Spring Break thus far

Family time
Big River Dessert with Brianna (mmmm...)
Gilmore Girls with Hannah and Brianna
Imago and Saturday market with Mom and Josh A.
2 Full days of snowboarding - from the bunny hill to blue squares.
So sore I can barely move
Canada or Bust as of today!

For Ally

Yes! New cute hats! As if we needed to match more than we already do... Now people really won't be able to tell us apart anymore...

At this time last year...

We had just arrived in London after a very unpleasant and sleepless busride away from that beautiful little place that had been our home for those wonderful 6 months. In short, it's now officially been a year guys. In one sense this makes me sad. It makes me miss people. It makes my heart ache just a little. In another sense, when I look at all of those I am still in touch with and still good friends with, it makes me pretty happy. One year later and still going strong. Rock it. I love you my Capers brothers and sisters. I love you a lot.

PIRAGI

On Thursday I spent almost the entire day making my very favorite Lavtian food item: Piragi, a yeast bread bun with a sauted bacon and onion filling. I remembered that they were good but as it has been 3 years since I've been to Latvia I wasn't quite sure if it would be worth that much time and energy...
... IT WAS.

Sam's Birthday EXTRAVAGANZA

Ok so maybe that's over doing it a little. I just wanted to use the word EXTRAVAGANZA... it makes things seem new and exciting and wonderful. Doesn't it just make you excited just reading it?
Anyway, that's beside the point. The point is that today was (actually still is) my brother Sam's 15th birthday party and I played chauffer and chaperone for 5 crazy 15 year old kids! First we went to the dollar store - they each got six bucks to spend on WHATEVER THEY WANTED which they LOVED. And second we went bowling. I scored the highest score I believe I have EVER scored bowling... I'm just going to go ahead and not say what the score was because you'll be much more impressed if you just know it was my highest... not what number that translates to.
And here's the main reason for this post: funny pictures of my brother and his friends.

Happy Things from Today

-All Finished With Finals! Woohoo! (did pretty dang well too if I do say so myself)
-GOT A TICKET TO SIGUR ROS AT THE SCHNITZ MAY 4!! (I can barely contain my excitement. Allison and Josh A. might come too! And Hannah and Luke will be there 'cept I can't sit with them cuz they have better seats than me).
-Came home to bratwursts for dinner and 4 kinds of icecream in the fridge (nuf said)
-spent time with people I love (ie. Hannah and Luke and my family)
-Spoke on the phone with other people who I also love (Miss Rebecca Beers, Miss Allison Moody, Mr. Caleb Atkins, and later Mr. Josh Atkins)
-Read Prufrock aloud to Allison and to each of my parents separately (it's my current obsession, you can ask me later if you want to know what I mean and don't already).
-Read pages and pages Harry Potter Six guilt free with no homework hanging over my head. (wow, think that was my first public admission. Yes, it is true. I have crossed over to the dark side. You can blame Allison).
-Shared a mango with my brother Sam.

trust me on this one.

You can thank Lori, Allison's mom, for this one. Go ahead and take a couple minutes and listen to the following sound clip. It's, as Rob would say, Ha-flipping-arious.
http://www.chumfm.com/MorningShow/bits/march24.swf

What's the difference?

Normal college girls hang out in bars and get picked up on by guys with lines like "What's your sign?"
I hang out in coffee shops and get picked up on with lines like "What translation are you reading?"
Same thing really - LAME line in a place where people consume drink. Only major difference: I was wearing a turtleneck sweater and not a tank top.

Pet Peeves.

I always find these interesting when other people do them so I will go ahead and throw a few out there... just to show you what a really shallow and irratable person I really am ;-)
If you are guilty of these you can be assured that yes, I did notice, yes it did bug me, but no... it did not make me devalue you as a person on any level, I recognize my own analness. Promise.

NUMBER 1: Unfinished parenthetical statements! (like when a person starts out with a parentheses and then they never tack on the end one so you just keep waiting and waiting for it to come but it just never does. The sentences just continue like normal. No second one is to follow. Oh my gosh this is so hard for me to do right now.

Number 2: When people use the wrong directional words. Like my friend in Washington who always says going going UP to Oregon. Down! You're doing DOWN! Or my friend in Corvallis who always says she's going DOWN to portland! Holy crap people, it's really not that hard!

