home!

July has pulled a disappearing act on me.  But!  What an amazing month.

For the Fourth, Justin and I met up with a bunch of friends over at Paradise Creek (near Vancouver, WA, but way out in the boonies) and camped for five wonderful days.  When my brother, Kevo, and dear friend Julie also joined us, I was very close to having all my favorite people within arms reach at the same time.  There were no fireworks (alas!), but a frightening incident involving bacon grease + Dan, our very own Fire Guy, more than made up for them.

Pictures of the trip are posted in my web album — click on the photos to your right!

The very next weekend, I was already in Port Townsend for the Writer’s Conference.  I want to devote more time to writing about that, so I’m going to wait til tomorrow, when I’ve caught up a little more on my sleep.

In the meantime, I’ll just say that after Justin picked me up from the conference, we met up with Chris and his girlfriend Jess, who is out here from Washington DC.  Our grand adventure?  The Olympic Game Farm in Sequim (an entire city obsessed with all things lavender, we noticed).  I haven’t giggled so much or shrieked so loud in a very long time.  There are certain things that feeding wild animals by hand will cause… most often a quick revert back to the kind of pure joy you haven’t experienced since the age of three.

Yes, that’s drool in the above photo.  It landed in a little pool on the fabric seat.  Luckily we took Chris’ parents’ car.

The buffalo know just where to stand to get fed…

And they are too huge to be ignored.  Even by people in large SUV’s, who often have a tendency to ignore everything.

I’m sure I’ll be subjecting you all to more of these photos in the coming days.  Surreal experience.

One other thought: if the teacher/writer gig doesn’t work out, perhaps I should try my hand at training Kodiak bears.  I’m not kidding.  Carrot in hand, I said (calmly and assertively a la The Dog Whisperer — hey, it could work), “Up!  Up!” and he sat up on his haunches.  When I waved my carrot, he began waving his paws. 

Seriously one of the (largest) cutest things I’ve seen.  I was in love.

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Seriously.  How can you not love this guy?

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These are two people happy to be back together after a long week apart.  More soon!

 

for Grace, who’s been asking me for months to get the beacons lit…

One of my dearest friends, Grace, and I were FA-NAT-ICS about the LOTR movies.  Still are, actually.

My old work digs, Masterworks (where Grace still works) boasts a LOVELY view of the Olympics, especially on clear days.  A year or two ago, Grace, upon seeing this loveliness, said something to the effect of “It looks like the beacons are lit,” thus confusing her co-workers and forever proving her nerd-dom.

It’s the kind of nerd-dom I can appreciate, though, and so I decided finally fulfill her request of me: that I finally light the beacons.

resolutions: day 6

Hello, all.  Hope the new year is treating you well!

It occurs to me that this past New Year’s Eve marks the second for us where we went to bed around 9 o’clock (our early-morning wakings demand an old-people bedtime).  Since we’ve only been together on two NYE’s, this means we have yet to count down to midnight together.  Oh, well.  One of these years we’ll make it to midnight, I suppose.  As it is, we wake up the next morning, some of the world’s only well-rested people, and wish each other a happy new year. 

I’m not real good at resolutions, but this year I have already been making good on my vow to get more quality time in with friends.  New Year’s Day, I had coffee with Amber, a friend from work who I’d long been wanting to share conversation and hot beverages with.  (Her first child is due in March, and I’m completely unbiased in thinking that their name choice of “Justin” is a good one).  She is deeply fun to work with (and extremely funny), so it was a joy to get to know her better. 

Justin and I had my favorite professor from last quarter, Michael, over for dinner on Friday night, which was a total blast, all nervousness about my cooking abilities aside.  It made me so happy to have Justin meet someone who made such a difference in my first quarter back to school.  They share a bit of common ground in that they’re huge gamers, so it was truly amusing watching the conversation travel to a place where I was completely lost.  So funny.

In the above kinds of situations, where it involves taking a friendship from one sphere into another (i.e., from work to a coffee shop, from the classroom to our living room), it always feels like a bit of a leap to me.  What if it feels awkward or uncomfortable?  I always think.  The reality is that it’s never all that awkward, and it always ends up being so worth the leap to share conversation and laughter together, and get to know another person better.  So worth it.

