Eat this, Erika

The good thing about having a blog is that it gives you lots of accountability. Who knew that my laziness in not going to the dentist for years would spark such outrage, such sorrow, such a call to action? But never fear, blog readers, mainly Jessie, - you spoke up and I listened. I went to the dentist today! Don't ask me what his name was - it was very hard to understand and pronounce. I don't think his employees know what his name is either. One of them sort of tried to say it and dropped off mid-syllable and just skipped to her question instead. It sounded Dr. Krossenmaxamillion or something.

But regardless that I don't know his name, he was very kind and his minions have already coerced me into setting an appointment for six months from now to get my teeth cleaned again. They're a clever bunch at this office. No hiding my delinquent dentist past from them. They're not afraid.

It's good to have teeth because then you can eat. I suppose you can probably eat without teeth but it's not as enjoyable. Babies eat without teeth, but they don't really know what they're missing since they've never had teeth before and by the time they're old enough to figure it out, they have teeth.

Babies and eating are a good segue into something Erika suggested I write about some weeks ago, and that is the subject of why do people say things like "that baby is cute enough to eat." We all do it - I remember when loyal reader Meagan shared with our small group that she was pregnant and she said she couldn't wait to nibble on her baby's toes. There's just something about babies that make us want to eat them, and it's kind of weird.

Maybe it's just because I've been thinking about this subject of why we think that when babies are cute they ought to be eaten, but I found myself saying it just the other day about a small child in my neighborhood. I was driving home and this little girl was walking down the sidewalk in front of her house. She had on cute little pink pants and a cute little pink shirt and these little pink sunglasses that were lopsided on her face. She was all sassy and cute at the same time and when I drove by I said to myself, "She's so cute I could just eat her up." And then I gasped in horror! I wanted to eat an innocent child because she was cute! This is not ok!

Eating people is no laughing matter. If you don't believe me, just watch the movie Alive, although it's not for the faint of heart. I watched it once and was so appalled that I had to watch it a second time. I've been thinking a lot about it recently again, but I think I'll refrain from watching it a third time. If you've never seen it, it's about a Uruguayan soccer team whose plane crashes in the Andes mountains and they end up having to eat each other to stay alive. Hence, why the title is Alive. It's based on a true story because you can't make stuff like this up.

I've been thinking about it because I've flown over the Andes mountains four times in the last four months. Fortunately, none of my planes crashed and I didn't have to eat anything except the little sandwich snack they offered onboard, which was made out of turkey. But every time our plane passed over those peaks, I thought of those soccer players and how awful it would be to find myself in that position. I bet that little neighborhood girl is glad she wasn't on the plane with me and that we're not Uruguayan soccer players.

The other phrase I don't understand is akin - "eat your heart out." No thanks. I'd rather eat the little neighborhood girl because she's so cute than eat my own heart. That's too Indiana Jonesy and the Temple of Doom to me.

My conclusion is this: English must be a hard language to learn. Probably all languages are really hard to learn, but as far as I know, I've never heard any Spanish speakers talk about eating cute babies. At any rate, Rosetta Stone hasn't taught me how to say that phrase yet. And that's probably for the best.

At least my teeth are clean.

Estoy en Peru

Hola amigos! Estoy en Peru ahora!

I'm sitting in the Lima Airport waiting for the rest of the Lifetree Adventures team to arrive, drinking a white chocolate mocha from Starbucks and acting very American. I'm actually sitting at the exact same table that Jeff, Christina, Ryan, Amy, and I sat at on the day we left Lima back in June. I'm nostalgic that way.

I wish I could say my Spanish has dramatically improved in the last three months, but dramatic would be an overstatement. I'm far from fluent and get confused very easily. However, I have managed to live most of the last 12 hours pretty much only using Spanish, which is an exciting thing. I've been able to avoid taxis, walk to the hotel, check into the hotel, sleep, eat breakfast, get a massage, ask how to connect to the internet, check out of the hotel, walk back to the airport, ask Peruvian Airlines where the heck the flight was that my friends were supposed to arrive on, and order a grande white chocolate mocha from Starbucks all in Spanish.

