Tag: Manoa Church

Hannah & David

Holy moly, aren’t they adorable? That *might* have something to do with why I took so many photos that it took me two and a half months to get them all processed (over 900 altogethr) and the decent ones (423) uploaded. (If you want to see them all, they’re here.)

First, a couple shots from Hannah’s PA wedding shower back in April:

(There are a few more on Flickr, but I forgot to get out my camera until people had started leaving, so I mostly just took pictures of Hannah and Lydia 🙂 but Hannah has a bunch of lovely pictures – including some of other people on her blog!)

Roadtrip Day!

That Wednesday, I got up obnoxiously early, loaded up the last bits, took a little detour into the city to pick up Hannah’s friend Jess – who had arrived from Perth, Australia the night before – and headed up to Massachusetts! Being July 3rd, we expected the traffic would probably be less than pleasant and could add an hour or two to the drive, so we left plenty early to try to avoid as much of it as possible.

Of course, that didn’t really work at all, and it took us a solid 10 hours (and three full-stop traffic jams) to get from Philly to northeast Mass. I was very happy to have Jess along to keep me company and we had lots of quality time to get to know each other! Fun fact: her parents and mine got married in the same church, just a couple years apart! (First Presbyterian in Bethlehem, PA! Small world!)

We got up there just in time to head straight to the nail salon, where Hannah’s assorted womenfolk were gathering for manicures and pedicures. (It was conveniently located right next to a coffeeshop, where we acquired some much-needed chai before settling in.) Apparently I didn’t take any pictures there – must have been too ~~tired~~ busy laughing and relaxing and catching up with Hannah and her family and meeting her Massachusetts friends and the ladies of David’s family!

Oh, and being indecisive about what color I wanted. They used this fancy nailpolish/gel hybrid concoction called Shellac, which you could layer to make additional colors… so of course I ended up asking for a combo they’d never tried before! It worked out just like I hoped! (Taken at the end of the trip, still impressively unmarred):

(Actually, it still looks pretty good, if a bit grown out, 2+ months later! The fingernails lasted about a week.)

Afterward, a few of us headed over to Hannah’s adorable little apartment and ate delicious wraps from a local place they love, and hung out a while. We were all pretty wiped, though, so before too long we said TTFN and I headed off to find my home for the week – Hannah’s dear friend Willa’s attic guestroom:

I could not have asked for a better place to stay! Willa, her husband Rennie, and their daughters Camilla and Fiona are all super hospitable and awesome and treated me like family. When they say “make yourself at home,” they really mean it. And their home is pretty much my dream house. 🙂

Rehearsal Day 🙂

The next day, a number of us had “secret plans” – rehearsal for the epic flashmob song & dance extravaganza that Hannah and David put together with the help of choreographer-extraordinare, Greg, to surprise… well, everyone coming to the wedding who wasn’t in the flashmob!

Once we’d sung and danced through “Life’s A Happy Song” (from the most recent Muppet movie) enough times that everyone was feeling reasonably comfortable with it – and thoroughly silly and tired – we dispersed. The wedding party headed to the actual wedding rehearsal, and I wandered off to find new shoes to wear to the wedding, since I’d forgotten it was on grass and only brought heels (and sneakers, but not ones I wanted to wear with a pretty dress)!

Then it was time for the rehearsal dinner / 4th of July picnic at… one of David’s relation’s houses.

(I lost track of whose was whose!)

We ate, we drank, we chatted with Hannah and David and their families and friends from various times/places…

Hannah sang a song she’d written (for David, though she didn’t know that when she started writing it!)…

Siblings and cousins toasted and roasted…

The small ones were adorable…

And a good time was had by all. 🙂

This is a really long post! Go to Page 2 to keep reading!

September 22, 2013
134 TweetUp, Take 2!

On the Monday the 9th, they announced the new launch date would be Monday the 16th, around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy said he had to help the sistercreature move home from school right around then, so wouldn’t be able to go. (Somebody got their priorities on wrong! 😛 )

I still wanted to drive back down so I’d be able to get around without begging my aunt/uncle or the tweeps for rides, but the parents were none too keen on me roadtripping with other tweeps, (even though I had been talking to them for ages, spent a few days with them in person now, and everyone had to pass a Federal Government background check to get into the tweetup!) and even less amenable to me driving alone, and no friends from home were available for a random vacation that week, so I talked my aunt into letting me borrow their extra minivan once I got down there, and started scrounging for cheap flights.

