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I want to write, but don't know what to write about. I'm too tired to sit up and use my pen and journal, so you're stuck with my stream of consciousness this time, dear reader.

This weekend I was on retreat with a few members of my new church, Bayou Blue. It was so, so good to meet a few people for real-- get to talk with them and know them a bit, actually learn their names. I got to hear some of their hurricane stories, some of their oil stories, and some of their good stories, too.

Something that hung with me all weekend was something Rev. Kris pointed out on our car ride up to Feliciana Retreat Center (which is on the border of Mississippi, but a different border than I drove in on), the juxtaposition of the large number of the people driving enormous pick up trucks for no real reason, with the disappearance of the wetlands thanks to the oil and gas industry there.

Also the juxtaposition of something called the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival that apparently just happened down south. Those things seem kind of mutually exclusive to me. I don't understand why you'd celebrate petroleum since it's destroying the wetlands and the seafood industry...

Anyway.

It was good to see the camp that I'll be spending quite a bit of time at in the next handful of weeks. It's a nice place, very peaceful with barely any phone reception, with pine trees and a lake. It's love bug season, which sounds nice, but is actually an enormous pain in the butt, as lightning bugs are mating which makes them all crazy and fly around in swarms and splatter all over the car windshield and get stuck in your hair and clothes. Obnoxious. Take your business elsewhere, fireflies.

But yes, it seems I'll be out of town a lot in the coming weeks. This week I'm spending two days down south for some talks. Pretty much every week I'll need to go south to do some of my work, and that will vary if it's for a day or few. There are a lot of people offering me places to stay when I do go, which is nice. They're even kind about my vegetarianism despite it not really lining up with the cultural norms here. I'm spending every weekend of October at a conference or retreat. Actually, I think that continues into the first weekend of November. A lot of really great, worthwhile things but a lot of time away. I am curious how that will play out on the intentional community part of the program. I am really thankful that my housemates are generally excited, encouraging and seemingly understanding about my work.

I had a good weekend and have lots of thoughts and ideas bouncing around in my brain, but as you can tell, they aren't particularly organized. I still feel the need to write some of them down.

Miscellaneous goals for this week

• Get a library card in New Orleans
• Study my new map of Louisiana (I'll explain how and why I got a free map when I am better rested)
• Learn more about the geography of Louisiana-- I plan to do this by following my Geography of New Jersey syllabus and researching accordingly, because I have no other ideas on how to stay focused and organized in my self-education
• Eat healthy. I discovered honey butter this weekend, which made me realize that even as a vegetarian, it might be really exceedingly easy to totally not watch what I eat while living in THE SOUTH.
• I would like to respectfully reneg on my previously mentioned goal of eating food that was cooked with meat, and replace it with, eating however the spirit moves me, but continuing to be a conscientious, educated eater as best I can be 
• take some pictures of my neighborhood to share!

learning Louisiana

Today for work, I sat home in my pajamas most of the day learning about the people, plants and places of southern Louisiana. I have made a small career out of being familiar with New Jersey (to the point which that I got a famous author/internet personality to publicly and personally apologize to me for dissing the great Garden State). I don't have that same knowledge base here, but I'm working on building some foundation for understanding the local context.

Things I knew about Louisiana before coming here:

• The capital is Baton Rouge.
• I learned in Geography of Eastern North America in college that there's some sort of "cancer alley" from all of the chemical production going on.
• However, being from New Jersey, I will not base my entire opinion of LA on one minor pollutiony detail. 
• The Mississippi River dumps into the Gulf of Mexico here, and there's all sorts of wetlands, and they might be shrinking or there might be changes in hydrology and sedimentation patterns because of development stuff I think?
• Probably some other stuff.