Mostly I just nod and say si and then things magically happen around me. Like just now, my lunch appeared that I apparently ordered in Spanish.

Also, I've decided I might love Peru almost as much as I love Canada only because on my flight down here yesterday I sat next to this Peruvian guy who now lives in Oklahoma but was on his way to visit his mother and he made my day. He asked me what I was going to do in Peru and I briefly told him and we then had the most awesome conversation about God that I've had in awhile. And by "conversation" I mean that he spent about 45 minutes telling me what he believes about God and the ways he has been hurt by church and Christians but that he really wants to still believe in God. It was an honor to get to listen to him and ask him questions and be his friend.

Then he told me I was lovely, which was kind of him, and that I shouldn't wait around long for guys who can't make up their minds because I'm lovely and kind and someone will see that someday and make a wife out of me. This is what I love about Spanish speaking cultures - they are very frank and don't hold much back. He's married and he was definitely not hitting on me, but there's just a general way of uncensored speaking that I love and appreciate about Spanish speakers. Sometimes it's nice for a single and sometimes lonely girl to hear a man tell her she's lovely.

But the best moment was when we started talking about part of Lima called Miraflores. I said the word "Miraflores" to him and he busted out laughing. This was the first Spanish word I had said to him in the whole 6 hours we had been sitting next to each other. I asked him why he was laughing and if I had said the word wrong and he said, "No, no, no - you said it perfect. Your accent is perfect - I just wasn't expecting you, a white American girl, to have a perfect Spanish accent." Then he said it with a bad American accent and said "That's how most Americans would say it."

So I'm grateful to be here and grateful that God put he and I next to each other for 6.5 hours yesterday. I usually don't talk much to people on airplanes but I'm glad for the conversation that was had and the way God used it to encourage me and hopefully to encourage him.

Please be praying for us this week - for health, for safety, for my Spanish abilities, for humility, for productive work to be done. Pray for Ricardo and his family and the ministry he does among the Shipibo people and for the visit to Flor de Ucayali village that we will make on Wednesday.

Please also be praying for the Cox family. Derek went home to be with Jesus this morning. There is never anything easy about death even when we know that the one we love is whole and perfect in God's presence now. I'm grateful for the amazing witness Derek was to Jesus throughout his battle with cancer but grieved that we have temporarily lost this brother for the rest of our earthly lives.

So we meet again, malaria pills

I'm going to Peru on Friday for the second time this year and I'm really excited about it. Partly because I'm hoping my Spanish is way better than it was in June (Segundo will tell me straight if it is or not) but mostly because our team will get to take a fast boat into the jungle in the middle of the week and go visit Flor de Ucayali, the Shipibo village we stayed at in June when we lived on the riverboat when there were more of us and we were building a church. This time around, we'll spend most of our time in Pucallpa, helping to repair a home for a needy family and sharing God's love with them, and they will be sharing it with us too.

But the not fun part of going back to Peru is that I get to welcome my old friend malaria pills back into my life for the next 10 weeks. I took the first one today. It would have only been six weeks except that then I go to the Dominican Republic while I'm still taking the Peru pills and my doctor thought since I'm already taking them, what's another four weeks to cover my DR trip as well. Awesome.

As I discovered the last time I took them, I am apparently one of the only people in the world who actually experiences their side effects. My June team had no issues with their pills, other than Jim not being able to remember if he had taken his for the day or not, resulting in lots of time spent counting pills every morning. Maybe it's because all of them took the daily malaria pill but I take the once a week pill, because I'm special. At least that's what my doctor says.

What side effects, you might ask. Well, mainly that I hallucinated. Twice. And then had lots of really vivid dreams most of the rest of the time.