The plan was to fly down either Sunday evening (or super early Monday morning if it was significantly cheaper), since I’d been co-planning a “baby party” for Rachel and Elliott, to be held Sunday right after church, so wanted to stick around for that. (You’re not hallucinating, the last post did say I rushed home from the first one for Rachel’s baby shower, and now I’m talking about another one… sort of. That was a small family-and-close-friends sort of shower, this one was a bigger church-wide celebration for almostMama AND futureDad.)

This is the invitation I drew (pretty adorable, if I do say so myself!), which we snuck into church bulletins on a Sunday we knew they wouldn’t be there:

Conflict! D=

Then, we tweeps were informed that we might be able to have another shot at seeing the RSS retraction (well, re-retraction!)… which was scheduled for noonish the day before launch – AKA, exactly when the party was happening! The real trick was “might”. Being there for RSS retraction and getting to be that close to a shuttle on the launch pad would be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, if it turned out we could, especially since there will literally only be one other space shuttle on a launch pad ever again… but did I want to miss a party I helped plan for my best friends for a maybe? A long-shot, even? Dilemma! (And we didn’t even know when we would find out if we could go, to at least decide if I could wait to find out before finalizing plans!)

The more I thought about it, the more I was leaning towards taking the chance that the maybe would pan out, skipping out on the party to get to Florida in time to make the RSS retraction if we were allowed to go. I mean, logically, seeing RSS retraction up close and unobstructed would be a literal once in a lifetime opportunity, while baby showers are clearly not, and in this case, not even limited to once for this baby! And I did technically fly a thousand miles to make it to that one…

Besides, Rachel is almost as excited about all my crazy NASAtweetup adventures as I am!

BABY SHOWER vs. SPACESHIP

Ultimately, no matter how awesome the friends and anti-cheese the shower, that right there should have made it a no-brainer. But, after all, I am the master of making simple decisions way more epic and convoluted than they have any right to be… and then the maybe did solidify into a yes, I saw a picture from a previous tweet-up of how close we would actually be, and I was sold. I found a super cheap flight on Spirit airlines for early Sunday morning, arranged a ride straight from the airport to Kennedy, and told my fellow party planners I wasn’t actually going to be present at said party.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I was going to get a new camera. Not so much a decision as a realization – I’d wanted a nice digital SLR for a couple years, but my inner cheapskate would always slap me upside the head, point at the price tag, point at my bank account, and laugh. “Someday…” I’d think, wistfully. And then, an epiphany of sorts:

If you are EVER going to spend THAT much money on a camera,
it BETTER happen in time to take some pictures of that frakking space shuttle.

Instinct had always said wait until I was a “grown up” with an income I could actually survive off of outside my parents house… but honestly, the value of a camera is not in the camera, it’s in the pictures. What makes it worth the money is how you use it, and I did want to get a nice camera eventually, so in a sense, I would be being a bad steward of the hypothetical future camera if I missed my chance to photograph one of the last space shuttle launches and a ton of other cool stuff, just because I waited too long to buy the camera.

I thought about going with one of those in-between sort of cameras, with a decent optical zoom and more manual functions than a point-and-shoot, but without interchangeable lenses, but then my mom agreed to chip in a couple hundred bucks as my slightly-early birthday present, so entry-level legit dSLRs were a bit more doable. So I perused the interwebs a bit, asked twitterfolk for their opinions, and ran around to every store I thought might have a decent camera trying to figure out which to get. It would have been nice to get another Canon, so I could use the lenses on my film camera too, but I was ultimately wooed by the Nikon D3100 (plus 55-200mm lens for some nice zoom), which seemed like a better camera than the Canons in the same range – and then was on sale at Best Buy for a hundred dollars less than that!

And then there was panic.

Spirit Airlines is cheap, in every sense of the word. The ticket price is very reasonable, comparatively, but/because they charge you extra for everything other than getting your arse from Point A to Point B. For a hopefully 2 day trip, with access to a washer dryer if needed, I didn’t need a lot of stuff, and Spirit wanted at least $28 for even a carry-on, so I figured I’d try to avoid that, and just cram everything in my purse, but I needed to clarify that I could have both my rather large purse and camera bag without paying anything. Spirit’s website was not helpful, so I tried calling them, which was less helpful. (Automated menu was broken, no matter which button you pushed, when you finally got a human, it seemed to be the same guy who barely spoke English and couldn’t understand my question!)

So I turned to the rest of the internet… which just made it worse. Not only could I not find an answer to my question, I could not find a single positive review of Spirit Airlines. Besides complaints about nickel-and-dimeing, which I was okay with because the total still ended up cheaper than any other ticket, last minute anyway, there were horror stories about planes getting delayed for days because of weather or mechanical problems and Spirit refusing to put passengers on alternate flights or refund/compensate or do anything to help, cabins being horrendously dirty, seats being even more crammed and uncomfortable than usual, and the staff being generally unpleasant.

