Church

Yesterday Dave and I decided to try the catholic church in town (we've also gone to a different catholic church east of here). While we were living in Duluth we attended services at the Coppertop (United Methodist) church where Dave most times played guitar in the contemporary music group (during the service). This may make my mom cringe a little, but I don't really care too much which christian faith we decide to go with. I have mixed feelings about organized religion, but I definitely see many of it's benefits so I'm not at all against it - I just think there's a lot of room for improvement and that people should be able to really look at what is working and what is not. It just seems like there can be a lot of mixed signals/hypocrisy involving inclusion and loving ALL of God's people. So I will get off the little podium (stepping stool more like) to describe in detail the Crucifix at this particular Catholic church.

Most people have seen likenesses of Jesus' crucifixion at some point or another. It's Jesus nailed to the cross. Different artists have rendered the icon in different ways, and the artist (not sure who) that made the crucifix at the Grand Rapids church makes quite an impression. The church is fairly large and open (at least for this part of the country). The ceiling reaches it's highest point above the altar and about halfway between the ceiling and altar is the crucifix. The cross in thick wooden beams, just an ordinary cross, maybe life-sized. Jesus is also close to life-size, and Jesus is in immense, terrible pain. That may not seem strange, especially given how painful it probably is to be nailed to a cross. The reason it seems so different is because most crucifixes seem to show exultant, peaceful, or maybe just a little grief-stricken Jesus'. This Jesus has his head thrown back in agony, (his face is almost out of view since it's looking at the ceiling), his fingers are splayed out, on the right hand they are turned upward almost asking why, on the left hand they just seem to be stretched as far as possible to suggest further pain. His back is arched as much to his right as his spine will allow, portraying writhing pain... noticing a theme? pain, pain, and more pain. On the one hand, the crucifix shows what a tremendous sacrifice and gift Jesus provided, on the other, is that what you think of when you look at the Son of God full of misery?

Dave and I did like the sermon. It was mainly about walking your talk (don't just talk the talk, walk the walk, or however that saying goes). If you think something is important, it should show through your time, actions, and dedication. Since it was church this was applied to our faith and going to church, doing good acts, and so on, but I thought it was a great message for anything in life. If something is important to you, do other people know it? How involved are you with it?

I guess it's been a slightly philosophical day. On a lighter note, the weather sure has turned toward fall :) Work was very busy today and I was mildly frustrated a few times, mostly with mistakes I made. I'm trying to learn how to breathe when it gets busy at the drug store. This weekend Dave and I went to Duluth to see his family (Grandparents from CA came to MN to visit), and I got to visit with my sister. She just got a mini-lop bunny. It's super cute and has attitude which is nice to see (I wasn't sure how smart rabbits were, so it was amusing to see Temperance/Keystone (it has dual names at this point) be a sneak and move a blanket to get to a forbidden tunnel). On Sunday a couple of our friends from Duluth stopped by on their way home from further up north (it's sort of hard to imagine, sometimes I feel like we're it for "up north" as far as the U.S. is concerned). We had a lot of fun playing guitar hero 5 (Dave's b-day present from me), and going out to eat. The weather has been rainy and cold but it had to happen at some point.

I intend to post more photos soon"ish" so I'll find a few to leave you with.


this is my bruise from the small trees I hit with the four-wheeler, and because I'm a huge dork, there's a penny so that you have a bit of a scale to show how large the bruise is. I think the picture was taken 4ish days after said incident.





Before our friends came over on Sunday, we decided to take the 4 wheelers out for a last spin before M took them back. We went back to the mine pit and these are more pictures of where I jumped into the water. After talking to my sister I feel a little less brave and brag-worthy because it sounds like she's been off some pretty scary stuff up the north-shore of Lake Superior. Maybe next summer she can show me some of the spots :) The first of these pics is looking down to the water, the second shows Dave standing just down from where I jumped, the next one is the rope you climb back up on, and the last is just another pic looking out from the jump site.

This is where we jumped off of the "cliff," I had been hoping that I would have a better pic of the drop, but you this one just has you looking out from where you jump.

view of mine pit





more mine pit.

I'm not in much of a mood to write, but I will say that I did not escape my little mishap unscathed... I have a pretty large bruise on my thigh (might take a picture if it gets colorful enough) and I bit my lip, so the inside is a little swollen. I will have to go back to try to capture how clear the water was, and maybe try to get a shot of the drop, although I bet it's more impressive from the bottom up and I'm not sure it will be warm enough for me to jump again.

fun weekend

Life got going again (my excuse for not writing), and there was a lot of it this weekend.

