im back...

Here I am back in Winchester,

back home
back to being with my family
back to living on the farm and having a dog
back to having my mom fold my laundry into perfect squares
back to my dad's lame jokes - "why did the girl run around her bed? to catch up on her sleep!"
back to being around Senator fans. *shudder* honestly i don't think they get any worse.
back to being a big and little sister
back to waking up with my mom singing me a song in the morning
back to dial up internet
back to eating steak
back to living in a clean house and kitchen, and a dishwasher - heavenly
back to being able to drive
back to going to bed at an earthly hour - kinda.

It's been wonderful to be home, I have been keeping pretty busy with catching up with my family, friends, and sleep. On Thursday night we went to my sister's high school play. It was pretty neat, although it was long, 3 hours long. It was based on the "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" by CS Lewis. It made me wish that they had plays when I was in high school. If I was only given the chance I probably could have been a Holleywood star by now. I have always been told I have a flair for the dramatic and that the Olsen Twins have nothing on me.

And I cut my hair, quite a bit of hair - tear. I don't like it at all. The next time I suggest that I cut my hair in any drastic fashion, snuff that idea and remind me that I always regret it. No the fifth time is not the charm... Oh, well, good thing hair grows back.

YES! New Jersey just scored in 2 OT to beat the Senators. My whole family are Sens fans, except I am the only one still up watching the game. I don't know what to attribute it to, my extreme dislike for the Senators and the joy I get from seeing them loose, or the fact that I just love watching playoff hockey. It's probably both.

As much as I do love being home, it has been a huge ajustment. I miss being able to have everyone just chat away, I miss the randomness, I miss the late night talks, I miss the constant activity, I miss the good times, and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself tomorrow without you guys to have lunch with. I miss you, I miss "it" and I can't wait to be back.

good bye

Am I allowed to swear on here? Cause if I am, I would, and I would use it in the context of describing good-byes. Today we are leaving, parting ways for a couple of months...
Man alive, I am going to miss all of you.
These past days have been completely wonderful and bittersweet, making the best of the moments.

It's the moments that make the memories, not what your doing but who you are doing it with.
Thanks for all the moments, I treasure you all.

the courage to change

Play - Pause - Stop - Record - Rewind - Fast Forward.

6 different options on the remote control. As I hold the remote in the palm of my hand, I can't help but wish that I could have one of these for my life. I feel like my life is stuck in fast forward and all I want to do is press a Pause button and freeze frame it.

Life is always changing. Call me a prude, call me boring, call me unadventurous, but I HATE change. Yes, I know I am using the word 'hate' and that it has strong connotations, I use it deliberately. I hate the fact that I have two places where I live, I hate the fact that I have to leave people that I love twice a year to be with the others that I love. I hate the fact that because I leave people, I have to constantly miss people. I hate the fact that I don't know where I am going to be in 5 years. I hate the fact that relationships always change. I hate that change usually means good-bye.

Alright, I think I have made that point clear.

Last week I was having this discussion with Tamille in her room, while laying on her Buzz Light Year comforter. She didn't say too much to try and convince me that change is not as bad as I think it is. Instead she just pulled out this chapter from Don Miller. (I am selecting the bits and pieces that struck me the most, but I encourage you to read it all. It's from his book 'Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road')

It is fall here now, my favorite of the four seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. These seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire, everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back again so they can love it again for the first time, and for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read one page again and again.

The only good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and I into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems; the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did you really do all of this to dazzle us? Do you really keep shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore your glory

Here is something I found to be true: You don't start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were too far out, that they were cast beyond my lifespan. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created so he could resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page, it has to be lived, a person has to get out of their head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

"I'll tell you how the sun rose. A ribbon at a time..."

It's a living book, this life, it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are, it is coming to a close quick, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still silence. And they will make a fire and pour wine and think about how you once were, and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. So soon you will be in that point of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly towards its closure, knowing that the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualifications.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love other more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God.

We get one story, you and I and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it? It might be time for you to go.

It might be time to change, to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry, everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

About the part of only choosing selections... I found that I couldn't leave anything out. It's a pretty challenging message eh? Not very comforting though. My attempt to describe it would be as frightenly beautiful.

I know that change is inevitable and I don't think I would even want to get rid of it, for it is the very fabric of life. What I am beginning to realise is that is takes a lot of courage to change, it is daunting to release what is familiar and secure and embrace the new. But you know what? I don't think I am willing to give up a life of meaning for a life of security, to give up the movement of life, and the power that comes with it.

So maybe I don't particularly hate change... but is it okay that I am still scared of it?

