Post #250

Some snippets from the past week:

- I think I may finally have my subwoofers adjusted right in my car! I'm getting sweet, juicy low end even at quiet volumes, without the wonky raw overpowering bleah that I've been battling since I got them. This makes me VERY happy.

- I got dinner at a Ghanaian restaurant this week. Yes. Two ladies from Ghana run it. I ate spicy spinach-chicken-sauce stuff with a lump of gooey ground up fermented cassava root whilst perusing a monthly Ghanaian newspaper. I love their style of journalistic writing. You don't realize how smarmy and uninformative news is here until you read something that straightforwardly tells what happened, using blunt English words. It was refreshing.

- Trader Joes! There is one near me! This was revealed mere hours before I was set to go on a grocery shopping expedition to supplement my first 80 dollars of food, which had lasted just over a week. I was excited at the prospect of buying more real food, and by drifting through the aisles for an hour and a half I was able to find good deals on solid supplies. Grocery shopping is a tremendously satisfying struggle against three competing requirements. I want my food to be 1) Reasonable to prepare, 2) Healthy, and 3) Not expensive. Quick healthy meals are expensive. Cheap healthy stuff is usually nasty and hard to make into a decent meal (mmm, bag of lentils). And cheap easy-to-make stuff is usually unhealthy (chili-mac anyone?). By dint of time investment, some cooking knowledge, and culinary fortitude, I walked away with three bags full of REAL food like frozen tuna steaks, lacy raw milk baby swiss, and broccoli, all of which is merely a step or two away from being a meal, and all of which set me back about 54 bucks. This pleased me greatly.

- Did I mention the fridges at work are stocked with Dr.Pepper? This fact envelopes each day in its warm, 23-flavor embrace.

- My laptop's wireless worked for one day at the church, and then refused to admit the existence of any signal. After days of grief from this, I went with my gut feeling. Restarted it, and boom, it's been working like a charm. While I feel frustration with computers, it is overshadowed by my enjoyment of wireless internet. It is highly useful when one has four bosses and no office!

- I haven't been sleeping well at night. It's warm and humid upstairs, and venetian blinds do a poor job keeping out the glare of two sodium vapor streetlights outside the house. Several times I have woken up, seen a time like "4:17" on the clock, and genuinely panicked that it was PM, and I had slept through the day. Took awhile to squeeze that thought out of my sleep-impaired brain.

- Housing! Greg informed me the other day that he could house me here through October, and that he's got a buddy who can take me after that. So I think I'm good! That is an answer to prayer. I had had the unfounded but persistent feeling that I'd be here more than just 4 weeks, and so it proved to be. Now I state with much more confidence that the internship is "for the fall; through December."

- Fireflies. Are in my head. Ten million of them. You would not believe your eyes.
Sorry. It's a song by Owl City, and it has been delighting my heart more than any song has in a long time. Probably since "Awakening" by Switchfoot. One of those pieces of sound that just goes into you and fits into some lock, releasing joy.. why I know not. But it makes me euphoric.

- I went to my first care group meeting on Tuesday, and it was a blast! Each guy there brought a unique set of contributions to the table, and it was a delight to watch them all come into play during the discussion. And to participate myself, jumping in like we were all brothers. Which we are in Christ.

- Monday is my day off (since I work a full day between Saturday and Sunday). I had grand plans to go to D.C., but woke up late, read leisurely and productively, and got ticked off that I would have to pay $4.75 to park for the Metro. So I toured the local thrift stores, bought a lamp that broke, and got some needed stuff at Target. Scored a Johnny Cash record, and a record of the Muppet Movie soundtrack!

I'll probably write another post talking more about what I'm doing at work and how things are going. This was meant to be some fun-size candy bars of text treats to fill your pumpkin bag of blog-surfing trick-or-treating.

:-)