Camping for Christ

Videos!

2009-08-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

I figured nothing could show the impact of actually being at the conference like a video, so I'm sharing some YouTube clips. You don't have to watch all of them, but they're all guaranteed awesome.

My dad made that one, and there's a lot of goofy pictures of Emily in it. :P Silly Emily.

The above video gives a good sense of the sheer number of people that were there, plus, you get to see how we started every evening.

There were SO MANY PEOPLE. So it was really cool to get a letter from President Obama. Everybody loved it, in part because the ELCA is pretty left-leaning, in part because we got a letter from the friggin' president.

We Will Love You!

I wish I could have posted some legit recordings from the ELCA itself, but apparently they're too busy promoting their new women's Bibly study to post videos of speakers, so there you go.

Misconceptions

2009-08-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Mom wanted me to post this, because she thought I might have given the wrong message in the post about cleaning up the school. She says there's an opinion among some people that there's no point in helping people--well, let's be brutally honest, there's an opinion among some people that there's no point in helping poor people--because they Can't Be Helped. You have to Want To Be Helped before the proceeds from the Women of the Church Auxiliary Bake Sale will do you any good. 'Wanting To Be Helped' usually entails renouncing all ties to your former culture, friends, family, and former way of life--just like emigrants at Ellis Island in the 1800's! It is the Only Way For Them To Become Good Christian Men And Women!!

That's crap.

I don't know if anybody with that opinion has read their Bible lately, but in case you didn't know, Jesus was a poor kid from the ghetto, too.

So, if writing about seeing graffiti on the bathroom walls of the elementary school made anybody think, "what's the point of painting the school if those kids are already delinquent" or whatever, that is not what I meant to say. In fact, I think seeing all the graffiti was what made me realize that the kids who go to that school need a nice building more than anything.

I know a little about child psychology, and from that I know that kids in elementary school grades are basically a reflection of what they see around them. If they see a lot of bad language on TV and hear it from their parents and older siblings, of course they're going to repeat it. To me, it was just a sign that the kids in that school needed more love than anybody.

When you really think about it, who will get more out of walking into a beautifully-painted new classroom (one that looks like a home, not a mental hospital or a prison), a rich kid or a poor kid? Probably a poor kid.

So the next time you're tempted to refuse aid to a "bad" person, take a leaf out of the Good Book:

⁹As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. "Follow me," he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.
¹⁰While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many tax collectors and "sinners" came and ate with him and his disciples. ¹¹When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"
¹²On hearing this, Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. ¹³But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."
the Gospel of Matthew, 9:9-13

Day Six--New Orleans State Of Mind

2009-08-07T08:27:00.000-07:00

We got up early and packed--a long and painful endeavor-- and headed downstairs--another long and painful endeavor. We loaded everything into the Subaru, which took about twenty minutes, considering that we also had to bungee a mattress to the roof of the car (long story). Then we had to get ourselves in the car. A Subaru Forester fits four people comfortably, and have five seatbelts on the off-chance that you have three small people or children sitting in the back row. We had six people, and none of us would qualify as small, especially not after a week of Louisiana cooking. Emily and Mom shared the passenger's seat, and I was sandwiched between Justin and Jimmy. It was not a fun way to travel, although we got used to it as the week progressed.

We parked at the Superdome and managed to get floor seats for the first time. I looked around the stadium. We were in one end of it. Jimmy commented that seven Superbowls had been held in the Superdome. I looked around again. We were in the end of the stadium, on the floor. We were in the endzone. We were sitting where a Superbowl-winning touchdown was made.

If that's not reason enough to go to New Orleans, I don't know what is.

The sending ceremony was really good--great music, a reprise of 'We Will Love You,' and the largest wave in the 500-year history of Lutheranism. It was awesome. Have you ever done the wave with 38,000 Lutherans? I think not. (If you don't know what the wave is, go ahead and find out.) After that, though, we pretty much just packed up and got in the RV.

We thought it would be better for the engine to just drive the Subaru over the mountains, rather than towing it, so I went with Mom in the car and we had a nice, long conversation. When we got to the campground (the same campground we stopped at before, where all the lanes are named after figures from Southern Civil War mythology), Jimmy, Emily and I headed to the bathhouse. Last time while I was waiting for everybody else to finish up in the shower, I noticed last time that there was a door next to the showers with a light on and a radio playing. I had tried the doorknob before (urged on by a combination of boredom, curiosity, and the feeling that I was in a movie and "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz was the theme song), to no avail. When we went to the bathhouse, the lights were on again and the music was still playing. I tried the handle again. It opened.

Not wanting to go in on my own, I enlisted Jimmy's help to go in with me. It was nothing but a storage shed with nobody in it. There was a radio playing--a cool, vintage radio--but that was about it. Because you can't just trespass on private property and not mess with what you find within before you go, we took a little plastic item from the shelf and put it on the curb outside, just so they'd know we'd been there. Otherwise, it's just not worth it.

Day Five--Mad Season

2009-08-01T19:41:00.000-07:00

Mom, Dad and I got up early to go to something called Hip-Hop Worship. It was in a hotel down the street, so we grabbed breakfast and headed down. It was in their grand ballroom, and it was packed. I got a seat (on the floor, and I had to fight even for that), then spotted six or seven people wearing Save Darfur t-shirts. For those of you who don't know, I've been pretty seriously involved in the Genocide Intervention Network, 1-800-GENOCIDE and Save Darfur for about a year. I call my senators and representatives just about every week to ask them to vote for anti-genocide legislation, I donate, I sign petitions, that kind of thing. For my sweet 16, I had a Darfur-themed party and raised money instead of getting presents. So I went over and talked to them.

As it turns out, it was a youth group and their pastor from somewhere in the Midwest, but about 40% of their congregation (including the kids at the conference) are refugees from Darfur. I talked to their pastor a little and shook hands with a girl named Christina, who was from Darfur. She seemed really cool. Their pastor told me her father was shot in front of her at age five. In light of that, dedicating my silly little birthday party to the cause didn't seem as impressive as I'd always thought it was. That realization was definitely a much-needed lesson in humility.

