SOB Turkey & Poisonface

I realize this post is super long, but if you read it, I promise it won't disappoint.
The makings of one GREAT day:

Saturday was one for the books. I'm super allergic to mother nature & for 3 or 4 out of the last 6 winters, I have gotten some manner of poison ivy or other, unspecified contact dermatitis ON MY FACE. You can imagine my dismay when, during a staff meeting on Friday, my face began to itch. I felt around, and had itchy bumps on my left cheek and temple. Shit. I excused myself from the meeting, dug around in the meds cabinet and work, and slathered my face with cortisone. The itching was briefly satiated, but the angry red bumps spread. By Saturday, they were on my eyelid and jaw as well. Not one to panic, I persisted with home remedies of oatmeal, benadryl, cortisone, and caladryl, toughing it out until I could get in to see the doctor and get some steroids today. On Saturday, though, while my face was inflamed, itching and raw...

You see, every year a kind member of the community gives a 20 pound turkey to each of my coworkers and myself. Most of us 20 somethings have never cooked a whole bird before, and have done things like not so accidentally forgotten to pick it up, or given it to our moms for the family dinner. Well, this year I thought I was doing my friends a favor and picked their turkeys up for them. I had them in my trunk and made my 2 friends take theirs out before they left work, because I didn't want turkey thawing all over my car. One of my coworkers went home and crammed the obligation into her tiny fridge to cook when she feels like it. The other forgot his in the trunk of his car. You can imagine his disappointment the next day when we informed him that he must now cook his turkey, and that re-freezing it would be a small disaster.

"Hey," I said, "You can borrow my roasting pan. Or, for that matter, you could come over and cook the turkey at my house so you're not alone in your apartment cooking and eating a bird for hours and hours all alone."
"OK," he said, "that sounds good."
And we made an event of it. 2 other friends came over, and Jenny and Ben were here, too. The bird wasn't quite totally thawed, so the meat handlers did their best and we got the beast into the oven. We seasoned it well with lots of aromatics, herbs, and garlic injected into the meat. Everyone broke and went about their afternoons engaging in solo activities. I opened the Timothy House and waited and waited and waited for my volunteer, who I eventually had to call at home, to arrive.

I got home a little late at 6:30pm and our friends arrived shortly thereafter. Ben took the internal temperature of the bird, and found it to be a tepid 120 degrees. Hmmm... 60 degrees to go. So I made some dip, we talked and played games and I enlisted Jenny, who has prepared multiple birds to check into things, assuming that, since the temperature had risen 100 degrees in 3 hours, it had surely risen another 60 degrees in the last hour and a half. Jenny takes the temp...still not close. Jenny flips the bird over and takes the temp from the other side. It is now 8pm.

"Oh, this is quite raw," she says with big, distressed eyes. "If we want to eat before 11pm, we're going to have to cut it up and cook it some other way."
Everyone frowns. I suggest eating all the side dishes and just letting the turkey cook all night. Ben points to OUR obligation, now thawed and resting in our sink. "But we have to cook ours, too. It won't keep now, and we said we would bring it to church."
By this point, the owner of the raw obligation has joined us in the kitchen. "I'm fine with throwing it away. I was told this was the 'easiest thing I would do today.' I'm fine with throwing it away."
Jenny's eyes grow bigger and more distressed. The oven door rests open, and she is still holding the roasting pan handles with oven mits, contemplating the albatross. "I can't throw away 20 pound of meat. That doesn't happen in my world." Everyone murmurs agreement and I find the sharpest knife we have.

The struggle was epic. As she hacked into the carcass, I brainstormed ways to cook the bird. We settled on braising some on the stove top in BBQ sauce, George Foreman Grilling some, and letting the rest finish baking. After half an hour of hacking and another half hour of cooking, we had meat to eat. We stood around staring at each other, but finally someone stepped up and served themselves some. I took some of the George Foremaned beast, as the BBQ sauce looked too much like blood for me to cope. I cut off a small slice, popped it in my mouth, and it crunched. Oh...oh no...oh, it's a piece of garlic. Man. My first bite of the hot, cooked obligation was 80 percent crunch garlic. It was gross. But I plugged away and finished my supper, as did my friends and husband.