Things I learned about Louisiana today:

• Louisiana has 64 parishes, government areas based on historical Catholic church area divisions.
• New Orleans is in Orleans Parish.
• Bayou Blue and the wetlands area I toured on Sunday are in Terrebonne Parish.
• Number of parishes I'm sure I'm pronouncing incorrectly: at least seven
• Number of parishes I'm probably pronouncing incorrectly: almost all of them that aren't distinctly English or include "Saint" in the name, which is a lot.
•  There are 9 parishes named Saint ______.
• Favorite parish name: Natchitoches, probably because I'm not saying it correctly
• Least favorite parish name: Saint Martin, because there appears to be two of them?!
• Just kidding, upon further investigation, it appears that it's just discontinuous. Still confusing.
• State tree: Bald Cypress (I can live with that, though I'm kind of surprised it's not the live oak.)
• State bird: brown pelican
• State flower: magnolia (also a viable candidate for state tree, as far as I'm concerned)
• They have an absurd number of state symbols, including the state crustacean, state meat pie, state jellies (there are two) and state vegetable AND vegetable plant (two different things).
• There are 4 tribes involved with First Peoples' Conservation Council (FPCC). None are federally recognized.
• There are 10 state recognized tribes, including the Isle de Jean Charles (whose kind and hilarious chief I met last Friday, who is actively involved with the FPCC) and Point-au-Chien (the wonderful people we hung out with on Sunday).
• In the past 80 or so years, Louisiana has lost an area of wetlands totaling approximately the size of the entire state of Delaware. An area the size of Manhattan disappears about annually.

I've read a lot of other stuff today, and will continue to read until bedtime. I also drew that map that I posted a picture of, because writing things down helps me to learn. Tackling the 64 parishes of LA might take a little longer than memorizing the 21 counties in NJ, not just because there are more than three times as many, but also because I haven't spent the past two decades working on it.

I welcome any and all fun facts and solid resources for this stuff. Bring it.

French, s'il vous plait

On this lovely 90 degree, 90% humidity Labor Day, two of my housemates and I wandered about the French Quarter for a few hours. It was nice to see a little more of the city and enjoy our last day before we all start our jobs.

I've had an interesting time observing French from the moment I crossed the state line from Mississippi on I-59. I'm fairly confident in my complete inability to pronounce anything even vaguely French. I had my spelling corrected approximately 23957 times in the meeting last Friday (ok, just twice, after I wrote down my fifth iteration of the town "Thibodaux"-- Tibido, Tibideaux, Tibideau, Tibidaux, Tibi~~~ (squiggly lines ensued), and after I noticed a specific local forestry term written down on one of the papers being passed around the room). Thankfully, one of the good things that came out of the infamous Peace Corps debacle was plenty of free online French language lessons and resources. Also, I hear there are lessons at my local library. One of my goals for the year: learn enough French that I can at least write things down correctly, or closer to correctly. I'll know I have truly succeeded in this if I can also pronounce street names and business names without the preface, "I know I'm about to embarrass myself..."

I heard a lot more French being spoken in the French Quarter than I expected, oddly enough. People have reassured me over and over that I'll be fine without a background in French or Romance languages (nine years of German and a year of Mandarin? Surprisingly not useful!), but I'm pretty sure I've heard it every day so far. I definitely heard it more on my trips outside of the city, weaving its way into and out of conversations between people whose families have lived in the area for generations.

I guess I was vaguely aware that the French here are related to the French in eastern Canada and northern Maine. This weekend, while down in Bayou Blue, it was pointed out that "Cajun" is a sort of bastardization of "Acadian". It all kind of clicked and I started to think about all of the beautiful things I saw last summer when I drove across eastern Canada with Jamie, Amanda and Katie. The stop signs may not say Arête, but the language is still very present here.

Cajuns were exiled from eastern Canada for failure to pledge allegiance to Britain. They kind of wandered south until they were left alone, settling on the bayou and adapting their culture to the local environment. (This is as opposed to Creole, which are people of France French heritage and sometimes Spanish and Italian.) They invented all sorts of wonderful foods and Zydeco music.

