Summer, Fall...Homecoming!

It has been a LONG time since I've updated anything on here! Unfortunately, I don't even have time to do it now, but thought I would at least post a picture from Michael's arrival home from Iraq on September 30th. We had an amazing 5 days together getting our car, apartment, and life back together in Georgia before I jetted back up to Chi-town to get back to work and school. It's hard to believe that in just 7 months I will have my Master's degree in French! In retrospect, it has gone really quickly. In the day-to-day, not so much, but we are thankful for the lessons we have learned and the obstacles that are making us stronger individually and in our marriage. That being said, I am certainly looking forward to just bumming around the house for at least a couple of weeks when I get home to Georgia in May!

Hopefully, I'll be able to give a more in-depth update sometime soon. Until then, here's our most recent milestone...

Summertime = readingtime

Tomorrow I will leave Chicago (again) for a 7-week trip to Washington. While I am looking forward very much to having so much time to be with family, friends, and my French books, the constant movement of Michael's and my life is certainly wearing on me lately. Having just been gone for almost a month in Europe after a whirlwind year at UIC, this week has felt like it has happened in slow motion and also like there was never enough time. The proximity of Michael's arrival back to the States in just a few days over 3 months, paired with the amount of work that lies ahead to prepare for Master's exams next April, combined with the stresses of packing and getting all of my ducks in a row for almost 2 months away has been tiring. The variety of emotions that I am feeling is quite like the rainbow, and each one comes and goes just as quickly. This is a good year for us - for our marriage, for ourselves, and for our future - but it is a hard, and sometimes desert-like, year. Of course, we are not lacking in anything we need - love, food, and resources are abounding compared to many 20-something married couples' realities. However, emotionally and spiritually it has often been desert-like. Strangely enough, the desert usually ends up yielding abundant and beautiful life - whether through lessons or literal things that could only come with time. Well, let me correct myself = most good things come over time. But some things that for some come quickly and easily (and that are often, as a result, taken just as quickly for granted) have come slowly, but surely, for us. Time together, for example. Obviously this has been something that neither one of us has any control over, and that God has painstakingly planned out day by day. Also, independence and self-confidence for each of us has been built up and fortified this year as we have been apart. Being on either side of the ocean has forced us to become more expressive with our words, and we have both gone through very challenging and despairing moments in our own ways. So, as we near the end of this period, I am grateful for it.

Last month, we were blessed to have put away enough money this year to finally take our honeymoon - just in time for the one holiday we celebrated together so far in 2009-2010, our 1st anniversary! A fabulous trip throughout England and France was filled with rich conversations, wonderful friends, and even a wedding at a royal palace (not ours!). We met up in London, not surprisingly at the airport, and proceeded to spend our first 3 days there. During that time, we met up with (or I should say they came to US, thank you N & D!) my dear friend, Niamh, and her boyfriend, Damien, who are currently living and working in Stafford, England:
Next we headed to Lille, France, where I lived for my sophomore year of college. While we were there we visited a few of the sites and spent two great evenings with my former roommate, Claire-lise, and her boyfriend, Samuel. Wonderful food and wonderful conversation - regardless of a slight language barrier for the boys!

After a time that was much too short in Lille, we headed back to the UK to meet up with Robert & Heather Pasman, who kindly stuffed us and all of our luggage alongside theirs in their rental car out to Oxford.

The of our 1-year anniversary, we hopped back on the Eurostar and back to France - this time to Paris, where we stayed in a wonderful hotel on the Ile St. Louis. My parents met us for 3 of the 6 days we spent there, and we were blessed to only have about one and a half days of rain!
It was an amazing time together and we hope to be able to get back there sooner than later...

After Michael headed back to Iraq, I continue up north to Scotland to meet my parents and to take in some of the breathtaking scenery up there. We visited Murray Watts and Monique Sliedricht at Freswick Castle outside of Wick, and also took a few days up in the Orkney Islands. The Viking history remains evident in many of the corners of Orkney, but so does life from 5,000 years ago! It is hard to get one's head around standing in a village that is older than the Egyptian Pyramids.

What a fabulous way to spend the better part of May and the beginning of June! Now I look forward to spending the better part of the next two months doing preliminary reading for my Master's exams. A Kindle has been purchased in hopes to minimize cumbersome carry-ons in what will certainly be many back & forth journeys from Atlanta to Chicago, and I am set with two lists of French classics to choose my primary sources from over the next several weeks. I am so lucky to be able to be studying the language that I love so much, and will also look forward to another two semesters of teaching at UIC as a TA. God is good! Blessings to you during this summer season.

