Blog for week 10

Sadness has started to creep up on us during week 10. At family meeting, Dustin reminded us that we had 18 days left until graduation...I feel like I've been here for awhile, but it also feels like time has just gone by so quickly!

It's been a good week though. Monday, a bunch of students went skiing. I stayed back and wrote papers and finished “When Character was King” ( Ronald Reagan's biography). I also went to town and spent time with Matthew and Marcie at a cute little coffee shop downtown. I've really come to enjoy spending time in coffee shops. Not only my mind, body and soul have matured, but so have my taste buds ;) My love for coffee has definitely grown while being here. The caffeine doesn't effect me...unfortunately, so it doesn't help me stay awake during morning and evening classes. But I really love a good cup of black coffee...no cream, no sugar! I do like flavored coffee when I go to Starbucks though...only because they usually burn their coffee... I think they do it on purpose so that costumers will go for the more expensive fancy flavored drinks, since their regular coffee is so crappy. Anyway, I sat by the window facing the river, eating a cinnamon roll and drink a vanilla latte, reading C.S Lewis. What a glorious way to spend a Monday afternoon.

Tuesday was even better than Monday! It was “Ladies Appreciation Day”! A few weeks ago we put on a “Guy Appreciation Day” where we made and served them breakfast and dinner, covered their dish crews, wrote them each a letter (so each guy got 19 letters!) and line danced after dinner. It was a great evening! But the guys...the guys went above and beyond on their day. They made us parfaits with fresh fruit and granola, and scones for breakfast. They did our dish crews too, which is always nice...since we do so many dishes here! For lunch they made us orange chicken, special Asian rice (made by our very own Asian/Mexican/Hawaiian boy) and vegetables...it was so delicious! In the afternoon we had work-crews. I was on the crew that chopped up trees, carried the logs to the barn, and then chopped the logs into fire-wood. I spent the first hour and half throwing the logs down the mountain to Peter, who loaded them into the wheel-barrow and took them to the truck. Before we did any of that though, I had to shovel a path from the mountain to the drive-way so that we could push the laden wheel-barrow through the snow, which was about 8-10 inches on the mountain. After we had finished that, we drove the truck down to the barn, unloaded and began swinging our axes and chopping that wood! It was my first time chopping fire wood and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I thought I would be super sore the next day, but I wasn't...probably because swinging an axe works the same muscles as rowing does. After work crews we were told we couldn't enter the main lodge until 5:30 and that we needed to dress up. So of course all the girls freaked out and ran to their rooms to go shower and dress up. It was really fun...we were all borrowing each others dresses, doing each others hair, etc... At 5:30(ish) one of the guys came over here to escort the ladies to the main lodge. When we got to the door, each girl got escorted to the tables, were we each had a name-placement card. The tables were covered in red table clothes and set for a 5 course meal, which is what we were served! The guys didn't even sit down to eat...they served us each course! It was so cute how they were all dressed up, and polite. They cooked each course themselves, since the cooks were girls they too got the day off. We had amazing freshly baked french bread, followed by Tomato Basil soup....

Ok so I wrote all of the above about 2 weeks ago...so I don't remember what we had after Tomato Basil Soup...sorry to leave you hanging. Im sorry for not posting anything last week. I must admit I've been a little lazy in bloging lately due to the fact that I only have a week left at Semester.

Lots of stuff happened this week, Thanksgiving, Baumans final class, and of course Christmas parties. Thanksgiving was lot of fun, I ate too much as usual... I ate 3 full plates of food. Everything looked so good, that I just had to try some of everything... duh! After napping off my food baby, I went for a run, which was extremely painful. Food baby was definitely kicking during my run! It was really nice to see everyone's families who came to celebrate TG with us. Although, it made me miss my family even more... Spending TG without my family was a weird feeling, but luckily I had my summit family to celebrate it with.

On Friday we went to go chop down our tree...and by we I mean everyone who remembered to wake up early and go walk to miles to cut it down...and yes, I slept in by accident. I did want to go help get the tree though :( The rest of the day was spent listening to Christmas music, playing Settlers of Catan and making ornaments!

Unfortunately I have to leave civilization so this is the end of this post! Sorry folks

Blog Post for week 8-9

It's been too long since I've last sat down to jot down the exciting events of my life for y'all. I'm not even sure where to begin since so much has happened in the past two weeks! I guess if God began at the beginning, I should follow in His example and begin at the beginning.