The highlight of the day, by far, was the bananas foster Ben made for desert--way to save the day, babe. After desert, we left the picked carcass cooking and watched The Big Lebowski. Near midnight, as the plot was wrapping up, I remembered the carcass. Ben, who feels the most obligated to follow through with any obligation, ran up to check on it. We all heard laughing. He had tried to pull of a drumstick and the whole femur had fallen off in his hand. "It kind of looks like that bird from Christmas vacation," was his report.

Upon inspection, we discovered that the carcass was, well, not food anymore. Our trash was overfull from some home construction projects earlier in the week, so I asked the owner of the obligation to kindly dispose of it in whatever way he saw fit, provided we had our roasting pan back so we could prepare our obligation, which was still staring at us from the sink. Recalling the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, I half jokingly suggested he heave the cursed albatross into the sea, or, as we call it here, the Hocking river. He laughed, hesitated, then buoyed and left with the bird. I wanted to go along really badly, but didn't want a $500 littering fine. He didn't make it all the way to the river, but settled for a creek that was closer by and much more out of sight. I've protected his anonymity in this post b/c I don't think he's a criminal--desperation will make you do things out of character.

Once the pan was returned, Ben had a mild existential crisis. He contemplated ditching our bird, too, but his deep sense of duty came through and we got our albatross in the oven by 2am. The people at our church said it was delicious. I wouldn't know. I don't like turkey--I choke it down, but in the end, I always think it tastes like dark meat on chicken.

Arghh!

Hasn't been the best couple of days.

Christmas was AWESOME and my family is adorable and loving, generous, and all of those other things...work however, is stressing me out more severly than I normally permit. It's stressing me out enough that I'm blogging from work rather than working because I can't take it. I think part of the problem is that I haven't been engagin 2 of my 3 normal coping mechanisms. Out of my triumverate of prayer and meditation, art, and excercise, I've only been employing exercise for the last 2 weeks or so...I think I'm accidentally ruining my own life a little bit. I'm planning on spending my evening remedying this problem. I need some time alone, man.

A resident said something great to me today, though. We have an older wirery guy at the shelter right now with a great big, bushy, gray beard, and I was commenting to him that a stocky, younger guy with an even bushier red beard (whom I've named "Small Bunyan") was giving him a run for his money. The older guy said, "Yeah, but I've got the gray advantage; Old age and treachery trumps youth and whatever else."

You made my day old wirery guy with a great big, bushy, gray beard. Totally made my day.

Xmas in Maryland

My father-in-law is making bacon and eggs right now. Awesome.

We drove to Maryland--my husband's hinterland--yesterday morning for the Horsch family Christmas. It was good for several reasons that mostly stem from my inlaws not being wrapped up spending tons of money or particular traditions. So, we had terrific spaghetti for Christmas dinner and every couple brought 2 gifts for an exchange. I won (I do feel like I win or earn presents) the book Into the Wild and a bunch of Napoleon Dynamite posters. Ben won a box of different soup mixes. We gave (which I hear is the best part of presents) 2 pounds of coffee from a local fair trade coffee shop, and one of those I-gave-a-gift-in-your-name Heifer International gift of chickens to an impoverished 3rd world family. It felt a little like cheating.

Time for bacon.

Christmas Parties

Christmas parties make me nervous. They are inevitably held at some stranger's home where toilets break and there are inside jokes from 30 years ago that no one gets anymore. There are cats that I'm allergic to and dogs that I'm allergic to sleeping on my coat in the guest bedroom, and those delicious looking cookies are full of nuts that I can't eat. Someone is drunk, and no one is cutting him off, and then there are gift exchanges for people you don't know who don't want to know you...not how I want to celebrate the incarnation.


So, I host Christmas parties when possible. In part because I love to host things, and also in part because because I have created for myself an allergy free bubble of a home in which I am perfectly comfortable. So, I hosted the Good Works Christmas party yesterday morning. I love the Good Works Christmas party. We draw names and exchange words of encouragement with one another. And my coworkers are for the most part, incredible cooks. For example, I ate cheese grits yesterday and breakfast casserole that was full of crab meat. The Christmas party is 3 of my favorite hours of the year.

I like drawing names and writing words of encouragement. I like it SO MUCH. We did this last year, too, and an older (maybe 75) woman that I work with complained. There are only 15 or 16 staff members, but she wanted to do something else because she didn't want to get someone she didn't know. Someone she didn't know?? I insisted. "Then that's a great reason to get to know them! How do you not know people you see for at least 2 hours every week?" I was especially fired up because we work for a ministry of hospitality.