Feeling that very weird feeling you get when something has just happened that can only be the work of God in your life, I went to go back to my seat. Then their pastor came after me and asked me to sit with them--they had saved a seat for a kid who decided to sleep in. (It was 7:30 AM, I don't blame him.) So I got the opportunity to worship with three kids from Darfur. I stepped on Christina's foot during one of the songs and spent a good part of the rest of the service berating myself for my clumsiness. The service was really cool, though, I bought the CD when it was over.

We got the rest of the group and headed over to the convention center. The Interaction Day is what we had been looking forward to for most of the week, and we weren't disappointed. We got into this huge hall--and when I say huge, I mean the size of an aircraft hangar--and it was packed with all these different things you could do. I didn't really see enough of it, because I kind of hunkered down in one place when I found something fun, so there's a ton of stuff that was there that I'm leaving out, but trust me, it was awesome.

So we all went our separate ways with instructions to meet back at the FEMA trailer (the room was so large that they could fit a FEMA trailer in there without batting an eyelash... then again, that's not saying much as FEMA trailers are tiny). I eschewed the climbable attractions and the ziplines in favor of the more subdued activities. There was a cool thing that Habitat for Humanity was doing where kids could help build walls and framework for a house that would be transported and given to a family. I kept going until I found what I was really looking for--arts and crafts. Yes, in the middle of a hall of wonders that the ELCA must have poured tens of thousands into, I spent at least an hour and a half sitting on the floor and making bracelets out of hemp. Whatever, they were really cool-looking and I got to talk to some cool people.

After I had made enough jewelry to bedeck the whole family, I headed down to see a big portion of the space dedicated to a store called The Old Lutheran that was selling all these cute Lutheran t-shirts. (Example: You Might Be A Lutheran If... and 'I Dig Organ Music.') I headed down further to see a place with a bunch of tents sent up. The tents had light lines drawn on them in chalk, creating a grid. We were supposed to paint cool stuff on them, and it'd be sent to Darfur for refugees. I spent a good twenty minutes painting little inspirational messages on the tents, even though I knew full well not many of the recipients would be able to read English very well. I was also a little amused by the number of people who painted crosses on their squares, seeing as something like 95% of the population of Sudan (the country of which Darfur is a province) is Muslim. Imagine if you were in a refugee camp and you got a bunch of tents that had crescents all over them. You'd probably appreciate the gesture, but think it a little misguided all the same. Well, I hope the paint job will brighten the camps they go to all the same.

I walked by a bunch of other cool things (one example--a display of how much water on the face of the earth is salt water, and how much is frozen, and how much is unavailable, and how very little is available for human use in the form of 100 gallons. So there was a huge tub of the salt water, three buckets of the frozen water, another bucket of the unavailable water, and a Dixie cup of the available-for-consumption water. Scary.) Then I checked out the FEMA trailer--about half the size of our RV, I can't imagine how people could live in one of a year--and found Mom and Dad. Apparently, I was a good half hour late. Whoops.

The speakers were Donald Miller (yay!), a lady who helped prostitutes get off the streets (yay, but she talked really slow), and another lady who talked about the Earth and how awesome God's imagination is. She was really cool. I thought from her little bio-thing in the guidebook that I wouldn't like her, but I guess you never know.

The Flying Karmozov Brothers performed--the guys who make Jerry's jacked 'disappear' on Seinfeld!--and so did the fiddle-playing girl from Hurricane on the Bayou. She was amazing. She made me want to play fiddle. (I am going to learn how to play mandolin next year, though. I've got it all worked out. Watch your back, Chris Thile.)

We went to an event called Gathering Idol at the Hilton and hung out for a while, then realized that this was the last night we'd have in the city and all felt a little depressed. But then we had a very meaningful Final 15 devotional and went to bed feeling a lot better. For once, I managed to sleep through the night.

2009-07-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

Day Four—Rock You Like A Hurricane

2009-07-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

We got a late start and went to the convention center for Learning Day. And, no offense to Learning Day, but it was kind of boring. We made some postcards, did a workshop about our aspirations and made plegdes to do some sort of good deed, and then went to a forum about how to be a Christian in a non-Christian world. That actually was pretty cool. I met a cool kid form Minnesota named Nicole and we prayed about situations in our life where we need courage. She is a lot braver than I am, I’ll say that much.

Because we got stamps from all three sections of our activies, we were entitled to a bandana from the ELCA. We trekked across half the convention center to get them and then took a picture with them to show how ganster we were.

It seems to me that the third day of a convention is the day when you start losing energy, and that was definitely true of our trip. I started freaking out because Mom and Dad wanted to eat in the convention center and I really wanted to go outside and get out of the freezing air conditioning. I think my hysteria was excacerbated the fact that I hadn’t really eaten a full meal in two days and I had woken up four or five time that night due to being cold. Mom, Dad, and everyone else pretty much ignored my freaking out and ate inside anyway. I got a hold of myself and maintained my composure until we got to Riverwalk and started looking at masks and other Mardi Gras stuff. Then I started to fall to pieces because I couldn’t see the point of us wasting our time in tourist traps when there was so much cool stuff to do.Then Dad said we were going to get some Hadgen Dazs, nevermind that we had just eaten less then twenty minutes ago and the ice cream line was at least 25 people deep. I sat down on the sidewalk and tried, ineffectively, to calm down. It didn’t help that Justin came over next to me and started telling me everything I never wanted to know about Resident Evil 4. I turned my face to the wall and feigned sleep to try to get a few minutes to myself, to limited success. I realized that I’d have to take it up a notch if I really wanted to be left alone, and pulled my hat over my face. I don’t know what it was, but then I just completely broke down and started crying in the middle of the Riverwalk mall.

After a few minutes, I felt a little better and was ready to rejoin the world at large. I took my hat off and asked the group if anybody really wanted to go to the Garden District, which was our plan for later that day. Nobody wanted to, so we went back to the hotel to hang out until it was time to go to the Superdome. Jimmy and I sat in the lobby and played a few hands of poker, but it was kind of boring because it was just the two of us. (Emily wasn’t playing because she was on the computer and Justin was swimming.) We decided to ask the bartender if he wanted to play a hand, seeing as he had absolutely nothing to do. He played quite a few hands with us and got us a bunch of waters and stuff.

