Otter's Rock

• Y'know, it's a good thing that when I pick up washclothes 10 for $1.99 in the "College" section of Target to use as cleaning cloths (I know, but I wasn't going to haul worn-out t-shirts across the country), I think to myself, "Self, I bet washcloths this cheap are cheaply made, so I will not just chuck them in the laundry with everything else because they will probably run." I wonder how many unsuspecting college students pull their first load of laundry out of the washer and freak because everything's blue or green or pink ....

• I cannot be a member of the community choir I wanted to join because it rehearses the same night most committee meetings are for church. I will, however, be able to participate in a community orchestra; it should be interesting, because I've been in bands before but never an orchestra.

• I have two prompts 3/4 done, and am not starting another until one of them is done and posted.

• tgawarmychris came and visited me on Sunday, watched me preach (which went well). It was good to see him; I've missed him while he was on internship, and now that he's going back to class, I'm on internship!

htbthomas wrote me a fic for my birthday. It's a fun twist on the Superman Returns cliche.

I needed the pick-me-up. I leave for Pennsylvania at six in the morning on Friday, and there are some things that simply have to be done between now and then. Such as finishing the bridesmaid dresses. I thought I was in good time; all that needed to be done was the final fitting to make sure everything fits right with the zipper in, and mark where the hem needed to be. It had been fitted before I put the zipper in, so I wasn't anticipating it needing any alteration. Yeah. It needed an inch and a half taken in at the waist. That's not "take in the zipper an eighth inch or so," that's "take it apart and put it back together." I have no idea how I screwed up that badly. So, yeah, a lot more work and a lot more stress than I really wanted my last few days at home.

I want a kitchen with a large island. Or a peninsula. Because cutting fabric for sewing is easier on the kitchen table than it is on the floor, but it's still hard on the back. Those extra few inches of height make so much difference.

Right now, I'm working on the bridesmaids dresses for my brother's wedding. Two cotton sundresses (it's going to be outside in Hawaii). I am so glad my future sister-in-law said "Just buy the extra yard and a half on the bolt" when we were getting the fabric. Because the skirts are very full, and each panel is to wide to fit on 45" fabric folded in half (the standard fabric width), so you're supposed to unfold it and double it up (so you can still cut two pieces at a time). Except ... they're obviously assuming you're working with a fabric that has no "up" or "down," because it doesn't work at all if you do. The way they tell you to arrange the pattern pieces on the fabric to cut it out usually sucks, but this was worse than usual. I needed actually quite a bit of the extra yard to make it work. Fortunately, it's cotton, which is so easy to work with. It just lies there flat and straight on the table, needs a bare minimum of pinning, it's great. The lining, on the other hand, is thin rayon (breathes better than polyester, and these are designed with Hawaii in mind, after all). Rayon lining is a bear to work with--it slides around on you if you so much as look at it cross-eyed. Even if you use lots of pins, it's going to find some way to slide around ... and it's real easy to have it slide on you when you're putting a pin in, and the more pins you put in the more chance you have of that. On the other hand, if you use too few pins, you risk a catastrophic slip when you're actually cutting.

It's an easy pattern to alter to fit--it's a halter top dress with a relatively high waist, so only the bust and waist measurements matter. One girl has a size-14 bust and size-16 waist (there's no size 15 in between), the other has a size-14 waist and is just under a size-14 bust. Very simple to make the adjustments. Pattern sizes are much different than ready-to-wear sizes--I'd say both girls are probably a six or an eight in ready-to-wear. See, stores have been slowly increasing sizes in ready-to-wear garments for decades, because playing to the vanity of the women trying on garments sells clothes. If you can say "Oh, I must have lost weight--I'm not really a fourteen, I'm a twelve!" you're more likely to buy it than if you say "yeah, still as fat as ever." (This is also why sizes can vary so dramatically from store to store and brand to brand--they haven't all been increasing at the same rate.) Pattern sizes, on the other hand, have stayed exactly the same. If you take out a pattern from 1950 and look at the measurements they give, a size-14 is the same as a size-14 today. This is actually a bit of a problem, for me--I didn't start buying ready-to-wear clothing for myself until college. I'm not a clotheshorse, never went shopping for fun; all my store-bought clothes came from birthdays and Christmas, and the only time I had to actually look at the sizes myself was when I was looking at patterns and fabric to make something for fun. So when I went away to college and started to buy my clothes myself, my first instinct was to grab twelves or fourteens, and then wonder in the dressing room why they didn't fit, before going "duh, sizes are different" and going out to find something my size. (First few times, it took like four trips out to the rack to grab the right size; I am so not joking.) I still don't shop for clothes much; I'm only now getting to the point where my first instinct is to grab the right size in ready-to-wear.