We had Dave's brother and sister-in-law as well as another couple come up to visit. His brother has two 4-wheelers that everyone got to try out and one of which I drove into a small group of trees. His brother (M) was a great teacher, going over the most important things to know and addressing issues as they came up. I just needed to practice driving on a slope without trees before going into slightly more difficult terrain. I tried to keep the steering straight, but it seems that you need to be turning up the hill in order to continue straight. When I started heading into the woods I panicked and actually gave it more gas until I was so close to the trees that death actually crossed my mind as a possible outcome (I may have been thinking over-dramatically, but it happened kind of fast and the only protective gear I had on was a helmet and goggles). At the last minute I let off the gas and squeezed the handle brakes. I still hit a group of very small trees but I didn't fly off the vehicle and seemed unhurt. M was good about looking back periodically and (to my dismay) realized pretty quickly that I had disappeared from view. He came back and pushed me out of the mess I had gotten into (I was now STUCK on the baby trees). Soon enough we were on our way out to the mine pit. The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful and I became more cautious and more experienced. There was a very frightening hill I went down, but no other mishaps on the 4-wheeler. There was a fantastic view of the mine pit (which has filled with crystal clear water) and even a 22 foot cliff to jump off... which I'm incredibly proud to say I did. I didn't plan on swimming but there were four people jumping off and I knew I'd regret it if I didn't give it a try. It was incredibly scary once I had decided and was standing at the top, but the scare made the water temperature nothing to deal with. It wasn't really cold in the first place, but I don't know that I would have noticed since I had the adrenaline going. M decided that he'd better try too, very exhilarating experience. We finally made our way back to the house where we bragged to the others of our amazing feat (yes, I'm still oozing pride, sorry).

This morning I took the canoe out on my own for a couple hours. It was very peaceful and I was able to take a few photos of a crane. Unfortunately it kept flying away so none are very detailed. I will add some photos later, I need to charge my camera.

I'm already sad that our guests are gone. There was lots of eating/snacking, and a fun game of Settlers (of Catan). Dave pointed out that I sure like to be around people for someone who's semi-anti-social. The truth is that I'm not so much anti-social as I am a homebody. I don't necessarily like to go into town unless I really need something.

Jobs... I've been putting this off for a long time so I want to at least give some details. Dave found out that rather than teaching 4th-12th graders, he will actually be teaching kindergarten through 12th grade. Everyone. He also found out that his high school band has less than 15 kids and there is a pep band performance/game every week. The good news is that he likes most of the kids, the school is pretty laid back and friendly, and it's more experience.

I am working at a pharmacy in town. Currently I work on the sales floor ringing people up, starting to fit them for braces/boots/slings, and doing paperwork. I really enjoy it because I am busy (no time to be thinking about other things I could be doing with my time) and I love the people I work with. They are good people and most have a great sense of humor which is always a good thing.

That's all I have for now, but I will hopefully add those pictures soon.

Dave's car

Another long pause in blogging. I'm going to set my goals low and just write about car stuff today.

Dave had (yes, had... I'll get to that later), a Hyundai Sonata 2002 that served him well for years. I wrote about some of the things that happened around the time we moved such as helping my mom with the garage sale in GR, cleaning the apartment, the trip to OK, and finally moving up here to live. Sometime in that time period something, or rather, multiple somethings, climbed into Dave's car. I started working at the Pharmacy before Dave had to go to school so he did things around the house like mow the lawn. The lawn mower ran out of gas one of those days so Dave got into his seldom-used Sonata to get to God's Country (our gas station name, no lie). As he got in he decided that the car smelled like dead fish (he doesn't like fish to begin with, so it was really bad). Despite that, he turns the car on and sees that the air coming out of the vents is providing tufts of fur, and now despite even that he travels to God's Country and gets the gas. When I get home he is telling me about this issue and we decide the next course of action is to get the car looked at. I go to work the next day and he takes the car in. Turns out there's a "rat's nest" in the air duct, full of dead animals. I put quotes around rat's nest because it could have been mice or other smallish animals, we will never really know. The smell was so atrocious that the first mechanic would not deal with the clean-up and found someone else (with a stronger gut) to do the job. Even after cleaning out the inside area of the car and Dave cleaning the interior, the car smelled a little rancid. Dave's solution... air freshener, but not just any air freshener, Peach. Since Dave had not begun the school year yet he decided not to be literate and chose the orange colored air freshener thinking that it had an orange smell. Not so, this air freshener was distinctly labeled "Peachy Peach." At this point the car started taking on an artificially sweet, fruity dead animal scent, so delicious.

