pies from end to beginning...

My pride and joy. A beautiful cherry pie.

The runners' up, pumpkin 1 and pumpkin 2 (although these were the winners according to my family)

These are just empty shells of their former selves... (teehee)

oh the dough.

And finally what makes it all possible...LARD.
Yay for the most fattening of all substances.

my mission should I choose to accept it...

I'm about to embark on a VERY serious mission...

...I am...

...about to make this years thanksgiving dinner pumpkin pies.

If you didn't already know this about me...i don't like pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving is the one holiday where dessert doesn't tempt me in the least. I am happy to make the pie though. It's funny how thanksgiving is so much about the pie, but I guess no more than Easter often becomes about the chocolate. This year I am thankful I am able to be at home to spend this holiday with my family. I am also thankful for other pie fillings...like cherry..and since I am making the pies I will include one of those as well :)

It's a big world after all

Suddenly, as the rope coiled around my body, the spikes strapped onto my feet, and the bug eyed polarized glasses went onto my face....I felt like a mountaineer. Amazing. I was learning how to survive on the ice, climb the ice, move on the ice and in the process love the ice. Despite the numb toes, then the thawing toes bringing on what's descriptively called the "screaming barfies", and the exhaustive climbing we were accomplishing goals and it felt great!

The glacier has a mind of its own...it moves, changes shape and forms beautiful patterns in response to the shifting weather. It's a playground and yet it also has no mercy, a fall off the "monkey bars" will usually mean more than a scraped knee. Every move needs to be thought out, intentional, firm...every step secure.

At certain moments I would look back down the valley and marvel at God's majesty! He formed these huge masses of rock with His hands, and made it possible for me to enjoy them...created in me the capacity to love them and love Him through them. What a gift!

I was happy and content perched precariously on the edges of cliffs...

...knowing I was safe in God's hands and feeling free.

Nearing the end

Well I have one more week in Churchill...and after three months am feeling pretty comfortable here already. I think I might have city shock when i head south..all the people and cars everywhere. I can just hear all of the stores calling my name.."reennnaaaeee...spend your money, you haven't shopped in tthhhreeeeee months, it is time you had new things...come innnnn, you neeeeeeed this."

Must not listen, must not go in...MUST RESIST!

I have realized up here little habits like stopping and getting a coffee somewhere, or a snack for the hec of it are pretty unnecessary to do multiple times a week. I haven't gone out for coffee in three months! Actually that sounds a bit sad, as it is one of my favorite things to do, but it has saved me money that's for sure. Also in a place where there is no form of entertainment to be found you have to be resourceful with your time...it makes you creative...or lazy...or a workaholic..but over all its economical.

The north is a great place to think. With less stimulation from noise or people or city options you just have time to experience your surroundings, which are beautiful. I guess its still a matter of making the time and consciously taking it all in, but there are some instances where it feels like what you are seeing or doing is just forcing its beauty on you and yelling at you that you are in some place special, like no where else. I mean where else can I go out on a sea-do and have beluga whales swim right under me, or quading and drive by polar bears lounging on the rocks?! I've seen herds of grazing caribou, arctic hares, countless birds and the most amazing sunsets blazing their brilliance off of melting sea ice...

I've swam in the Hudson's Bay...with the sea ice...and been to places where first contact was made between Europeans and Aboriginal people in the 1600's. crazy!

I've also been introduced to some great people...but at the same time missed my family and friends....

I sort of forget why i started this post, maybe just to reminisce a little bit over the last three months....to say that out of the 9 things in my previous list (number 8 is still a mystery) I have accomplished 8 of them. I will miss Churchill for sure, but what's next is about to begin and I am excited for that!

see you soon :)

Well a new adventure is happening...this one involves the town of Churchill, MB. This is where I am living for the summer, working at Parks Canada and experiencing the great Canadian north! When i arrived in June I could barely see my house for the snow...literally. I found it though and now it is much clearer but we still have snow on the ground...yes you can now feel sorry for me :) Things I am looking forward to:

1. the beluga whales and possibly diving with them
2. SUN!
3. Four wheeling
4. sea kayaking
5. possibly seeing a polar bear
6. all the baby birds that are going to hatch soon
7. learning to bead and make moccasins
9. getting my work published
10. today we are heading out to my uncle and aunts cabin by the lake...yay we are going out of town and its sunny!

bits and bytes

do you ever get distracted while you are on your computer and have to go away for a bit and then come back and look at what is one your screen and realize you are WASTING time. That what you are reading or researching or looking up maybe popped into your mind for one second and because you have the 'information world' at your fingertips you can just 'google' it and start reading but you actually dont NEED to know that information at that moment and its just clogging your brain with stuff that doesn't need to be there, but you can't tear yourself away and all of a sudden its 2 in the morning and you are looking at how many elephants it would take to pull a semi truck up a 20% grade hill at night.....

Just get up and go outside! ;)

my kind of root canal...

Some people hate going to the dentist, or the doctor, or hate anesthetic, or medical exams, or needles, or colonoscopies....well I hate going to the optometrist.