So, last years Christmas party rolls around, and my 75 year-old coworkers has drawn my name. She wrote me some encouraging things and I thought, "Oh good, I'm glad she got someone she knows."

Pre Christmas party this year, she says to me, clearly having no recollection of last year, "I'm glad I got someone I know this year. Last year I got someone I didn't know at all, but I'm glad that didn't happen this year."

Wow.

I wasn't offended, just surprised and entertained.

Merry Christmas Party.

What's in a name?

Last night, my friend Heidi invited Ben and I over to her house to hang out with 4 Chinese students. Their names (phonetically) are Shwen-shwen, Shwen-shwen, Tsai, and Ginny. Shwen-shwen and Shwen-shwen were discussing what their names meant, as they are from different regions of China. One Shwen-shwen meant "beautiful girl" and the other meant something like "lovely pond."

I knew, from taking ancient greek in college that Andrea comes from the root greek word andros, or "man." So, my name means "manly" in Italian or any other romance language. Lynn means "from the lake." And I'm assuming that my new last name, Horsch likely means "horse," as english is a germanic language and these cognates are frequently correct. In short, my name is Mandrea Sea-Horsch.

So, I explained, "my name is Andrea. It's Italian for 'manly.' Americans don't think much about what names mean. My husband is Benjamin, which means, 'son of my right hand.'" They all laughed and we played some games. An hour goes by.

Later, Shwen-shwen asked me, "So, do you think you grew up according to the meaning of your name?" I shrug my shoulders, about to half agree, but am interrupted by the other Chinese girls agreeing vigorously. Wow. They really, really think I'm manly.

It was a little bit of a downer.

Untitled

Um, this is the 3rd in the series of oil pastels I'm working on now. It's based on our friend, but I wussed out and made the face in the pastel a lot more gentle. I think I'll do a different pastel some time that shows all the gory details of life, but for now, here it is. Not sure how I feel about it yet.

Ornaments

Our super-duper fake tree has no tree topper. Last year, our friend Dr. Janet gave us a starship Enterprise that is about 3 and a half inches long that lights up. I hung it at the top of the tree, but really just as a gag. I think I might try now, before I go to bed, to make a new, better, prettier tree topper. Yeah. I'd feel good about that. Something that says, "Hooray! Jesus was born." Not, "sometimes I watch Star Trek marathons when I have the day off."

Also, for the record, grown ups still like it when other grown ups make them Christmas tree ornaments...

Preachin'/False alarm #3

I gave the message at my church today. Before you are too impressed, I should say that my church is 20 or 30 people who meet in the basement of an old church building that is now an arts building for the city. We sit on metal folding chairs and there are frequently art exhibits involving naked ladies on the walls. Today, there was a crochet circle in an adjoining room. Let me tell you, though, this is one awesome group of 30 people.

I spoke on Isaiah 9:1-7, a prophetic hymn about Jesus that's quoted in Matthew 4:12-17. I really, really like Isaiah 9. It's SO hopeful. I want so much to take people beyond their understanding of Christmas being a bout baby Jesus in a manger, to the beginning of a revolution. The life of Christ is a life of revolutionary hope, so I spoke a lot about hope.

I came home, ate chili, put on the movie "The Life Aquatic" and took a nap. Ben went out to the garage to engage further in his epic struggle with our '81 Volkswagen Rabbit. An hour and a half into my nap I hear a big "KABOOM" coming from the garage. I ran out, picturing Ben crushed a bleeding, but the car was still on it's jacks and he wasn't there. Ben was on the computer, upstairs. The kaboom was in the movie.

We have the best sound system ever in our living room.

False Alarms.

So, my mom coughed up a big blob of blood two times in the last month or so. Mom's a nurse, which means two things. 1. She gets regular TB tests, and knew she didn't have TB, and 2. She doesn't feel the need to go to the doctor unless she is certain she will die.

So, when mom used words like "blood clot, bronchial scope, CAT scan, and chest x-ray," in a conversation with me last week, I, naturally, pictured a giant throbbing tumor. Today, though, she called me with the news that she, basically, has a scar from a severe childhood sickness, and should treat this by going to the doctor before death is immanent. No big deal. Thank God, false alarm.

