use chocolate-coated almonds on a warm sunny day, or you will end up washing all the eggs out by hand.  But still, it was fun to watch the kids romping around the yard just like they did when they were little.  (They just had birthdays, turning 20 and 17....WHAT?  How on earth has that happened?)
It sure was good to enjoy our lives as we celebrated the possibility and promise of eternal life.  

Things to Be Thankful for this Spring

How easy it is for us (well, me) to complain!  Last weekend we got 4-and-a-half glorious inches of much-needed rain.  After it had come down in buckets for 2 straight days, our poor dry creek finally started running again.  You would think that I would be thankful (and I was, for a couple of days, there) but yesterday, the hubs was looking at the week's weather forecast (we need to know how to dress for campus!) and the next few days are "70's and sunny", to which my reply was, "Oh, brother."  We actually do need quite a bit more rain.  But hubs responded, "You cannot actually be complaining about that!" (he said it in a very kind way), which made me think.  It seems to me like the weather, and maybe the president (whoever it may be) are two things that half the general population is always complaining about.  So I have decided to play a game called "What Can I Be Thankful For Right Now?"
1. As I type this, I am sitting on the back deck with my son (who is doing his American History homework), one cat, one dog, and two chickens, in the sun, and we are listening to an A's-Dodgers game on the computer.
2. I got to spend 4 days last week in Temecula with other Cru moms and wives from our region, including my friends Melissa (we were randomly placed in the same freshman Bible study in college and our kids call each other 'cousin'),  Vivian (she came on staff with me and Melissa in 1989 and recently survived breast cancer and wrote a book about it  called Warrior In Pink), and Jill (she came on staff with Jamey just before me and was on my team for years in Irvine, and we run together at many conferences).
3. My 'to-do' list for the next day-and-a-half includes the following: go to a golf match (we are watching Jason's friend Beanie - that's a nickname I gave him in the third grade and he still lets me call him that), go to a tennis match (Grace's boyfriend Devin plays for Cal Poly), and go out for lunch at my favorite deli with a coworker.
4. On Saturday, Jason took Max-the-Dog down to the creek for one of his favorite dog activities: retrieving rocks by sticking his entire head under water.
5. There are hyacinths blooming in my front yard.

6. I am making my friend Terry's mac and cheese tonight for dinner.  It has bacon in it.  Everyone is thankful for that.
7. We made it through our third soccer season in a row without having to sit through a downpour.  This is incredible for a winter sport!
8. Did I mention it's baseball season?  I just switched my ring tone from the Monday Night Football theme to "Take Me Out To The Ball Game".  This makes me happy.
9. Saturday night our students showed a video that they made as a tribute to Jamey - I will attempt to post it here on this blog for your enjoyment.  It's a parody of a very horrible song called "What Does The Fox Say?" in case you wondered.
10. In a week, I get to celebrate St Patricks Day by having our whole staff team over for a real Irish dinner and speak in my best Irish brogue for the whole evening.  This is one of my favorite days of the year.
This is proof that if you look hard enough (and it usually isn't very hard), there is plenty to be thankful for at all times.

We Are "Those" Dog Owners

We discovered a couple of weeks ago that our beloved dog Max has (had?) congestive heart failure.  It's not a surprise that he has gotten old and gray (actually, according to the chart in the vet's office, he has passed the 'adult' and 'elderly' stages and has moved into 'geriatric'), and, truth be told, I knew when we got him from the pound that we would in all probability outlive him.  But still, it's not something that you ever really expect.  There's a rumor going around that I am cold and heartless, but this is not always true (except with really mean or dumb people).  I am the little girl who cried in the bathroom for an hour after reading Where The Red Fern Grows (side note: What the heck kind of terrible book is that to put in the children's section of the library?  And what kind of person writes a book like that for children?!).  I still have never watched "Old Yeller" all the way through, and when I read The Yearling out loud to my own kids, I changed the ending so that for years they thought the deer just ran away into the woods.  
So, when we realized what it was (thank you Google) that was causing Max-the-Dog to cough and have trouble breathing, we prepared for the worst as we took him to the vet.  Seriously, we made Jason get up in the wee hours of the morning and say goodbye to him, and with many tears, we drove down to the vet's office.  Max-the-Dog is probably one of the very few pets that actually loves visiting the vet, so he wagged his tail as he struggled into the car, which made it worse of course.  We were fully expecting sweet Dr Hallock to tell us that it was time to put Max down. Tragic.  Heartbreaking.
But, after a blood test and an xray, it was determined that, with new advances in heart medicine, Max-the-Dog can hopefully live another wonderful "6 to 12 months".  A reprieve!  So, Jamey and I have now become "those people" who faithfully give their dog heart medicine (three kinds!) twice a day, in wonderful meaty canned food, no less.  Pricey, yes, but what else can you do for a dog who has faithfully watched over you, your kids, your yard, your walnut tree and your chickens for ten years?
Max of course might be under the illusion that he has already died and gone to dog heaven, since he now gets to eat basically whatever he wants, come inside way more often, and is going on rides to visit his favorite places.  He seems to be back to normal - just this morning he chased a squirrel up the apricot tree, across the electric wire and out of the yard.  So, we are okay with being 'those pet parents' who put little pills in peanut butter sandwiches and make sure they get eaten (actually, while Max-the-Dog does love peanut butter, he eats everything, so I can simply throw the pills on top of his dinner and he will eat every bit very happily) if it means that we get some good extra time with our good boy.

