I don’t want to be right!
It’s plain yogurt with a little granola, and a LOT of the Hershey Special Dark chocolate syrup.
Gotta use up the chocolate syrup from the party for the older friends somehow. . .
This really hit the spot after working out. Tonight after WT I did half an hour on the bike and half an hour on the elliptical. I’ve realized that quick intense workouts don’t accomplish one of the main benefits i get from exercisie: namely, zoning out, blissing out, relaxing and enjoying the endorphins, so I’m going to start making time for longer lower-intensity cardio sessions.
And following them up with lots of chocolate.
It’s all about balance.
Dear Friends and Family,
Today makes one year since I started this blog.
Right now I don’t have time to do a lot of reflecting and tallying and such, but I just wanted to say “Thanks” to you. So, thanks for reading and commenting and sharing this year in our lives.
Love,
Katie (and Zack)
Ah, the weekend. After much stressing and planning, things did not quite go according to plan.
Item A: Saturday afternoon.
Our Saturday afternoon of entertaining the older ones who live in the infirmary. I poured my heart into preparing all kinds of activities, including this fun version of Jeopardy! with our panel of contestants for the Indo group. . . And while it went well, the biggest hit by far was a rousing group game of Bat-The-Balloon-Around-The-Room, octogenarians vs. Cheryl.
Well, that and the ice cream.
But the Jeopardy! was fun (for me, anyway).
Item B: Saturday evening.
Meanwhile, my friend Ashley from Virginia was in town this weekend, and her plans fell through, so she was looking for someone to bum around the city with, and since Zack had to stick around here for a duty and I wanted nothing more than to take a nice long nap, she almost had to do it all by herself. But I was plied with coffee and pizza and prevailed upon to be a good sport, so the two of us went into Manhattan and had quite a fun time. We went to the giant Toys ‘R Us and got attacked by a Dino:
We walked from Times Square to Koreatown and bought some cheap bling:
And, thanks to Ashley’s parents, we even saw a Broadway show! (Newsies–great dancing. And she even knew a couple of people in the cast, so we hung around the stage door after and got some pictures. Which I don’t have. But we got them.)
Item C: Saturday night/Sunday
When I got home, Zack wasn’t feeling well. So Sunday, which we had planned to be a fun day to celebrate our six-year anniversary, was a quiet day of sniffles and staying inside, out of the nasty, cold, rainy, windy weather. We ventured out for brunch (five-star food, two-star service) then came home and watched the new PBS/BBC version of Great Expectations.
So a pleasant weekend, but not according to plan. We’re going to take a day off when the weather is nicer to do our anniversary stuff.
Are we getting back on course? Well,this evening Zack is feeling a little better. He mustered the energy to shave off most of his three-day beard, but methinks there is the hint of a ‘stache.
Definitely not in the plan.
No, not that I’m actually posting something after months of silence. . . A party!
After Zack gave his first Indonesian public talk on Sunday (I’m so proud of him!) the whole group went for hospitality, like usual, except that after eating and hanging out for a while we were dragged to the middle of the room and presented with a surprise cake for our anniversary. Aww. They like us. . . They really like us. . .
And we love them too. What a great, indescribable feeling, to see the group grow, and experience the love and the bonding, and the progress we all make, some starting as spiritual babies and some as language babies.
And here’s a picture of Zack giving the talk: (oh, did I mention? He did the talk? In Indonesian? So proud.)
All patched up and ready to go!
See you back home!
We went in service, ate weird fruit, got sunburned, saw a horse:
Back at the branch, saw a coffee bush, got caught in a random hailstorm:
Visited a giant mall:
Went to downtown Bogota with friends, had delicious coffee:
Went to museum of Colombian artist who only paints fat people, museum is in beautiful colonial house:
Went up mountain overlooking city at night:
Ate corn on the cob from roadside stand:
Took pictures with table and with Wayuunaiki translation team back in Faca:
Pretended to be secret agents:
Took last picture of branch:
Now in Bogota, leaving Monday. Tomorrow we have one last doctor’s appointment, the English meeting and then a Superbowl party. Then it’s back to New York, back to winter, back to our lives.
It’s gone by really fast. Hard to believe it’s been a month.
Hello! Sorry it’s been a few days, let’s pick up on Sunday morning.
Despite lingering congestion, we made it up and down to breakfast and onto the shuttle in time for our ride to the zone meeting. (The shuttle left exactly on time, too, despite one brother not showing up, so good thing we made it!)