Onto the next story. Did you know that Athens County, with a poverty rate of around 27% is the poorest county in the state? Consequently, we, at Good Works, were not surprised to get a call from the Red Cross/FEMA today asking us to feed an additional 40 people who had been flooded out of their homes at our community dinner tonight. (See actual photo of Chauncey when flooded, left.)

We scrambled a little bit, given this would be a 30% increase in the crowd we usually have, but we're pros. This is what we do. By 4pm, when our Friday Night Supper staff left our afternoon meeting for the dinner, we were ready. Ready to feed 40 more people. Ready, even, to distribute non-perishable food to them.

At about 4:15pm, when our staff had already gone to work at the supper, our Director of Operations, Paul, made one last call to the Red Cross/FEMA to make sure we were prepared. The response he got went something like, "Oh, this was just a drill. I told the pastor of the church where you have the dinners. No one is coming."

And the incompetency of FEMA hits home. If you run a disaster organization and want to condition the helping community in areas prone to natural disasters to NOT respond when there's a crises, might I recommend holding drills and not letting anyone know it's a drill? I know I won't jump so quickly the next time I hear from FEMA. That is one hell of a false alarm.

"Crushing Sadness"

I'm having coffee with cardamon. It's terrific. YOU can buy this as well as other spices, herbs, cheeses, and dried fruits at the Bulk Food Store on West 40 in Zanesville. Can and should.

About a month ago, I dried about 50 peppers of different varieties and pulverized them in my food processor. I cleverly named my smokin' hot home made chili powder "mace." As, when pulverizing, it made tears run from my eyes, and made me choke. Well, you can immagine
my surprise when I found a spice already named "mace" at the Bulk Food Store. What a bummer. Does anyone know what this other, surely inferior "mace" is?

Anyway, "crushing sadness" is a quote from my coworker, Chris. The phrase describes the state of being at work right now...at least to some degree. We've seen some successes over the past few months, but the theme that stands out is neglectful parenting. I can't handle it. Seeing kids suffer for their parents' incompetencies is the reason I hated the internship I did at a domestic violence shelter. At the DV shelter, I was running a therapeutic art group with the kids. Every week was heart wrenching. At the Timothy House, I'm working with the parents, and it's enraging. We see moms drag their kids back and forth between the Timothy House and their skanky, criminal boyfriend's apartments, with children's services on the trail. Anne and I have to meet with one such mom in two and a half hours. This woman has such blinders on. She can't see anything that isn't right in front of her face, and clearly can't think about the future. It's so sad. So, our job becomes to first empathize and seek to understand, and then to attempt to persuade. To persuade her to look for steady housing (not live in her car), to get help for her kid, to stay put, to be patient, and to listen. It's a monumental task.

We have hope, though. Jesus not only makes people right with God, but he fixes their relationships with other people. He rescues the wounded, and transforms people who hurt others into healers. We get to see that happen, too...sometimes.

Update

FYI, I've regained my will to live.
I know. I'm relieved, too.

I'm a person of pretty level moods, and usually good health, but rain does me in. It robs me of my will to live and I just let the germs take over. But the sun was out today and I buoyed enough energy to fight off my head cold.

If you're thinking now that you need to caution me to never, ever move to say, Seatle, don't worry. I won't. I lived in swamp land Kentucky for 5 years, where it never snows and only rains and is 33 degrees and wet all winter. I just barely got out alive.

SO sleepy

This morning, I woke up about 5 minutes before my alarm was going to go off, as usual...except today, I thought it was, like, 2 hours before my alarm was going to go off, so I had just given myself permission to sleep for a good, long time when the damned machine started going crazy. I was tired all day. I spent most of the day slumped at my desk checking emails. I felt out of it and pathetic. I don't think I even washed my own lunch dishes. I just abandoned them in the kitchen. Thanks, whoever had enough will to live today to wash my dishes. It was probably Anne. Thanks Anne.

Maybe I'm sick or depressed. I hope not. This is several days of feeling sleepy in a row. Maybe it's just the awful, awful gray weather. And the terrible darkness that comes in the middle of the day, before I get off work. Shit. I'll bet that's it. Bummer.

I know adding this photo to this post makes it out like I'm some depressed teenager, but here's the zombie table top I painted for my friend, Kevin.

The severed head is painted inside the drawer...I know, I'm sick.