We just checked out of Mt. Bachelor Village (in Central Oregon, just outside of Bend). Mom and Dad were here for a Professional Photographers of Oregon conference. Verdict: it's an okay place for a professional conference, but sucks as a resort because it's small and there's not much to do besides swim in the pool--they don't even have paths or trails to walk around the place, if you don't drive you have to walk on the road. If you want to go to a resort in Central Oregon, I'd suggest either Inn at the Seventh Mountain or Sun River instead of this place.

Most Annoying Thing: all the wide expanses of green lawn. People think Oregon is rainy, but that's only the coast and the Willamette Valley (the Northwest corner of the state). The rest of the state is one huge desert. You don't hear much about it because most of the people in Oregon live in the Valley or along the coast. (Although Bend is growing fast, and has been for a few years.) I do not consider myself an environmentalist, mostly because most "environmentalists" in Oregon are nuts, or at least they're the ones who seem to be in control of the environmentalist groups. (Don't get me started on the Spotted Owl idiocy or the problems in the way they're regulating the timber industry and all the public forests.) However, I am a huge fan of common sense, and of being good stewards to the creation that God has given us.

Huge green lawns in a desert is NOT GOOD STEWARDSHIP and it is also STUPID. (Mt. Bachelor Village has lots of huge green lawns.) The water could be put to much better use. The water table in the area has been decreasing at an alarming rate and everyone knows it because there are already too many people living here for sustainable water use at current levels of usage, and it's getting worse because of all the people moving into the area. They're going to be in a world of hurt in a few years because there aren't many big rivers in the Oregon desert, so once the water table is used up they're SOL. Bend is almost certainly too far south to be able to draw from the Columbia and its tributaries, and it's too far east to draw from the Willamette. (Not to mention they'd have to get the water over/through the Cascade Mountains, to draw from the Willamette.

So, after a week at home to relax after the end of school for the year, we've taken our annual trip to the beach for Memorial Day weekend. And this year? We actually have a nice day! Sunny! Warm! So warm, that one only needed a sweater on the beach--and it might get warm enough this afternoon to actually wear a swimsuit with nothing on top of it! It's been years since it's gotten that warm while we're here for the weekend.

We always come to the Nelscott area--it's one of those little towns that got incorporated into Lincoln City a while back, along Highway 101. The beach is beautiful and huge, and there are mostly condos and vacation homes instead of hotels along the beach, so the population density on the beach is fairly low. For those of you not familiar with Oregon, beaches are all public property, owned by the department of transportation. You can own the land right along to the beach, and not allow any access across your property, but the beach itself is open to everyone, and they're usually pretty good about regular public access points to the nice beaches. (The beach technically belongs to the department of Transportation, not Parks and Rec, for some odd reason.) ANyway, the other thing about the Oregon coast is that the water is incredibly cold--as in, even in the height of summer, your feet go completely numb after a few minutes of wading. Also, the ocean is powerful. You really have to respect it. Even on the calmest days, it's never going to be gentle. The Coast Guard makes all it's people do training rotations in Oregon, because if they can handle the Oregon coast, they can handle any US coastal waters anywhere.

By the way: the Dory Cove was a restaurant that always had the best chowder anywhere--and the rest of the food was awesome too. They never took reservations, and there was always a huge line to get in. It burned down a couple years ago, and the owners were retirement age so they just took the insurance money and didn't start it up again. BUT. The cook and the whole staff took the recipes and opened up their own restaurant with the same menu and recipes. It's called Captain Ron's, and it's here in Nelscott (Lincoln City) along Highway 101. Highly recommended. Check it out, if you're ever in the area.

The hard thing is that this is the first Memorial Day Weekend without Grandpa. We've always come over with Dad's parents and Aunt Jackie. Every year we came back to the same motel, until it was too hard for Grandpa--it wasn't very handicap accessible, so we switched to a new hotel, which was better. Except ... this year, he's not here. And that's hard.

