Roommate clarification

I thought I should clarify. Jessica doesn't actually live in my room. We both live in the apartment that all interns and a few other people have lived.

Today I get to spend being a nerd. I'm working on adding a wireless access point to our network and a booster antenna so that John (our boss) can get access to our network from his basement office. He lives across a courtyard from our building. Right now, I'm getting advice from Brent Gerig about how to set up the new hardware so that it won't interfere with our current network. Thanks Brent!!

Anyway, back to work

Penguin Refuge or Hurray for Modern Warfare

This is amazing.

I think it is very cool that these guys can live protected from humans.

Tonight was a fun night. I put on DC Talk on the Stereo and my roomate and I took a trip through time. We started with Nu Thang and listend up through Supernatural. Jessica was playing a compute game and I was working on chainmail. Both of those are relativly mindless activities, we had a great time just talking about nothing.

Ok, I'm heading out for a jog.

Half way done

As of today, I've been at Emmaus for 6 months, which means my time here is half done. That is a weird thought. I'm looking forward to the second half of my time being even better than the first half. I've learned a lot about myself and what I need to survive in a people-intensive job. Just because I'm an introvert doesn't mean I can't do people-ministry. It just means that I need to make sure and structure alone time into my schedule in ways that let me unwind after a long day.

Cooking in our ministry center is always an experience. I put a bit more spices in the stew than I should have today. Jeff* couldn't even eat it, because it was too hot for him. However, most of out guys thought it was great. I'm developing a taste for spicy foods, although I'll never catch up to some of our guys. I've learned that hot sauce is an appropriate topping for pretty much everything but dessert. That and BBQ sauce.

I had my first chainmail related injury tonight. I was winding a coil of wire, and didn't have a good way of guiding the wire down the madrel, and was just guiding by with my left hand. When I got to the end of the wire, it sprung back (which is something it will always do). Springback is the coil unwinding a bit, like a spring. It does this with a fair bit of force. I didn't get my index finger out of the way in time, and the end of the wire sliced it. It is a weird combination of cut and bruise, because of the force of the blow. My finger is swollen. After this experience, I went and found a block of wood to do the guiding with and didn't further injure myself on the next coil :). I sincerely hope this is that last injury I'm writing about for a long time.

I'm a huge fan of Skype. I've just recently started using it, and I must say it is a very convenient way of communicating. The informalness of IM with the ease of expressions of a phone and the cost of an email. If any of you use it, let me know.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my chainmail. Or maybe I'll go get something to eat. Choices, choices...

* all names of clients of Emmaus have been changed

So I'm an idiot. Again

The Sears website lets you order something online and have it sent to the nearest store to pick up. They don't charge any shipping for this, which is nice. I had to buy a power drill for winding coils to make chainmail, and I like Craftsman, so I got one from Sears. It arrived the other day, so I biked down to Sears yesterday. I got there at approximatly the same time as this other girl. I really wasn't paying any attention (I was busy looking to see where the merchandise pick up counter was), and I followed her through the revolving door. In the same quarter as her. But I didn't want to accidently kick her so I stayed back to give her enough room to walk. This resulted in me getting caught between the door and the door jam. I felt pretty dumb, but chalked it into the "I'll never see her again" catagory, and didn't feel to embarassed.

Today, I spent most of the day sorting and filling envalopes. It was boring, but needed to get done. The police had stopped some people outside our office this afternoon. They were checking their car for something, but let them go after a while. We were never sure what the deal was. They had a couple really cute puppies in their back seat, that my two co-workers who were around at the time pointed out. The day made me appreciate computers, though. Some of what we were doing could have been done much quicker in a computer, although by the time we were doing it, typing everything back into the comptuer would have taken too long as well. Makes me even more firmly believe what my comp sci Profs at Taylor taught about a little planning ahead of time makes much less work in the long run.

Anyway, I need to get my laundry into the dryer. I hope you are all well.

Oh, my ankle is doing fairly well. It won't be completely better for a while, but I'm back to all normal activities.