Life is on Fire

I finished this yesterday. It's acrylic on canvas, approximately 3ft by 4ft.
Don't paint a lot of flowers, but it's for a friend.

Gratis

So, we had 2 Thanksgivings. The first was at our house with our 2 rather odd middle aged friends, and the second was the normal Thanksgiving with mom & dad, the brothers, the sisters in law, and the nieces and nephews. The normal Thanksgiving was super enjoyable and ended with delicious rasberry pie made from berries that grow in my mom & dad's yard.

That first Wednesday night Thanksgiving though...

Matt, Ben and myself sat down at the dinner table, and Robert (our very sick older neighbor who has, among other things, organic brain disease) begins talking in the middle of a sentence and proceeds to tell the three of us about the one and only time he hired a prostitute. It went something like this,

"It was the first time I had called one of those escort services, and we went to a hotel. And I wanted to make it nice, a somewhat romantic time...so I asked this girl, how much of this money goes to you and how much goes to the pimp? Anyway, I was kind to her, and she said, 'For you, none of it,' and she didn't charge me. That was the first and only time I ever did that and I didn't have to pay for it."

Something to be thankful for.

Sick day & Thanksgiving.

I had a personal day yesterday and accidentally slept until 11:30am. Last night, during our book discussion group on Shaine Claiborn's "The Irresistible Revolution," I got tired. By 10pm I was downright lethargic, then, by midnight, I was just plain sick. Bummer. I felt achy all over. As the night wore on, I felt grosser and grosser. Thought I might barf but didn't. I think the experience would best be described as "flu like symptoms with stomach cramps." By 5am I didn't feel like barfing any more, so I could finally sleep. I woke up at 8:45am to call in sick, then slept until 1pm. Got up to eat some rice, slept from 2:30pm to 5pm. Took some Tylenol and I'm feelin' fine.

I prefer, if I'm sick and I know I'm not contagious, to just go to work sick. I use these sick days at work to do things I hate, like well over due paperwork, or cleaning my desk. There are 2 benefits: 1. I don't use a sick day. And 2. I have all of the negative experiences all at once--only one day is ruined.

After I felt better today, I made 2 kinds of stuffing (dressing, really, as I'm not cramming it into the ass of any dead birds). Ben and I are having 2 older (46 and 50 something) friends over tomorrow night for Thanksgiving dinner who are pretty broke, so we're treating them. One of them is a vegetarian, so I made stuffing with a bunch of herbs, garlic, celery, butter, veggie stock, and almonds for him. It tastes great and I wish I had made more. The meat stuffing for the other three of us is approximately half sausage. This, in my opinion, is the only way to live. I am so looking forward to this dinner. Ben and I are trying hard to take Christ's advice about inviting people who can't repay you to your feasts. So far, Jesus is right, and we're being rewarded in ways that encompass a lot more than food and money.

Insular

Some people live rustically on purpose. It's trendy. My friend Matthew built a big one room house with a nice shower and super efficient washer and dryer. Nice big one room house with an out house instead of a toilet. On purpose. Way to be sustainable, Matthew.

Others are just hacks. Unfortunately, that's what I must assume about the incompetents who have lived in the house we bought for the last 30 years. Last winter, it wasn't unusual for our thermostat to read 55 degrees inside our home. We knew from our home inspection that the place needed some extra insulating. Last winter, Ben went into the small storage room under our entry way to insulate it, and he could see LOTS of day light. Even after we insulated our basement, the house was still freezing. So this week, Ben dug out the extension ladder and peeked up above the entry way of our house...guess what? No insulation. No insulation over our entire entry way. It's like a 10 by 15 foot room with no insulation. All of our heat, expensive, polluting heat was rising up from our downstairs and going straight through the roof of our entry way.

So, we bought $700 worth of insulation and Ben's been installing it all weekend. Our house is so much warmer already. I can feel my hands. It's great.

communion

This is a pastel I did last night of an old woman from my church...sort of. It's kind of about communion and the love feast. I don't know. I hate talking about things like this, hence my expression of ideas as images instead of words.

Anyway, I know it looks like a drunk at a bar...that's about half on purpose.

Thoughts?

Warmth

So, I started this drawing Sunday night and finished it last night. It's in oil pastel, which you can draw with and paint with.