So anyway, French Quarter. It's very touristy, so my lack of French skills was not actually a hindrance. Hannah, Jess and I wandered around the market, checking out local crafts and the myriad of masks, beads and voo doo dolls. We had lunch at Mothers, a legendary po'boy shop where even the cabbage had meat visible in it, so I ordered buttered grits and was plenty happy. Another goal for the year that I am not sure should actually be a goal but am considering anyway: building up to eating food that was cooked with meat in it, but probably not actually eating the meat. So the rice and beans that's cooked with a hunk of ham in it, potatoes and corn cooked in the same pot with the crawfish or shrimp... I'm still really not interested in eating meat, and I'm pretty sure my digestive system isn't either after nearly ten years of vegetarianism, but I really do want to experience the culture as best I can, and I really don't want to turn down the incredible hospitality offered to me here.

I drove, and was happy to do so, to start getting my bearings on the area. The whole Crescent City thing is confusing-- there are streets that go from one side of the city to the other, but they don't exactly run due east-west. Still, we had a pleasant drive, ultimately down Canal Street and Magazine Street back over to our neighborhood, Carrollton. It was a good day.

I'll never be blue, my dreams come true, on Bayou Blue!

Yes, I'm aware that Linda Ronstadt sings Blue Bayou, but I'm working in and around Bayou Blue, LA!

Yesterday was just awesome. The whole house visited my church, a VERY friendly, welcoming, small, rural congregation who worships early and has a brunch feast afterward every Sunday about an hour away from our house in New Orleans. I enjoyed biscuits and grits and fruit salad, and I survived many hugs and lots of hand holding. There's a certain context to a place like this.

I've spoken a little bit about place and placelessness before on here. As we visited Kris and Dick's (the pastors I'm working with on the Wetlands Theological Education Project among other things) house after church yesterday and I explored their expansive library covering wetlands and ecology and spirituality and a whole lot of geography. Oh man, these are my people. Dick and I got to talking about how a lot of the trouble in southern LA is place-space related, meaning, this is currently a PLACE (which has particular, personal meaning and some sort of sentiment, whether good or bad-- the locals certainly have good sentiments about their home here) but is quickly transitioning to a SPACE (which lacks that meaning, either by being wiped out or changed to the point that you can't recognize it for its place, like building the same big box stores in every town, or the landscape being totally destroyed-- it loses its uniqueness).

Now that you've survived the geography lesson du jour (look! I spoke French!), let me tell you what it looks like:

Incredible.





 

(More of my Louisiana photos can be found here!) 

  

So the problem here isn't just that there are a lot of wetlands, absolutely critical ecosystems, eroding away very rapidly-- for example, this tree stump in the middle of the photo was ON LAND six months ago.

The problem is that the people who live here have strong ties to the place they live. For the most part, they are still subsistence fishers, meaning, they really just harvest enough to survive as a community. They really aren't selling this stuff. Without a healthy ecosystem to fish in, or solid ground to live on, what will happen to the community? And what few, small efforts have been made to move these people inland, only intend to move individuals to new communities, not the entire community together. What will they do? How will they survive without each other? Not very well.


These signs and pipelines were everywhere, for petroleum and for natural gas. Our hosts for the day also let us know that they are damaged and leaking all over the place. No one checks up on them. The wetlands are just being polluted.

It can be very overwhelming to think about.

Instead, I'm going to focus on the beautiful hospitality, the incredible community, and the good work being done to protect it all. Tomorrow is my first day of work. I'm just going to meet some of the researchers I'll be working with and come up with a contract, but it's the first step of many toward supporting some really awesome projects.

We were supposed to experience Cajun music and dancing at a place called the Jolly Inn, but the owner closed up shop to go fishing himself, so we've all agreed to make the trip another time!

It took less than three days.