The speakers that evening at the Superdome were awesome. The first was a guy named Spencer West who had his legs amputated at age five due to a muscle disease. He talked about how important it was to take your challenges as they come and the value of standing up for what you believe in. Then he asked us to stand up if we believed that we could make a difference in the world. Everybody stood up, and he jumped out of his wheelchair and stood on his hands. Then he said, “This is 38,000 people standing up for what they believe” and everybody cheered like crazy. He jumped back into his wheelchair (though it looked more like he was flying than jumping, his arms were that strong) and wheeled off the stage.

The next speaker was a former child soldier named Michel Chikwaine. He was pretty cool, although his story was very brutal. Then he said that when he first visited New Orleans right after Katrina, he was reminded of the refugee camps he had lived in as a child and how we needed to spread the wealth and take care of each other more.

Then this band Skillet started playing. Apparantly, they’re some big deal, and Justin loved them, but I wasn’t really impressed, so I left before the second set, along with Jimmy, Emily, and Dad.

Once we got back to the hotel (after a quick, desperately-needed bathroom break at the Holiday Inn), we went upstairs for the dance. We hung out for a little while, but the people there were dancing kind of… how can I say this…un-Christianly and we couldn’t really talk because the music was so freakin’ loud, so we went downstairs and Jimmy bought everybody nightcaps from our friend Eric the Bartender. (Jimmy cannot hold on to money. It burns a hole in his pocket. He’s bought Emily and I more gum, Chapstick, and Vitamin Waters in the past week than our parents have in a month. He is incredibly generous.) The kids got virgin Hurricanes, Dad got a scotch, and Mom got a beer. (Oh no, Lutherans drinking!) Jimmy then took a sip of water and made a face, commenting that the water tasted like mud after the Hurricane. We thought about that for a second. “The water tastes like mud after the hurricane,” he said. “Wow, that is really tragic when you think about it.”

Day Four--School's Out For Summer

2009-07-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

We woke up at five-thirty on our ServantLife day. Since we slept on the ground, I had woken up three or four five times during the night. We pulled on our fluorescent-orange ServantLife t-shirts (I don't know what yahoo decided to make the shirts a color nobody looks good in) and rolled out to the convention center. We waited a long time, then got on the buses and waited some more. We struck up a conversation with the bus driver, Jack from Wyoming. He took us a mile or two out of town and dropped us off. All six busloads of orange-clad Lutherans got off and started swarming around the elementary school we were supposed to be painting. There was no one there to meet us or tell us what to do. The front doors were locked. I found a way in the back and Dad went in and looked around. There was no one in there either, but he said it was pretty rough, the worst school he'd seen, even. Finally a guy named Troy found us and took us to the playground (or, more accurately, the asphalt lot with a playplace sticking out of it) and gave us a motivational pep talk. We grabbed our brushes and went into our assigned classroom.

The school wasn't awful. It was workable, but not much more than that. It was kind of dirty and really old and run-down-looking. Wait, I know exactly how to describe it. My high school is under construction, and there are sections of it that are really old and about to be replaced. Because the kids and teachers know it's about to be destroyed and rebuilt all shiny and wonderful, they don't bother picking anything up, and they don't bother fixing any broken cabinet doors or desks or whatever. They just break everything and get everything dirty and don't bother fixing it up. And it was exactly like that.

We got up to the third floor and got to our room. First, we had to get all the staples and tape off the wall. That was more problematic than it sounds, because there were literally hundreds of staples in the walls and we didn't have any way to get them our other than our fingers. Some of them had been in that wall for decades and were not coming out in a hurry. We finally figured to used the corner of paint scrapers, but we didn't have enough scrapers, a fact that would haunt us for the rest of the day. When we got all the staplers out, we started scraping paint off the walls and doors, a task that took the rest of the morning. It was kind of boring and definitely strenuous work. There were at least six distinct layers of paint. And after it was all scraped, it had to be washed off so we wouldn't be painting dirt onto the walls.

We talked to Troy, the guy who was running the operation. He told us he used to be a ninth-grade science teacher, but he was attacked by a student in class and ended up waking up in the hospital. He decided to get out of teaching and started working on the schools themselves. He said that the painting was really important because the colors and the care taken in the painting made the school seem like a school and not a prison, hospital, or mental asylum like it used to.

We went to get lunch and they didn't have any veggie subs, so Troy's vegetarian friend took pity on me and gave me an extra PB&J she had packed. Then we got back to work.

We finished scraping and broke out the paint. I also went to the bathrooms (I couldn't see how those little girls in elementary school managed to write so high up on the wall, much less know the things they wrote about.) Then when I walked back, I saw no less than six kids scraping paint off one door. It made me want to crack a joke: "How many Lutherans does it take it scrape a door?"

We started painting, which was awesome, because we got to see the fruit of our labors. All the scraping started to seem less laborious when we saw how nice our classroom was. At two, we packed it in and started cleaning the brushes and straightening the rooms. A couple of people started a game of pick-up basketball with one of the volunteers. It was pretty awful--just the way I liked it. That was, I feel like I'm an asset to my team, rather than a liability.

After we got back to the hotel (Jimmy talked the bus driver into dropping us off at our corner), we hung out until dinner, when we went to a pretty nice place. The food was great. It was the first square meal I'd gotten since we've been in New Orleans--this city is really unfriendly to vegetarians.

Because we were running late, we had to take a cab, Jimmy's first-ever cab ride. It was pretty cool. The driver was very talkative. See, we're supposed to talk to people and learn their stories, then take it back home with us. So far, though, not many people have been real chatty.

The speakers that night were really good. There was a guy who had been raised in a hellfire-and-damnation church and started doubting his faith, but really discovered who God was and got ordained as a pastor. Then we heard from a lady from Africa who had started a program called 10,000 Girls, this really cool organization that helps girls get through school. It's doubled the graduation rate of girls in her country. How cool is that? Anyway, I think she was the best speaker so far, but they were all phenomenal.

We left the Superdome after hearing an awesome band called Group1Crew and headed over to what was called "the Fun Room" or something like that. It was at the Hilton (a fact that led to a spirited debate about the relative merits of Paris Hilton and her Disney doppleganger, London Tipton), and there were so many people trying to get to the same place that they shut down the escalators and made people walk.