Going to the optometrist instills fear in me, it has ever since I was a fourth grader who needed glasses. Every time I went to see the eye doctor he would tell me my eyes were worse...I was getting more blind. No one ever told me my eyes would level off, so I thought my eyes would get worse and worse until I couldn't see any more. As a child this is hard to handle, and every optometrist was the same, telling me I needed a stronger perscription. I thought maybe if I got the answers to their questions right, my eyes would be better, so when I got told I was giving wrong answers, my fears increased and I wanted to read those little letters on the bottom line even more!!!

To this day, I hate going to the optometrist, even though the last 4 or 5 times I've gone, my perscription has stayed the same and it seems my eyes are leveling off, I still have this fear that I'll get the answers wrong and my eyes will be worse again :(

Today I had an eye appointment, but i've also had a bit of a chest cough for the last little bit, so on the way to my appointment, i stopped and bought some Benelyn. I love this stuff. I didn't have a spoon so i got to the eye place, parked and took a few swigs from the bottle before shoving it into my glove box and getting out of my car. The guy in the vehicle next to me must have wondered....

I swear they put things in the air in optometrist offices to make your eyes go blurry the mintue you enter the door. As i'm sitting and waiting i had to keep blinking to keep my eyes from blurring up, then I forgot to hand in my form so i waited longer than normal in the reception area panicking about reading the bottom tiny line of letters on the chart. What I dont understand is the first thing they do to you when you are in the 'pre' test area is flash the brightest light possible into your eyes to take a picture of your retina which leaves you seeing white dots for the whole rest of your exam!! How am I supposed to score well after that? Then they make you stare without blinking so your eyes dry out and want you to push a clicker every time you see a squigly square come onto a white screen with a black square in the middle that is an optical illusion in itself! You never know if you are seeing what your supposed to be seeing or are imagining the bright white flash as a squiggly square! I do feel pretty confident with the color blindness test though, i can always get the numbers. What was good about today was when i went in for my actual test, the optometrist did a shorter routine than normal. He told me my retina's looked normal, and my perscription was the same and only asked me two or three times about the little letters. I was so relieved. Anxiety abated, I was able to walk out knowing I dont have to go through this horror again for another year or two.

I think the trick is....Benelyn.

parboiled

I sat in the hot tub way too long tonight...

I feel boiled.

Just for fun!

hahahahahahahaha.........

Retaliation

Today my grapefruit squirted me in the eye...

What did I ever do to you grapefruit?

(except cut you up and eat you.....)

apparently it was my birthday....

The funniest thing happened yesterday...I was sitting in one of the computer labs at school. I had been there for almost 8 hours straight, besides about an hour break, working on a computer assignment, when my phone rang...

the people on the other end proceeded to say "Rebecca?" and then without waiting for an answer, sang me happy birthday! When it was all over, i thanked them, but told them they unfortunately had the wrong number. It sounded like someone's granparents acutally, which was so cute and he said "well i guess you dont get that every day hey?" and i told them they had made my day.....which they did :)

whoever's birthday it is out there today, this is for you...

Salsa!

I totally thought of something today that I wanted to blog about and now it is in some little box in my brain and doesn't want to come out...so instead i will show you some pictures. My friend Kim came to visit from Seattle last weekend and we had a great time playing Wii, sitting in the hot tub, going to the ski hill, reading, eating....and making very tasty salsa!

You know you should wash your car when....

You also know you need to change your oil when the idling doesn't sound right and ....oops you can hardly see any on the dipstick!

Just about forgot!

I was just about to go to bed when i remembered...BLOG! Today I will muse on the story of the lady who just had octuplets. I just watched Dateline where they interviewed her pretty in depth....and she seems surprisingly...rational. There are so many debates you can have over this whole situation i'm not surprised the world is having a hay-day with it all. Children's rights is one of them for sure...how can she possibly take care of 14 children? How is it fair to her first 6 children to bring 8 more into the family...will they get enough attention, care, opportunity?

and yet....

people ask why she didn't selectively reduce her fetuses when she found out she was having 7 more.(the eighth was a surprise during the c-section) So I ask what about the rights of those babies? Do the rights of children outside the womb mean more than the rights of children inside the whom? I believe our world says they do. I say no. This woman went right to the embryo stage and said that each of them had a right to live, although she didn't know if they would, she left that up to God. This sort of sparks another debate....Yes her fertility doctor implanted 6 embryo's (there is controversy over what is the standard there of how many to implant) but two previous attmpts at implantation after her six children and before these eight had failed. This was the last time before she called it 'quits' and it happened not to fail.

Do these babies have purpose? yes
will life be easy for this family? no
Are these children loved? yes
Does all of the criticism and attack on her help her in ANY way? no i don't think so

It sounded as if she was conflicted...definitely as a young person, wanting children, struggling with reproductive issues, a failed marriage, disability, deciding to have IVF while still in school....maybe not the best decision, but some people just want to be mom's and that's ok....

I guess there are people that plan to bring babies into this world, and there are babies that are born that aren't planned...

God says 'love your neighbour' and 'feed, clothe and house the needy'...i would say this means people in our own continent as well as around the world.