Last week, Monday October 31^st, we had celebrated Halloween the Christian way with a Fall Festival. Except here at Snow Wolf Lodge we call it “Farvest Hall”. Originally it was “Harvest Fall” but the past director kept accidentally referring to it as Farvest Hall, so thats what we call it now. Anyway, its our Halloween celebration and we do all sorts of fun things. Our day started off with a 5k, which I did not participate in. One of my closest friends, Sarah Donely, won for the girls, and Steven Forrester won for the guys. After that we had a photo-savanger hunt! My team definitely did not win...but we had fun. And I did actually take some pictures, so here are a few of them:

Farvest Hall Finish line!

New friends!

Silhouette 

Hold the sun

Defy Gravity/ Horrible picture of me, but its cool so I posted it

Where's Waldo?

Anyway those are some of the pictures we took. After our hunt, we had a wonderful lunch of some weird pumpkin squash soup in a bread bowl. Then we had shoot competition (No I did not win), carved pumpkins, and made candy apples. My first pumpkin carving was a disaster! We tried to cave Jacob wrestling an angel into a pumpkin...yeah not my idea, and it didn't look anything like an angel. HAH!

After that we got into our costumes!!! Anna, Amy and I decided to dress up like the three guy mentors. I was actually able to borrow some of Jeremy's clothes, which was nice and made it easier for me to look like him. It was so fun to see everyone in their costumes! There was an award for best costume, and I won for the girls, and Jon won for the guys. The ironic thing was that we had both dressed up as somebody of the opposite gender! Then we had an EPIC dance party! I used to think I sucked at dancing...and I found out that I don't! It just takes a lot of practice to get good at it. We do a lot of line-dancing, swing, and freestylin' here. With the occasional dubstepin'. When our wonderful day was over, we all plopped into bed exhausted. The mentors had decorated our classroom and turned it into a really pretty room with a bunch of finger foods and stuff, it was quite lovely.

Some of our more artistic students painted this and put it on our ceiling.

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Tuesday we went back to normal routine... I honestly cant remember anything special that happened that day...

Wednesday classes with Bauman started again... same with Thursday and Friday and Saturday... Although it did start snowing again on Thursday. And it didn't stop until Sunday!!! We got about a foot total. It's covering everything! Its crazy!!!! We had another huge snowball fight on Satuday...we had so much more snow this time that we got to erect a giant snowman, and a fort...I also had adequate gloves and snow pants this time, so it wasn't miserable. Sarah and I really enjoy throwing snowballs at Koert's (one of the guy mentors here) window and then hiding...Im not sure why we hide though, since he totally knows it us. Sometimes he throws pennies at us...I'm not sure if it's supposed to be payback, but I like getting paid to throw snowballs! It's so weird going from living in Florida, where it gets really cold because of the humidity but doesn't snow, to living in Colorado where it snows a whole foot before Thanksgiving! I'm not sure that I like Colorado better than Florida. It might be because I live in the middle of no-where in the mountains here...I think that if I lived in the city, I might like it better here. But I also really miss Florida.

Sunday 21 students and 4 staff took a road trip to the Grand Canyon! The roads were covered in snow! The driveway from SWL to the main road was pretty icy, and we left at 6AM so it was dark, which made it all the more scary! It took us 8 hours to get to the Grand Canyon, 5 of them were spent driving through Arizona desserts...SO BORING!

I did get some pretty cool pictures with my iPod though.

Arizona

We got to the GC at about 3PM and set up camp...yep, I just said set up camp. It was under 30 degrees when we arrived and by the time we were ready to go to sleep it had dropped to below 20. After setting up camp we went on a 1 1/5 mile hike to see the canyon. Koert got us lost though, so what should have taken us 20 min, took us an hour and a half. Almost immediately Sarah drops one of her precious mittens into the canyon. Luckily, it didn't fall more than 20 feet before it landed on a little ledge. She started freaking out about how she needed her mitten and how much they had cost. So a bunch of the guys decide to use a rope and a little hook thing to try to grab it. After about 20 minutes of unsuccessfully trying to grab the dad-gum mitten with the rope, Koert gets the bright idea of climbing down to the ledge to get it. So he climbs down there and throws the mitten up. Then the problem arises...how to get back up. He tried rock climbing for a few minutes but to no avail. Then the boys throw him the thin little rope and tell him to tie it around his waist. Picture a 6 foot 5 tall dutch-man, tying a little bity rope around his waist and having 4 normal teenage boys pull him up! It's quite a comical picture. While all this was going on, many foreigners passing by, stop and watch the whole ordeal. I think I counted at least 4 Asians who muttered “stupid Americans” and a few Mexicans who said “Stupid Americanos”...it was ridiculous! I was thoroughly embarrassed, not to mention surprised that no park ranger showed up to kick us out! So Sarah got her mitten, Koert felt like a true hero, and I felt like an embarrassed American. But for real...I saw SOOOO many foreigners...I think there were more of them than there were Americans.