Yesterday, I met Tracie, one of my bridesmaids, for lunch and shopping in downtown Seattle.  I am ashamed to say that I haven’t seen her since my wedding (how did that happen?), but we made up for lost time, and it was lovely to pick right back up where we last left off.  Not all friendships are able to do that, and I find myself incredibly grateful for the ones that do — lifelong friendships almost always have to play out this way if they are to survive and grow.  Incidentally, Tracie is one of my favorite shopping buddies, so this was fun on several levels.  We must have looked a little mad, stopping and standing in the middle of Old Navy for ten minutes at a time, fully engrossed in conversation, trying to catch up with each other’s lives and happenings as fast as we could.  It was a lovely afternoon.

Some of Justin’s friends Levi and Dave (also dudes from our wedding) came up to watch the Seahawks playoff game and crash at our place, and although I missed the game on TV, I was able to join in on both the celebrations and the moans and groans since I was listening to the game on the radio on my drive back up from Seattle.  It was actually really fun to share the game that way, calling back and forth for ten seconds or so after big plays.  Now I know why Justin and Chris watch games this way (Chris lives in California).

The challenge here is to keep this up once our lives get crazy again with school and work – we know we’re heading right back into some long days.  All I know is that my heart feels so full when we’re spending time with good friends and sharing good words about good things together.  There’s nothing like it, so we’re working to make a solid place for it in our schedule and in our home (which is also a good thing because it motivates us to keep our place clean — also a challenge when school is in full force).

Anyway, I’m going to go back to spending quality time with my sickie hubby, who is sniffling on the couch.  Be well and blessed, all.     

garage-saling with the professionals

Team Lawlis drove home a few weekends ago, stayed with my folks, and caught up with friends for a few days.  Part of this revelry involved garage-saling with Chris.

This is Chris.  Note the classy use of my garter at our wedding.

Chris is forsaking us; is moving to glamorous California.  Apparently, we’re not good enough in comparison to palm trees and sandy beaches and eating disorders.  So, to celebrate his impending demise departure, we decided to accompany him on his garage sale quest.

First thing you need to know: to Chris, if anything is worth doing, it had better be done in a suit.  Whether searching for reduced-price crap on someone’s lawn, or a wife and career out on the side of the road, you need to look the part.

Justin and I were slummin’ it — we showed up in our usual civilian garb — but Chris was not one to disappoint.  Suit and tie, kids.  Suit and tie.

A few snippets from our little adventure:

Chris, at our first stop: “How much for the lot?”

Man running garage sale: “What?”

Chris: “How much, for everything here?”

Man: “One thousand, nine hundred and ninety five dollars.”

Chris: “I’ll give you fifty cents.”

At our next garage sale, my fine husband found a vampire cape which he purchased for $1US.  He proceeded to wear it to each garage sale that followed, which elicited strange looks at some sales, and open staring at others.

Justin and Chris were discussing a potential purchase at one house and the lady walked up to them, in vampire cape and three-piece suit, respectively, and said, “Hi there.  What’s the occasion?” 

They looked at her as if that were the strangest question in the world.  “What occasion?” they asked.  “We’re garage saling.” 

She then felt awkward to have asked, mumbled a “Sorry,” and returned to her lawn chair in the garage.  It was one of the more tangible awkward moments I’ve been able to enjoy in a while.  That, and when Chris asked at one house if they were selling pot.

Chris purchased a fan from the Philipines for fifty cents, not to keep, but to barter with at the next garage sale.  He pointed to an item, requested its price from its owner, and then had Justin ever-so-suavely pull the fan from the inner pocket of his suit and display it ever-so-tantalizingly.

(Justin has come in handy before.  Once he carried around a clipboard, jotting down notes for Chris as they were perusing.  Chris would point; Justin would say to the seller: “The gentleman would like to make you a very generous offer,” write down fifty cents on a sheet of paper, fold it up, and hand it to the person.)

While we were saling, Chris also tried to garner a book of Shakespeare plays by delighting a garage-saling crowd with a dramatic reading: “Act One…”  I thought he did the Bard justice, but they insisted on him paying 38 cents for the book.

By the way, random thought, I think this T-shirt is brilliant.  With that, I leave you.  (There was pretty much no way to wrap up this random post, and I really do like the T-shirt.)

conversations

I had a good cup of coffee the other day with one of my all-time favorite people.  When I stop to think about it, it’s such a funny friendship (but life’s great friendships are, more often than not, odd pairings).  I can only credit God’s sense of humor with how we ended up friends.  He is, I suspect (although I can never fully know for sure, since he refuses to reveal his biological age, only his mental one), slightly older than my dad.  Me, I’m twenty-five, but have always been a bit of an old soul, and have never easily fit into my own demographic.  We have a rare brand of kindredness — a mutual love of flip-flops, coffee, discussions about faith and culture, church survival, and all things Bono.  Somehow, it all evens out, and for about a year now we’ve met every so often to get caffeinated and throw words and thoughts around.  (We mark seasons of life by which particular coffee shop we were in when we had such-and-such a conversation, e.g. “Oh yeah, that was back when we were meeting at Barnes and Noble.  Has it really only been six months since we were praying for that job?”). 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all that God blessed me with this friendship during the year my faith was tested more than any other. 