The first hallucination may very well have been a dream too - it happened at night while I was in my bed on the first day of my new adventure into the land of malaria pills. In my hallucinogenic dream state, I sat up in my bed and proceeded to claw my face off. Because I didn't have scratch marks all over my face the next day, I'm inclined to think I dreamed it, but it was the most vivid, scary dream I've ever had.

The second hallucination came when I was wide awake a few weeks later and cooking dinner. I had a small pan sitting on the counter and when I went to pick it up, it turned about 180 degrees all by itself. I just stood there and stared at it, hoping that maybe it would start singing and dancing too, but it wasn't so inclined.

So who know what the next ten weeks hold in store for me. All I know is that by the time we hit December, I will have been on malaria pills for four out of the last six months, which I feel guarantees me an automatic "get out of jail free" card for any weird or erratic behavior, comments, and actions you may experience from me during that time frame.

I hope I really wrote this. I think I did. It feels real.

Why I love Canada, eh?

It’s slightly horrifying to me that I’ve had this blog for three weeks and five days now and have yet to blog about Canada. This is a cultural faux pas from which I may never recover. Also, what's a blog about Canada without mentioning Aaron LeDuc in the first paragraph? Don't worry, Aaron, you might hate Canada but Canada doesn't hate you, eh?

My history with Canada is a long one, spanning almost a decade of annual visits and nearly two decades of close ties with a very dear Canadian family, but it hasn’t always been fun and games for me when it comes to Canada and Canadians.

Like all great stories, this one begins with a prayer and ditching math class. (Don’t worry, math friends like Randy, Phil, and Brian - it only happened once.)

My first brush with Canada came when I was a 14 year old freshman (or a Grade Nine Baby, as Canadian band Bare Naked Ladies would put it.) It had been a rough few years and my life was very quickly careening off into the wrong direction. I’ll spare most of the details here but I knew enough at age 14 that my patterns of self-destruction, if they continued, would lead to injury and possibly even death by the time I reached senior year.

I didn’t really know if I believed in God anymore at that point. I wanted to but didn’t seem to know very much about Him or think that He cared at all about me. But one night, I scrawled a little prayer in my journal that said, “God, if you’re real, you need to bring people into my life to show me who you are because I’m not going to make it if you don’t.”

Little did I know that before I had even written the words, He had already brought the answer to my little home town of Los Alamos, NM, all the way from Canada with love. Actually more like Loves. As in Sean and Penny Love. Penny was a recent PhD Chemistry grad doing her post-doc work at the Lab, and Sean was her new husband and substitute teacher extraordinaire. They also quickly became the part-time youth directors at the Episcopal Church I sometimes went to.

I remember the first time I met them. I was the snobby 14 year old girl who hated adults drinking kool-aid after church in the basement one Sunday morning and they were the cute Canadian newlywed couple clutching each others’ arms and introducing themselves to all of the snobby looking teenagers they could find. They invited me to Bible Study. I smiled and said “maybe”, while on the inside rolling my eyes and swearing I would never go.

As luck would have it, about a month later, I walked into Geometry class to discover that Ms. Shockey was absent that day and subbing in her place was one Mr. Sean Love. I turned to my friend and said, "Leave your backpack in the hallway. I'm getting us out of this class."

On rare occasions, I turn on the charm. This was one such occasion. I hadn't seen the man in a month, but I waltzed right up to the desk and said, "Mr. Love! It's me, Robin, from church! How are you? Do you have any pictures of your wife?"

Now, Sean had been married for less than a year, so not only did he have a picture of his wife, he had more like 20 pictures of his wife that he started digging out of his wallet. I oohed and aahed, especially at the picture of her in her wedding dress, and then casually went for the kill. "We left our books in our lockers. Can we go get them?" I asked nonchalantly. As Sean tells the story, "I said ok and they put their backpacks on their backs and walked out of the room, never to return." But really we had left our backpacks in the hallway, so don't believe anything Sean says about this particular story.