Defeat of Purpose.

Today I bought a starbucks mug. It looks like this. Made of 29% recycled materials. I bought it becuase, well i needed a new one, but i also feel bad every time i get a disposable cup. So I was so excited to get a drink in my new mug because you get a free beverage when you purchase it. So i got to the counter and the lady told me you can't get your drink in the mug on the day you buy the mug...they give you a coupon to come back. So I paid for a drink which they put in a paper cup and I promptly poured it into my new mug and threw away the cup! Why couldn't they have put my drink in my new mug?!?!? The joy of not creating garbage was robbed of me today..... but I DO like my new mug :)

Fresh

So I was told I need to update my blog more regularily....OK, OK, OK....I am going to try something crazy...a blog post a day!

WHAT?

oh yes, no matter what, I am going to try to post a blog a day for the next little while and see how it goes. I know some of you have tried this and succeded, others may have failed, I dont know how I will manage...But interesting content or not I will TRY!

So do you like my new layout?? I needed something fresh to inspire me. I may change the title as well....we'll see how creative I feel.

Did you know that on this day last year Toronto got so much snow they were thinking of calling in the canadian armed forces to dig out the streets....oops they were in Afghanistan! Where is the army when you need them hey??

Home again.

I'm back in Beautiful British Columbia, but here are some final pics from my last week in paraguay....

check facebook for more in the days to come.....

Araguay Paraguay

This day was a rest day, which included a trip to Araguay where the main street is lined with ceramics of every kind. It was so colorfully stimulating, and among some of the more gaudy, cheesy pieces were some beautifully handcrafted pots, wall hangings, lamps, figurines etc. The people here are very into figurines...lawn ornaments and little things you put on a shelf in your house. Well here was the place to get them!!!

Painted mushroom anyone??

The last week of my life...

These pictures represent what's happened in the last week of my life :) I've realized that maybe i needed to paint without getting paid to really enjoy it! It is amazing how when you are a part of something God has put together, it doesn't matter what you are doing so much, you just work as hard as you can, this just happens to be painting.

So this is the center we are working at. ALTO REFUGIO means High Refuge, and that is what God is in our lives and what this center is to so many people suffering with AIDS here. It really is an amazing ministry!!

Inside the centers' main area where we eat lunch every day. the red is what we were painting most of the pillars, including the wall around the sign reading SOLIDARIDAD which means coming together, or working together sort of getting strength together as a community. Below, mom is improvising with taping a brush to a pole...we've had to improvise a little bit with the tools here, but thank goodness we brought some of our own brushes!!!

One of the perks is that we are right beside and ice cream shop! Ice cream cones for 25 cents!! A sign I am in the right place ;) We enjoy them pretty much every day...And below me painting door and frame. One of my least favorite days was painting these ALL day, and its oil paint so i got really light headed and it burned my eyes....so that was a down side, but by the end i realized you just choose to do something to make you happy. We really do choose our attitudes sometimes....So that was the past week. LONG days, sometimes 13 or 14 hours of working, and 38-40 degrees!! Oh yes, that is above zero ;)

well here we are from left to right mom, me, my double chin and grandpa!!

We have arrived just in time for Mango season! They are SOOO good, Mango's for breakfast, lunch, dinner, in juice, for snack, fruit salad..i'm not sick of them yet, and more drop every day in the back yard :)
One of the two mango trees in Auntie Joanne's yard.

Enjoying the fruit.

And this my friends is my new best buddy! Reina :) She is the one i'm teaching how to fetch...today she forgot again, but she'll get it. I wouldn't say she's the brightest bulb on the tree, but she is great and i love her!

A new Adventure!!

Hola from Paraguay South America!!!!

Some of you may know i'm here and some may not, so i thought i'd write a little blurb on what's been going on with me. I have an Aunt who lives here in Asuncion Paraguay as a missionary. For a long time i've wanted to visit her and i've just never made the opportunity happen, but now it just sort of fell in my lap. Two days a week my Aunt works at an AIDS center called Alto Refugio (High Refuge). This is an amazing ministry started by a couple who are Canadian's but who both grew up here and raised their own family here as well. The center offers meals, support groups, counselling, meds, clothing, aids education, hospital visits, and above all a family environment filled with love for an often rejected and shunned group of people. My mom arranged a while ago to come and help them paint the center and I just couldn't let this opportunity go! I feel so honored to be able to help them in this way as...me...with a skill that is so natural. I have never thought i would use painting in this way...its great!! It's even more amazing to be here with my grandpa and my mom...three generations together coming to visit family and help out! So tomorow we officially start working and then it will be a couple of weeks of endless painting :)

So far the excitment that has happened has come in the form of almost missing flights, having bags not arrive with us on our flight, very full buses, a gecko flying out at me from an air conditioner, and teaching the dog how to fetch :) I'm sure there will be more stories to come, maybe with more detail! Anyone wan't to quickly give me a spanish lesson? I'm feeling way out of my element in that way here...i'm determined to learn some here, and more when i get home. For now,

Feliz Anyo Nuevo Everybody!!!