Part 2

I'm stressed out beyond my capacity right now, with moving and trying to create a small group and my work schedule is getting crazy and people are vising, BUT- I have to finish my blog. Priorities are priorities. :)

Less than a week before the Lock-In, I was invited to chaperone the Girl Scouts to Juneau for a weekend. At first this sounded like a great idea. Time with the girls, time in Juneau, and I love the ferry. Great. I would need to switch my Saturday shift at Mt. Market, but that shouldn't be a big deal. However, in the couple of days it took to work the switching out with another coworker, the Lock-In happened. I'm sorry, what I meant to say was the Kids to the Max and Thourough Exhaustion happened. So I walk into work the Monday morning, having come from the church after the Lock- In and cleaning up and such, quite the zombie, and Nelle tells me she can switch and to have fun in Juneau. Uhhhhh....I call Crystal to tell her I can come and only then do I learn the schedule: leave Friday night on the 10:45pm ferry, get to Juneau around 3:15am, drive to the Council office, sleep a few hours, wake up early for Thinking Day (the event we were there for), run around Juneau all day (including the MALL), get up 6:30am Sunday morning to be on the ferry and back at church by 10:30am. Upon hearing this, I started to cry. Crystal doesn't know it, but as she was talking, Leche was sitting in her warm bathroom, crying. I was just so tired...I called Kenny BAWLING at another sleep-deprived weekend ( was just so TIRED), but took a few days to catch up on sleep and headed to Juneau. I had a great time. The girls were hilarious and we got to go BOWLING! One of the girls had a cast on her good arm which made her disinclined to bowl, but I promised to bowl left handed or granny-style and it worked out great (I SUCKED). Kelly, pictured with the bowling ball, decided to name it Old Reliable, which I thought was hilarious. We hit the mall, where all the girls spent their money on earrings and shoes and headbands and bangles and oh my word, were they decked out. I bought comfortable shoes in lieu of my hiking boots and COFFEE, finally. Thinking Day was a whole 'nother story, but the trip was a fun whirlwind.

Last Friday, Lori, Kenny, Mike, and I went ice fishing at Mosquito Lake. Not kidding, folks, there were, in fact, mosquitoes flying around us as we were ICE fishing. Weird phenomenon. Lori and I made it competetive, boys against girls, but I soon realized my standards were too high and I modified my goal to just three fish, tops, even as the guys were catching nine, ten, eleven...The picture on the left is of my first fish caught, displayed morbidly with the weapon which expedited its demise. I'm proud to say that I actually caught four fish (the last one by accident as I was walking away to do something else while still holding the pole) and even caught the final fish, making our total catch THIRTY fish (but we only kept sixteen). Kenny and Snoopy can be seen posing by the catch we kept.
The weather was beautiful and let me tell ya- by the fourth fish I was taking the hook out and beating it over the head multiple times with a screwdriver all by myself. Papa would be proud. :) It's even on video, as Mike recorded the event for posterity. Don't worry- we watched it later that night. A few times. :) We had a fish fry and I cleaned my own fish, but not without much girly hesitation. *shudder* I'll go ahead and admit that three of the fish cleanings did involve plastic bags tied around my hands so I didn't actually have to TOUCH them. Heh heh. Don't judge.

Well, I'm outta steam. Phew. Thanks for hanging in there. I tried to include as many pictures as possible for those of you who require visual stimulation to stay interested (Jennifer?).
I'll try to post more often in order to prevent any future bombardment of posts.
Honest. :)
<3

Catch up, wouldya?

Phew. Hold on. Give a girl a minute to catch her breath.
Okay. I’m good. Thanks for that.
SO MUCH has happened in the last few weeks- I mean MONTH since I just noticed that it has been that long since my last post. It seems like just yesterday I wrote an update, but apparently that is not the case (duh). As a brief overview, we have gone from MAD FREEZING temperatures to crazy balmy (33 degrees), which has made me very unhappy. If I wanted a rainy winter with slush and drizzle, guess where I would still be living? But I digress. There has been snowshoeing at the golf course in 55 degrees-below-zero winds, game nights with desserts lit on fire (Banana’s Foster, of course), Valentine’s Day parties with fondue and tattoos, trailblazing, all-nighters with 35 youngsters, a whirlwind of Girl Scouts in Juneau,a Star Wars Marathon, and most recently- ICE FISHING.
Pretty daunting list of activities to report on, not to mention the amount of pictures that accompany said activities. I'll try this in chunks.

Trailblazing wasn’t exactly part of the plan when Lori and I went to hike Mt. Riley. The couple-a-mile walk to the Battery Point trailhead was fun enough, then 0.9 miles to the Mt. Riley trailhead…that wasn’t really there. Surely someone else must have hiked from this side of the mountain to set the trail…heh. Apparently not. But we were feeling optomisitic and Boy Scout-like (hey- I have some experience with orienteering), but gut feelings and your inner compass only take you so far. After only four arrows in the beginning, an hour and a half of climbing, falling, guessing, losing a glove (me), we hit a roadblock---absolutely NO IDEA where to go next. No clues, no nothing. Sigh. So, resigned and starving, we headed back down (which only took us twenty minutes) to eat our sandwiches on the beach. The picture of Lori and the tree was the result of never knowing if we would see another arrow, which made finding this one (and validating that we were on any trail at all, even if we were actually pretty far off) pretty exciting. I like to call the close up of me "I Actually Have No Clue" Face, which I didn't let Lori see until it really was time to call it quits. Finally, the last shot is us on the beach with Mountain Market sandwiches on a beautiful sunny day with quite a front row seat of the mountains. After chowing down, we trekked the mile or so back to town and collapsed into Mountain Market to dry off and not move for a while. :) Trailblazers, we are not. :)

It began as a simple movie night. Our big outreach for the month, held after youth group for any kid and every kid. Then it evolved into an overnight. In the end (and The End was a glorious happening) it was an ALL NIGHTER. I remember exactly when it happened...the walls began to close in around me and my world suddenly seemed doomed once the competition began- "I'm not sleeping AT ALL tonight!" "Neither am I!" "I bet you can't!" "Leche, you can't be tired! You have to STAY UP!" Dun dun DUN!!!! Thirty-eight kids in little ol' Haines Presbyterian, eating junk food and watching movies and playing games ALL NIGHT LONG with YeaYea, Zazu, and I, though several other blessed souls came for a while to join in the fun and help with the pandemonium. The gutter sundae was a hit (in a real gutter that fell off someone's house from the church) and we wouldn't have made it without 4 a.m. Mac n' Cheese and brownies (the making of which is shown here). Unfortunately, after 3 a.m. it was less "what game can we play next" and "what fun can we have" Leche and more "if you bounce that ball against the wall one more time I might kill you" Leche, but such is lock-in life. I never thought the church would be clean again, but we got it spotless even with enough time for me to run off to work that day! Exhausted? Well, yes, as a matter of fact I was. And I think that the parents hated us a little, but the kids had a great time it seemed. And it only took us several days to recover. Man, I can't stay up all night like I used to. I must be getting old.

Well, stay tuned, friends. More to come. I'm breaking it up into installations. I like to keep 'em guessing. :)