Thoughts on My Third Half Marathon

That's correct, I recently ran my third half marathon.  For someone who never wanted to run more than a mile at track practice, I kind of amazed myself!  It turns out that what I really like about running (at a lovely s-l-o-w pace) is having some alone time to just think and listen to music.  Running around our neighborhood is wonderful, because I get to run mostly past cattle ranches, big yards, gardens, oak trees and fields, among rolling hills.  I am not sure I would run in another setting.  Plus, the fog is a HUGE bonus - I've always kind of loathed running in the sun (did I mention I ran track in Arizona?!  For Pete's sake, what was wrong with me?)  
As I was training for this half marathon, I found myself looking at some articles and blogs that I haven't looked at before.  For example, the training program I used this time was called "Couch Potato to Half Marathon".  I looked up tips on how to deal with aching feet, tight Achilles tendons, and joints without constantly eating ibuprofin (my solution, and I think it might have worked - at least, I ran the whole thing pain-free - was taking Turmeric tablets. You can research for yourself...) The best (?) article was actually recommended to me by someone who will remain nameless (not a family member, but a friend who also runs).  It is from a web site for women over 45 who are training for 10Ks and beyond, and the article is called, I kid you not, "How Not To Poop Yourself While Running".  I am proud to say I did not have any such issues at any point during my training or the race.  The grossest thing I had to do was use my sleeve to wipe my nose.
The best part of the race was seeing my husband at about mile 3, cheering me on from the side of the road, and then of course at the finish line, where I was greeted by my sweet daughter Grace and her great friend Stephanie (who I love), dressed up in hilarious outfits with signs.  They made me laugh so hard I forgot to look at my time (it was 2:20 - I looked on the web site later on) and brought me my post-race drink, my favorite pink fleece (it stayed gloriously foggy and cool the whole way), and my flip flops, and gave me a ride home so I didn't have to take the sweaty shuttle (not the real name, but everyone knows that's what it is).
I am really enjoying not getting up for training runs when it is still dark out, but I really had so much fun that I have already signed up for another run - this time my absolute favorite, the 8-mile Castle To Coast run that starts at Hearst Castle and ends in Cambria and goes right along PCH.  I'm looking forward to that....and to getting a new pair of running shoes!

Home Again Home Again, Jiggity Jig

Our summer travels this year took us to Orange County (4 times), Colorado, New Mexico, and Chicago.  Here are some of my observations:
Some deserts (the Sonora, for example) are really beautiful.  The Mojave is not one of them.
We stopped for lunch in Las Vegas - met some wonderful friends (who live in Henderson, NV) - at a restaurant in a casino.  The burger was great - in fact, the sandwiches were all stacked so tall that they put a steak knife into them to keep them from falling over until they were delivered to the table.  Throughout the whole meal, I kept thinking I could smell a brush fire, and wondered where it was....turns out it was just all of the cigarette smoke.
Things seen along the I-70: Galloway or "Dutch Belted" cattle - one of my favorites, they are the black ones with the white stripe around the middle.  Upon crossing into Utah, a "Speed Limit 80 mph" sign - it brought joy to my Mario-cart-loving soul.  In Vail, at over 8000 feet, in July, snow.  Sadly, along Wolf Creek Pass, thousands of dead pine trees (victims of some kind of bark beetle, I was told), but at the same time, hundreds and hundreds of new, baby pine trees, growing up under the brown ones (surely there is some kind of lesson to be learned there, at another time, when I have a moment to think....).  Also sadly, one 2-liter bottle full of a yellow liquid, discarded along the highway (yuck!).
Needles, California might just be the worst place in the country, and that is hard for me to admit, because I have been to places like Nevada, El Paso, and New Jersey, and because I have a soft spot for Route 66 towns.  If you don't believe me, you should check out the reviews on Yelp.  Let me just say that our feet got dirty from the carpet in the hotel room.
There is a spot on the 101, just north of Los Olivos, that can make me teary almost every time I drive it.  It is Steinbeckian in its grandeur, and makes me grateful I live here every time I see it (rolling hills, stands of oaks, a great old barn, and a pond).
There truly is no place like our neighborhood - which I would like to prove with this photo of our dinner a few days ago, minus the steaks that were on the grill.  All of this food was from either our garden or our neighborhood farmer's market, including the amazing goat cheese made by my neighbor, that we devoured.
Something in the human heart is just always longing for home, I think.