Silliness Abounds

So...I decided that I am going to start posting my favorite work pictures, which will hopefully keep me laughing at work rather than crying that I'm going to miss everyone.

Installment 1: the silly pictures...

Maia and I at Botany Bay...I'm pretty sure behind the camera Kim is whining about why we always take pictures together and leave her out :)













Princess Day 2008...In case you were unaware, there is an International Princess Day the first Friday of December. It's pretty much the best random holiday ever to celebrate at work being that you can wear tiaras and eat cupcakes (or tiny brownies as it were). And no I have no idea why I am making that face. Maia says it's because she just told me I wasn't allowed to eat the rest of the brownies myself.













Princess Day 2006...as you can see, we were a little more into it the first time around with tiaras and donuts for the 'princesses' and the 'commoners'. Awesome.















However, Princess Day is not the ONLY time you get to wear a tiara at DNR! You can also wear one on your 30th birthday :)



















The decoration of Julia's door when she went home for wedding dress shopping. Yes, we taped a copied Julia head on everyone of the dresses. We were OUT OF CONTROL for real. I mean, honestly, when is this acceptable to do to a person?



















This is what happens when you get a new installment of DNR hats at work. See Kim, we DO have pictures of you :)















We got to wear the cool DNR hats when we used to have the money and staff to do these cool open house things where the public could come out and see all the different programs we do and get to touch the animals and go on a boat ride...and eat hot dogs. Maia and I were in the food tent. And we made a LOT of hot dogs! Clearly too many that we were this excited about it.













Here we have the first ever ACE Basin sweatshop. Anna and I had to copy and bind 120 copies of these for an event we were putting on. In addition to the fact the speakers didn't get us stuff until too late to be able to do this on a weekday and hence we had to come in on a Saturday, there was also an issue going on with the copier so that every once and a while it just randomly didn't make a copy of one of the pages. You know, just for fun. So we had to count the pages on every single copy. And then to finish off the absurdity of it all the binding machine we were using was DEFINITELY made prior to my birth. Can you tell we are loving life?















Speaking of Anna...unfortunately sometimes once you leave you get uninvited to birthday lunches because place people want to eat is too far away to justify you driving to...hence the Lost Dog for my birthday experience. Tragically we decided it was a good idea to take a picture of Anna, cut her head off and put it over Lauton's head, and thus try to prove to her she did in fact eat at the Lost Dog. Likely it didn't work :)






























As I am about to write this I am realizing that apparently we do a lot of convincing. This is me convincing my cousin Tegan (who was shadowing me for a week) that she really did in fact like eels...it was in fact unsuccessful.
















As I went through pictures, it was also clear that we do a lot of eating. Although, anyone who knows me is not shocked by this since eating is my favorite thing to do :) We have snacks on the way back from days in the field...













lunches at the lovely St. Phillips Tea Room...















and, if there happens to be an abundance of cheese left over from a cheese plate that was ordered for an event, why not invite your co-workers wife and tiny baby to enjoy some fondue? I mean what ELSE do you do with an enormous amount of cheese?
















And then what would DNR be without the Chicken? Why do you think we had a random Anna head on file with which to make a picture of her at a meal she didn't go to? Because we had made the Life Aquatic picture and hence recognized the importance of having head cut outs of your coworkers, of course!















Mr. Chicken didn't just star in movies however, he also did important things like help with the fish tagging event...an no, I have no idea why I'm making that face, best I can tell I was eating something...which...again, not surprising













And, I couldn't decide if this picture was going to be funny to everyone else, but guess what? it's my blog, so I get to decide :) this is Maia and the chicken discussing the very sad fact that I am moving out of the admin building and my office is empty. She and the chicken will also have to comiserate over my exiting the Marshlands House...but the sadness is for another day. Today, please recognize the fact that Maia is sitting in an empty office talking to chicken hand puppet...come on people that has GOT to make it into the silly picture installment :)















stay tuned for future installments...they will likely not be as funny, but they will be enjoyable!

Pull Up, Pull Up!!!

I have 5 days left at DNR. It's somewhat freaking me out and every time I think about it I start to enter emotional panic mode. Hence I'm not thinking about it all too much. But, I did think it is appropriate to share some of the the best comments about life given by co-workers this week:

"You're leaving too! It's probably for the best. Look at those of us who have been here for 35 years - we've got anti-depressants in our drawers and liquor on our desks."

"Generally your e-mails are very organized, but as I was reading that one I was thinking, this is very stream of consciousness, something in her life is spirally totally out of control"

"Pull Up, Pull Up!"

Northward Bound

So, my attempt to post 'moments' on the blog is not going well, I keep forgetting to take a picture of them :) Today I remembered! In 10 days Allison, Jen, Angela and I will be headed to Maine for a glorious 5 days out of the Charleston heat and humidity. Tonight we set up shop on the Barnes and Noble floor to look at maps and guidebooks, decide where we may want to go, laugh about how ridiculous and unrealistic our plans are, determine just how many rich unknown people we need to meet along the way to take us on boats and planes, and then go to Senor Tequila's to finish it off with some chips and salsa. Spectacular moment to say the least.