The Faithful Remnant (i.e. those who haven't gone home for Easter) are having a potluck Easter dinner Sunday after church. As I was in the store buying stuff for it, I realized--this is the first time I've ever taken something to a potluck myself, rather than having my parents provide something for the family's contribution. Wow.

(Of course, I still had to consult with Mom about quantities and such. Ah, well.)

So, it turns out that within two days of the intern matching workshop, half the middler class and a couple of teachers have the flu. I'm thinking it's not a coincidence.

( Cut for whining about symptoms )

Matching workshop went well on Thursday and Friday, except for me writing the time down wrong for one of my interviews and missing it. Lot of good sites and supervisors. We'll see what happens with that.

Despite the weather, I got back to school after Christmas and J-term all in one piece. No, it wasn't weather that delayed the planes--it was weather that delayed my getting to the airport! It snowed the day I flew back to Gettysburg, and the Willamette Valley isn't very prepared to deal with snow. By 9:00 that morning they were barely starting to de-ice the secondary highways. We thought we left in plenty of time to get to the airport, but we weren't expecting it to take over an hour to drive the first fifteen miles. We got to the airport just in time to wave at my plane as it left. Southwest was easy to deal with, I got to BWI only an hour later than I had planned, and when my baggage got left behind they shipped it up to the seminary for me so I didn't even have to go down and get it. It was a positive experience.

I'm really starting to look forward to internship, much as I love the seminary; next year, I'll be in a parish full time! As of today there are 14 internship sites in Pennsylvania, five in Virginia, two in Maryland, one in Alabama, one in Florida, and one in Washington. More should be trickling in over the next few weeks, some from outside the area. It's kind of fun to go up to the Field Ed office and look at the booklets each church has put together about their site and their supervisor. That's why they trickle in--there's quite a bit of paperwork involved in applying for an intern, and a lot of churches try to do it in the lull between Christmas and Easter. Not that there's much of a break between the two this year; Easter is extremely early this year. (It's a moveable feast--it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.) This year, it falls on March 23; the earliest it could possibly ever be is March 22. And it hasn't been that early since 1818. What this means for Western churches is that the down time between Christmas and Easter (the two great festivals of the year) is extremely short.

My classes are good so far. I'm in Exodus: Shaping a Community, Intro to Systematic Theology, Current Trends in Adult Christian Education, The Church Year, Stewardship Theory/Mission, and Funeral Proclamation. Exodus should be interesting; if nothing else it will make me practice my Hebrew. I have a lot of friends in that class, and the professor knows her subject well. Systematic Theology is a required course, and it deals with theology in a, well, systematic manner. It's basically how you take a few underlying theological principles and develop them out and apply them to other matters. What it's good for is helping people deal with new questions and situations by helping them build up a coherent theological model/outlook that they can then use to figure out things that maybe aren't obvious. It's a good way to do theology, but not the only way or necessarily even the best way; Luther, for example, wasn't a systematic theologian--he was an occasional one, that is, he wrote treatises about specific problems and ideas, rather than trying to cover everything. The Church Year is about the liturgical rhythms of the church and the theological reasons behind them, and the way Christians look at time in general--plus an interesting bit of liturgical trivia here and there.

Funeral Proclamation should be interesting. We have to preach two funeral sermons, and they can be for anyone real or imagined. (They've had funeral sermons for family members, before; they've also had Darth Vader and the Road Runner.) Only one can have died of old age. We can pick our own texts. I'd like to do my first one on a character, warm up with someone who's not real, and the second on a real person. I know who I'd like to do for the real person, I'm waiting on a few things to start planning. But if you have any suggestions for a fictional character, please let me know. My first thought was either Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) or Doctor Daniel Jackson from SG-1, but then I considered the theological implications of preaching a funeral sermon for someone who resurrected and thought better of it.

After talking with the director, I won't be singing in Schola Cantorum this semester, much as I have enjoyed it in the past. Schola is a community choir that meets here on the seminary campus. You have to audition to get in, and they do great music. I will miss it. Speaking of things I miss, as you all know I enjoy writing just for fun. Unfortunately, it's the kind of thing I don't do regularly unless I set aside time daily to do it, which I haven't done since college. I think I'm going back to that, because I do enjoy it when I do it.