Biking

So I asked a good friend of mine if she would like to go on a bike ride today, I do this thinking that I will just pump up my tires and go. It turns out that my tire has a hole in the inner tube, so I fight with it to get the wheel off and ready to change the inner tube. This is kind of an older bike that has a disc brake instead of the standard calipers. I finally get it all ready and run it over to the bike shop where I am informed that my tire has a giant tear in it and that there is no point in a new inner tube without a new tire. 

I get the new tire, costing $21 instead of the $8 I expected. I take it home and begin to reattach it and find that part of the bolt that adjusts the brakes in the back is stripped. So I grab my friend and head over to Wal-Mart (blech) and get a washer so I can tighten the bolt without getting to the stripped part. Finally I get home and get everything back together only to find that the brake cable came off up on the handle end which takes me a while to fix. After all this the bolt that gave me the trouble in the first places completely strips and makes the back brakes unusable. 

At this point I decide that its not worth it and that I will work on it another day. I take a friends bike and discover part way along the ride that one of the front gears is unusable, the biggest one, and that the handlebars are dangerously loose in the front to back direction. 

None of this put me in a bad mood remarkably, in fact I had an amazing time. We get to campus hang out with a third person, bake cookies. (I even wore a "man-pron." It's like an apron but for a man) After it gets kind of dark (read: pitch black in the woods) we make our way home. The handlebars at this point are so loose that it takes all of my forearm strength to keep them upright. My legs are dying and I ran into a boulder. 

Overall though, it was an amazing time. Wonderful fellowship, good exercise and perfect weather. It was an incredible day.

A new leaf

I've turned over a new leaf. Well, I'm trying to turn over a new leaf anyways. I had long conversation with a good friend of mine in the upstairs of the MEC and in the end was convinced that it would be worth my while to do away with my cynical, negative side and instead work on bringing out my fun, happy side. 

On the one hand I know that by putting the effort into being a generally more outgoing and "uppy" person that I can more easily acquaintance myself with new people. Inevitably this will pay off at whatever new job I end up getting, it will allow me to make new friends and grow in new areas. It won't be easy though, it means putting effort into my encounters and working at drawing people into a new realm of interaction. It means moving outside my immediate comfort zone and examining who I am in order to redefine that in myself. 

I thought I had figured out a living situation for this fall, but it seems that my Plan A won't work, which means trying out Plan B.

I have 5 days to finish moving, and I'm not at all looking forward to it. Particularly the large boxes of books, it is a lot of effort to move those and a lot of stairs to get them down.

I think this week I'm going to begin looking for a full-time "real" job for this academic year. As long as it is a living wage and something that will stretch and bring me growth then I think that I will be happy at it. I'm going to various human rights organizations around town, maybe they need a college graduate for something?

I'm not sure how this next year will go, I feel like it will either be amazing or miserable. If I can find the kind of job I want, then I will be fed and grow and having an amazing year, if I'm stuck in retail or something like that I will try to make the best of it but don't have particularly high hopes that that will be a positive experience necessarily. 

I went to coffee with a friend from high school today, caught up a little bit. She wanted to know about Cambodia, which made me remember that I haven't really talked about it a lot recently, or even thought about it. I think to some extent I'm done processing it for the time being, but at the same time it is interesting to see how I react as I think about it again.

If I end up living with someone not NCC related, it will mean that I will make new friends and have new adventures. It will mean a more concerted effort to stay connected with the friends I've made over the last few years. It will mean new 'temptations' pulling me in directions I've never been pulled in. None of these are bad things, but simply ideas to be aware of. 

Maybe I'll try to redesign my blog a little.

Moving

I made a decision, I talked to my school and confirmed that I'm deferring a year. 

I've begun the process of living in a new home.

I'm tired way too early in the day.

It's been an odd past few days, mostly because all of them are a blur. Something about working outside in the sun, all day, everyday, doing mind-numbing activities has an effect of making the days pretty much impossible to distinguish. 

It's hard to wrap my mind around this huge shift in my life, I think that it will really sink in once everyone else starts going to school and I do not.

I talked to one of the co-regional ministers of Oregon and she offered to see if there wasn't a church that I might work in part-time over the next year. While I hadn't really intended to work in a church it might not hurt to get some more experience, in an area outside of youth work. 

The next year will be an adventure, to say the least.