I just pray that someday I will be courageous enough to completely trust my Father, so that in turn I will be given courage to change.

*Listen to 'Every Little Thing' by Delirious

the newspaper does not get delivered

If you have been a faithful reader of my blog for the past year, you would know that I think that the Pickels comic is priceless. I admit, not all of them are 'laugh until your side splits' funny, but I love the characters, the subtle humor, and then the occasional one that makes me chuckel for days to come when I reflect back on it.
Also, who says that comics need to be funny anyways? (exception "For Better or For Worse" - boring snoring)
Since they daily paper is not delivered to the dorms anymore, I sadly miss out on a daily randition of Pickels (along with my Word Jumble, but that is a completely different situation that I might blog about some other time when I feel uninspired to write anything else). The lack of a daily newspaper means that I am forced to look up the comic on the internet sight. I am ashamed to admit I am not a true avid fan, for I only check it weekly.
Wow... I went on a complete tangent, so now I am actually going to write about what I mean to.

This Sunday's Pickels Comic:







Ok. So not THAT funny...

Do you ever catch yourself repeating the proverbs sayings that your parents or grandparents always would say? Just today, when I was just sitting at the table in the dorm staring into space, I snapped out of my daydreaming by saying, "Well, this won't buy the baby a dress, or pay for the one she is wearing."

--- Robyn looks at me as if I had gone nutso. ---

Nope, not nutso, just a slip from my childhood. My mom would always say this after tea time and it was time for chores, or when she was reading a good book and needed to fold laundry.

This got me thinking about all the little proverbs and sayings we had around the house... mostly from my dad concerning the weather - when I was little I was convinced that he was 'Weather Man.'

I love these sayings, they are so neat. Neato.

Now, all I have to say is that "a cold April chill the barn will fill" better be true. I am sick of this cold weather and there had better be an explanation for this, but if it ensures the filling of the barn I am ok with that.

It just that I don't think the saying about "April showers bring May flowers" accounted for the snow day that Winchester had the other day.

What do April snows bring?? We have yet to see, maybe Ill make a clever saying for it. What rhymes with snow...?

Today's Pickels Comic:








Baahahah! Too good, too funny; this one is a keeper!

Maybe Ill attribute this to the fact that my brain is exhausted and anything is funny right now so that you don't think my taste in humour is completely lame. So now I am going to go to bed and stop staying up into the wee hours.

the greatest climber in the world

My childhood summers were always full of adventure and this episode was not an exception. On this particular morning I had watched a television show on TVO kids which introduced mountain climbing. That was all that it took to convince my brimming spirit that it was my destiny to become the greatest climber in the world.

Now the first thing was getting the right equipment. They stressed that on the show... understandable I guess. There was only one problem, the only funds that I had were stashed away in my glass peanut butter bear jar. I had to find another way; I headed towards the play room. The belt from my dolls play swing was a perfect fit for the harness, the yarn from my mom’s sewing drawer became the rope, and of course for extra safety measures I wore the blue Toronto Maple Leafs plastic hockey helmet.

It was then time to choose the mountain that I would conquer. Since I do live in Eastern Ontario, where the only mountains are the occasional lumps in the road, I was forced to look elsewhere - I chose the biggest of the pine trees in my backyard. I tied one end of the yarn to my makeshift harness and started to climb the tree with ease in order to tie the remaining end to the top branch. Once at the top, feeling quite proud and excited, I decided it was time to repel down this mountain side. Mountain climbing is a synch, I was well on my way to becoming an expert. So I started to slowly repel down the side of the trunk, imitating the way they did it on the television, having complete trust in my homemade apparatus of yarn and doll’s swing belt. Complete trust…

I would love to say that yarn is a great substitute for rope and that a harness can be easy replaced by a buckle of cheap plastic, but unfortunately I can’t. First the yarn started to fray, and then quickly snapped. I began to quickly and uncontrollably fall towards the ground. Luckily, humans have a natural instinct to survive. I did the only thing that came to mind and grabbed a hold of the trunk, hugging it as tight as I could. The friction of my body against bark, hitting every branch, and knocking off every pinecone, slowed the plummet towards the ground. Believe it or not, I did not die, but my dream of becoming the world’s greatest mountain climber did.

Although this episode contributed to my fear of heights, it did not have a lasting effect on the person I have become today, nor does it plague my life with an unforgettable lesson. However, this story is can be seen as a metaphor on how I have learnt my lessons throughout my life, the hard way. “Experience is the hardest teacher, because it gives the test first and the lesson afterwards.” I have always learnt through experience and still do today. I was mostly likely a frustrating child, if my parents would tell me “no” it would generally just entice me to try it and find out the consequences.