The car also started making additional sounds coming up to stop signs. Dave's parents were concerned about his commute to work and suggested that he needed an all-wheel drive vehicle. We knew we couldn't afford one of those fancy hybrids (plus I'm not sure if they have AWD), so we started looking at Pontiac Vibes. Started looking at, and ended up buying over Labor Day. Honestly, I'm a little bummed about the money, loss of money I should say, but if it really helps Dave in the winter it will be worth it. Hoping to pay it off sooner than later. I just hope that he doesn't forget how to drive stick completely, being that it's our first automatic. I'm loving the automatic locks and spacious cargo room (when you fold down the seats, it's pretty regular size when they're up) of the hatchback.

Eventually I will get to talking about our jobs, at least I got the car news out of the way.

backlogged stuff

Some random notes to start... a few posts ago I referred to my grandmother's house as uninhibited, although it may be, I meant to say it had been uninhabited. My parents came up to stay a few times, but for the most part it would have been empty if Dave and I hadn't moved in.
I would also like to write a bit about leaving Duluth and our road trip. I had four days and three nights to clean the apartment and pack up the remaining items in our Duluth apartment. Calci started having problems walking on the 3rd night and we put her down the day we needed to leave. We still had cleaning to do after that and I had to be in the twin cities by 6pm. I remember realizing as I passed West Duluth that I was leaving this town for good (or at least for the foreseeable future). I said goodbye to Duluth and tried to mentally be aware of the changes taking place. So much seemed to happen in such a short time. I went to a seminar about money (not about making money) that evening and woke up at a decent time so that Dave and I could get ready to leave for Iowa. We did a few errands and then made our way to West Liberty, IA, which is close to Iowa City. I have a good friend that lives down there and that I don't get to see very often. We only stayed the weekend but were able to see "family life" since she is married with two children (they are the perfect little family of four, although I know my friend is super excited for her husband to finally be finishing his doctorate - he's on track, it's just a long process), we ate at the Hamburg, a delicious burger joint with pie shakes, watched Rambo (the last one), and visited around a fire(pit). Next we drove down to see Dave's friend and college roommate just outside of Tulsa, OK. It was very relaxing lying around and watching movies and South Park. I was happy to visit the Gilcrease Museum of art, and we had a lot of fun at Grand Lake (of the Cherokees) where we were able to take out wave runners on the huge lake. Unfortunately we were not able to get to the ice cream tour because they were booked, but we had fun visiting, seeing another friend who came up from Texas, and doing various impressions including the Kool-Aid man. After about a week we finally returned to Minnesota and began to actually live here in Grand Rapids.
Again, thought I would have more time, but I will try to write about the jobs tomorrow. As a final thought I will say that Kiki (the calico cat) and Lydia (the ferret) have made a little headway in their relationship. Lydia does continue to initiate play, however, Kiki declines with a double swat of her claw-less paw. Sometimes Lydia just checks in with Kiki, and Kiki seems fine with that, even shows some interest with a little amicable sniffing of her own. I will leave you with a photo of a staged cuddle between the two. If Kiki is repeatedly pet and Lydia is barely woken from a slumber, they can be placed next to each other.

Still getting settled

Dave and I have still been "setting up house," although I guess it's more that I am moving things around and he's playing Star Wars on the playstation. He did sweep the house, as in, he swept the siding of all the cobwebs - with all of the spiders around here I'm sure they will return soon. I was saddened today by finding that I had run over a huge caterpillar. It was minty green and about the size of my thumb in both length and width, I guess that's what happens when it hangs out next to the garage :(

Over the weekend I was able to organize the kitchen - was incredibly excited about that (especially about alphabetizing the spices), put books into the shelves, and got a patch of dirt on the side of the house ready for a garden next year. It was full of weeds and as I soon found out, slugs.

This is a picture of the area half-weeded.


...and here is a picture of it completely weeded.


...the pile of weeds I tore out (barehanded!)


and some close-ups of the slugs




I need to go to bed now, but I should at least note that Dave has started work this week (no kids yet) and that I am becoming more proficient at my job. I hope to write more about it tomorrow but I keep thinking I'm going to have more time in the evenings and never seem to. It reminds me of the quote, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."