I arrived late Tuesday. My first day of work isn't till next Tuesday, and yet, I found myself at a NRCS field office yesterday in Luling, enjoying a meeting with the First People's Conservation Committee. This includes area tribal leaders, some current and retired NRCS employees, and Kris and Dick, the pastors from First Presbyterian Church of Bayou Blue who are launching the Wetlands Theological Education Project. I'm here in New Orleans for a year to support all of these things (and more)!

It's kind of surreal being here this week, the eighth anniversary of Katrina's devastating landfall. The hurricane definitely changed the story around here, and is just part of nearly every conversation, even in a very subtle way. While Sandy was nowhere near as devastating as Katrina, I feel some small connection to this place through that experience, mostly in thinking about environments and how the landscape contributed to the failures along the east coast and the gulf coast. I'm working primarily with wetlands, which are absolutely critical to environmental stability-- a haven for biodiversity, a crucial wildlife habitat, a sort of sponge in times of deluge... also, they're beautiful. Just stunning.

I'll save the gigantic lessons on wetlands ecology and local environmental problems for another day. I learned at the meeting about the constant loss of homeland, heritage and livelihoods down bayou from New Orleans. It's very sad, but there are a lot of really great people involved in trying to stop, and hopefully reverse, these losses. There is so much great work being done. Just a few of the things we talked about--

• working on size regulations for soft shell crab farming
• prescribed burning programs in the wetlands (to encourage regrowth)
• native plantings, including the Sand Live Oak, a tree that hardly grows in that area anymore
• water quality protection without sacrificing storm surge protection
• mapping projects to show land ownership and land changes

They called me a "technical person" on this team. It's so exciting that my education and interests mean something to this project. I am so excited to get to work on Tuesday.

The only trouble with working "down bayou" is that a lot more people speak French and Creole, which I do not have any sort of foundation for. I've decided my goal is to learn enough French to be able to start spelling things correctly, and to be able to read signs without feeling like I'm embarrassing myself. In the meeting today, French snuck in and out of the conversation. While I'm nervous about totally lacking these skills, it's really cool to see the unique culture of this place.

I wanted to share Dick's blessing over our lunch--
"Remind us that life is a gift, and a responsibility, and that it can be a joy. Amen."

1551 miles later

• Left Stony Point at 5AM on Monday.
• Pro: I might arrive early to my cousin's and be able to visit a while before I sleep!
• Con: I didn't get to bed on Sunday night till 11PM.
• Dropped Katie off at Newark Airport.
• Pro: One last hour with my beloved Katie before she went to Chinook, MT!
• Con: I had to say goodbye to Katie.  
• Pro: I didn't have to feel bad when that Jack Johnson song I like played.
• Stopped at Wawa in Phillipsburg to enjoy both Wawa and having my gas pumped for me one last time.
• Pro: WAWA.
• Con: I was so discombobulated by the time of day and early onset exhaustion that I don't think I got to truly enjoy the experience.
• Stayed in Kentucky with my wonderful cousin Bekea and her awesome family.
• Pro: THEY ARE AWESOME.
• Pro: They know what it's like to do that drive so they prepared a light dinner which was delicious and perfect!
• Pro: Ainsley is wonderful, smart, helpful, sunny company.
• Pro: Eben is hilarious.
• Pro: Bronwen's smile. Oh my goodness. So contagious.
• Pro: Bekea and Dan are awesome people who I don't get to see much in person.
• Pro: Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Stout
• Con: I had to leave.
• Crossed into Central time in southern Kentucky.
• Pro: This is when it hit me, that all of this is really happening.
• Con: This is when it hit me, that all of this is really happening.
• Waffle House for lunch.
• Pro: hash browns, scattered
• Waffle House for dinner.
• Pro: grits
• Pro: I have no shame. Yes I did just have Waffle House two meals in a row. I don't care what you think.
• Con: I stopped in rural Mississippi for this one, and couldn't understand a word they were saying to me.
• Hit the Louisiana border on I-59 just before 10 PM Eastern time.
• Pro: SO CLOSE!
• Pro: SO EXCITING!
• Con: My heart started racing.
• Arrived to my new home about 9:30 Central time. 
• Pro: Done driving!
• Pro: I'M HERE!!
• Con: Aforementioned racing heart finally slows down and I crashed HARD.