Spring Break, Easter, 10k, Food & Water Challenge

I hadn't realized how long it had been since I'd updated the blog! Things have been crazy since the beginning of March...then came Spring Break...then came Easter...now comes FINALS!!! It's so hard to believe that we only have 2 more weeks of regular class before finals week. What a crazy, wonderful, exhausting year it has been. Today is also ONE MONTH away from when Michael and I will see each other for the first time in 7 months. I cannot wait.

During Spring Break, I'm not sure I ever got a night's sleep longer than 7 hours...which I know is still considered "enough"...but when you're goingoingoing it is not really enough! I flew out to San Ramon, California, to visit Jes for 5 days in the sunshine. We had a great time catching up, running, and having some great meals together. My mom touched down in Chicago one hour after I did for a 5 day visit of her own to me, during which we shopped, sight-saw, and just had a great time hanging out together. It was COLD, though! Definitely didn't feel too much like the first week of spring. One highlight of our week was seeing the baby mammoth that they recently uncovered in Serbia (or Russia? I should know this...) that is the most complete specimen found to-date. Amazing - scientists were able to determine her age at death, the approximate date of her death, what she'd been eating, how she died, etc. from her internal organs, which were just as well-preserved as her outsides. The Field Museum is always a fun visit, but this was pretty astonishing.

The weekend after Spring Break was Easter. I headed out to Wheaton to visit Tony & Marianne Payne, dear friends who I met last summer at an arts conference on Orcas Island and with whom Michael and I shared a wonderful dinner when we first moved up this summer. It was a chaotic yet fun couple of days, and it was good to be with a family for the holiday.

Over the past month and a half, I have been training for my first 10 kilometer race, which took place last Saturday in Grant Park here in Chicago. It was so fun to train running in California and then along the lake which is so close to my apartment, and it definitely was rewarding to cross that finish line without having stopped! I won't say I was feeling at my best, but my friend Sarah ran it with me and kept me going through the sweat and sideaches. We ran it in about 1 hour 3 mins, so approximately 10 min/mile. We aren't speed-demons, but I was happy to have kept a consistent pace no matter what it was.

This week, I am participating in the "Food and Water Challenge" with my church, Willow Creek. It is in conjunction with their "Celebration of Hope", an annual 3-week period following Easter during which they raise money and awareness about the 50% of the world who isn't fortunate enough to have daily access to clean water and regular, nutritional meals. A week from Saturday I will be packing seed-packets for families in Africa (each one will eventually yield approximately 1,000 POUNDS of fruit & vegetables!) with hundreds of other volunteers. The packets will be going to villages close to where Willow bored wells last year, so that irrigation is possible with viable water. The "Food and Water" part of this started on Monday and will continue through Friday - those participating agree to eat and drink as that 50% of the world does. We are limited to plain oatmeal or Cream of Wheat in the morning, and throughout the day a cup each of rice, beans, and vegetables, as well as a couple ounces of meat...and all throughout only tap water for drink. It hasn't felt impossibly hard like I thought, but hunger isn't a very friendly companion, that is for sure. I find it fascinating how the mind can overcome the body for very long periods of time - I find myself forgetting the fact that I haven't eaten much at all for several days...until the night when I am lying in bed and wishing I could have something as substantial as a yogurt! (It doesn't help that I have about 10 of them in my fridge.) But in those moments of hunger and of grumpiness from it, I am doing all that I can to channel my thoughts and prayers towards those who don't choose to live this way, and who are forced to live in uncertainty each day as to whether or not they will even get this amount of food. I urge you to pray for that half of the world's population - and if you are able, look into donating to an organisation like World Vision or Compassion International whose goal is to seek out and help those people, especially the children. There is 2 times the amount of food necessary to feed the ENTIRE world's population - why isn't it happening? If you think about it, we are really the sole solution. So whether you are a believer or not, it is up to you - and me, and our friends, family and acquaintances - to make that difference. Even $5 can be the last money needed to bore a well or pay for a shipment of seeds.

I'll get off my soapbox now to post up a few pictures from the events I've talked about.

Jes & I heading out to celebrate one of her friend's birthdays.