I had never ditched a class before, mainly because I didn't want to get in trouble. But this seemed like a brilliant move on my 14 year old part. Mr. Love wanted me to go to youth group! There was no way he would turn me in because then I would never go. It was a win-win situation, eh?

But you can't trick Canadians that easily. They are a clever bunch, and full of integrity. When Sean realized we weren't coming back, he weighed the choice between doing the right thing (turning me in) and trying to make me like him (by not turning me in). He chose wisely, I suppose, in reporting me to my teacher. At the time, though, it really pissed me off, especially when I was reprimanded with two days in detention. Oh, Canada! What have you done to me?

So I served my two days in detention.

And then I didn't go to youth group.

And whenever Sean was calling youth to invite them to some activity, he would hand the phone to Penny when he got to my name on the list and make her call me instead.

We probably would have gone on like this for the next three years except that my mom signed me up (behind my back) to go to camp that summer with the Loves. I had kept the little ditching/detention episode a secret from my parents and she had no idea that World War III, involving only America and Canada, was secretly brewing in a little northern New Mexican town.

This story is long, so I'll cut it short. I begrudgingly went to camp with Sean and Penny that summer and saw someone in them who I had never seen before that closely and genuinely - Jesus. It would take me several more years, lots of Bible Studies, youth group (yes, I started going to both after camp), and living part of my senior year of high school with them to really grasp that the way Sean and Penny loved me was only a fraction of how much God loved me.

Year after year since I was 14 years old, they have never failed to hold me accountable for my actions, house me, encourage me, support me emotionally and financially, teach me about God and how to drive a stick shift, and play Rook with me. When they moved back to Canada in 2002, it only made sense to visit at least once or twice a year. I make my 12th voyage to the great north in just a couple of months. As Jeff so aptly put it, Canada is now my heart's home.

So why do I love Canada, Aaron? Well, other than cool things like Tim Horton’s, socialism, maple leaves, and the word “eh”, I love Canada because it was Canadians who introduced me to Jesus. So is my confusing, unpatriotic, awesomeness going to continue to light up your facebook world? Why, yes it is.

P.S. I never ditched a math class again after that and I even got a B+ in Calculus my senior year!
P.P.S. Sean likes to introduce me to new Canadian friends as the girl who ditched his class.

Because he told me to too

Today is my friend Dave's birthday. He would be turning 49 today except that he died from acute myelogenous leukemia almost 18 months ago. He is missed.

I wrote him a lot of letters while he was in the hospital that year. I can't keep it brief when I write most of the time, so he got a lot of very long letters from me. But I guess when you're stuck in a hospital all day every day, long letters aren't the worst thing that can happen to you.

He told me a couple of years ago, "If you're ever thinking of switching careers, writing would be a good route for you to take. I love your letters! You should write." To which I told him, "I don't want to write yet. Maybe someday. But for now I write for you."

I was in a meeting earlier this week when the theory was thrown out that the USPS is going to be obsolete in another year or two. Letters will be a thing of the past. I think about how every letter I sent to either New Mexico or California was a little lifeline for the 11 months Dave fought cancer and it makes me sad that there might very well come a day when no one writes letters anymore, just emails or blogs or updates facebook statuses.

When Erika told me to start a blog, I wasn't really sure if I was ready to write again or to write for more people than just one. But it seemed like good timing, and I know if Dave was here he would say, "Robin, you should write!"

I'm grateful and amazed at how God can heal, how He can restore and make all things new. I remember the extremely sad and brokenhearted woman I was a year ago and am so grateful for how He has put me back together again. He is a good God and I write for Him above all others.

But I also write for Dave because I miss him and because he told me to too. Happy birthday, Dave! You are missed and not forgotten. And don't worry, I'm writing :)

Bull sharks turn up in the dangdest places

Yesterday I spent $8 and went to see Shark Night in 3D. Don't judge me. I am bizarrely intrigued by sharks and spend way more time than is really necessary reading books about them, watching documentaries about them, and working comments about various facts and habits of them into normal conversations that have nothing to do with sharks.