Google Maps, which usually serves me very well, is a lying liar. I was promised two days of 11 hours of driving, but instead had 14 hours on Monday and almost 14 hours yesterday. I did not take three hours worth of stops! I didn't. It started to feel like this, which actually happened when I backed up my hard drive before leaving home:



It was mostly just frustrating to me because I love roadtrips and adventures, but I had no time to stop and smell the geography. It's difficult to really get to know a new place from the interstate. It was neat to see the overall landscape change, but frustrating that I really had to just. keep. going. 

Because I arrived well after dark, I have few impressions of my new place, but I can tell you that our house has an awesome front porch and seven other cool ladies, that I have no clue how to pronounce anything around here, that it smelled like low tide at home as I drove through the wetlands approaching Lake Pontchartrain, and that I'm pretty excited to settle in and get started down here.

I heard the nightbirds picking up the song!

Hebrews 12:1-2


Right now, I think every cricket in Stony Point has been added to my cloud. There are also a few YAV, YAVA (Young Adult Volunteer Alum), and staff who are kind enough to skip sleeping and see us off because they are not driving anywhere today.

Heading out to drop Katie at Newark Airport before continuing on to my cousin Bekea and her family in Kentucky tonight. I should arrive in New Orleans late tomorrow.

My cloud of witnesses is so great and so beautiful. Thanks for being part of it.

We shall overcome.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. We listened to part of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and spent some time in reflection. The worship team used pictures from the march in the slideshow between the lyrics of tonight's songs. Powerful stuff. It kept coming up, how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go, and how we are a part of this grand overarching movement of peace and justice.

Today we also discussed community and relationships and housing and culture shock. One of the cool things about the YAV program is the intentional community aspect-- the eight of us NOLA ladies are not just living together, but striving to foster a very intentional faith-based, collaborative community. We all have different jobs, but will be sharing space and a meager food budget, and community service projects and Bible studies and retreats and our lives and works with each other.

In our discussions about our community today, we were encouraged to really focus on the intentional community this year, which might mean distancing ourselves a little bit from other relationships. I brought up with my team that I need to be clear: I am pretty committed to Mike, but I am also committed to my intentional community in New Orleans. The reason this works isn't just because he's already seen me through a community that absorbed a great deal of my time and energy, but because he is kind and understanding and supportive of basically everything I do. He knows I call when I can, and while it's really hard sometimes, I think we do a pretty good job of communicating and making this work across the country. Goodness, he's already been in Arizona for more than a year.

So this lead to another big reflection that I kind of struggled with this summer: my life is so easy. I am a middle class white girl, engaged to a middle class white boy. Granted, he has some non-white ethnicities to his heritage, but they don't really show and his name is Hennessey. Regardless, people can see my ring, and once they get past how weird I am and that it's got a piece of petrified wood instead of a diamond, they can celebrate this very seemingly normal arrangement. I do not struggle with my promise to marry Mike. He's awesome and I'm excited. I struggle that I'm so privileged that it's generally accepted. A good friend of mine came out this summer, and I'm overjoyed that he feels safe and comfortable enough to share this minor personal detail-- truly, this is not the most interesting thing about him. But I'm so sad that he feels it is a big part of his identity, because I think that comes from having to fight to be himself, to be with the man he loves. It's not fully accepted.

It breaks my heart that there are so many people out there in the same situation. Are we not all created in God's image? I don't understand why the world can't just accept each other as we all are. Don't tell me because it's in the Bible, because the Bible was written by humans, and humans are not perfect. Humans are the worst. Humans screw up a lot of things, like loving and accepting each other.