The Assembly Hall is in the suburbs of Bogota, and the area must have gotten some heavy rain recently, because once we turned off the highway the road looked like this:
Some of the friends took public transportation which dropped them off at the end of this little road, so there were sisters in high heels trying to wade through the mud, and cars passing by with an empty seat or two picking them up.
The Assembly Hall is huge! There were over 5,000 there, and other assembly halls around the country were connected for a total attendance of over 18,000. They can use the whole AH for district conventions, or partition it off and have two simultaneous circuit or special assembly days.
Some of the friends had gotten up at 1:30 in the morning so they could drive in for the program! Most of the congregations had rented buses, but there were a few cars and some motorcycles too.
We went around talking to people before the program started, and all the missionaries in the country were in the next section taking a group picture. We pulled out our camera to get a picture of them, but they dragged us into the picture instead! It was chaos! The chairman was trying to settle everyone down, cameras were being passed around. . .
After the program, there were lots more pictures. . .
Then it was back on the shuttle to Faca. One of the couples on the shuttle used to be Bethelites in Spain and were transferred here to work in the printers a few years ago. They were fun to talk to.
Since then, let’s see. Monday we spent all day in Bogota doing appointments.
We hadn’t reserved spots for lunch in Bogota Bethel, so Carlos took us to centro comercial Santa Fe, which we later heard is the third biggest shopping mall in South America. We had fun browsing around, but we didn’t buy anything. We’re still waiting for a good souvenir opportunity.
Tuesday we didn’t do much during the day, but we had two social invitations for the evening. Yesterday we both got some work done, and then more socializing, and today we’re heading back to Bogota, but coming back here tonight for, yes, more socializing. The friends here are really friendly and hospitable. Now that my arm is better the rest of our evenings here are booking up fast!
Tomorrow night we’ll spend the night in Bogota so we can do service with the English congregation on Saturday, and they got Zack to agree to do the talk on Sunday.
The Insight books are coming along slowly. By slowly I mean I’m up to page 620 or so, about halfway through Volume 1. By my calculations I was supposed to be halfway through Volume 2 right now, but self-imposed deadlines were made to be broken, right?
That’s all for now. See you!
We saw the doctor yesterday and she told us that the pathology had come back clear; no more surgery necessary. Yay! She also took off the bandage (rolling her eyes at our scotch-taped efforts to keep the thing on) and let us see my arm for the first time.
It ain’t pretty. Feel free to skip ahead to the pretty pictures if you prefer.
The incision is long and jagged, and the arm is all lumpy and bumpy. “I had to move the fat around,” she said, fingering my other arm. “I tried to make it match.”
The whole area was covered with stitches, some holding the incision together, but most were just little tacks in the skin on either side of the wound, sectioning the arm into little quadrants so if the pathology had been different she would have known where she needed to open it back up. But fortunately that will not be necessary, so she removed all the extra stitches.
She also removed the drainage tube, which was the worst part. I had been picturing it sort of delicately tucked up by the incision, but that was not the case. It was inserted into my arm at least an inch below the incision itself, and it was inserted at least a couple of inches into my arm. Feeling in slide out was very odd and not at all pleasant, but not having it attached to me anymore is wonderful.
We’ll see the other doctor on Monday and we are promised more details and even pictures of the actual surgery. I’m not sure how deep they had to go. I don’t have much feeling in that area of the arm (missing nerve endings?) which is good-hardly any pain! But also weird. Did they have to take muscle out? I don’t think so, the arm seems to be functioning perfectly normally. But for we are just happy that it seems like they got it all, it’s healing well, and things are getting back to normal.
And now for the pictures:
This is the building the doctor’s office is in. Note the windowcleaner.
This is a nice mall where we got coffee after the appointment. It’s a 19th century hacienda which has been swallowed by the growing city.
Today we took a nice walk around the branch.
The tree in the rock. Note the tiny Katie.
We attempted to take a picture of ourselves by propping the camera on another rock. . . It took a couple of tries.
We had fun with the local flora (roses the size of my head!)
And fauna (watch-geese doing their rounds, ducks with punk-rock hair, a peacock who was indifferent to my waving leaves at him in the vain hope that he would spread his tail)
And dramatic light effects from the clouds over the mountain.
Tomorrow is the special zone meeting, if we make it up and onto the bus in time. Bye!
(We got back to Faca this evening. Tomorrow, more resting, and then the zone visit starts Wednesday! We’re so glad to be here for it.)
Sorry again for the lack of exciting daily play-by-play. I still haven’t quite shaken this cold, so although my arm really hasn’t been very painful, we haven’t done much. Which is as it should be, according to the doctors. But Zack is feeling better, so hopefully I only have another couple days of this.
A few of the highlights from yesterday and today:
Good night!