Here's a closer view of the central figure. I hate talking about this kind of thing, but this is about a kid from my church. Her mom is like, 17 and doesn't take the best care of her all the time. I think she's just trying to make it herself, let alone care for a kid. Anyway, I pray a lot that God would fill this family with hope...that's kind of what this is about.

Mmm good.

Over the summer, when it was around 95 degrees, I made a crock pot full of French onion soup for a work function. Not wanting to spill a gallon of soup onto the floor board of my truck, I taped the lid onto the crock pot, placed it on the most level part of my floor, and held onto the top of it with my hand as I drove the 1 mile to work. At the first big corner, the crock pot slipped out from under my hand and up-ended itself, spilling nearly every drop of my delicious (and I do mean delicious) soup onto the floor mat. When I arrived at work, I had just enough time to fold my floor mat into a scoop and heave a few throws of it into the yard before we departed for 6 hours. I did have the presence of mind to leave the crock pot and my floor mat sitting on the ground under my truck instead of in it, but nevertheless, I was unprepared for the slap in the face of hot, stinky onion and beef when I returned to my vehicle that afternoon. I can't even describe it. I shampooed my upholstery and floor mats, and well as the floor of the truck. I scrubbed it. I scrubbed the hell out of it. That was months ago, and the smell is still there. It hit me in the face this morning, even though it was only about 50 degrees. Other people say they can't smell it, or that it's not bad...they're wrong. Maybe they think that smell is BO, or that I deliver pizza for a living...but I know it's soup. I think this smell may have ruined me on French onion soup. I hope not, but I'm having trouble recovering.

Anybody ever tell you....

That they're a prophet of God?
That they know God made them a horse and a lot of other animals?
That people who don't go to church are stabled?
That they have lights in their eyes?
That they won't eat any GODDAMNED MEAT or take any pills?
Or that people are following them everywhere?

We met with a woman today who was really paranoid. Really, really paranoid and delusional. She scared me for a minute. Every couple of months, I meet a person insane or drunk enough to make me wonder, "Is there a gun in that bag? I guess I wouldn't know until it was too late..." This woman is that ill.

We could not house her; she's far too sick right now. So after we talked to her, we just prayed for a while. It didn't seem like there was anything else to do. Through a series of events, she came back to the house later and we called her a cab. I offered to pay for it if she would take it to the hospital to get a psych evaluation, but she declined, quite angrily.

God is faithful, though, and I think he looks out for people. I just talked to a woman who does psych evals at the hospital, and they are admitting the paranoid woman from this afternoon. I'm glad. We prayed that she would have a place to go and that she would get help. Seems like it's working out.

They COULD amputate...

My inlaws are in town. This is a good thing. I like my inlaws. They are kind. They are concerned with our lives but don't butt in or give unsolicited advice. They're never snotty or judgemental, and they're really generous. Right now, they're downstairs with Ben watching "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a movie that I only sort of like and definitly can't stay awake through. So, I update.

Any way, because my inlaws are in town, we had my brother Charlie and his wife and kids down. The kids are ages 6, 5, and 3, so it was a little nuts in our not so child proof house. Abby, the 5 year-old is autistic, and therefore doesn't have the best concept of empathy or understanding of small creatures as delicate, living things. Our 2 gerbils only weigh ounces and have very tiny teeth that don't even hurt when they bite and therefore are rather defenseless against creatures as large as 5 year-olds. So, no one was that surprised when Abby loaded one into their plastic gerbil ball and threw her accross the room. Well, I guess the gerbil was probably surprized. Poor, dumb animal. Poor, dumb, helpless, limping animal. I think she'll be fine, she's just favoring her right, rear paw. When I pointed this out to my husband, he immediately googled "broken+paw+gerbil," and said, "As long as it's eating food and the wound isn't open, it should heal and be OK. If it gets infected, you can take it to the vet and they can amputate."
"Amputate? What would that look like?"
"They can make it on 3 legs."
"I know they can make it on 3 legs, but what on earth would they do to amputate? Oh well. We'll cross that bridge when we get there."
Hmmm...I like my pets. Maybe I even love my pets, but, not to be cold hearted...they only cost $5. I'm not sure trips to the vet are in our gerbils' future.

In unrelated news, my mom is in Haiti for the 3rd time. She's there with a surgical team doing outpatient procedures. She arrived 2 days ago and have already done 2 or 3 cases, and have many more coming up next week.
Way to go mom.