Thankfully, when I expressed this frustration about my own privilege to other YAV's in my small group and my site group, they credited my position but celebrated that I am fortunate, and aware of my many blessings. Earlier in (dis)orientation, we talked about being people of privilege, and overcoming that by using the power for good. We've come so far since Dr. King gave that awesome speech, but we have so far to go. I like to think that I'm a small part of it (even though my work is primarily with natural resources), and am hopeful that this year of service supports a greater good that I can feel proud to be part of.

/end rant. My life is awesome.

(This is probably a good time to remind you that this blog is full of my thoughts and opinions which may or may not reflect those of PC(USA) and the YAV program.)

allergic to anxiety

I am alive and well at Stony Point Presbyterian Center. It is lovely here. It's a pleasant campus with older but well maintained facilities, incredible food service featuring many fresh vegetables grown on site, and an intentional interfaith community that focuses on peace and justice. Orientation (or disorientation, as we're calling it) has been keeping me incredibly busy so far, but is treating me just fine.

I went about 22 years assuming I was extroverted. I like people, and while I've grown increasingly shy in my adult life, I generally like visiting with people. I'm friendly, I think. A friend brought a Myers-Briggs test to the bar during grad school, and that was when I was first presented with the idea that being an introvert doesn't mean I dislike all humans (though if we're talking about geography, that's another story), just that I generally gain my energy from time away from them. It's so true! So (dis)orientation has been a little exhausting, aside from the busy schedule. I have, however, been able to spend a little time with my summer roommate, Catherine, and my ever beloved Katie, as they orient for their YAV sites, and I finally got to sit down with my entire New Orleans team for the first time today. There are eight of us living together in NOLA. That's a lot of women in one home.Thankfully, I've been talking to these girls a little bit for a few months now. Of the eight of us, four are from New Jersey. One even went to my college at the same time as me (but we didn't meet until this week). It seems we all have various things in common, and it was a comfortable gathering. I like them all.

Today's seminars were on conflict, stress and self care. We spent some time in small groups discussing stress-- our triggers, our tells (signs), our tools (recovery strategies). I acknowledged that I tend to work pretty well under some stress, and that I generally spread myself pretty thin, pretty effectively. I don't tend to be an overly anxious or stressed person, but it does creep up on me once in a while. Last week I had my first real physical response to stress, that literally crept up on me from my feet to my face: hives.


Here is my leg after two doses of Benadryl!

There was nothing different about my environment or diet. I was just stressed out of my brain, trying to say goodbye to people who are important to me, watching good friends go through difficult things, trying to tie up a million loose ends at my job, thinking about packing, dealing with a thousand other internal and external things... ugh. My hands and feet started itching Thursday evening, and by Friday dinner, it was literally creeping up my neck and onto my face.

So I spent the weekend bombed out on benadryl.

Thank goodness I'm not generally anxious or stressed or high blood pressured, because last week might have killed me.

Anyway. In our small group, we talked about high-stress situations, and I talked about my time in Mexico, and how I hit my stress limits when showering was literally my only alone time-- I was even sharing a bed with one of my research cooperators. That was just too much.

When I arrived at Stony Point and got to my room, I found two very nice girls, including one of my NOLA people, and two beds. It appeared that I was expected to share a full bed with a stranger.

The hives returned by dinner.

Long story short, I took another benadryl and acquired a roll away bed (that feels very hammock-like, which was one of the better sleeping arrangements in Mexico, but I digress), and my room is a happy little introverted place (all three of us!). I'm managing to find snippets of alone time, including this entire evening, and I even attended a Quaker meeting this morning (alone together!). I have a hard time navigating new situations with lots of new people, especially so many leaders and type-A personalities, but overall this is a kind, patient crowd or missionaries who mostly understand that I really don't want to hug when I meet them for the first time. And, after this week, I'll really just get to focus in on my crew of eight and my wetlands.

