Happy birthday Mitchell!

Today was my brother's 12th birthday.  I was allowed to take the day off, so I caught the bus in to White Rock and spent the day with him and the rest of the family.  It's always great to hang out with them...I hate saying goodbye at the end though.  Some of the kids get a little teary-eyed, and I feel I'm leaving part of myself behind.  Still, this time wasn't SOOOO bad as they're planning to come in to town in a few days and spend the afternoon with me.

This afternoon Mom and I visited a second hand bookstore (always a dangerous place for us!!!) where we found a couple of books to take home.  She and Dad have been reading "Conversations With God" by Neale Donald Walsch, and we found another book by him called "Tomorrow's God" that she and Dad decided to buy.  I found a book called "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz that I recently heard about (via a new friend I made while playing a game called "Kingdoms of Camelot" on Facebook) and was wanting to read.  However, Mom was also interested in it so I left it in White Rock for her to read while she's there.  She started it this afternoon and already found it interesting enough to share a few things with me...which of course peaked my interest and now I can't wait to read it myself!!!

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Pillow fight!

I have the best job in the world, apparently!  At what other job do you get PAID to beat children with pillows?  Seriously, it was a good night.  Some of us started out with a few games of Twister...which we promptly abandoned once we heard there was a pillow fight going on upstairs.  Twenty or so kids and a couple councillors running, screaming, and beating on each other with pillows equals a lot of happy kids.  Then we "quieted" them down with GuitarHero (one of the kids bought it yesterday at the mall).  Now I have a little bit of free time.  Not much else to share...except a favourite poem of mine that I re-discovered today.




"Earth" by John Hall Wheelock

"A planet doesn't explode of itself," said drily
The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air--
"That they were able to do it is proof that highly
Intelligent beings must have been living there."


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Roses
















Lovely sunny afternoon...I'm so glad I have a laptop!  Now I can blog on the grass in the sun while listening to worship music in Mandarin.  Can life get any better?  I submit it cannot!



Since a group of Taiwanese students arrived late last night, they had to stay behind and do placement tests while the other kids went off to their English classes.  After the test, Matt and I took them on a tour of the campus (like we did for the first batch of kids).  Thanks to these two tours, I have changed my opinion of...roses.  



Yes, roses.  I've never really liked roses.  I mean, if someone were to give me a rose (or a bouquet of roses), I would receive it/them graciously, and appreciate the thought behind them.  But they are not my kind of flowers.  I like wild flowers (among which, ironically, wild roses rank very high on my list of preferred flowers!).  I remember a number of summers ago I was rather obsessed with the story of Beauty and the Beast and read several different versions/variations of the story.  All VERY different and all VERY good.  One of them was told from the perspective of The Beast, an unfortunate Persian prince who was turned into a lion and as such was chased from his kingdom.  This particular prince loved roses above all other flowers and had a huge rose garden back in Persia that he had spent many many hours working in.  I never understood this obsession of his.  Until now.



Here on the university campus there is a rose garden.  I'll admit I groaned inwardly when I saw we were going in...but inside it's so pretty!  So many shades of red, pink, orange, yellow...and the SMELL!  Sun-kissed roses in a slight breeze....



Maybe not quite as close to Heaven as the smell of pineapples, but it's definitely up there!


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The next six weeks...
















I'm being really stretched right now!  Today is my first real day as a councillor for an ESL youth program, and I'm exhausted!  Up at 7:30 to get people in to breakfast around 8, temporarily loosing 2 students, orientation, finding the 2 students (changed rooms without telling any councillors, slept in, and did not respond to our door knocking or yelling “HELLO!  ANYONE IN THERE?”), ESL placement tests, lunch, campus tour (2 hours of walking!!!!), meeting 2 new students, dinner, ice breaker games, announcements for tomorrow's schedule, new batch of Taiwanese students to meet at 10pm tonight, give them an orientation and get them settled in...


 
The stretching part is being a leader when I have no idea what I'm doing!  But it's all going relatively well, and I'm sure by the end of the week I'll have got the hang of it and the next 5 weeks won't be so hard.  It's good though.  Last night I laid in bed and all I could really do was thank God for what He's teaching me through this and how He's stretching me and helping me to grow into the best version of myself.


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The shots you take
















I always seem to find myself in a pickle...wanting to try new things, take risks, live an adventure...and being too scared to take the plunge.  In fact, I'm kind of facing that right now.



