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I am currently doing HAND WASHING! This is definitely a sign that I'm growing up. Always in the past I've passed those difficult laundering issues off on Mom. Hand wash only? To Mom it goes.

But now, here I am, living in my apartment, and doing my own handwash. I'm serious! It's in the little pot as we speak!

Pot? you may ask. Well, yeah. I find that an apartment doesn't come stocked with all the things you'll ever need in said apartment. Mama does her hand washing in a plastic basin type thing. I have no plastic basin type thing. So I improvised and am using a cooking pot:)

Where did you get the cooking pot? you may ask. AH! Let me TELL you! I purchased a pots and pans set!!! My friend Karen (mother of two of my current students and fast becoming a dear, dear friend) had a beautiful teflon set of pots which she'd purchased before her marriage, not knowing that her future husband would have an issue with teflon (as well as cell phones, artificial sweeteners and anything else that has any possible link to cancer). So I bought it from her for much less than the original price. Hurrah! I felt SO very grown up to be driving home with my very own pots and pans...

Here, in fact, are some of these pots and pans, surrounding Melissa in glory:) (She came in to use my computer right after I'd unpacked them...) Ummm, also I had no bedspread at that point. Don't notice that. I just got one from Mum today.

I tell ya, this apartment business is more fun THAN a!

Just for the Record...

Just for the record, TJ is getting cooler by the second. He stopped by this week, and brought enough Chinese food with him that I was still eating the leftovers this evening for dinner. What a sweetie!

Just for the record, I love that I can hear church bells playing hymns from my apartment!

Just for the record, I'm rooting for the Red Sox to win this evening. I lost so much sleep last week watching late games! Friday I was late for school - the THIRD time in that week. I was chatting with Mr. Bailey about something and then he brought up the Sox and asked me if I'd watched the whole game the night before. "YES!" I wailed, "and that's why I can't get my act together!" He just smiled knowingly and said he'd stayed up too. It was such a great bonding moment:)

Just for the record, I love bonding over the Red Sox!

Just for the record, I think it's a little cruel that baseball ends right at the point where people are most into it. It leaves you with this nostalgic longing that lingers through the winter months. But, as A. Bartlett Giamatti, late commissioner of baseball, put it: "renewal has rhythms as old as decline."

Just for the record, I think A. Bartlett Giamatti is the coolest. With him baseball is poetry.

Just for the record, I carved a great pumpkin today! Melissa and Sara and Elizabeth and some of Sara's friends were all there and some definite masterpieces came out of the experience. We decided we should do a gingerbread house making party in the Christmas season. (I miss you, Penny!)

Apartment Pictures!

And now, for your visualizing pleasure... pictures of our apartment!


This is the view when you walk in the door: our beautiful kitchen!

Then, if you go just around the corner, you see this little alcove for sink, fridge, and shelf space.
























Proceeding from the kitchen inward you come to our living space. The first area is the "work space" with a computer and chairs for people with laptops:)


















Then, further in is the living room. I love the pillars! And the hardwood floors. And everything about it!!!
















Ahhhhhhhh. Now do you see why I'm so dumbfounded that this is actually real and I'm not just playing house?! What an incredible blessing.

From the New Homefront!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!! Suddenly I'm SO inspired about BLOGGING! Why? you may ask. Well let me tell you!

I'm sitting in my apartment, the kitchen to be exact, at the beautiful new table donated by the landlady, after having made myself dinner (Cup-a-Soup - thanks Britain trip, for opening my eyes to the virtue of such fare - and a muffin - Aunt Pat's housewarming gift to the three of us which TOTALLY saved my life since I missed the exit for the grocery store on the way home and wanted something a little more substantial than soup alone... I'm going to be eating SO well), and I'm suddenly really excited again (as I often am) about the fact that I'm living in an apartment!

I just can't believe it. I have been (mmmm, cup-a-soup's really good!) dreaming of this for years, literally. Since Bible School, at least, which makes it 7 -9 years... Many a girl can testify to my penchant for saying "we should get an apartment someday..." And now here I am. And not just any ol' apartment, either. It's a big kid apartment! It's beautiful! And yes, I will try to get pictures up pronto. (Well, pronto-ish...)