This will certainly be a year of growth and learning in many ways, and I'm sure my limits will be tested on occasion. Hopefully this new allergy to anxiety will not persist, or at least, that I'll be able to keep my stress to more manageable levels. I'm excited for the opportunity, at least.

a day in the life

7:19 AM: woke up.
7:21 AM: bowl of Cheerios
7:23 AM: Packing Crisis #1-- which soil books do I bring to New Orleans with me?
7:31 AM: Packing Crisis #2-- I found a small pile of laundry that wasn't washed yet.
7:31 AM: Packing Crisis #3-- I remembered I hadn't finished unpacking my car from Johnsonburg yet.
8:06 AM: Decide to stop unpacking for a moment to start writing this nonsense down.
8:21 AM: Thank goodness Fred, the soil scientist I've been working with, takes me seriously. "Ok. You'll probably want to take the Field Guide for Describing Soils because that'll help keep your describing skills sharp. Can't think of what else to bring. I'd say the Soils of NJ but I don't want it to make you homesick. But that's an interesting read anytime!"
8:37 AM: Clothes in dryer, going to get oil changed and stop by the bank. And get a bagel. This is my last day in NJ for a while.
9:31 AM: Got home from errands to find that Mom has taken a half day to provide moral support/distract the little dog while I pack!
9:37 AM: Announce that I will start packing.
9:55 AM: Actually begin packing.
9:56 AM: Pick up little dog instead of packing.
9:59 AM: Actually actually really start packing. I decided to break this up into parts: a small suitcase for orientation week, then a big suitcase for all the other stuff.
10:13 AM: I packed for the week. I deserve a break. Looking up directions to where I'm going.
10:51 AM: I know where I'm going! And will go to three new states in the next 10 days!
10:52 AM: I'm thirsty.
10:57 AM: I'm hungry.
11:00 AM: Ate some string cheese. Because I'm awesome.
11:04 AM: Thinking about finishing packing.
11:17 AM: Dancing with the little dog? I mean, I'm aiming to leave around 1 to visit the ocean and pick up Katie. I've got time still?
11:19 AM: OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH WHERE ARE ALL OF MY SHOES WHERE ARE MY SHOES WHERE ARE MY SHOES
11:20 AM: They were in my duffel bag from camp still. I wonder if I forgot to unpack anything else? Ha ha.
11:27 AM: Actually seriously begin packing.
11:49 AM: BOOM. Done. Seriously. Except for books, but that doesn't count. That will be the hardest part.
12:03 PM: Picked out a sufficient amount of books.
12:04 PM: Winding down. Time for my everything bagel!
12:24 PM: Going to actually move those bags into my car. In a minute.
12:25 PM: OK OK OK  I'm going!
12:26 PM: After I let the little dog inside.
12:45 PM: Car is packed and I am casually finishing my bagel and hanging out with my mom.
12:51 PM: PILLOWS OH MY GOODNESS I ALMOST FORGOT PILLOWS!
12:55 PM: I am heading out. Stopping at church to drop off a certain wedding reservation form at church because I promised Janet Mike that I would. Going over the bridge to pick up Katie to ensure that I dip my feet in the ocean one more time. Then heading to Stony Point, NY for a week of orientation before I depart for New Orleans, via Kentucky.

Thank you everyone for your love and encouragement.

Oh where, where have I gone?

I did a bad job of sharing my adventures this summer.

• Mission trip: Rhode Island.
• Camp: hectic, but I think I was exactly where I was supposed to be this summer.
• NRCS field work: awesome. Lots of stellar field experience. I just love soil.
• Promised Mike that I'd marry him. I feel bad that this is a bullet point on a list right now, because it's kind of a bigger deal than that.
• aaaaaaaaaaaand tomorrow I leave for a week of orientation in Stony Point, NY and then I leave for New Orleans for a year.

I will write more soon, I suppose. I am just exhausted at the moment. Many adventures to come. I am very fortunate. My life is pretty great.