I listened to the dueling pianos for the first twenty minutes, though the second half of the duel hadn't showed, so it was just piano. Then I went to find Emily and Jimmy. They were standing in line for mechanical bull riding. They were taking bets on bragging rights on how long they could stay on. I didn't want to do it at all, but then Jimmy remarked that it would look really bad if Emily, the dancer and volleyball player, went for it, but I, the black belt and rock climber, chickened out. I won't say they made me do it--I don't really believe people can be made to do anything--but I will say there was peer pressure involved. Anyway, after we saw a bunch of people fall off in what looked like horribly painful fashions, Emily went up and stayed on for 16 seconds, a very respectable score, considering that you were only allowed to hold on with one hand. I went into the ring and stared the plastic bull in the eye. Thanking heavens for my horseback riding experience, I got into the saddle with some measure of grace and gave the ride operator the thumbs-up.

After one close call, I fell off at 20 seconds, although I probably would have worked harder to stay on if I hadn't already beaten Emily's time. I gave my friends high-fives and Jimmy entered the ring. He stayed on for a full three seconds before falling off. It was one of the funniest things I've seen in my life. Sad but true.

Day Three--Stories

2009-07-24T15:59:00.000-07:00

The first story the brothers told us was about a time they were building a school in the Andes and they ran out of time and couldn't finish the school in time. They told the elder of the town that they'd come back later to finish it, and she said, "it's no problem, I'll call a minga." They didn't know what she was talking about. She went outside and shouted "MINGA!" at the top of her lungs. People in other villages across the mountain range heard her and passed along the message. People from miles and miles around dropped everything they were doing, walked hours to get there, and helped finish the school without asking for so much as a word of gratitude. He said the closest way they could describe it was "a riot for good." He said our culture has words for what's important to it, like money and cars. How many synonyms do we have for the word 'car'? But we don't even have anything close for 'minga.'

Then he told us a story about a young man named Santosh. He was the student council president of his high school in Sierra Lione. Hi school was invaded by anti-government soldiers. They took the teachers out back and shot them. Then they took all the kids into the auditorium and gave them a choice. The first option was to join the militia group. To be initiated, they would have to come up on stage and get a small cut made on their temple. Then the militia leaders would put some brown-brown (a mix of cocaine and gunpowder) into the cut. The brown-brown would make them emotionally unstable. Then a member of the militia would take them to their home and force them to shoot their mother and father. They did this so that the kids could never go back home once they had joined the militia.

The other choice was equally simple and equally dreadful. They could come up on stage and have their right hand cut off by a machete. The soldiers did this so that the kids could never join a government army--they could never pull a trigger.

Santosh walked to the front of the auditorium and said, "Mr. Rebel Leader, I am the student council president, so I am in charge of these students." He put his right hand on the desk at the front of the auditorium. The rebel leader was so mad he chose a dull machete on purpose. It took two strokes to sever his hand completely. Santosh ran out of the auditorium and through the night to reach the border, where UN troops managed to save his life.

When they met him, they asked him how he could continue to afford school. He took them to the back of his house and showed him beautiful carvings he had made. He did them all left-handed.

Then they said, "Santosh, that must have been the hardest, most painful decision you ever had to make." He said, "no, telling them to chop off my hand wasn't the hardest, most painful decision I ever had to make. Last week, I saw the rebel leader in the market. Holding out my left hand to shake his right hand as a gesture of forgiveness was the hardest thing I ever had to do."

They told us if he had the courage to do that, we could have the courage to do all things.

Day Three--We Will Rock You

2009-07-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

Mom woke us up early and we went into the city around nine-thirty. We checked in at the convention, a process that took several long hours. Our parents abandoned us for an hour for an orentation. We stood in an awkward semicircle for several minutes when we noticed a few people playing cards. Emily and I argued in hushed tones for a few moments about whether or not somebody should go over there and talk to them. Finally, I got up enough courage to give it a shot. They invited me to play and asked where I was from, but I didn't really start to feel like I was one of them until they started quoting Charlie the Unicorn. It was great. It seems like most Lutheran youth have exactly my sense of humor. Emily heard somebody call their cell phone 'a decroded piece of crap' a la Napoleon Dynamite. Seriously. These are my kind of people.

They gave us a pin for their church, and somebody else gave us Mardi Gras beads for telling us where we were from and what our church's name was. Not to mention, we got a free bag and Bible from the ELCA, as well as a t-shirt to wear on our ServantLife day. I think they gave us a t-shirt so we couldn't complain about getting our good shirts dirty. Only time will tell.

We ate lunch at Mother's Restaurant. We had a twenty or thirty-minute wait outside the restaurant in the blazing Louisianna summer sun, but it was worth it (for everybody else, at least. They didn't have any vegetarian food, because authentic Creole food is not authentic until smothered in seafood, so they gave me a bowl of rice. Our waitress did offer to make me a cheese sandwich, though. That was pretty nice of her.)

We went on a ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers island and I talked to a girl from South Dakota. She gave me a pin as well. Cool, huh?

EVERYBODY in New Orleans was wearing a matching t-shirt. EVERYBODY. Like, you couldn't look around without seeing thirty or so people in the same t-shirt. It was then that I knew we needed matching t-shirts. So, we went down to Walgreens and bought six for eleven dollars. I wanted to get them in a color, but all they had was plain white tees. Since we were using Sharpies to color them, white was probably the smartest choice for a t-shirt, but I was a little disappointed all the same.

I went back to the room and started making the t-shirts. I only managed to make two--Emily's and Mom's--before we had to leave, but they looked awesome. On the front, there's an arrow out of duct tape, pink for girls, green for guys. Underneath it says "I'm with Jesus." On the back, it has the name of the person, jersey-style. Below Emily's name, it says "Jesus, Justice, Jazz." Below Mom's, it has the logo for the event, with the cross standing out of the hurricane. They look awesome, I can't wait to wear them.

The opening ceremonies in the Superdome were beyond amazing. Even the walk there was awesome, swarms of people in multicolored shirts converging on one block. We had to wait a really long time to get in--getting 37,000 people in a building is no easy feat--but it was totally worth it. The place was packed. Picture the Coliseum. Now, picture all the seats inside. Picture people in every seat, cheering crazily. For Jesus. That's kind of what it's like.

One important detail--there were probably fifteen screens of varying sizes playing Bible verses, lyrics to songs, and close-ups of what was going on below. In the middle of all the screens, there was a cross, probably two hundred feet tall.