Gretchen and Mama were the absolute HEROES. Gretchen was here Sunday and helped me start the process (she stayed until 10pm!), and Mama was here Monday and helped me finish (she worked tirelessly alllll day). I can't imagine having done it without them. OH MY WORD I have so much JUNK! But the nice thing about moving is that I got RID of a lot of junk, too. Hurrah for that! In fact, I believe one small bag got over here without being sorted, but nothing else escaped my scrutiny. I looked through things I haven't seen for years! I found a wicked nice jean skirt, too, which is awesome because I was just thinking about buying one. And I can't be throwing money around anymore... Perfect timing! (Wow, this muffin is so good!)

You know how sometimes people leap into things and it is said of them that they "didn't look back once?" Well, that's not me. I loved it at the Browns so much! It truly was a home. I even felt a little claustrophobic today, thinking about driving home to the city instead of the country. Not that I have gone outside ONCE since school began (except to talk on my phone. Another great plus of this apartment - service inside!), but hey, what if I wanted to now?

However, despite a little backward glancing (good thing this isn't a plow!) the upsides are incredible. Foremost among them, of course, is the fact that I'm living with Melissa and Sara!!! I mean, seriously, you can't get much better than that! I love them, and they're so comfortable to be with. That's a big thing. We're going to have SUCH good times! Also, the shortened commute is sweet - I woke up at 5:30 this morning instead of 5! And then there's the shedding of the stigma associated with not having your own place (a stigma with which I do not agree, and yet still felt hanging over me sometimes). And I'm within walking distance of the mall! And right at this moment the strong accents of a woman's Portuguese upbraiding of her husband is pouring from her open window through mine. Oh no, wait, that's not so good... I'll put on some music:) Really though, it's pretty amazing. I got right down on my knees and thanked God for it last night, when it finally started to sink in.

Okay, enough blathering. I'm just really, really thankful. And now about those pictures...

PS. Sara is SO amazing. I had no idea she was so efficient before this whole sharing an apartment thing came along. She just blew in here after work with freshly bought curtain rods and now she's going to make a pizza (NOT a frozen pizza) before breezing out to get keys copied and then go to school... She has also arranged for us to have heat, electricity, intenet, etc. Who knows when that would have happened had I been doing this on my own. Sara is the ally for the ages!

News from the (soon to be old) Homefront

Well people, I am finally becoming a real big kid... with an apartment! Things have opened up, pretty suddenly and semi-miraculously, for me to move into an apartment in Providence with Sara and Melissa. I still can't quite believe it!

Melissa has been renting a room in the upstairs apartment, and when I first went to see it I also looked at the downstairs apartment and fell right in love. Clunk. But of course the rent was through the roof for one person to pay, and no one else I knew was free to rent an apartment with me. So I just prayed a little prayer and told God how I'd love to live in that apartment and left it there.

A couple (?) weeks later, Sara mentioned the possibility of moving out of her apartment into this apartment - if Melissa and I were interested. I jumped in whole-heartedly, and after a few minor bumps it's actually happening now. Tomorrow and Monday (thanks, Columbus!) are my moving days.

OY VAY!!!

As awesome as this is, you know me and change. We don't totally click. I'm kind of sad about leaving the Browns. I mean, I've been here for over six years! It's been such an incredible home away from home. I'll miss being neighbors with TJ and chatting with Aunt Laura and being the recipient of Uncle Paul's regular affirmation and Amy's happy greetings.

Still.... I'm pretty psyched about this apartment business. Wooohooooooooo! Okay, you can make that wicked psyched. So everyone book visits into your calendars!

"However we may miss and mourn the dead, we really give little deference to death. 'Death,' a friend of mine said as he approached it himself, 'is a convention...not binding upon anyone but the keeprs of graveyard records.' The dead remain in thought as much alive as they ever were, and yet increased in stature and grown remarkably near. The older I have got and the better acquainted among the dead, the plainer it has become to me that I live in the company of immortals.

But now I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day. I live in this love, and I know something of the cost. Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love and grief, this little flickering lamp that I have watched beside for all these years."

-Wendell Berry

Wendell's got some good stuff to say, but I'm glad that the picture is even bigger and more solid than this. Andrew is not just alive in thought and love today, but alive in actuality as never before--perhaps more now than a year or two or three ago. Not just home with a vague sense of the company of loved ones, but Home, with glorious Love Himself, our All in All, as well as with all those others we have known and loved. A solid home, a solid joy beyond all measure.

Miss you, man. Coming soon.