Whether this is a good thing or not, I have hardly ever lacked self-confidence, I tend to easily trust those around me, and I do, feel, and react in extremes. I have found that this life brings my life and dreams to two different spectrums – success and happiness or disappointment and utter defeat. I have had many ambitions in life that I have intensely fought to keep alive, whether they were realistic or not. I have made many big mistakes in my life, I have trusted many people who I shouldn’t have, and through these failures I am slowly learning that there are limitations, people do betray you, not all your dreams are attainable, and yarn does not serve as a substitute for rope…

Most of these failures have left scars, real ones and hypothetical ones, but they remain to remind me of the lessons I have learnt. One big one that I have learnt over the years is that you can’t achieve everything you set your mind to. That is a big hocus pocus, self help line that people throw out to kids. The truth is that there are many unmovable obstacles that prevent you from running away with your dreams.

If I changed the way I go about life would it have made things easier? Probably. Would my lessons be less jarring? Definitely. Do I wish I could change it? No.

There have been many mountains that I have not been able to climb, however there have been the ones that I have been able to make it to the top to look back and realize how much it took to get there. The lessons have been valuable, the scars meaningful, and the experiences wonderful.

There will always be the trees that will hurt you, but somewhere nearby will be one growing just waiting for you to undertake it. The frustrations only prove to heighten the accomplishments; the failures make your dreams seem more real. Even though experience is the hardest teacher, it has been my favourite one.

increadible imogen

I love her music.

presecription for Leaf fans

Today , across Ontario, many a heart of a loyal Leafs fan took a horrible beating. The playoff fate of their favourite team lay not in their own hands, but in the hands of the New Jersey Devils, they needed them to come out victorious. In the third period the plight of the Leafs looked grim as the New York Islanders were up 2-0. The hearts of the Leafs fans were plumeting and it seemed as if there was little hope to cling to... but then New Jersey scored, 2-1! It was now a close game, the spirits lifted and we saw a light at the end of the tunnel. As the minutes wore on, New Jersey had yet to score. It then came down to the seconds... 10-9-8-7-6-5-4... the tears started to fall down the faces of some, while others smashed anything within reach... 3-2-1... good-bye Leafs...0.7 SCORE!! The New Jersey Devils had scored! Unbelievable... No one knew how to react to the painful squeeze of their hearts as they struggled to quell the shock. It was not over yet! The fat lady had not sung her tune! Fate was on our side, so it seemed anyways...
Overtime came and went with the different chances for each team, but no one was able to decide the game. This only meant one thing... the dreaded shoot outs ie. the nerve destroyer.
New York scored, New Jersey scored 1-1.
New York scored, New Jersey didn't 2-1.
Smyth was the next one to shoot, if he got it in Leafs would not make the playoffs. Realistically, many fans knew what was most like going to happen. Smyth is king, there is no way he will miss. Once again Leaf fans accept the coming doom. Smyth skates, shoots and NO GOAL, saved!
The spirits rise once again, new hope is given....
New York doesn't score, it is over. Leafs are out to the golfing range.

Tear.

Honestly, this was one of the most intense games I have ever seen or heard (I had to listen to it on the radio, no tv channels). My nerves were shot and my heart battered with disappointment. Will I get over it? Eventually. I just don't think I can watch another close game like this for quite sometime - my doctor advised against it.

The cure for this does not come in a bottle as advertised above - although it could work for you - my cure will be seeing the Senators loose in their first round of playoffs. Other than that, I think I wore off at least a year of my life... oh well it was worth it.

GO JAYS GO!

Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

Let mans Soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreigne motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey:
Pleasure or business, so, our Souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirled by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the West
This day, when my Souls form bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sun, by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget;
But that Christ on this Cross, did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?
It made his own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sun wink.
Could I behold those hands which span the poles,
And tune all spheres at once peirced with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height which is
Zenith to us, and to our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Souls, if not of his,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God, for his apparel, ragg'd, and torn?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnished thus
Half of that Sacrifice, which ransomed us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turn my back to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O think me worth thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turn my face.

- John Donne

killer queen

If you don't see me around this week, it's because I have transformed into the Killer Queen.

Superpowers include:
- accelerated healing
- invisability
- poison generation
- sonic scream
- superhuman reflexes
- night vision
- wallcrawling
- superhuman intelligence
- immoratality

She's a Killer Queen

Gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite, with a laser beam.

Guaranteed to blow your mind anytime!