Last month I finally took a TESL course to become a certified ESL teacher.  It's something I've talked about doing for about 7 years, but wasn't quite sure if it was what I really wanted or if I'd be good at it.  Thanks to the encouragement of my family and a few friends I decided to just go for it.  And I'm glad I did.  But now I have to find a job...which can be a little trickier.  Apparently a lot of schools around the world only like to hire certified ESL teachers who have some kind of university degree...and I don't have one.  But that doesn't rule out some of the private schools, nor does it eliminate the opportunity for private students.  And that last one is the option I think I like best.



So now, here is where the risks show up: I'm thinking about teaching English in another country.  I have a few friends in Korea, some of whom are already ESL teachers and think I should go teach there.  Korea is supposedly a very good place to work and live.  I've heard great things about it, and I'd love to go...but really only because I have friends there.  Otherwise, I'm not naturally attracted to Asia.  And it's the same thing with Taiwan.  I have a friend who is going back there next month, and she thinks I should come and teach there.  She and her sister have contacts and she thinks I wouldn't have a hard time finding a job there at all.  Besides, she was teaching me Mandarin while she was here and thinks I should take the opportunity to immerse myself in the culture and the language and become fluent.



The other place I've started thinking about is Mexico.  I have the opportunity to go down there in August...which is actually a very attractive idea.  I never really wanted to go to Mexico because that's where EVERYONE seems to go.  But Central and South America have always fascinated me, and I really badly want to become fluent in Spanish.  I took it for a year and a half, and can still remember a lot of what I learned, but I've never really had the opportunity to practice it.  One of the draw-backs to this idea is that while you can make decent money in Korea and Taiwan by teaching English, you really can't in Mexico.  However, I guess it's not that bad as the cost of living is quite low.  And it would be a good starting place to exploring the rest of the continent.



So, these are some options.  But do I have the guts to pursue any of them?  Like Wayne Gretsky says, "Statistically 100 percent of the shots you don't take don't go in." 


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Hey
















The grass beneath a tree is content
and silent.



A squirrel holds an acorn in its praying hands,
offering thanks, it looks like.



The nut tastes sweet; I bet the prayer spiced
it up somehow.



The broken shells fall on the grass,
and the grass looks up 
and says, 
"Hey."



And the squirrel looks down 
and says,



"Hey."



I have been saying "Hey" lately too,
to God.



Formalities just weren't
working.



~Jalaludin Rumi translated by Daniel Ladinsky


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What do you want in life?
















I was gonna write about something totally different, but had to look it up in a notebook I keep in my purse first...and got sidetracked reading some of the other stuff I wrote in there.  So instead of my original idea, I'm going to share something I wrote during one of my lunch breaks at work back in January 2007.  My desire is the same as back then, but unfortunately I don't think I've made much progress towards it.  Anyway, here it is:



"What do you want in life?"  I want the world to be my home.  I want to know different countries, live in them, have friends with different cultural backgrounds, and not limit my residence to Canada.  I want to spend my life learning about life, people...developing friendships.



I want to learn how to wisely invest my money...to be free of financial worry...what the heck!  I just want to be free of worry!  To be able to take my life one day at a time and enjoy it and fully experience it.  I want a life of intensity: joy, happiness, pain, sorrow, anger, forgiveness.  But I want to be able to control them because it's not good to be run by your emotions.



I want to share this journey with someone.  I want to get married and share his journey.  I want to have kids and show them the world.



I want to be sensitive to God's leading.  Sensitive to the spiritual realm.  I want to understand what's going on around me.



I want to have time--to relax, think, listen to people, watch the world...



I want to write about life.  People.  Ideas.  Beliefs.  Food.  Travel.  Lessons.



I want to major in life.  Learn to observe.  Take time for little things like flowers opening.



I want to take risks, have adventures, and live dangerously though not stupidly.



I want a nice villa in Spain!


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About Me











I was born and I will die. I eat, breath, sleep, talk, and periodically raise my voice. For a little variation I read, watch movies, and walk on the beach. I am a Christian, a Canadian, and a homeschool graduate. When it rains I stare at the windshield wipers and get mad when the wipers move a little too fast for the stream of water that is desperately trying to get away. When it's sunny I walk down to the beach and think about amnesiacs washing up on the shore. When it snows I stay inside with a book and curl up in a blanket. I like CSI Las Vegas, Criminal Minds, and Firefly. I like dark chocolate and dandelions and daisies and wild roses. And RED.




















    

    

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