It started out with a couple of singers. My favorite song was "I Get Down." The lyrics went, "I get down, and He lifts me up" over and over again. The dance was crouching down, then throwing your hands up in the air on "He lifts me up." It was incredible to look out in the crowd and see a wall of people doing the motion.

The presiding Bishop came onto the stage in an automated bathtub, dressed in a bathrobe, ostenibly because he had been doing service work all the way down there and had been in the shower when it was his turn to speak. (It was hilarious. "Rub-a-dub-dub, our Bishop's in a tub.") He gave a speech about how important our work was and challenged us to take it home with us. A lady named Liz, who had built 220 homes for New Orleans residents, gave a speech about how important our service work was. A pair of brothers who ran a really cool program building schools in Africa told us two really cool stories. I'll put those in a seperate post.

Then all the lights went off and some bright strobe lights started flashing. We heard people doing "stomp-stomp-clap" ala 'We Will Rock You." Before three repetitions could go by, the entire stadium was doing it. The huge cross burst into light. A group came out and started singing a song called "We Will Love You." You can't imagine how powerful it was to feel the floor under your feet shaking from the vibrations of nearly forty thousand people stomping, clapping, and singing. It was the most intense experince I'm ever had.

We left the stadium en masse singing and laughing. We got into an empty Chinese restaurant and ordered before the placed filled up. Mom had some trouble getting her order, but apart from that, it was great.

Emily and I had to sleep on the floor because the hotel ran out of rooms with two queen beds, but we were so exhausted we didn't really care. It was a good day.

Day Two--On The Road Again

2009-07-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

[FYI--we ran out of gas money, but we managed to fix the RV so it'll run off of comments. Help us along, won't you?]

We passed through Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Not much of great incidence happened on the road, I'm sorry to report. Dad, Jimmy, Emily and I played 5-card draw and Dad cleaned us all out. However, we did stop at a Southern convenience story in Alabama. It was a whole 'nother world. For starters, there was an ice chest full of beer, wine, and Captain Morgan's in the very front of the store. It was all in to-go cans...which only let us to assume that it was meant to be drunk immediately after purchase, which is creepy when you consider that it was a gas station.

But the wonders of the Southern convenience store didn't stop there. There was, once again, a walk-in beer cave. In the CONVENIENCE STORE. And this was a nice convenience store, too, not some creepy place with drug dealers on the corner. They also had a jar full of "semi-boneless" pigs' feet right next to the beef jerky. Probably because of all the beer, the counter was protected by a sheet of bulletproof glass with closeable windows.

Jimmy had some money burning a hole in his pocket, so he bought me a stick of chapstick and bought some poppycock to share. Poppycock is like crackerjack but it has caramel-covered almonds instead of chocolate-covered peanuts. Don't worry, it's not some kind of alcoholic beverage...although think he could have gotten away with buying it.

[We have some pictures of the wondrous Chevron gas station, which we'll share as soon as we can figure out how to upload them.]

Life was pretty quiet until we reached Lake Pontchartrain. Then I amazed Jimmy by reading 200 pages of 'Salem's Lot in three hours and told Justin off for talking incessantly about Mardi Gras and immediately felt bad about it (though not bad enough to flash him.)

Once we got into the city, things started to get more interesting. There were abandoned hurricane-destroyed buildings sitting side-by-side with new developments. It was weird. But the weirdness of that was far eclipsed by us seeing a hooker on the sidewalk four blocks from our campground.

The campsite was not the best. It was pretty much a parking lot with trees, and there were people towards the end of the lot who were definitely residents. The owner had a long conversation with my mom, only some of which I heard. Apparently, he returned to his house after the flood and found it burned and looted. With the money he got from FEMA, he set up this campsite/trailer park. He was a really nice guy, and I feel very safe leaving our RV in his care.

We ate dinner and wrote the first of our postcards. (For those of you who donated to the cause, you'll be getting one sooner or later.)

After much debate, we decided to go into the city. As soon as we were out of the car, Dad warned us all that somebody would come up to us, tell us he could tell us were we got our shoes, then tell us we had our shoes on our feet in Louisiana on Bourbon Street, then ask us for money. I rolled my eyes. Then we passed a knot of people with one guy in the middle saying, "...on your feet, in Louisiana on Bourbon Street!"

"Oh my gosh, he's psychic!" we whispered. Then he started following us, which really creeped us out.

We walked around for quite some time looking for a restaurant to get dessert in the French Quarter. There were plenty of options, but not many that would admit under-eighteens. Jimmy and I found what we here sure was a hash den. It was full of low-slung couches and people laughing hysterically for no reason. Suspicious.

Oh, just so you know--the place was TEEMING with Lutherans. Everywhere you look, Lutherans. You could tell. The men were wearing bright Hawaiian shirts and sandals, sometimes with socks. The women were generally shortish and roundish and had shortish, roundish hair. The kids...well, they all looked, talked, and walked exactly like me. And they outnumbered locals twenty to one. Lutherans everywhere. It was strange. It was like walking into a city of clones. For the first time, I started to get really excited about the trip. We also ran into the W-boro Lutherans by pure chance, which was kind of surreal.

We got dessert, and Justin got a half-pound of shrimp. Then we headed home.

Day One--Beat It

2009-07-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

Jimmy is reading over my shoulder and will probably be making a lot of snide comments, so please excuse if this entry is weird.

We started out at the crack of nine o'clock, after everybody had hung around our house and waited for half an hour. Oddly, the trip got off without a hitch. We didn't hit any dogs or anything. After an hour or two on the road, Emily got out her laptop so I could get some work done on my new story. Unfortunately, she then felt that she was entitled to look over my shoulder and make fun of my characters. My ego irreplaceably damaged, I choked back tears, put the laptop away, and took up Jimmy on his suggestion to teach us how to play five-card draw.

Five-card draw took a good two and a half hours of our day, especially because Emily kept looking at my cards, but the whole game changed when we started betting. Of course, we weren't betting anything--we were using BananaGrams as chips, consonant worth five, vowels worth ten--but even betting BananaGrams brought out a whole new aspect of the game. It was fun... but I definitely can see how people get addicted to gambling. I think you'll never have a problem if you never bet anything more valuable than vowels and consonants, though, never fear.

We stopped and ate lunch, which was even less interesting than it sounds. It was, however, delicious.