Number 3: Ok, this one doesn't apply to you all, so don't worry. But it's a big one lately. When people who meet me for the first time call me Pam directly after I have just introduced myself as PamELA. Or when teachers read my name off of role for the first time or nurses at the doctor's office and I know full well it's written there as Pamela but they call out "Pam?" Like freakin, I don't mind being called Pam by my friends when they are just shortening it for convience' sake but seriously, that's not my name! Why do they all assume it is! It's so rude! So persumptuous! Like do they think I'm LIEING to them when I say my name is Pamela? "Oh... she's just being polite and saying her whole name... it's ok, I'll go ahead and help her out and call her by the short version..." Like I call Courtnay "Court" all the time, it's just easier to say, but wouldn't you think it was kind of weird if you were sitting in a waiting room and the nurse walked up and was all "um... Court?"
But really, I don't mind it when friends call me that, no worries. Just strangers. Bah.

Ok that's enough um "complaining" (there's another word I could use there but I won't because my pastor reads my blog sometimes) for now. I find these pet peeves more amusing than anything. It entertains me that I get so irritated about such meaningless unimportant things. Silly Pam.

Last night I remembered why I spent 14 years dancing ballet. 14 years of pain and sweat and blood (well the blood didn't come until the last 5 years). I remembered why I love to dance. Why I always will. I realized that I will always miss it, and I will always long for it, because dancing is not something that I did, it's a part of who I am - and I'm glad for that. I hope I never completely forget: the exhilerated feeling one always leaves the studio with, no matter how she entered. the thrill of aching muscles after they've given you something beautiful the night before. the energy that can be passed from an exuberant teacher to a willing student. in short, the love of dancing. but I hope I don't always completely remember, that would be more painful than breaking in a new pair of point shoes.
Last night I took a really fantastic ballet class from a really fantastic teacher. Thanks God!

It's Snowing!

Frikin lost my wallet today.

Thoughts about God

(I often reference song titles in my blog titles and then I realize that no one else will know that I am doing so. That one references Rita Springer, a terrific worship leader).

I have 3 thoughts. I will try to be brief (ok I failed at being brief). I will list them in decending order of length of time I've been thinking about them - starting with the longest.

Holiness
A reoccuring theme I've been noticing as I have read through the pentetuch since January is the theme of Holiness. The entire purpose of the Law, as God restates again and again, was to set apart this group of people as his own. Because he is so very holy and the group who represents him is called to be holy as well. The law is a picture of absolute holiness and is serves to show us how very far away we are from achieving it, but it was also meant to be followed. God really wanted the Israelites set apart as His and to reflect him to the people around them. He is holy so they were called to be holy. And so in this manner, it still applies to us. Yes, we are free from the Law but we are not free from righteousnes, in fact Romans says we are slaves to it. I think our culture, at least the strain modern Christian culture I am most involved in, would like to forget this. I know I do at least. In the great push toward freedom and love, the pursuit of holiness seems to have dropped by the wayside. It can't! It absolutely can't. We are set apart. We have been given the GREAT HONOR of being called the very BODY of JESUS CHRIST. We have to represent him. He is completely holy, therefore we too must be holy. This includes things we like to tell ourselves are no big deal like: cussing, drinking too much (or underage), telling dirty jokes, watching movies with questionable material or even blatantly awful material, and a whole lot more. Jesus said "therefore be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect." I think he was actually being serious. That's what we should be striving for. OF COURSE there is grace when we fall - don't you ever forget it! But Grace opens the door for righteousness to abound not for sin.

Unity
My friend said last night, "I want to be someone who LOVES the body of Christ." (or you might have said "the church", correct me if I'm wrong). Either way that really stuck with me and has now become an urgent prayer of mine. I won't even go into details of how this topic came up becuase I think that would do more to divide than to unify, but the point is this: As much as I see holiness as a recurrent and highly important theme throughout the Pentetuch, so I see Unity as an incredibly prevelent theme throughout the New Testament. It comes up again and again. I've mentioned this before but the New Testament actually talks a lot more about loving your brothers and sisters in Christ than it does about loving non-believers - yet the latter is by far the message I hear preached and personally focus on more often. Of course we should love unbelievers, I would never ever say we shouldn't, but HOW MUCH MORE (a common NT phrase) should we love our very own brothers! I don't just mean this on an individual level. In fact I mean it most urgently on a corporate level. That is the level I find myself struggeling with the most and I see the church struggling with the most. If you find yourself talking about the church - the corporate body of Christ OR any individual believer - in any way shape or form stop and ask - is this working towards unity or towards division? If it's the latter STOP RIGHT THERE. I know I can't make myself into anything, but I really belive God can make me into someone who really loves the body of Christ. That is really exciting.

