dogs and roosters, grandparents and aunts

Whenever I’m in Maine, I want to write. Is it how pretty it is here? Is it how almost everything I touch has a special memory attached? Or is it just because I have nothing better to do?

My Grammy loved roosters and chickens. She had lots of rooster/chicken things. She had salt and pepper shakers. She had cookie jars and timers. She had little figurines. The timer has passed on, the cookie jars are with my cousin, and, quite frankly, who wants salt and pepper shakers shaped like roosters? But the little glass chickens still sit in the windows for all to see and remember. There are also a few other little pieces of memorabilia that have lasted.

Last surviving rooster glass, and my favorite.

These hang in the kitchen/dining room.

I don’t see a rooster anywhere without thinking of Grammy for just a second, at least.

Since my aunt came to live with Grampa a couple of years ago, a lot of things about the house have changed. But they're good changes. Sometimes it's easy to just want to hold onto the "perfect" pass in whatever ways we can, but in the end, it's not healthy. Moving on is incredibly important, and even a little change in decor can help with the process.
 

Today in a few words: dogs; snow; aunts; laughter; cookies; pictures; wind; chili; boots.

My aunt Francine comes over for a couple hours, and we just sit and talk. We laugh a lot- about things that my aunts and mom remember from childhood, about the way we are... I love these ladies.

The dogs are nuts. We Lowes brought our dog up to Maine for the first time this week, and it's the first time Brutus and Annie, the big, beautiful boxers belonging to my aunts and uncle, have met him. James is about 1/2 the size of Annie, who is considerably smaller than her son Brutus. When all three of them are in the room together, the background noise (if you can call it that) is the loud sound of 60 hard little dog's nails clicking on the wood and tile floors. 

James is a little intimidated by the other dogs, who don't appear to like him very much- he's too timid to really play with them, for the most part. They do things like block his path up the deck stairs until a human comes along to make them move. But they usually behave, and all's pretty much well when they're outside. 

Yesterday, Zoe and I attempted to go sledding with a girl we’ve known all our lives from Grampa’s church. Attempted was the key word. We have to remember, in the future, that sledding should not be tried when the snow is at least 2 feet deep and you are walking to your hill. We each slid down the hill once or twice. Then, we sat on our sleds in the snow and threw snowballs at each other. We walked home (my feet were so numb I could hardly feel the floor under them) and had hot chocolate. It was fun, but next time I go, we either need a better hill or about 20 less inches of snow.

Bedroom

Ok, Meg, here it is. :)
 My room is tiny and almost triangular, but it's mine - I can decorate and organize the way I like to. :) It's got two doors (one to the stairs and one to the hall with the bathroom and Zoe's room) and a closet that's basically a weird corner that's going to be blocked with a curtain eventually.
 This is the pre-painting post. We're painting in about a week, and after that, it'll probably take a couple days to finish the trim and get the curtains (we have to put up new rods) and pictures hung, but I promise I won't wait too long after we're done to put up more pictures. :)

This is what you see when you face forward from the stair door.

And so it continues... Dresser to the left of bookcase. That door goes to the hall.

Ok, so my closet has a little bit of a mess on the floor. But anyway. There are shelves in a little cut-out-thingy back behind the clothes, and it's really convenient for boxes and my schoolbooks. That painting is going over my bed (Claude Monet's Water Lilies, courtesy of Hannah), and the mirror will be hung on that wall soon (hallelujah-looking forward to the day when I don't have to be three feet away from it or holding it up against the wall in order to see my head). Also, that's the door to the stairs on the left.

I noticed that you couldn't see the windows in the other pictures. They make the room so light- and, yes, even somewhat pretty despite the dingy, bi-colored walls- during the day. Oh, and note the baseboards: that, my friends, is the standard method of heat, at least in old houses, in New England.

My paint chip wall. I really like the color that's actually painted onto the wall in the spot next to the chips, but it looks neon in some lights, and that's definitely not what I'm going for. I really thought I wanted a light sea-green at first, but now I'm thinking some more color- like a blue or purple- might be better. We'll see what I wind up with... I know I have a lot of colors up there (11), but last week, there were 23 of them. I'm just going by course of elimination here.

So, that's my room in a nutshell. No... Make that "that's my room- it IS a nutshell." But I like it. :)

There you are, madame best-friend/probably-the-only-person-reading-this. ;)

moldova 2010

Note: I’ve written this because, what with trips to New England and moving, I didn’t really get the chance to talk to my sponsors about the trip. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t read this (based purely on length. I promise it’s interesting! ;D), but I felt like it should be out there for the people who DO want to know about my trip.

Also, this is way, way overdue, but I happen to think that it’s better late than never.

In July 2010, I went on a two-week missions trip to Moldova with a team from River Ridge Church in Charleston, WV. While we were there, we helped orchestrate a family camp for church leaders and their families, helped put on a VBS for children in a small village, and built relationships with the members of the missionary team there in Moldova.

Moldova is a really little country (about the size of Maryland) between Romania and the Ukraine. Its population is about 3.3 million, if you trust Wikipedia (which said it got its information from a 2004 census).