Also, in the midst of this, I discovered I didn’t know where my drivers license was, which I’d need both to get on the plane at all, and to get into KSC. Spent the better part of the day before I’d leave looking for it, getting yelled at for not having it with me at all times (it’s not like I need to see it regularly, so I just hadn’t noticed it wasn’t in my bag), trying to pack, and generally freaking out. Eventually my dad found it under a seat in my car, where I had looked, but apparently not well enough.

Getting there: AKA, more panic.

The flight was to leave at 6am, from the Atlantic City airport, so I figured we should leave around 3am to have time to get there and get through the airport… and since I rarely get to sleep before then, just didn’t plan to. That evening, I went over to church to help set up for the baby party I wouldn’t be at, and then came home to finish packing (and conceded to maybe having to pay for a carry-on backpack, if they wouldn’t count that as the personal item in addition to purse and camera bag… the rules were really confusing!)

I knew I had told my dad when and where I had to leave from, so when I went to wake him up and he said we didn’t have to leave for an hour yet, I figured he knew what he was talking about… but when we were getting in the car close to 4:30 and I asked him if he knew how to get there or needed the GPS, and he looked at me like I was a moron, I realized he thought I meant Philly, and had forgotten the flight was from AC, and I had been right with my original time estimate, so now it was going to be a miracle if we got there before the plane left at all.

Thankfully, traffic at that hour is pretty non-existant, the airport was slightly closer than Dad thought (he was thinking of a different one another side of the city, apparently), and I was able to call the airport itself, who had no way of getting in touch with the Spirit people at the gate (???) but did assure me our ETA would leave me enough time to get through security and to the plane in time, which I did. *phew*

Spirit’s lines were confusing as crap, and the lady directing traffic was bitchy and condescending about it, but I had ditched even more of my stuff in the car so I could get through faster, so with just the purse full of clothes and camera bag, I got through security pretty quickly, and ran frantically through the airport, only to discover there was still a frakking line at the gate! >.<

The plane wasn’t nice, by any stretch, but it wasn’t disgusting or noticeably more uncomfortable than other coach seats, and did manage to leave on time and arrive in Orlando in one piece and on schedule. My ride’s flight was not, and rental car confusion added further delays, so I had a nice long while to sit in the parking garage waiting to leave, but we still made it to KSC and the press site a few minutes before we needed to be on the bus to the launch pad!

May 15, 2011
What's your favorite color that's not a color?
So we’re gonna go around the circle and introduce ourselves. Everybody tell us your name, where you’re from, where you go to school, for what, and what year you are, or where you work and what your job is, and…

Everybody needs a good icebreaker.

Between college, church-related activities, and [what I can only describe as the retarded hybrid test-tube baby of spontaneity, whimsy, the inability to say ‘no’, and an awkward introvert’s varied attempts to be social], I have found myself in more of these self-interrogation circles than I ever would have imagined, much less could possibly count.

The questions asked are remarkably predictable (and alliterative):
- Who: Your name, of course.
- What: do you do? Job and/or major.
- Where: are you from, or where do you work/go to school.
- When: How long have you been doing whatever it is you do?/What year in school are you?
- and finally, Wildcard: You thought I was going to say “Why”, didn’t you? WRONG.
Who makes sense. Names are helpful. What/where/when are smalltalk standards, good to get out early, as a function of our culture more-so than actually being relevant to substantive conversation. The Wildcard question is where things get interesting.

The Wildcard is, as you might guess, at the discretion of the group leader or organizer. They might go for profound (ie: most memorable something-or-other), immediate (ie: highs & lows of the past week), or just silly (ie: favorite breakfast cereal). The more groups you do this with, the more they get redundant, so you try to think of new and interesting questions.

A few years ago, I found myself in one of those recurring events for which the group varies so we were used to doing the go-round each time for the benefit of new members, but on this particular occasion, it was a smallish group and we all knew each other, at least as far as the standard Ws went, so the group leader posed what might be considered the ultimate icebreaker: Come up with an icebreaker. We each thought of a question, and everyone answered each. Some were goofy, some forgettable, some awkward. Mine quickly became my favorite thing to ask people. 🙂

What’s your favorite color that’s not a color?

I couldn’t explain it well enough, so the lousy approximation that came out of my mouth was as much riddle as inquiry. It became as much about trying to see who understood my brain to “get it right” as people actually sharing their favorites, and after a few attempts at explaining it, my friend Elliott seems to be convinced that the question is entirely subjective and dependent on my brain, Jeff thinks we should put it to a vote, and only a few people seem to be catching the general drift of the question’s intent. (I think Rachel knows what I mean.) So it’s time to try to put this into words that are valid outside my brain.