Often, you don’t realize the value of a friendship until life’s pathways have drawn you to separate circumstances and locales, and you suddenly realize with a pang of loss that you had it good.  This is one of those rare occurrences where I’m already aware of this friendship’s value and impact — that this particular mentor has already left a lifelong mark.  If I ever have some measure of success in this life — outside of my family, Dan will be a big part of the answer to why.

There have been brief moments in my life — aha! moments — where, all of a sudden, I feel like I am with my own kind.  Most of the time, those moments have been shared with people I’ve never met:  Buechner.  Yancey.  Lamott.  (I think Donald Miller showed up at one point, even if he was late to the party).  Musically, I found that kinship in Nichole Nordeman.  It was like coming face to face with my own thoughts in another person (who could articulate them far better than I).  In spite of learning to make friends, in spite of having a great family who loved me, I have more often than not felt an underlying loneliness all of my life.  Hard to explain, but it didn’t matter a bit if I was surrounded by people or completely on my own.  I felt the loneliness of not belonging, of not fitting in.  I think it all started my junior year of college, but when I first began to read these particular words and hear these particular songs — for the first time, I was not alone.  These words were no substitutes for a face and a voice, but they were a beautiful glimpse.

I have since found a precious few people who are the face and the voice with the words, Dan being one of them, and I cannot help but walk away from each hour’s worth of conversation with my heart full of the joy that is being known and understood (and, perhaps, loved even so).  Yesterday’s conversation was just one more among many.

This past year I have been at turns cynical, bitter, angry, stand-offish, unreliable, and more than a little feisty, at least, as it relates to church world and church leaders.  Refusing to let me go, God had mercy and grace on me, and sent a friend who listened, consoled, asked questions, and listened some more, even when my answers were frustrated and ugly and not well packaged. 

God double-crossed me by sending me a pastor in friend’s clothing.  He sent all these qualities in the very type of person I’d learned not to trust: a ministry-type.  A pastor.  He sent me Jesus in bleach blonde hair and surfer clothes, someone who could frankly not give a rip about the title of Pastor — being much more concerned with that of Friend.  Exactly what I needed.   

I’ve never been more grateful.            

–grasshopper

no nay never

Ah, the fun that is had when good friends, good music and good beer are all present.

HIGHLIGHT OF THE EVENING: In our dialogue with the Irish folk band that was playing (we were the table that a band loves), Grace mistook one of them and thought she’d been invited up to sing.  Grace doesn’t sing, but what she lacks in a musical ear she makes up for in bravado.  Much to their shock and much to our amusement, she fearlessly got up on stage and sang along with the band, as they tried to teach her/us the following lovely tune (it took several tries, that no nay never part was quite beyond us, but they eventually succeeded, and the whole place roared out the chorus in true Irish drinking song style):

***

Wild Rover (No Nay Never)

I’ve been a wild rover for many a year
And I spent all my money on whiskey and beer,
And now I’m returning with gold in great store
And I never will play the wild rover no more.

cho: And it’s no, nay, never,
     No nay never no more,
     Will I play the wild rover
     No never no more.

I went to an ale-house I used to frequent
And I told the landlady my money was spent.
I asked her for credit, she answered me “nay
Such a custom as yours I could have any day.”

cho:

I took from my pocket ten sovereigns bright
And the landlady’s eyes opened wide with delight.
She said “I have whiskey and wines of the best
And the words that I spoke sure were only in jest.”

cho:

I’ll go home to my parents, confess what I’ve done
And I’ll ask them to pardon their prodigal son.
And if they caress (forgive) me as ofttimes before
Sure I never will play the wild rover no more.

11.10: Happy Birthday, Myles!

Today, dear friend, we celebrate the moment that God decided to grace us with your presence.

For your honest friendship,

for your listening ear,

for your ability to artfully spin thoughts into words,

for your deep appreciation of all things beautiful,

for pushing me to read Harry Potter

(for all sorts of good book recommendations, for that matter),

for your bitter diatribe when Bush won,

for your coffee-addict tendencies,

for your heart for Jesus and the world around you…

I’m thankful. 