Jes & her man Jon when we met up with him in Santa Cruz - amazing day and he's pretty cool, too :-)

Holding Eliana, the baby that Jes nannies for.

With Mom at the Field Museum.

Out to dinner at the Creperie.

All ready for the race, dorky hat and oversized-shirt and all!

Afterwards - we didn't really care about overexposure, we were too sweaty to! Whew, a job well done.

All my love to all of you - I hope that this finds you well. God bless.

23

Last week I celebrated my 23rd birthday. What a strange age to be - glorious to still be in the prime of youth and potential, scary to be old enough to begin facing so many of life's changes and transitions. To think of what I have done since my last birthday is quite a thrill...and makes me want to take a nap, too! Planning a wedding, graduating from college, getting married, moving (several times!), starting school and beginning teaching...and not least of all being away from Michael. I've learned to take one day at a time except when making to-do lists for the next week - our society is so overambitious as a whole that it is sickening to think of the disappointment and depression that could be avoided if more people would just be reasonable! No human being can accomplish a task that takes 10 hours in 5, no matter how well organized or OCD they may be, and multitasking takes away from EACH task you are trying to multitask on! So: a lesson I'm thankful to have learned and that I am forced to relearn several times a week!

2010 has been a good year so far. I am just about over the mid-semester hump of my second semester here at UIC, and it is crazy to think that I am almost halfway finished with my Master's. Well, let me rephrase that: halfway done with the coursework for my Master's! The work for the M.A. exams hasn't even begun yet and will do so towards the end of this semester when we choose our subjects for the exams we will need to pass to receive our degrees in April of 2011. I am anxious but more excited than anything, because that means I'll get to dig into a subject of my own choosing (or three, haha) and read all kinds of great books (and some not-so-fascinating articles for research...). The end of the schoolyear will hearken in a period packed with reading French literature and making annotations and writing bibliographies - and one that I want to savor, stressful as it will be to balance all of this work with traveling in the summer and Michael once he is back. God is so good and I am so thankful to have this opportunity; I don't want to risk wasting it and so I try to find one thing each day - whether in my teaching or in my classes - that makes me "tick" and get excited about French. It isn't that hard most days, but some, like last Tuesday when I literally cried in front of my students before my class started (mostly from an overloaded and overwhelmed head and spirit!), are not so easy. And that is just the road I - and we, being Michael and I - are on and I try to embrace it, even with its thorns and imperfect moments.

Below, as usual, I will post some pictures from the past few weeks in hopes of providing a somewhat-sufficient visual update from recent events :-)

1 foot of snow the week prior to Valentine's Day!


The flowers that Michael was so sweet to surprise me with the Friday before Valentine's Day :-)


Kyla, Sarah K, me, Sarah B, and Ellen at my birthday dinner at Bucca di Beppo last Saturday - 17 wonderful people gathered around that table and I was blessed by each person's presence and friendship.


My wonderful, darling neighbors - Amelia, Katie, and Michele. They have helped me through so much in moments when I needed a friend to just sit next to on the couch and watch something mindless on TV while enjoying a glass of wine and restoring conversation.


I hope that this post finds you all thankful for blessings, for challenges, and for another day to use the skills God has given you.

2nd semester - "Spring" 2010

As you can see, I have put the word "Spring" in quotation marks due to the fact that when I arrived back to Chicago to start said "Spring" semester, it was a cozy 10 degrees outside! So I don't really think we can call it that...yet. I am hoping that by the time "Spring" Break rolls around, we will be having temperatures at least in the 50's. However I must admit that this past week we have had particularly mild weather in the mid-30's and 40's...but I think that is ending for another few weeks, the lows for the next few days are gradually making their way down to a single-digit 8!

The semester has started out well, although it is extremely busy. Last semester was, too, but since I am teaching not one section but two this time around, and taking two graduate classes that will require a bit more work than my first two, time organization is paramount. I've found, at least so far, that it's actually even easier this semester because I am forced to use my time wisely. I've also discovered that because I've - at least until now - managed to remain organized and stay on top of things, I have a very good and regular sleep routine even! I'm teaching a 104 class which has been fun since I was teaching 103 last semester and thus have some of the same students. Either way, it is in their best interest to participate and do well this semester, since 104 is the last class for the "basic language requirements" for undergraduate degress at UIC...so if they don't pass this time, they're in for more than they needed to in the first place!