For instance, I had this conversation with Jessie while driving to Alex and Laura's wedding last year:

Jessie: "There might be elk out now since it's dusk."
Me: "Sharks like to feed at dusk and dawn. You should never go in the ocean during those times."
Jessie: "That is the second time in like an hour that you've worked sharks into the conversation. That's really weird."

Anyway, I don't really recommend Shark Night to anyone else because it was a really dumb movie and portrayed sharks in a really bad light. For the record, they kill about 11 of us every year - we kill about 40 million of them in a year. Really sharks should be making movies called Human Night in 3D, if we're being honest with ourselves. Also, I went to the 4:20 show. Seriously? Who thought that showing a 3D movie about sharks at 4:20 was a good idea? That's just asking for trouble. That's not why I went, though. I'm not that kind of girl.

The highlight of the movie for me was when the redneck bad guy says, "It must've been a bull. Bull sharks turn up in the dangdest places." Amen to that, brother! That's one thing Shark Night in 3D got right.

It's a little known fact that bull sharks can actually survive in freshwater for 3-4 years. Bull sharks are also the most aggressive shark towards humans, not the Great White as myth would have it. Bull sharks have been found thousands of miles inland in the middle of the Amazon River. Thinking about going for a dip in the Mississippi River, Tom Sawyer? Think twice - there might be a bull shark waiting for some dinner. All those ferry crashes in the Ganges River where they write off the missing bodies as "drowning"? Doubt it - they were devoured by bull sharks. The story that inspired Jaws was actually based on a likely bull shark attack in a New Jersey creek. That's right - a creek.

All this talk about Shark Night and Jaws and freshwater reminds me of the screenplay I'm going to someday write called Shark Attack in the Poudre River. Now, I don't want to give too much away, but it's going to be about a shark attack in the Poudre River. It will follow a Larimer County Ranger, portrayed by Nicholas Cage, who begins investigating mysterious tubing deaths in the middle of a quaint town in northern Colorado. It doesn't take long for him to recognize the killer as having the same handiwork as the shark who killed his lady love years ago while rafting in the Mississippi River. But no one in the town believes him that there's a rogue bull shark hunting in the Poudre, except his new lady love Ranger Robin. Together they will save the town from the bull shark by catching it and then releasing it back into the ocean. It's going to be in 4D, because by the time I write it, 4D will have been invented.

I'll end with this - all of my crazy fascination with sharks has actually made me extremely terrified about going in the ocean. Like I almost paralyze myself in fear and drown whenever I try to swim in it. I still do it, but every time I get in, I think about how most shark attacks occur in less than 3 feet of water and that my splashing arms and legs make me look like a turtle or a seal to a shark. And then when I'm snorkeling around, I'm just waiting for a bull shark to appear out of the murky waters ahead, because, after all, bull sharks turn up in the dangdest places. But at the end of the day, I love sharks. A lot. Just as long as I stay on the land and they stay in the water.

Blogging is hard

This week has been brutal, mainly because I've only been home long enough each day to sleep and change my clothes. I don't like living life this way but sometimes that's just how it goes. In the words of Ed Powers, "It is what it is."

Now that I'm a blogger and have five loyal followers, my extreme busyness is going to take its toll on all of you as well, since blogging is hard to do when you're never home. I'm sorry. I like writing for you, really I do, but sometimes sleeping and changing my clothes is more important. And showering. That's pretty important too. Definitely more important than blogging. But I haven't forgotten you!

In fact, while I was sleeping last night, I dreamed that loyal reader Michele had her baby! Let's hope that dream comes true soon!

In the meantime, I will leave you with this tantalizing list of blog topics I will someday write about when I am not so popular: sharks, automatic sinks in bathrooms, my BFF Gwennie, sharks, Eli Manning, knitting, my cat Midge, and sharks.