So we got the mitten...PTL! While all of this was going on, my blood sugar had started to drop rapidly! It had been dropping on the hike to the canyon, but I had eaten three apples and it had been better. But apples only last so long...ya know? When my blood sugar gets low, I start getting really grumpy and tired. We start hiking back, and guess who gets us lost again?? If you guessed Koert, you're correct. This time it took us about an hour to get back...and the whole time we could have taken a shuttle...(we didn't find that out until we were 5 minutes away from our campsite, when we got on a shuttle and the driver told us it'd be faster to walk now...ugh). It was getting cold, it was snowing, my blood sugar was low and we had to hike for an hour. I was so close to passing out...it was really embarrassing. Thankfully, Andy bought me some peanut Mms which lasted me like...5 minutes. All the way back to the campsite I kept thinking about how much I looked forward to getting back to our campsite, and then I would remember all I had to look forward to was a tent in 20 degree weather...but I still looked forward to it.

We got back to the campsite and I ate 2 packets of Gatorade powder...talk about nasty. But it did help. I ate a lot of granola bars during the next few hours...some of the boys made us a really nice fire and all 25 of us huddled around the little fire trying to stay warm. My biggest complaint about the whole trip was that the snow kept putting out our fire. Being from Florida, snow has always been somewhat of a novelty to me. I've always enjoyed snow, up until that point. I cursed every flake that fell down anywhere near me. After singing songs, telling scary stories and of course making sh'mores, we all went to our tents because the snow was getting us really wet and cold. I was in a tent with Marcie, Teiter, and Caitlin. We all stayed super warm all night because a) Caitlin brought at least 12 blankets with her, b) 4 girls in a three man tent is pretty tight so our body heat kept each other warm and c) I had on 2 pairs of socks, short spandex, long spandex pants, ski pants, a tank-top, under-armor, a t-shirt and my super warm jacket. Not to mention my body heat...I'm always warmer than other people because of my metabolism. Marcie an Caitlin stayed warm all night partly due to my body heat.

I slept like a baby!! I as so warm and toasty all cuddled up in my mummy bag! I woke up the next morning, looked outside and saw everything covered in 6 inches of snow! I also got out and ran to the car to get the water boiler so we could make hot chocolate :)

The trip was a lot of fun...even if I did almost die. We didn't get the best view of the actual canyon because of all the fog and snow clouds...that was a tad bit disappointing, but we had a totes epic adventure!

J.P Moreland is our lecturer this week. The topic: Philosophy. I've been getting a headache during most classes, just mulling over things he's telling us. So far we've covered: epistemology, the problem of evil and where it came from, evidence for God's existence, how to choose a religion, do animals have souls, and free will.

We've also discussed modern day miracles, which is the thing I struggled the most with. This week has reallllly made me aware to my ignorance of many topics. I'm going to read up on all this stuff when I get home. I'd read about it here, but I seriously have no time to read anything other than required reading.

Saturday we get a day off...which will be really nice. We get to go into town and use the INTERNET, whoo hoo!!!! NOT that I NEED it or anything, but I want to check up on all my peeps on FB, and post this on my blog, and maybs skype my family.

Sunday, the church we attend here is having a big thanksgiving dinner after the service. So we're going to attend that, which should be fun and totes delish!

Thank you to all my loving, adoring fans who have sent me mail while I've been here... it's been really nice and encouraging to get mail. Debs, Shep, Dad, and Molly, special thanks to you for writing me every week!

As some of y'all already know, but I get to stay an extra 5 days in Colorado with a good friend here! So I wont be flying back until December 8^th.

Toodles!!!!

ps. I couldnt add all my pics because the internet is too slow. my apologies :(