Michael is doing well. We just "celebrated" our 8-month anniversary of our wedding yesterday, which is hard to believe on one hand...and on the other not too much of a surprise. It will be so great to celebrate our first year anniversary together this May, and I'm relieved that we are finally at least WITHIN the year 2010, when he and I will be reunited!!! I am in the midst of beginning the reservations for that two week trip in May, when we will also get to attend a wedding at Hampton Court Palace outside of London, which should be absolutely fabulous. (It also gives me an excuse to buy a new dress, so that's not all bad, either!)

I hope that this new year is going well for you. Chicago is a great city and I'm happy to be here, learning all that I am about teaching, French, history and myself. God is good and has been faithful in teaching me patience amidst showers of blessings and challenges. May He be gracious to you also, and may you remember to focus on the blessings in your life rather than the obstacles.

Below are some pictures of the past week. (Sarah's, B & K on B's 24th birthday, Cécile at the party, Amy & me at Sbucks, and Baby Vienna showing off her new skill of sitting up...and her well-practiced skill of looking like an angel.)

There and back again.

Today has been an absolutely stunning day on Camano Island. Every time that I looked outside of the windows it seemed that the sky had painted itself into an even more beautiful pattern of clouds, greys, blues and whites. I love how even when one is literally running up and downstairs constantly all day, or sitting at the computer gearing up for a new semester, views like today's can still grab your attention and hold it for long enough to almost rejuvenate one's being. Unfortunately even a view like some that I saw today can't replace sleep...

It's been a great four weeks here in the Pacific Northwest. I fly back to Chicago Saturday afternoon, and will start into the new semester of teaching and grad classes next Tuesday. I never leave feeling quite as rested as I'd like, but I've made a point this week to really make sure that I can have most of my time at home. The stress of packing and anything that needs to be shipped off are more than enough without the normal comings and goings to and from the island to town. Unfortunately that means that certain friends I had hoped to see or spend more time with, I wasn't able to and if that is you I am very sorry. I am thankful for the people that I did get to see and please know that if you were not in my arms for a hug, you are in my thoughts and prayers! I'll be home for over a month between June and August (probably closer to two now that I've typed that out!) so there should be ample opportunity to catch up with people then.

While home, I was of course able to see many friends, but it is above all a time for family during the holidays. I spend quite a bit of time with Michael's family and some with mine, too! It seems like I am always arriving home during the final push of my dad's Celtic Christmas tour, which is a mixture of very fun and very stressful emotions. This year, though, we had lovely little Vienna to bring joy to all around; the violinist that he is now working with, Wendy Goodwin, has a 7-month old baby girl who traveled with them for the entirety of the tour. She is one of the most darling little humans I've ever set eyes on and her laugh would probably almost charm Scrooge or the Grinch right out of their socks! Here we are while the concert was happening at my parents' church, St. Aidans. What a doll.
I was blessed to see many friends, like I said. Here is a picture of two of my oldest, dearest friends (not old just longtime!) Amelia and Laura. What a joy it is to catch up on one another's lives and get to laugh and enjoy each other's company...even if it isn't nearly as often as we'd all like!
For Christmas Eve, my parents and I headed down to Lynnwood to have dinner with Michael's family. We had a great time, although Michael was missed.For Christmas Day, we had our good friend Kathy, my grandpa Dale and his friend Lynne, my Uncle Kirk and his girlfriend and my parenst and I. We had a fun time trying to whistle some tunes with a kit that Lynne had brought, but mostly just enjoyed a wonderful meal and being together. I look forward very much to when Michael can share all of this with me!For New Year's 2010, Jes, who is my closest friend apart from Michael, came up for a quick visit from San Ramon, CA. She is a great guest and so much fun to have around. We weren't able to do many exciting activities, but we got some good catching up in and had a fun little get-together with Kathy and my parents on New Year's Eve. We shared it with Kim & Rebecca, Bob & Dawn, Amelia (who was in a previous picture - popular!) and Nancy. Low-key but we had some good laughs ringing in the new year and fresh decade.I pray that this finds you all well and committed to your New Year's resolutions. I haven't really written mine out yet, but they are certainly materializing. I anticipate the coming semester with significantly less stress and doubt, though it will be no less challenging than the last. I will be focusing and working much more in my graduate classes this time around, however, which will be nice, since that is what I am there to do! I'll be teaching two sections of French 104 additionally so it will be busy...but then in the spring, I'll get to see Michael! Only 4 more months to go...