          I went because I felt like God was calling me to go. I was the only member of my family to go, which I didn’t actually freak out about until last week. I came close to worrying about the question of my sanity. But, of course, when I thought about it a little more, I remembered that I went because I felt like it was what I was supposed to do, and I was completely taken care of by God on the trip.

         

The first extraordinary thing that happened in relation to the trip was that I was sponsored. Yes, I did really try to get the fact that I was going and the enormous figure it was going to take to get me there in people’s minds, but the landslide of support that came in so quickly was just astounding. I could have written and talked until my hand was unusable and I lost my voice without convincing anyone to help me, but I didn’t have to, because God moved people to help me. It was really a blessing to see that people wanted to support me so much.

         

I learned a lot of lessons on the trip. Sometimes, it’s just the little things that hit you. Like how happy the Moldovan kids were to simply get a balloon. They were occupied happily for hours with their shaped balloons, and it reminded me of how much I take for granted here at home.  

I learned to rely on God and not myself as I, nervously and after much deliberation, agreed to speak in front of the whole camp. I only got more frightened as the time approached, and when it arrived, I was basically scared silly, but I did it. I, through the grace of God, found myself able to actually open my mouth and share my heart as I spoke about how God had provided for me to take the trip to Moldova. I even told them about how I gradually came to the conclusion that it was right for me to speak and how nervous it actually made me. And when it was all over, I was rewarded with the knowledge that what I said meant something to someone, and that I actually faced one of my biggest fears without being compelled to.

I love the memories I made there, with and without lessons. There was the day at camp that Kayla Barnhart and I decided we couldn’t take that camp food anymore and, making sure it was ok with Sam Caldwell, walked to the cantina together. A little background info: said cantina was supposed to be less than ten minutes away. Someone had told Kayla how to get there, but neither of us had seen it before. On the way there, we almost turned around roughly 5 times because it was taking longer than it was supposed to, but we kept going. Also, Kayla fed a random little cow and we saw tons of other animals (on a second trip there, we passed a group [so, my terminology may not be correct] of turkeys on the sidewalk). Eventually, we found a store. We came out with soda, bread, “cheese,” chocolate, and what I think may have been intended as breakfast cereal. On the way home from the store, we ate the entire box of cereal-stuff and discovered that we had actually purchased a substantial amount of BUTTER and NOT soft cheese (note to self: before going to Moldova again, learn Russian and Romanian words for cheese).

When we got back to camp, we saw about half of our American team members waiting for us at the entrance to the camp. We had been gone for an hour, way longer than it should have taken us. Sam had just told Ted Tanzey a matter of minutes before we got back that he had ok-ed us for a trip, and we’d been gone for almost an hour. So it turned out that they had very little panic-time and we were ok. It also happened that we PASSED a cantina long before we reached the one we shopped at. But all was well, and now its something that even Ted can laugh at. 

The four girls without family on the trip :) (Amanda, me, Kayla, and Linda)

Another big adventure of the trip was the day Amanda Hauf and I got lost in Chisinau, the capital city. It was our day to shop and be tourists, and we had pretty much the same places to go on our lists, so we split off from the rest of the group with the agreement that we would meet up at the museum we’d visited a day or two before, and go to our temporary residence from there. Well, we did our thing and headed for the museum. We got to the street it was supposed to be on and walked down several blocks, but we couldn’t find the museum. So we decided to go to McDonald’s, where, on the trip of 2009, we had decided we would go if we got lost. We waited for a few minutes, then we tried to figure out how the public phones worked so we could use our emergency phone number card. Well, the Moldovan public phones are not like payphones in America. There, you have to get a card with minutes on it or something like that. Someone had told us that we could get the cards at the bank, which is close to McDonald’s. So we went inside and asked around until a teller told us that we should go to the post office across the street. Of course, no one there would help us at all. So, we went back to waiting outside McDonald’s. I decided to walk over to the phones a few feet away and see if I could somehow punch the right buttons to access the lines. Amanda stayed at the table a few yards away, where any of our friends who might be passing would see us. While looking over at Amanda, I saw a man and woman, also sitting at a table, and heard them speaking English! I hurried over to Amanda and told her. We asked the couple if they could help us to a phone, the woman let us borrow hers, and we called the missionaries. They came and got us, and we got home safely.

That story, unlike the trip to the store, had a lesson for me:  I realized afterwards that I really wasn’t upset when we realized we were lost. I uncharacteristically did not begin to wonder what was going to happen to us, or imagine us being thrown in jail, or sleeping on the benches at McDonald’s while our team members looked for us, panicking themselves. I just knew that it was all going to be fine, because [duh] God was there. Despite the duh factor of this, that’s not really something I’d previously been ok with just accepting. But we didn’t freak, we did the next thing, and we had a far less frightening experience than we would’ve had we worked ourselves up.