I Have Decided

His yoke is easy, His burden is light,
I have decided, I'm gonna fix my eyes,
On the Perfecter, the Author of my faith, Jesus Christ

Greater - New Life Worship

School Shopping

Yesterday Brittany, Nikole and I went school shopping...which I haven't done in 8 years...it was pretty hysterical...and quite successful!

Perceptual Adaptation

I am exhausted. This week I attempted to dump my brain onto Word files and e-mails to prep someone else to take over the job I've been doing for the past 6 years. I also ran 5 nights of Vacation Bible School, which in case you haven't worked VBS in the recent past takes quite a large quantity of energy to get things ready, know what is going to go wrong before it goes wrong, fix what goes wrong after it goes wrong, and show no fear, indecision or exhaustion to the kids. And, all the while I suppressed the desire to panic about any of the facts in my life: that in one month I have no idea how I'm going to pay my mortgage, that I'm going back to school in a field that is totally new which takes literally all my brain power to focus and absorb the information, that the one year anniversary of my mom's death is looming on the horizon, that I'm going home next weekend to visit my grandfather for what possibly could be the last time...the list of reasons to panic could go on but I'm too tired to keep typing.

In short my life is upside down. Actually, no, it feels worse than that. In college psychology class I remember learning about a study where they had people wear glasses that made the world upside down and after 4 or 5 days their brains actually inverted everything so that they were seeing right side up again. When they took the glasses off, they were seeing everything upside down, and had to wait for their brains to invert everything again. It's called perceptual adaptation. I more or less feel like for the past two years I have had to take those glasses on and off about 20 times and my brain is feeling ready to give up on telling me which way is up.

In case you were wondering, it's a rather intense thing to feel, and not all together enjoyable. But...it's where am...I am in the land of continuous perceptual adaptation. Here is the thing though. The first few times I had the glasses put on or had them taken away I more or less freaked out. I was out of control of my life, I had no idea what was going to happen and I had no clue what to do about it. For me, that is a reason to freak out. The longer this goes on, however, and the closer the flipping back and forth happens the less thrown off I seem to be. Really, the past two weeks has seen some pretty major changes (so much so that half of you reading this don't even know I'm not going to be working in two weeks...yeah, I really don't feel like going into it) and yet, I'm shocked at how minorly phased I am all things considered. I have finally reached the point where I'm totally fine with waiting on God to tell me where to go next and I totally trust that He is going to. Being able to honestly say that is all by itself a sign of how far God's brought me. It's one thing to say you trust God...it's another to actually do it.

So remember how I wrote a number of posts about how much I hated the question 'how are you' after my mom died? The new question on my hatred list is 'so what is your plan'? Most people really don't believe you when you say you don't know, and you're ok because you know that you will when you need to. But guess what? I don't know. And I know that I will when I need to. My life is upside down, but it will flip back up at some point. Until then I will sleep with the ceiling as the floor.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three things remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. - 1 Corinthians 13:12-13

God is Wild About Us!

Is there anywhere on earth other than VBS where you can convince boys to wear panda ears, grown adults to wear paper mache panda heads, and shoot tiny pandas out of a leaf blower? Oh Pandamania, we are only one day in and I love you already!

My Soulmate

I have been known to say in the past that chocolate is my soulmate. When these little puppies arrived at my door, compliments of one Ms. Alison Krepp, I certainly was convinced. I mean really - you can get these things DELIVERED TO YOUR DOORSTEP!!!! I am so glad my friends know me so well :)

Me and Dorothy

While reading my first of many research papers to prep for my first of many abstracts to submit to my first of many symposiums, I find the sentence...

“We suggest that the association of emotion-focused coping with dysfunctional outcomes is closely related to the way it has been operationalized in coping measures”

…I am most certainly not in Kansas anymore.

Wow...I have entered a whole new world!

Voices from Afar

On Father's Day my family had a picnic. I was flying to Panama so I obviously was not in Pennsylvania at the picnic, but my uncle Mike took some video and posted it on his facebook page. For the past few minutes I've sat here and listened to it. Not so much watched as listened. Listening to people talking and people laughing. To be honest, when I think about family picnics the first thing that I actually think about is people's voices. Usually so many people are talking at once that you can't figure out what conversation is going on where...that is unless you were actually born in this family and then it's really obvious because you've been doing this all your life. And there are so many people running in and out of each conversation that you lose track of who said what. And so I sat there and listened. I listened to the voices that I miss so much, and the laughs that make me laugh just to hear them.

There was one voice and one laugh that I didn't hear. It's not that I expected to hear it as if as I was watching the video I thought suddenly my mom would be there. But the sound of the picnic just didn't seem right without it. But then why would it?

I never noticed how much you miss a person's voice until I wanted so desperately to hear my mom. I wanted to hear her say anything. We watched videos just waiting for there to be a place she talked. We called her old cell phone waiting for it to go to voicemail so we could hear her say her name. We have an old answering machine message that I have copied onto my phone and sometimes I just listen to it pretending it's not one of the only links to that voice I have. It doesn't really matter what she is saying, just hearing her voice is enough.

It's interesting I think how so often we go through life not noticing our senses other than sight. Sitting here and listening to the picnic with my eyes closed, listening to these voices I know so well, laughs I could pick out of a crowd, reminds me that not every moment is based on what you see...sometimes it's based on what you hear.