~affert

Bored

So I've spent the past two days just sitting on my couch waiting for my ankle to heal. And it looks like I'm going to be doing that again today.

It is feeling quite a bit better today. I can put light pressure on it without it hurting, so I don't have to hop around anymore. My left leg is quite happy about that, it's not used to going solo in transporting me around. The swelling is down quite a bit, and it is developing a really cool looking purple bruise :) I'm hoping it will be well enough that I'll be able to work starting tomorrow, but we'll see what tomorrow brings.

My girlfriend is awesome. She bought me this CD: Pachelbel's Greatest Hit. She knows Pachelbel's Canon in D is my favorite song, so she found this CD with 15 different arrangements of it. As with any CD like that, not all of them are good, but most of them are :) I've been listening to it over and over, as I sit here.

I'm hoping to finish up the dragonscale bracelet that I've been working on. Dragonscale is very cool looking, but much harder to do than over weaves. (Here is a description of Dragonscale).

BTW, this is funny

Well, that all I've got to say for now.

So I'm an idiot

Hi everyone,
Yesterday night, when I was leaving to go on outreach, I tripped going down the stairs and sprained my ankle. Fortunatly today was a day of office work. I sat on my couch (where I do my office work) and started working on making a database to keep track of our client info.
So yeah, that's my day.
I'm going to hop down to the kitchen and grab some dinner

Long day

Today was a long day in the MC (ministry center). We had a lot of guys come in today. Right now, we're kind of at a breaking point. We have too many guys coming in on a regular basis to really get done what we want to get done. We're trying to figure out how to restructure how the MC works in a way that will allow us to spend good time with the guys, encouraging them spiritually and helping them in life (trying to find jobs, apartments, get IDs, etc). These are the things we want to spend our time doing, but lately we've been spending a lot of our time doing the other day to day stuff of organizing and making sure chores get done and making sure that people aren't doing stuff they shouldn't be.
If you would, we'd appreciate pray about how to best serve the guys.

So over the weekend, my cousin brought his chainmail vest with him to our house. Seeing and playing with that was certainly enough for me to want to get back into that. So the last couple nights I've gotten my chainmail stuff back out. A while back I made a spiral bracelet that I really liked, but lost somewhere along the line. I made myself another one. It's made right onto my wrist, so if I ever go anywhere with medal detectors, I'll have to take it partially apart. It feels good to have it back on my wrist: I went for a little under a year with it on last time. I had to take it off for a air trip. I have no immediate plans for air travel, so hopefully I'll be able to leave it on for a while.
Another activity for this evening was buying the supplies I'll need to make a vest of my own :). It ended up coming to about $150! *cough* but a fair bit of that was tools that I didn't have before, but shouldn't need to buy again. At this point, I've got pliers and a somewhat crappy set of wire cutters. I bought a nice set of wire cutters and a drill and rods to wind wire into coils for making rings. So from now on, if I want a new size rings, all I've got to do is drop a couple bucks for the rod. And for getting more wire, buying it completely straight (uncoiled and uncut) is the cheapest.
Another thing that inspired this is trying to wean myself from computer games. I've been playing them way too much lately, to the point where it was hurting my ability to work well. More importantly, they were interfering with my relationship with God, so they had to go. "Throw off everything that hinders" and all that. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get past this phase of my life.

Well as usual, biological needs drive me away from blogging, but this time it is hunger. Dinner tonight was half a bag of trail mix, so I think I'll wander down to the kitchen.

Very long absence done at last

Hello everyone who is still checking this forgotten page.

Well, I've been here at Emmaus Ministries since the end of March. I have had a good time. I have learned a whole bunch about myself.

There is too much to say to get it all in one blog, and I'm out of practice writing, so I'm just going to do a short update, and try to do short updates often.

This past weekend, I went home. Some of my cousins were there. On Monday, we went and played some disk golf, which is a lot of fun. Everyone from our family had played before, and nobody from their family had, but fun was had by all anyway.

Well, to keep up with the past patterns, I'm going to go to bed without writing much.

goodnight...