What a randomly-formed friendship, but I’m so thankful.

Be well and blessed on today, your day.  Hope it’s full of friends and happy moments (and, perhaps, picking up pennies).

-S

Melissa update

It’s been kind of a rollercoaster ride lately as far as things with Melissa are concerned.  A month ago, Mom and I visited her, back in the hospital for the third or fourth time.  Depressed and severely nauseated, she slept 90% of the time we were there.  I came home scared that she had given up completely.

I called four days after she arrived back home.  “Hello?!” a perky voice answered.  I wasn’t even sure it was her.  “Yeah, it’s me, your friend who was rude and slept the entire time you came to visit me… sorry (embarrassed laughter)!”  The following Saturday, I met her at the soccer fields to watch 2 of her kids play soccer.  She was back to her loud and slightly obnoxious self – the loudest soccer mom you’ve ever heard — and I was never more glad to see it.  We hung out at her apartment for a while during her daily nurse’s visit (she is still on an IV four times a day), then went to Wal-mart to find some good knitting yarn.  She drove the motorized cart, and had the both of us in hysterics due to her bad driving as she ran into several aisle-ends. 

It was so beautiful to see her not merely breathing in and out, but living.

I received an email today from her mom.  Despite her feeling better, she is still losing weight, despite a high-calorie diet.  This is concerning to her doctors, and they are not optimistic about her body-scan on December 13th.  (This will be the first scan since the amputation surgery).

I am back to sheer heartbreak.  This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through, and definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever witnessed in the life of a loved one.

Please continue to pray.  Pray for the miracle of healing for Melissa… and for faith and acceptance of whatever way God chooses to do the healing.  Pray for Dashiel, her husband, as he begins his new job in the midst of such a crazy time.  Pray for their three children.

There is something in the works, something special for the family that we are working on.  I can’t elaborate here because we don’t want Melissa to know.  I don’t think she visits this blog but would hate to be the one to spoil the secret… so if you know Melissa personally, keep your trap shut!  I am raising funds here at work, and thought it would be a good idea to give the people familiar with her story from this blog a chance to contribute as well.

If this has moved your heart and you would like to contribute to the Melissa Santos fund ($368 so far!) please make your check out to her mom, Gloria Kono, and mail it to the following address:

Stacey Rich

c/o Masterworks

19265 Powder Hill Place NE

Poulsbo, WA 98370

If you need more details about it before you give, I’m happy to share with anyone who won’t spoil the secret.  staceyrich@gmail.com.

Any amount (any amount at all, no matter how small) would be appreciated.  Please give generously… and most importantly, pray hard.  This is hard to understand, but we need God’s grace and presence now more than ever.

thanks, stacey

melissa

I’d appreciate your continued prayers for Melissa.  She came home, went back to the hospital, came home, went back to the hospital, and is now home again.  She’s sick, throwing up all the time.  As if what she’s already dealing with isn’t hard enough (for newer types — she’s fighting a rare and agressive form of sarcoma and had her leg & part of her pelvis amputated in late July).

But still, her one request?  Prayer.

When you pray, please remember Melissa and her family.  Remind God that everyone touched by this situation needs Him to be here with us.  Remind Jesus that one of His lambs needs to be carried and healed.  Thank you.

update

I returned from an amazing (quick) camping trip to a message on my cellphone telling me the following:

1.  There were complications following Melissa’s surgery, and they were trying to get her stable.

2.  The cancer has advanced past her leg, into her uterus, bladder, and most likely her kidneys.

I am heartbroken.  I’m no oncologist, but I realize that unless God does something big here, I am going to lose my friend.

Five days ago I laid next to her on her bed as we were packing her stuff for the hospital.  I held her hand and told her everything was going to be ok.  She said that I get to think about my future — she doesn’t really get the luxury of taking for granted that she’ll get to watch her kids grow up.  I told her that of course she has a future, it just looks different than the one we’d planned.

I told her it would be ok.

And it’s not ok.

My heart hurts.

Please, PLEASE pray for God to intervene; for him to guide the doctors.  They want to do additional surgery, but have to get her stable from the first surgery in order to do so.

Pray for me also.  I’m headed over to Seattle this afternoon to visit her… and I… I just don’t know even what to ask you to pray for, other than that I’d be a comfort somehow. 

Thanks.