We are Not Moving to Belize

photo credit

It was while we were in Louisiana that my dad got a call from work. His boss said that he couldn't let my dad go to Belize and work there. So that was the end of it. All in one phone call. All of our plans, work, and time we put into it, more than a year, all of our expectations, hopes, desires, and as we felt our duty, were all put to nothing in one phone call.

I notised my parents acting a little fishy and I wondered what was up. Mom told me we were going to stay with our friends for another day. Okay, yipee another day. I was definetly not looking forward to saying goodbye so postponing our departure was very good news for me. But I still wondered what was going on. The next day our parents told us. I was very dissapointed.

We decided to stick with our plans and to continue on to Texas

Texas



Sunday - Thursday, October 14 - 18
We had fun in Texas visiting with friends. Here are some pictures of our time there.

One day we took a trip into Dentin. We breezed through the court house, stopped at a coffee shop, browsed through a second hand book store, and went gold digging in a thrift store. (We found quite a few gems but were low on space and didn't take any back)

Court House

Because I have a fascination for crooked pictures...

They turned the old court house into a museum. A new one was built in another part of the city.

I just love these old fashioned kitchens. I want one like this in my own house some day. Well almost, maybe I'd like a liiitle more counter space. ;)

Alabama: Part Two

Sunday, October 7

we went to Grandma's church. I've sorta grown up there. We visited often over the years and I remember playing on the play ground, making a friend there which I kept through the years because we visited often enough.

I love playing the piano in that building. The sound just wells up in there and fills the whole room. I could play for hours upon hours in that building. I love going in there when nobody else is around and just singing and playing to my hearts content. Sacred and solemn, joyful, beautiful, sad, confusion and turmoil, peace and contentment, praise. Playing on that piano in that room, I can make the music speak.

Alabama: Part One

I made a mistake in my last post. We did not go to Louisiana until after we had visited Alabama. This is the real order starting at Georgia. Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas. I had posted out of order and put Louisiana first. Sorry if that's a little confusing. The dates I wrote for Louisiana are all wrong. Those dates actually belong to Alabama. So, I'll just start all over again.

Monday, September 31 [Update: 11/22/12, Ahh! Why did I put Speteber 31? There is no Septeber 31! This was actually Monday, October 1]

We got to my grandma's place in Alabama late Sunday night. I can't remember if grandma met us at the door or not, it was a while ago and things have kinda blurred together in my memory. Anyways, I'll just get started with the pictures. We stayed in Alabama for a whole week. Here's (quite) a few snapshots of what we did that week.

We went out on the river of course...

Louisiana

Monday, September 31 [ Update: 11/22/12, I wrote the dates wrong on this post. This actually happened in the early part of October, after we had been in Alabama for about a week.]

We got in to Louisiana late Sunday night. After greeting our friends in whispers and pajamas, we quickly went to our prepared places of rest and plunged into a very deep sleep. It's amazing how hours of being cramped in a vehicle can make a sofa feel like as if you were enveloped in a cloud. (Although I've heard that clouds are actually very wet and cold.... but let us leave that to the scientist.)

The next week was filled with both joy and sadness. This would be the last time we saw these folks for a very long time. With laughs and smiles that were both genuine and sad we spent these days trying not to think about the day we were going to leave. Here are a few pictures of our time there. (Please note there will be no pictures of faces as our friends have asked to be kept private.)

 

The second oldest is growing avocados. This is her second try. The first two died after she put them in soil. I was quite impressed, I've always wanted to grow avocados, my older brother has.

Teenager n. A young person that shows irrevocable signs of being a jug-head and/or is driven by insatiable selfish desires

Who are we?

There is this thing that has been bothering me lately.

The misconception people have that "teenagers" (any young person 12 through 18 or 19) are practically a different creature than "adults" (any person that is finished with college and may or may not have children). Teenagers either think differently, see differently, dress differently, eat differently, think they're smarter than their parents, listen to horrible noises that they call music, practically LIVE for fashions and celebrities, or have a chronic disease called "irresponsibility". Teenagers get a "mouth off for free" and a "party, have sex, get high and get drunk for free" card. After all they're teenagers and that's what teenagers do. (I don’t mean to say that adults approve of these things, but they sure aren’t doing anything to stop it. Oh, and handing out condoms doesn’t help.)

And then there's "My crazy college days". This is the same thing as the teenage years except for two differences.

Georgia

Sunday night, September 30

On our way to Louisiana we stopped in Georgia. We did not stay long at all, only for a few hours. We have some friends that live there, they used to live in South Carolina. They went to the same church we did and we lived right next door to each other for a while. (I was too little to remember that part but I do remember their house.)

Seeing these people was two things, strange and dreamlike, but also like we had never left. I used to call the mom Aunt Lasagna. For some reason Tanya was very hard for me to remember. Em---- was there and S------ to but their middle brother was not. He died last year from a heart attack. It was very different not having him there. He was my "boyfriend" when I was little and we played together all the time. S------ didn't remember us, he had only been a baby back then, but I remember him. He and my little sister would play out on the sun porch with the big blocks. I was the only one of us young people that remembered anybody. Mom and Dad did perfectly and talked and talked.
They had dinner waiting for us when we got there. Pizza, lemonade, and some dessert. It was good, and boy let me tell you, I was hungry.