Summer is here!!! This weekend has been great. Friday I had a birthday party and while I was more concerned about the food, which was quite tasty (actually fairly incredible), and just wanted people to come, I also got some fun presents. Saturday I got up late, since people left my apartment around 3am, went running with Maria (my marathon friend), we jumped in her apartment complex's pool (which had just opened) and felt great after running in 38ºC weather (100ºF), and had a nice summery lunch of gazpacho, salad and fresh fruit. When I returned home, my roommate Chery and I finished off the lemon sorbet we'd made for my bday party, which I have to say was incredible. Last night I went to my best friend Ruth's house for part 2 of my bday party, with her daughter and some friends. They made a "cake" out of fruit - watermelon, kiwi, and strawberries. And we just had a fun time talking, laughing, dancing, and just hanging out til the wee hours of the morning. I am so blessed! And I feel very loved. One of my favorite parts of last night was when Elia (her daughter) came over to me and threw homemade confetti all over the place. :-) And there was a thunderstorm last night, which is also fun. It only lasted a couple hours and was before we went to sleep, but fun. I am now trying to get some work done, but completely exhausted.

scum of the earth

I was looking at a friend's page and came across this church in Denver & Seattle. What drew me to look at their page was their name and their explanation as to WHY. I just listened to a talk about: "Healthy Female Sexuality." It's a good talk.

“To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world.” (1 Corinthians 4:11-13)

WHY SCUM?

It doesn’t sound like a church name … on purpose. We really want to connect with people who have no interest in “church” by society’s definition. There are plenty of churches for “normal people” and we think we have a unique calling to reach out to our otherwise unreached friends. Our name is integral to that process. Whether outcast by society (e.g., punks, skaters, ravers, homeless people…) or by the church itself, many who come can identify with the name “Scum of the Earth” since they have been previously treated as such.

More important to us, however, the name implies that being people of faith does not mean we are better than anyone else. We know many non-Christians who think Christians are out to cast judgment on them. Our name makes it clear that we aren’t about that. We are just aware of our need for God, as Scum of the Earth. Fortunately, God never sees us like that! But the name is humble and we like that.

–Chris Baker

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

We strive to be a church who:
seeks intimacy with God and honest relationships with others
cultivates creativity and uses everyone’s gifts
asks questions while seeking Truth
recognizes our need for a Savior
passionately yet respectfully shares the saving love of Christ
demonstrates God’s love in our community

For more, check out their webpage.

Anyway, just thought I'd share. I don't know anymore than what I've said, but sounded cool. :-)

a quiet, lazy day

what i'm drinking right now... :-) a homemade iced café latte. and since it's a holiday here, corpus cristi, i'm enjoying some time to read, to relax, to listen to some sermons online, and to plan out the menu for my birthday party tomorrow night. :-) right now i'm listening to a sermon and enjoying my yummy coffee. :-)

happy birthday to me!

:-)

random mail

I've been going through a couple stacks I have in my room to try to get organized and to get rid of some clutter and I just came across an odd letter that arrived in the mail a few months ago. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure that it was intended for me, but phonetically the name written does sound like my full name, even if it's not entirely correct, and the address is mine, minus the correct zipcode. So, I opened it.

It's a brown medium size envelope. Inside are the following:

27 sets of used stamps cut from the envelopes on which they were sent

a few paper figurines - old and antiquey - a boy holding a pheasant, flowers, an english or swiss looking soldier, a sailor boy that i think is from some sort of old chocolate ad here, a little girl and dog on snow

a postcard from 1962 in french, but sent to an address in Madrid - it's a picture of the french alps

a small note signed: Besitos Amely

Now the whole thing is a bit odd, but it made my day when I got it (in part because it made me think of my dad - i send him clippings of cool stamps all the time because when i was little he and i collected stamps and he still does (even if they just sit in a box or a pile)) and now again today as I look through it and document the contents.

It made me feel like Amelie. So, no idea who this is from nor if they really intended to send it to me. And I'm half wondering if I should return it to the sender or send a note asking if they want me to return the contents or whatever (and hoping that someone else with an english name looking much like mine is not waiting for this envelope that remains unpostmarked and that was sent to my building), but part of me just wants to enjoy the peculiar, strange package that made me smile. If it weren't for the note from Amelie (or Amely), it would seem much more like a wrong address, but somehow the note makes me think that it was anonymous and meant to be that way. Writing me makes me think I am insane and living a bit in dreamland, but it could be, right? I do think it's awfully romantic (not in the actual love type of romantic, more the dreamy, surreal romantic, like something from the 1920s) and something from a book or the movies.

café - part 2

"Días Descafeinados" - Papel Maché

Si nieve o llueve, tu eres el porche
Que me protege.

