The Life as I Know It

This will be a short one I hope. Just a run down of my life and schedule right now: I work 10 hour days and have class or institute Monday through Wednesday, so I leave around 7 and get home around 10. I am used to that and like it, but in order to keep it up, I like having variety and relaxation on the weekends. So my Thursday through Saturday nights are free. Thursdays I've tried keeping open to go to missionary lessons with my friend, Nathan, and Sundays I go to church in the afternoon and usually some kind of food thing after.

This week, we had a work party at Diplomatic Langauge Services, DLS, my paid internship. We make language curriculums, so we have a lot of international people and hence international food. A coworker had just rented the nice basement in the woods of a guy with a PhD in religion and loves having guests and seems soooo respectful and Christian. I enjoyed the company and the meal. Here are some shots.



What Holly brought



What I brought



Kelly, Travis (husband), and Holly dishing up cuisine from Pakistan, India, Russia and America (or at least made by people from those areas)





More of my coworkers: clockwise are Atif and Julie who work on Urdu, Aida works on Russian, and Daniella does sound editing.



Me and the cool waterfall

The lonely well of the woods you have to go through fireflies to get through :) Magical! I wish I was the young grandchild of this family :)

This is my house if you already haven't google earthed it. I live with one other roommate upstairs, a temporary one in the basement, and our super nice landlady, Sharon, lives on the main level with her dog. I'm so grateful to have found this house and housemates. It worked out so well.

My house, I'm going to get all Anne of Green Gables on you and say I live up in the tower. You'll see why, it looks like a princess room that I then moved into.





Me talking on the phone with cousin Amy and my house in the background.

32 My grandma's princess room





The window reminds me of either a princess tower window or the window Joseph Smith was martyred out of, either or.





Notice my map wall. There used to be a classy and useless map of the Great Lakes there, but I replaced it with my touristy, marked up, DC/Arlington Maps :) :)

My marine friend, Nathan White, is getting baptized in August! I'm so excited and happy for him!! He came to church two Sundays ago after a 63 hour shift (can we think through the logic of of having armed, trained fighters with PTSD reporting to duty sleep deprived? Maybe that is unfortunately a reality in the field). He had a 13 hour sleep break and chose to come to church. Pretty cool. He was a little crazier than usual and shaking, so I fed him after.

As background, Nathan and I met on a Greyhound bus between Richmond and DC six weeks ago. I shameless eavesdropped on his conversation with a navy guy about some of his war stories in Afghanistan. He pulled me into the conversation, we talked the whole way to DC, mostly about Afghanistan. He invited me to breakfast and said I was busy. I legitimately was, church started at 1:30 and I wanted to shower and sleep a little before. Without premeditating anything, I invited him to church. To my surprise, he came, for all three hours, and enjoyed it and to be seeking answers. He met the missionaries later that week seemed to learn a lot and get more questions. He has read up through Jacob in the Book of Mormon and met with the missionaries for the second time three weeks later, some questions answered, and was invited to and decided to be baptized! He gets deployed on Jacob's birthday on the 15^th (or maybe before if he gets called up for predeployment), and he'd rather be baptized here than in the Red Sea with a branch in Saudi Arabia, so pray things work out.



Twinners Nathan and Amanda (Amanda is a good friend in the ward). They both have the last name, White, and both have Jewish ancestry. Cute :)



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Nathan and I. No skirt will keep me from climbing trees in the rain, it's unfortunate I started to split the seem though :)



Here's a humorous war story Nathan told while talking with a group of his “boys” from Elders' Quorum and others of us. Nathan said one time in Afghanistan, they had piled together all the IEDs, nitrogen fertilizers, and other explosives and bomb making materials they had found on patrol. No one wanted to wait for the bomb squad people (he said some acronym I didn't recognize) to come dispose of it so they decided to detonate it themselves. Sort of stupid, but sounds like fun, right? They went five football fields away, five, and detonated it. They saw a bright light, everyone had time to say, “Whoa,” and then a wave of heat and sound knocked them flat on their backs. All of them concussed, all of them bleeding noses, bleeding ears, and I think all them whooping because what came next was a big mushroom cloud billowing high in the sky. Their commanding officer, who I guess had left them alone for far too long, came yelling, “Was that a daisy cutter?” which is the bomb right below a nuke, “WHO ORDERED THAT BOMB?” The marines all said, “uhh, I'm concussed, I-uh-can't remember.” But the commanding officer thought it was really cool and just chalked it up to "accidental detonation" for when his superiors came asking. A superior did come asking. A colonel drove up, that's the rank right below a general for those less aware like me. “Marines. Was that you?” indicating the explosion. They all had to nod, that is if they could hear him through their bleeding ears. “I saw that from my tent....,” he said, “...That was awesome. You marines are all right.”

That does sound like soooooo much fun. I would have loved to be there, concussed ear drums and all, despite being FIVE football fields away. Hysterical.

more tree climbing in the rain