God's Power and God's Plan
Lastly, I have been thinking about how totally in control God is. We don't like to talk about it much but he would even control king's wills in the Old Testament sometimes so his plan could be fulfilled - (see Deut 2:30 for one example). He is first and foremost, above all else, concerned with his great plan that he is working out. We have the priveledge of being players in that plan. But what that translates to is that I really can't complain about any situation in my life. I can't despair. I can't long for things to be different. Because I KNOW that God has total control and total power to change anything that he wants and he has simply chosen not to... I say I want to be nowhere but his in will... So since this is his will, as long as I am striving to obey him and seek him, well then I want to be nowhere but right here. This too is not my natural way of thinking, but I believe and know that God can change me and even is now changing me to really live out these words and not just believe them as a concept.

So bravo for you if you actually read all of that. I hope it didn't sound to preachy - I really wasn't talking about anyone or to anyone but myself, I just wanted to share what I've been thinking about with you all.

Nerds.

I spent the better part of my weekend at a Robotic's Club competition. You don't know what the term "nerd" means until you've been to a Robotic's competition. You don't know how big of a nerd YOU actually are until you thoroughly enjoy a robotic's club competition.
I went to cheer on my brother's team from PHS, and to hang out with my brother. Both of which were surprizingly fun. But I've got to admit, as much as I enjoyed watching the robots knock each other over and score points by getting the balls into the goals... by far the more enjoyable part of the event were the sheer number of people there were to make fun of. Making fun of people is fun. Has anyone else noticed this?

Dreams

I've been having some really weird and often lucid dreams lately. Quite possibly due to having recently studied sleep cycles in psycology I tend to be waking up at the end of each REM cycle and therefore remembering each preceding dream. It's amazing how quickly that memory fades though, isn't it? I'm always grasping at them as they fall down into that vast crevas of altered conciousness known as sleep. But a few I remember. The really vivid ones. Often the really strange ones. Here's just a taste of what's been entertaining my sleeping self in the last couple nights.

2 nights ago I dreamed that I was dating Apollo Anton Ohno. Now... in real life I don't have any sort of celebrity crush on him, I think he's cool and all but Ally and I already decided speed skaters are grossly over-muscular and if I WAS going to have a crush on a speed skater it would definetly be Joey Cheek. But that's beside the point. In this dream Apollo and I were pretty much in love. It was difficult to manage what with the press always hounding after him and all but I was so proud of him for getting out there and skating so well and winning those 5 stinking medals! Upon waking and realizing it wasn't real I actually felt a sense of loss. For the next couple days I genuinely missed and thought about my lost-love: Apollo Anton Ohno.

Last night I was not only dating someone but I believe I got engaged AND married to them as well. (Now some of you may say this apparent theme is a latent message trying to alert me of my inner longings for a relationship. But A: I already learned this week that that's all Fruedian mumbo jumbo anyway, and only a so called "psycoanalyst" and determine the difference between latent and manifest dream content - and they're probably all quacks anyway who just want to put you through a bunch of expensive psycoanlysis to make money. and B: I don't really need to be alterted to that fact. Like, duh! I generally try to ignore it, and am in fact QUITE good at ignoring it, thank you very much).
But back to the dream, I haven't gotten to the good part yet. So the guy I was dating or whatever was my friend Rachel's cousin Nathanal - who I haven't seen for several years but I don't think my dream version actually looked anything remotely similar to the real version so that's unimportant. (My dream version was quite cute and had great dimples) We met at a Gregg family function which included many other Gregg family members, I believe this is where out love took root. Then a bunch of stuff that I can't remember happened I think we got married or something, I don't know - BUT THEN I found out that Nathanal was actually Santa Clause and that therefore meant I was now Mrs. Clause - which didn't concern me except that I had NO SHOES to go with my new Mrs. Clause outfit which I would now have to wear all the time. I searched and searched for the right shoes to go with it but alas, there weren't any to be found. I was just about to give up and stick on my running shoes when I thankfully woke up - saving myself from the tramua of witnessing myself wearing a big red dress and running shoes.

Don't you wish you had my dreams? They are VERY entertaining.