Soilent orange is made of...

Today was trick or night in the neighborhood of the Timothy House. We like to be good neighbors, so we pass out candy every year and serve people hot dogs, eat some for dinner ourselves, and have cider or hot chocolate. My coworkers, Kevin and Anne, were feeling particularly generous this year and dug a sack of "hot dog sauce" out of the freezer. We had probably 50 lbs, or several bags of it donated a couple months ago and haven't know what to use for until today. I would estimate that one frozen sack of hot dog sauce yields one a half gallons of finished sauce. When I first saw it on the stove top, bubbling in its cauldron, I said, "That looks like rendering lard or something." Then Kevin said something to Anne like, "Add more water," and I thought, That can't be right. You don't "add more water" to something like chili. Then Kevin stirred the cauldron, and I said, "Oh. This is meat oatmeal. This is oatmeal made out of meat." Kevin proceeded to explain that I wasn't too far off base, as the first 2 ingredients were "beef hearts, textured vegetable protein." Anne ate a spoonful of it straight with the promise of a peppermint patty later. I was disgusted. "Anne, you got a raw deal," I said.

But, if you know me well, then you know that I'm quite stupid. You probably know that I don't learn well from other's mistakes. If you know me well, I don't have to tell you that I ate an enormous hot dog with a ladle of bright orange meat oatmeal on top. But I'll tell you any way. I ate the orange beef heart oatmeal. I ate the hell out of it.

It didn't "sit well," but it didn't poison me either.

I have this theory.

Everyone has, as a part of their intense, ingrained survival instinct, and ability to consume anything that resembles food that does not smell rancid. Some people, even when they are not starving to death are capable of shutting down their higher brain functioning and only running on survival instinct. I believe this is the key to winning something like, say, a hot dog eating contest. Shut down most of your brain, and channel completely the God given ability that every human has to think, This dead zebra ass is my only hope of survival. I must eat this carcass if I want to have energy to hunt meat for my starving family for the next week. You go to that place in your mind, and maybe you eat 30 hot dogs in 5 minutes. Or maybe you eat orange meat oatmeal out of curiosity.

A pox, a pox on your house!

Lately, my whole body has itched from head to toe. The source of this itch? Paranoia. The source of this paranoia? Scabies and lice at work. 3 different residents were diagnosed with scabies over the past 2 months. Then, today, we discovered that some very long-haired people have lice. I just itch so badly. I've doused myself in pesticides and even had the house sprayed. Exorcism is the only remaining hope.

Most terrifying? One really, really clean (as in, much cleaner than me) person has gotten both. No one is safe.

But seriously, how disheartening. You live at a homeless shelter. You work as hard as you can, but people assume you're a lazy bum because you're going through hard times right now, then, you get diagnosed with a parasite that makes you feel like a leper. Crap. Everyone on staff has been earnestly struggling with what it means to be like Christ in this scenario. I have some nit picking in my future.

On the up-side, I've been painting some table tops recently. Specifically, 2 coffee tables and one end table. I'm pretty much done with the end table, that will belong to my friend, Kevin. This table top is under the genre of "zombie cartoon," meaning awesome. Pictures will follow. His last table top was under the themes "coffee" and "wizard battle." This is pictured below. Have any furniture you want gratified? I thought you might. I will do this for you, too, for only the cost of paint and what your conscience compels you to give me. Kevin's conscience paid me in home-made beer.

Back in the saddle...

"Welcome back to blogging, Andrea."
"Thanks, me. I missed it."
"Me too."
"Let's get started."
"OK."

I kept a blog for the longest time here. I gave it up, though, when 2 things happened. (1) My life, unexpectedly began to seem boring to me, leaving me, for the first time ever, with very little to say about it. (2) All of my "LiveJournal" friends moved to "MySpace," which was new, scary, and way too flashy and complicated. In my cave-man-like confusion, I did not follow and retired my blog.

I am excited to blog here though, for 2 reasons. (1) My life, providing housing to the homeless, painting, going to a crazy ass, living out the kingdom of God on earth kind of church, and having most excellent fun with my husband and friends is far from boring. (2) Blogspot is not scary or complicated and already feels "homey," "cozy," "familiar," and other adjectives that make it sound like I've never used a computer.

Mmm...good to be back.