Y si fuera un lienzo,
Serías el pincel.
Y si fuera un cuadro,
El pintor, mi dueño, y mi creador.

El azúcar en mi taza de café, tú eres
La pieza que cumple tal puzzle de mi vida, ah, ah.

Días descafeinados, ... cortados
Lo que sería sin ti.
Una flor sin sol, una pagina blanco.
Días descafeinados, fotos sin color,
Es lo que sería de mi.
Sin tener te a mi lado,
Me faltaría algo.

Eres la piedra angular de todos mis puentes,
La mama que me coge cuando no puedo y me caigo,
La canción mas bella de mi guitarra,
Las escuelas, el viento que empuje al heroe,...

El azúcar en mi taza de café, tú eres
La pieza que cumple tal puzzle de mi vida, ah, ah.

Días descafeinados, ... cortados
Lo que sería sin ti.
Una flor sin sol, una pagina blanco.
Días descafeinados, fotos sin color,
Es lo que sería de mi.
Sin tener te a mi lado,
Me faltaría algo.

café

:-) yum! well it seems like the web domain panic is just about gone, although i'm still waiting for it to get fully resolved (i'm waiting for wordpress support to write me back). but it does look like all is well, no information lost, it looks like we still have our web domain, it just doesn't actually work yet.

in the meantime, i'm drinking some coffee - just pure espresso this morning (i need to go buy some soymilk), which is probably helpful since i'm running low on sleep, and it does taste mighty good.

here are two quick side notes before i get back to being productive...

here are two blogs that made me laugh (i found them looking for coffee pics):

"how to defend your coffee habit"

"coffee as a cure for the plague

and, secondly, contrary to these blogs and to my love of coffee, i actually do think that it's much more advisable to not be addicted to coffee, but to merely use it now and then when necessary for either emotional or mental conditions. :-) it's definitely true that coffee addiction makes more tired in the long-run, as it drains your adrenal glands and causes you to need stimulant to function (and actually to function at a lower level of energy). bottom line, it's not so good (although it is tasty) and better in small doses, or on occasion.

note: i think i am mindlessly writing whatever, so this is probably very much random ramblings...

Yes, yes, I do really need to go to bed, particularly since I need to be awake and functional in about five hours. Anyway, I was hoping someone might be up in the US and write me back about the web domain predicament, but to no avail, so since I'm awake but tired I've been looking at friends' pages and such when it occurred to me something that I've been noticing here recently and thinking I should maybe blog about it.

So, obviously each culture has different social norms, some which vary little and some which vary a lot. Also, mind you, it is spring/summer and the pollen count is high and I can attest to the fact that my nose has been more stuffy than normal.

Generally in American culture staring isn't a socially acceptable thing, well here in most cases it is perfectly fine, particularly if there is something to stare about, then everyone will (and more so if you live in the south, really, I'm not making this up). In fact I can remember on many occasions when I lived in Sevilla, mainly when I first got there and didn't fit in as well, the ENTIRE bus, kid-you-not, turned around to stare at us for basically the entire bus ride. In Madrid, it's much more subtle. Generally people don't stare for too long, but much longer than would be socially acceptable in the US. In fact, I now find myself doing the same thing. But I digress.

Another custom that we as Americans are not quite used to is nose-picking. I can't say that it's encouraged here nor something you would do somewhere nice, but over the past few days the number of blatant nose-pickers that I've seen is astronomical. There just isn't the same stigma attached to it. Yes, allergy season is high, but still. So, in that vane, as I looked for pictures I found that wikihow has a page on "how to pick your nose inconspicuously". It's cracking me up. But there you go.

evil computer world

Ahhh!!! So, I was just going to update a website that we supposedly have for the Camino, which we will be walking this summer with university students (as we do every summer) and which we were planning on begin advertising tomorrow, but it seems that we are a bit technologically challenge or possibly too trusting that other people know what they are doing or something...

The problem, I think, is that the domain site wasn't renewed and thus it disappeared out of existence sometime in the past few days. Ahhh!!! So, right now I don't entirely know what that means. I'm assuming we lost what was there before, which sucks, and I'm assuming that it won't be too hard to get it back the domain, but that we'll probably be starting from ZERO. Hmm... oh well. I'm hoping that some of my computer savvy friends might be of some help both in figuring out how you buy or renew a domain and in recovering the former page. If you have any suggestions, I'd love the help. I'm going to send out a few socorro (help) e-mails and then hit the hay... each day has enough trouble of its own. :-)