Dad broke out the guitars and we spent another good bit of time playing guitar. Jimmy taught me how to play the intro to "Dueling Banjos." If you ask me, that is worth the price of admission right there.

I read a little and crocheted a little. It's funny how when you're traveling, the minutes drag but the hours fly. Before I knew it, we were in Tennesee and had been on the road for a good eight hours.

I complained about being bored, so Dad suggested we tell a round-robin story. It started off with a fictional Jimmy and his friends creating gold by burning old furniture and ended with the ghost of Michael Jackson facing off with *NSYNC. You want to know the worst part? It was still boring.

We four kids played a game called Blokus, which is like Tetris, only with four people and in reverse. Justin compared the relative merits of each of the five Resident Evil games and the weapons therein for the better part of the late afternoon.

Just when we were starting to get restless, we made it into the campsite. However, the fun didn't stop there. Our Subaru Forester got a dead battery and required pushing from the entrance to the campsite. (However, as Jimmy remarked, everybody secretly wants to push a car at some point in their lifetime, and we all jumped at the chance.) After that fiasco was taken care of, Justin and I scouted out the camping grounds. I was looking for some rocks big enough to climb and lamenting that I'd left my climbing shoes at home, and Justin was search for a game hall. A video game hall, to be precise. He seemed to be operating under the not-quite-correct assumption that the rural campsites of the American Heartland are teeming with video game halls. I thought it kinder not to correct him. Even if you never find the Holy Grail, isn't it the journey that counts?

Emily wasn't feeling well and Dad and I made a Tylenol run. We followed the TomTom past two different mini-mart gas stations that were built about thirty feet away from each other. I never understand when I see two gas stations side-by-side. That's like building a Target at the same mall as a K-Mart, it just doesn't make sense. The two gas stations were on opposite sides of the spectrum of the gas-station-niceness-scale, however: one was shiny, clean Mega-Star, the other looked like the kind of place where you could go in the back and buy crystal meth. It was a charming little dichotomy. I wondered if there was a rivalry between the two stores or if the coexisted peacefully.

We followed the TomTom, which led us down a dark alley of abandoned warehouses, restaurant-supply stores, and self-storage centers. I fully expected to drive straight into a Steven King novel, it was that kind of place--nothing in-your-face creepy about it, but a little off all the same. We got to the store in question and found it closed, so our only option was to go back to the convince stores.

"Which do you want to go to, the Mega-Star or the other one?" my dad asked.
"The other one," I answered immediately. "It looks more interesting."
"It looks a little seedy to me," he said, as he turned in and the entire wall devoted to alcoholic beverages came into view.
"That's what makes it interesting," I said.

I had to wait in the car while the engine was running because we had run into so much trouble jumping the battery once we pushed the car to the campsite, but I wished I had the chance to go in. I saw from the window something advertised as the "Walk-In Beer Cave." I think I'd really like to see some of the people who frequent a store with a Walk-In Beer Cave. I think it would have been quite the experience.

We got the Tylenol and went back to our campsite, and that's when we ran into trouble. We were in the middle of dinner when an RV drove up and a guy got out of it and told us we were in his campsite. The campsite we booked was two spots down. He asked us to move, which seems like a reasonable request on the surface, until you consider the facts. All he had at the campsite in question were three candles on the picnic table and two pieces of wood in the camp ring. My family, on the other hand, had to bring all our dinner dishes inside in a hurry, move Jimmy and Justin's tent, move our car, and disconnect all the wires to and from the RV, then reconnect them at the other campsite. Which we did.

Well. Um, I guess I should give the guy the benefit of the doubt. But when I meet a person who thinks it makes sense to make a family move their tent, car, and RV from Campsite 1 to Campsite 2 when all they would have to do to take Campsite 2 is move three small candles off the picnic table, well, I start to doubt the wisdom of holding popular elections.

Tell My Mother, Tell My Father

2009-07-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

So, tomorrow is the Big Day. Tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, we are Moving Out. I have my packing done, mostly, but I still have some entertainment items to bring. I need to grab our RISK game board, a crapload of books, every Wii game we own, our chess set (Jimmy and I are planning to get really smart at chess over the trip and come back and amaze our friends and family), and put a bunch of new music and stuff on my Zune.

I've also been listening to Shinedown, Justin's favorite band, to try and get in the mood for the trip. Justin promised to bring several Shinedown CDs so we could suffer--I mean, enjoy--the band's best music all the way down to New Orleans. I don't know if Shinedown is prolific enough to have 16 hours of music, but I certainly don't think I want to find out. I've been listening to "Second Chance" by Shinedown--the only song of their's I have--to psych myself up, but the more I listen to it, the more I hate it. The lyrics are pretty cool ("even the man in the moon disappeard/somewhere in the stratosphere"), but the song has no real beat. That's all I really need out of a song, a good beat. That's the only common feature between my two current favorite songs, "Single Ladies" by Beyonce and "Smooth Criminal" by Alien Ant Farm.

Jimmy said that "Second Chance" is actually not one of Shinedown's better songs, it's just the most popular. I hope he's right. Sorry, Justin, but I hate your band.

Further Listening:
Compare:
Single Ladies
Smooth Criminal

Contrast:
Second Chance

Picture Time!

2009-07-18T07:04:00.001-07:00

This is us outside of our RV. (I'm really disregarding everything I've ever learned about Internet safety, huh?) From left to right, you see: Dad, Mom, Justin, me, Jimmy, and Emily. (That thing on my foot is a cast. You know, because my toe is broken. It feels much better now, though, thank for asking. :P )

Take Nothing For The Journey

2009-07-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

This post has nothing to do with New Orleans, by the way, but it certainly involves travel.