The arch- one of the things Amanda and I wanted to see :)

But the lost-in-Chisinau story just added one more thing to the obvious yet necessary lesson I learned from the trip. God is always going to take care of me, no matter how frightening or out of control things seem to be. That’s something that I’ve really needed to take to heart since the trip, and I’m really grateful that I got the chance to learn through experience what I technically knew already.

I just want to thank everyone who supported me in any way from the bottom of my heart. Going to Moldova was, hands down, the best gift I got during 2010, so thanks again!

Love,

Charis

Alyssa and I

Myself, Medina, and Victoria (both translators)

Isabella and I

Me and my camp roomies :)

christmas is pretty much upon us...

Well, Christmas is the day after tomorrow. That seems extremely surreal to me at the moment… For once, I started working on Christmas gifts shortly before Thanksgiving and FINISHED them all a couple weeks before Christmas. That’s a new thing for me :).

          We’re going to have a Christmas of firsts this year. First Christmas in New Hampshire, first Christmas with my brother and his wife, first Christmas with my nieces. It'll also be the second ever Christmas without my sister Hannah. It’ll be different, but different in a good way :).

          Today, I woke up to the first real accumulation of snow since we moved to NH. I made my first snowman in New Hampshire, and Dad grilled burgers in 2 inches of snow for the first time :).

          Last night, we drove around looking for Christmas lights for the first time in New Hampshire, and then I ran down a snowy beach in the dark for the first time :).

          Bad first: I’ve gone 2 months without seeing my best friend (Well, for the first time in 10 years, anyway).

          I’ll be singing two songs (not by myself. With a couple of other girls) in the Christmas Eve service at our church this year. There are 2 teenage girls not including Zoe and myself at Hampton, and we’ve been singing a song every week or two, typically the offertories, in church for maybe a month and a half now. I really enjoy it. Not only is it good time to bond with the other girls from the church, but it’s worship - not only for we girls, but for those people in the church who seem to greatly enjoy hearing us.

          So it’s pretty much the first this, the first that, and the first other thing for me this year. :)

          I’m looking forward to a wonderful 16th (for me) celebration of Christ’s birth, the best thing that’s ever happened. :)

yes, i did say second first batch of brownies.

I like it here. I really, really like it here.

Things are good here. With the church, the latest development is that the four teenage girls in the church (Zoe and I being two of those) are playing an offertory every week. We’ve got two guitar players (Zoe and Alex), a piano player (me), and four singers (Zoe, Alex, Makayla and I). We played for the first time last Sunday, and we’re doing it again on Sunday. It’s good. I think we’ve all enjoyed it. The only problem right now is that I have a sore throat and we’re singing a verse a cappella Sunday and practicing tomorrow… But it will work out :)

I turned 16 on Monday. It was a good day :) Addie, my niece, spent Sunday and Monday night here. So, I had Little Miss Sunshine first thing in the morning, which was definitely a good thing :). And Lydia also spent Sunday night here, so she and Zoe and I went out and got coffee Monday morning, which was fun.

I took Addie for a walk to the library in the early afternoon, and it just occurred to me that that’s probably the first few minutes I’ve ever been alone with her. She loved the books :). We brought a few home with us, and she was particularly excited about one with a baby giraffe in it. She picked up in the library and was excited about it, so I asked her if she wanted to take it to Papaw and Grammy’s with us. She was all about it, and she made the librarian smile a lot during the checkout. She wanted to carry the giraffe book the whole way! I carried her for a couple of minutes on the way home, and for most of that time, she was holding the book open against my head talking about the giraffe! I love that girl <3 :)

In the late afternoon, the girls from church took me out for a snack :). We went and got French fries and tater tots, among other things, at Fast Eddie’s. That was lots of fun :).

Then, my Grampa and Aunt Gail came over for supper, and we had my mom’s fantastic spinach lasagna, along with a cheesecake (also made by my mom, of course). It was a meal worthy of praise! We had a very good evening all around, and I got to talk to both my sister Hannah AND one of my formerly West Virginian friends, and of course both conversations just made my evening that much better :).

Tonight, I made the second ever batch of brownies in the new house. I have declared them the inaugural batch, because I didn’t realize that they were the first ones in the new house when I made some a few days after we moved in, and besides, those were too salty anyway. Let’s just say I’ll never underestimate the difference between kosher and normal salt ever again ;). So anyway, I made the second first-ever brownies in the new house tonight!  

Our West Virginian cell phone service is up a week from today, and we’re not going to get new ones for an indefinite period of time, so that’s going to take some adjusting to! But we’ll always have the landline… and Facebook… Yay! :)

Hannah’s coming for the week of Thanksgiving. Hooray! We haven’t had all my siblings and my parents together since Hannah got married in August 2009, and that was only for a few hours… so this is going to be good :). I foresee a game of Monopoly in the near future!

So, I think that’s about it for the general catching up! Good night!

wedding dresses

So, I've discovered the joy of looking at wedding dresses. This is probably not a good thing, but I do it anyway...

I really like a lot of Henry Roth's dresses.

And Alita Graham's, too.

So, even though I'm almost certainly not spending nearly this much on my wedding dress... Maybe one of these will be on major clearance by the time I get married! ;)