“What’s your favorite color?” is a common enough question, and while interesting, and I love colors, the vocabulary that answers that question is so limited. “Blue”, “red”, “orange”, even “teal” are so vague, and tell me so little about what a person is actually liking.

Even more specific color names like “sky blue” or “brick red” describe only the hue and maybe shade of the color at best. But they’re really just largely-arbitrary labels assigned to a generally-accepted range of wavelengths in the visible spectrum. A sky blue car looks very different than a sky blue t-shirt, and neither actually looks the same as a sky blue sky. Color needs context.

What I’m interested in is not the label attached to the range of hues you usually prefer, but the whole and specific swatch of reality you find most visually appealing. It’s not cobalt blue, but cobalt blue glass… not brown, but the last half-inch of black coffee in a white mug… not just orange, or even soft orange, but Jim’s orange sweater. Big threatening clouds just before a sudden storm. That red plastic water bottle. Antique silver dinnerware. Polished mahogany. Even more complex things that don’t fit into traditional color names, like “Oil slick in the parking lot” or “the tv screen when it’s off” or Royal Stewart Tartan.

There’s depth to it. Texture. The way the light plays with a surface. It’s specific, so that assuming you seen it before too, you instantly know what the person is referring to, and don’t have to wonder “this part? or that one?” (Not just trees, even a certain tree, but the bark, or birch bark, or pine needles, or looking out over a valley of autumn leaves just before sunset. It brings to mind a certain mental picture that you can say, “Yep, that’s my favorite,” and when someone else hears it, they picture essentially the same thing and can say, “Ah, that’s their favorite.”

Blue corn tortilla chips. Copper (not merely “copper colored” but copper metal, like a brand new penny). #FF00FF on your computer screen (I have yet to see that one exist in nature). That greenish edge on a glass table. Orange juice. Tail lights. Blacklight. Black cat fur. Bluejeans. Blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers. Gold star stickers. Red rose petals. Beets.

Get the gist? I think I can rephrase the question better now. How about:

What’s your favorite [specific visual stimulus] that isn’t [an arbitrary label for a range of light wavelengths]?

Or better yet:

What’s your favorite color? Answer with a noun.
April 7, 2011
2011, Day 2

2011 has, thus far, continued its trend of not completely sucking. And I am [technically] keeping up with my tentative resolution to blog every day, and thus the actual resolution to blog semi-regularly.

Small victory. \o/

Church was interesting today… they finally announced that a fairly significant* change is about to start happening. The possibility has been brewing, officially-though-quietly, for a couple years now. I smelled it coming a good deal sooner than that, but didn’t realize it at the time. What is actually going to happen is yet to be determined, but things are officially set in motion now… so it will be interesting* to see what goes down in the coming months.

Entirely unrelatedly, I went to a wedding a few days ago. On Wednesday. It was a decidedly odd time for a wedding, and slightly inconvenient, being smack in the middle of the holiday week (though not according to Job #3…), but was a lovely celebration and a good excuse to take a couple days off and actually have a little time to enjoy the holidays. Initially, I thought it was far enough away that I’d have to spend the night somewhere, so I requested Thursday off too, and then it turned out it was close enough that it was easier to just drive home afterwards, so I had a legit day off on Thursday, and Friday was the official holiday for New Years, so between those and the weekend I had a nice little mini-break. (Of course, I worked at Job #1 yesterday and scattered hours for Job #2 throughout, so I wasn’t totally free, but at least I got to catch up on sleep a bit.)

Back to the normal unpleasant schedule tomorrow, bright-and-way-too-early.

* Understatement.

January 3, 2011
Settling in…
…to a new phase of life, in a few ways.
- Settling in to life as a graduate and some new jobbage. That’s right, world, I’m employed. I was a student, now I’m a bookseller/barista. Thrilling, right?
- Settling in back home. After 4 years of dealing with roommates of various types/levels of crazy, but being mostly in charge of my own living, I am now once again in my parents’ house, but with my own space. An interesting trade-off.
- Settling in back at my home church. Couldn’t be very involved for the last few years, since I was gone most of the year, particularly the parts of the year when most things happenned, but I did connect with a lovely housechurch out at school. Now that I’m back in the area for the forseeable future, I’m able to finally get involved again.
- Settling into great friendships. There’s a lot of overlap here with the last one, as I’m making a bunch of new friends through various church adventures, getting to know others better, and reconnecting with some old friends (both church friends and friends/acquaintances from highschool and such). Also making new friends at work!
- Settling in to new perspectives and deeper faith. More on that later! For now, goodnight!
And accordingly, settling in to a new blog. 😀
September 16, 2010