In an earlier post, I claimed I could run from my house to Kelly and Dallas's house without breaking a sweat. When I got home from 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' at 4 o'clock, I thought I'd take a nap and get up at 6, in plenty of time to get a ride to Young Life. I woke up at 7:54, stared at my alarm clock in incomprehension, cursed the world and everything in it, then got up to call a neighbor to see if I could get a ride from them. I misdialed and got some lady named Anita. Our conversation went as follows:

Sarah: Hey, it's Sarah Johnson. I was wondering if I could get a ride to Young Life.
(indiscriminate background noise)
Anita: Um, okay, sure.
(more indiscriminate background noise, this time with an overlay of awkward silence)
Sarah: So, are you leaving soon?
Anita: ...
Sarah: May I ask who I'm speaking to?
Anita: This is Anita.
Sarah: Oh, I'm sorry, I have the wrong number.
Anita: Okay.
Sarah: Um, bye. (thinking: you creepy freak)

I called my neighbors, and they had apparently already left. Cursing the world, everything in it, and Anita, I put on my shoes and polished off the last of my water. I thought briefly about calling Kelly, but I was afraid that she would think my parents neglected me or that I was homeless because I always wait outside and so she's never actually seen me come out of my house. Plus, I had made a bold statement. I had to back it up. It was time to run. I left my Bible and study book at home, figuring that they'd slow me down.

The running only lasted to about the bottom of the driveway before I gave up on it. I didn't want to stay on the road too long, because I thought I knew a great shortcut to get to their house. I walked down a little lane full of McMansions and cut across one of the gigantic lawns. Some Jack Russel Terriers barked at me, almost drowning out what sounded like the moo of a cow in the distance.

"No way," I thought. "No one keeps cows around here. Horses, maybe. No cows."

Yes, cows. If it sounds like a cow, it's a cow. I got to the top of a rise only to see that most of the valley before me was fenced off and filled with horses and cows. I tried going around the cow corral only to find out that all the corrals shared some fences, so unless I was willing to cut across them and put myself at the cows' mercy, I was going to have to go around through a forest. I chose the forest, heading in a vaguely southwesterly direction.

So there I was, hugging the fenceline, following what I can only assume was a deer trail, being watched intently by three brown cows, wondering what I had gotten myself into. The trees and brush were pretty thick, and a couple of times I had to stamp on prickler vines to get them out of the way. About then was when I started praying. I got neared the cow barn and decided that if I didn't want to be caught trespassing, I should steer clear of the barn. The trees thinned out and I headed uphill to what looked like a meadow full of Queen Anne's Lace. Wonders of wonders, it was a meadow full of Queen Anne's Lace. There were a few houses around, one with a slatted wooden fence, which looked far more inviting than the barbed-wire fence seperating the meadow from the next field over. I decided to duck through the wooden fence, soujourn briefly in the person's yard, and head over to the next field. It was then that I glanced southeast through a gap in the trees.

I saw the soccer complex. For those of you who know anything about the layout of my town, the soccer complex is the LAST thing you want to see while you're trying to get to Kelly and Dallas's house. The soccer complex is in the complete opposite direction. I readjusted my course and started heading northwest-ish across the grass field. I made it to the next treeline and, wonder of wonders, I beheld Kelly and Dallas's housing development. I was almost there! All I had to do was find a gap in the barbed-wire fence, navigate a hill, and cross a field of potatoes!

My first (and only) lucky break was that there was a place where the fence had been completely beat down by trespassers who had gone before me. I got across the rusty barbed wire without so much as a scrape. I walked along the edge of the potato field and cut across one of Kelly's neighbors' lawns to get to the little road that winds around the development. By this point, all bets were off. I was flicking beads of sweat off my face, and I could tell by the amount of light still left in the sky that I was minutes, if not hours, late. But, being so close, there was no way I was turning back now.

I got to their house, walked in (you're supposed to, I wasn't adding 'breaking and entering' to my list of misdemeanors by wandering into their home), and took off my shoes. Everybody else had already gone downstairs, so I got a paper towel and wiped off my face. Then I went down to the basement, apologized for being 10 minutes late, and gladly poured myself a big glass of water. Home sweet home.

'He told them: "Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic." ' Luke 9:3

44 fluid ounces and counting.

2009-07-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

We're supposed to starting drinking eight glasses of water a day now, the week before, so we go to Louisanna completely hydrated and used to drinking so much water in a day. The ELCA even sent us water bottles with the event logo on one side and fluid ounce tick marks on the other. It's a good idea, in principle. In practice, though, not so much.

It is seventy degrees in sunny Pennsyltucky. It is not hot. My body has no use for the water. I have drank 44 fluid ounces in the last five hours and summarily discarded 44 fluid ounces in the last five hours. Do you know how much water 44 fluid ounces is? A lot, my friends. A lot.

The weirdest thing is, even though my body has rejected all 44 fluid ounces, I'm still really thirsty. The back of my throat is nigh unbearably dry. I'm even getting a slight thirst headache. I would like to tell my body, 'if you're thirsty, for heaven's sake, stop sending me to the bathroom every ten minutes!'

In fact, the more I drink, the thirstier I get. There must be salt in this water. Tasteless salt. Or maybe there's some weird chemical in these bottles. The ELCA is trying to poison us. Maybe fumes from the Sharpie I used to write my name, address, and church on it.

I think that perhaps I am desperately ill and there's something terribly wrong with my kidneys and I'll start shriveling away from dehydration and they'll put me on IV but it won't help and I'll die of thirst surrounded by fluids and my last words will be "water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink."

Wow. I really need to stop watching House. A few nights ago, I had a dream that Cuddy and I were being chased around a historical landmark by a lunatic. That should have been my first sign that it was time to cut back. (Although it would be kind of cool to have a wasting dehyrdation disease if it meant I got be be on House.)

Can you believe this crazy talk? I've had a good five more fluid ounces since the start of this post and the sanity of the writing is only decreasing. Take it from me, guys--water is not your friend.

What can I say, the guy writes a good thriller. So he doesn't like the Pope. What am we supposed to do, flog the guy?

2009-07-12T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have been working on an awesome new idea for a book for about two weeks now. (It doesn't have a title yet... I've just been calling it Mambo Number Five because it's my fifth novel. Aaaaand that little tidbit right there seems to me to be more revealing than any Rorschach test could ever be. OH NO, MY SOUL IS BARE TO YOU.) I've written 10,000 words so far without even noticing. For my non-writing friends, that never ever happens. Usually, every word after the first scene has a little bit of drudgery about it, sometimes more, sometimes less. Never is it so fun and painless than you don't even notice that you've written 10,000 words. Never. On top of that, the idea is very promising. It has everything I could ever want out of a book--romance, nerdy main characters, epic-osity, and a coup in the very near future.

I didn't think much of it until now, but perhaps this is the way God is blessing my life via the youth gathering. If I was going to a camp, I'd be focusing whatever that camp was about--tae kwon do, writing, the beach, whatever. Instead, I'm thinking about religion a lot. Did I mention the main character of Mambo Number Five is a theologian?

