Portland

Meryl and Abby on the bus

Nepali restaurant

Callie demonstrates the proper technique for eating cheetos

Jon explains the “Suck Threshold” between “Boring” and “Innovative Shit”

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September

• After a few more false cooking starts, I eventually gathered the equipment I needed and started to feel more settled in to my new apartment:
  
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• I welcomed and started getting to know the new bunch of 8 volunteers at the Mennonite Voluntary Service house. They are a fun group and I’ve enjoyed hanging out with them once or week (sometimes more!) for bible study and watching The Office.
• I took the train down to Oregon for a weekend, to visit ONE/Northwest’s Portland office as well as James, Darla, Levi, and Bethany in Salem…great to see each of you! Unfortunately I lost my camera on this trip, so the photos included here are thanks to friends…
• I spent 3 days at a ONE/Northwest staff retreat on a lake not too far away. This was a wonderful time of getting to know my colleagues better and improving our shared vision of how our organization can be most effective at helping address the climate crisis (at least, when I wasn’t getting distracted by a certain server crisis). And I got to introduce the staff to Cowtris during our no-talent night.

  

  

• I hosted a homemade ice cream party in honor of my 23rd birthday, which was a great success with some 30 guests who struggled to navigate the tight confines of this apartment.

October

• I had the privilege to attend the 2008 Plone Conference in Washington, D.C. (Plone is an open source content management system used for building websites; I use it extensively at work and have enjoyed getting involved in contributing to the community that develops the software, as I described in the new Plone section of this blog). In addition to spending plenty of time doing geeky things like giving a talk on debugging Plone, I had some awesome Ethiopian food and spent some great times with Kyle and Christy (helping them decorate their apartment, watching nature documentaries, and trying to figure out how to get to the other side of the railroad tracks) as well as Don, Rosanna, Sharada, Eric, and Alberto (playing games and giving lessons in proper Facebook ettiquette).

  

  

• I made my infamous appearance as the bear market at the MVS Halloween party.

  

Whoops, it’s past my bedtime and I still have 2 months to go…guess there will have to be another installment sometime soon.

Imagine my chagrin, upon putting the onions and meat on to brown and turning to the cans of tomatoes and beans that were awaiting chilification, to discover that, quite inexplicably, my kitchen lacks a can opener. Despite being still occupied by its resident for the past year who, quite demonstrably, has a number of cans in the cupboard.* Odd.

In any case…I ruled out the idea of an excursion to fetch a can opener, and was just getting ready to ask the neighbors to borrow one when I discovered my recently purchased Swiss Army knife, with “4. can opener” emblazoned on the back of the still-unopened packaging. I spent a couple minutes trying to work out the bootstrapping problem of how to open the package of a knife packaged in packaging requiring a knife to open it, then found the scissors and was soon on my way to culinary bliss….where I remain.

p.s. And now for something completely different…Check out the nifty Obama T-shirts by the Odd Bird Collective.

*Of course, perhaps this is why the cans are still in the cupboard.

This past week I’ve been busy getting ready to move to my new apartment, ca. ten blocks south of the VS house. That move finally happened this morning. (Elapsed time from when Meryl arrived with the truck until we had everything unloaded at the new place: about half an hour. Although, keep in mind that the truck had already been half loaded, and the few bits of furniture I own were delivered in a previous trip.) I’ll post more pictures sometime when I’m less exhausted, but here’s one to tide you over. From the covered porch looking southwest out toward West Seattle:

Isn’t it pretty? And here’s aiming a bit more directly West, toward downtown:

Notice how I strategically failed to show you any of the inside of the apartment in its current state.

Shout out to all my friends who are also getting settled in new surroundings!

Guys Make $500 A Hour

Make $50 in 10 mins.

Err, hello, MATH, people! …I guess maybe you get a $200 bonus for lasting the hour?

There, happy, jrosei? No, seriously, sorry about the lack of bloggage, folks. (Is that a blog jam? Writer’s blog? (pronounce with German accent)) I must have been too caught up in that thing called “real life.” Forgive me. And maybe I’ll even post something substantive real soon now.

Tip 2: Drink your coffee before checking over your notes, so that it doesn’t take you 3 times to notice that you’ve forgotten said page (the last being 10 minutes before the service starts).

Tip 3: Practice your sermon well enough ahead of time that you can recreate portions of it from memory (scribbled hurriedly on a spare piece of paper) if needed.

Fortunately I was ready for #3 despite failing #s 1 and 2!

Amusingly (in retrospect), this is almost exactly the scenario that occurred in the stress dream I had two weeks ago, just prior to presenting the same sermon at the other Mennonite church in Seattle.

(minus any work completed on the sermon I seem to have agreed to give next Sunday, but we’ll get to that eventually…)

The discussion was amazing and I’d encourage any of you interested to check out the complete video webcast which is available here. The one from Tues. Apr. 15 is the one I was at. (You can spot me in the choir at 02:27:43 and a few other moments if you look carefully.)

One highlight of the morning for me was the following extemporaneous mini-sermon by Desmond Tutu (in response to the question, “How can you learn to not be so hard on yourself? How do you learn to redeem yourself for a mistake?”):

… It would be awful if we didn’t get angry when you see someone, for instance, violating a child. That would be awful! And so it is something to be thankful for when you lose your cool. That is quite important; it says something about a person. If you were to be indifferent, hearing that children were being killed in Darfur, I would get worried about you! And so I’m glad that you get upset.

And about the things that actually get to upset you… I get really angry with God. I mean I’ve…I’ve…rrrrrgggh!! You know…how can you–how can you?!–let this, that, and the other happen, you know. And the God that we worship is incredible, in a way. He says, “Yeah… You know, I gave them a gift of freedom. And they can use it that way. And I can’t do…I can’t do anything! Okay, get mad at me. Get mad at me; I’m glad you’re getting mad.”

And sometimes…I laugh easy, but I cry quite a lot as well…so, I cry. But I want to support you…for goodness’ sake, God has all of eternity to work on you. You and I are a work in progress! And if we slip — this is one of the wonderful things about God! — God doesn’t say (you know, if you make a mistake), “AAH! Good riddance to bad rubbish!” God…God picks you up, dusts you off, and says…Try again! And when you mess it up again, God says…”Tough luck. Come on, let’s try again.” Dusts you off… “Come on, try! Try…and try…” Because this God is a three-miles-per-hour God. Walking at our pace.