Some would say it's silly or trivial to attribute literary inspiration to God, and others would say it's ridiculous because bad people get good ideas, too, just look at Dan Brown (who I actually kinda like, sorry, Pastor Craig). I say, the rain falls on the Jews and the Gentiles alike.

Thank heavens for that, or America would be suffering a very severe drought right about ow.

Never mind. The point is, I was totally wrong in my last post. Strike it from the record. God is awesome after all.

Whining, Complaining, and Bitterness-Everything You've Come To Expect From A Vacation With Sarah Johnson

2009-07-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

It was not my idea to attend this conference. I had several places I would rather be. Six, actually. Let me list them for you.

Going to the Governor's Honors Program, a FREE six-week-camp available to rising juniors and seniors in which promising students from around the state are packed off to a college campus to learn about writing with like-minded peers. I've dreamed about doing this since I found about it in 5th grade. I couldn't go because one of the weeks was during the conference. It will probably be cancelled next year because the state of Pennsylvania is in massive debt.*
Alpha Fantasy/Sci-Fi Writer's Camp. Once again, couldn't go because it was scheduled for the same week as the conference.
Young Life Camp. Young Life is this awesome Bible study thing that I've been involved with for the past few months. Young Life Camp is guaranteed to be the best week of your life or your money back. It was on the same week. I had to sit through three months of talk and pictures about how awesome Young Life Camp is while Kelly and Dallas tried to entice everybody else to go.
Black-belt camp. I went once two years ago and loved it. I wanted to go again. Guess what weekend it fell on.
A trip to Rehobath Beach with Elijah. This one hasn't yet come to pass--they leave for the beach a few days after the end of the conference--but Mom said we probably won't make it back to the North before they leave.

Embittered? Me? No. But wait--it gets better.

Elijah and I are both pretty high up in tae kwon do. I'm a black belt, he's some convoluted belt that he assured me was pretty close to the top. So, to see who was superior, we decided to have a no-contact sparring match.

Bad idea, as it turns out. No-contact sparring is very safe in most aspects, but there is the danger that both of you will kick at the same time. We both kicked at the same time. Crunch. It didn't hurt so bad at first (remember, I made it out of black belt camp with only light contusions) but by the next morning, my entire pinkie toe was bruised black and red and swollen and most definitely broken. Because I am stupid, this did not stop me from going to a carnival the next night and walking around for an hour, then walking the two and a half miles to the car. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

All I'm going to say is, God is in control. He knows everything I ever wanted to do in the summer would fall onto the one week it could never happen. He knows I'm going to go into a service project with a limp and a broken toe. He knows I am not looking forward to this trip. So He must have something really awesome in store for me on this trip. If not, I will seriously doubt the benevolence of God.

Just kidding. Don't have a heart attack, Pastor Craig.

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*Fun fact--my best friend got accepted and had no ELCA obligation to hold her back. Every time I've talked to her in the last four weeks, she's regaled me with tales of how amazing the classes have been, how cool the people are, and how surrealistically awesome the whole experince is.

The Cast

2009-07-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

Last time, it was only my family going on the trip. This year, it's a little more complicated. I thought I'd provide a list of the personas dramatis for your reading ease.

Sarah Johnson--Our Intrepid Reporter, your eyes and ears on the front.
Dad (né Kurt)--Our Fearless Leader and RV-driver.
Mom (née MaryBeth)--Our manager, chef, and spiritual elder. Will not be driving the RV, except to inspire the rest of us to pray.
Emily--my 14-year-old sister, tall, blond, and beautiful--all things that can only be an obstacle our ELCA assignment, manual labor.
Justin--16-year-old aspiring pro wrestler and Shinedown fan.
Jimmy--17-year-old Thurmont Thespian and family friend.
Jesus-- the Messiah, Prince of Peace, the Christ, Son of God, Emmanuel, Savior, Lord of Heaven and Earth, etc.

The following aren't coming with us, but may be mentioned:

Rachel--at eleven, too young to attend the Youth Gathering, but not too young to wish she was going. She is staying with Grandma Piggy and Elijah for the duration of our trip.
Elijah--Sarah, Emily, and Rachel's awesome cousin who visits every summer from Florida.
Jeanie--Justin's mom, possibly the coolest mom ever (after my mom, of course.)
Sally--Jimmy's mom, currently challenging Jeanie for the title, aided by her excellent culinary skills.
Pastor Craig--Oh, Pastor, my pastor. Yeah. Pretty much says it all.
Dallas and Kelly--a married couple who run this awesome Bible study/youth group I go to called Young Life. Coincidentally, we're practically neighbors. I could run to their house without breaking a sweat (which I probably will do some Wednesday when I can't scrounge up a ride.)
Grandma Piggy*--my maternal grandmother, founder of the Thurmont Thespians, currently trying to wrangle 50 children into performing a high-quality version of The Hobbit by July 16th. Sarah believes that said children would be more aptly suited to a musical version of Lord of the Flies, and Grandma Piggy is in far more need of your prayers than anyone attending the conference.

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*If you don't know, don't ask.

Introduction

2009-07-12T17:30:00.000-07:00

Hey, all it's been awhile. First of all, let me say that it blows me away that people still remember my first travel-blog, Adventurer. When Grammie said one of her friends (somebody whose never even met me, much less someone who donated 1/4 of my DNA and is therefore obligated to fawn over me) asked if I was going to do another blog for the New Orleans trip and the New England trip, 'amazed' would be too mild a word. Suffice to say, it really warms my heart that you all still care.

Secondly, let me also say that since the fateful 2006 trip, I've written four novels and sundry shorter pieces. So my writing style has improved a lot (at least, I hope so). I can promise that this time around, my grammar will be correct, the boring digressions will be excised, and the sentence structure will be intelligible. It's a tall order, I know, but I'll rise to the occasion.

Last, I totally failed at making this blog in a timely fashion, so a lot of trip-related stuff has already happened. To catch up, I'm posting a bunch of anecdotes that occurred a while ago. The time-stamps on the entries will say it all happened within an hour, but really a lot of these things happened weeks ago. Just don't think about it too hard and you'll be fine.

Hope you like it!
--Sarah