My husband and his cat

From the moment I met Lucy, I knew there was no way we would ever be friends. She glared at me with her bright green eyes and wagged her fluffy tail every time I got near her. After Jed and I got married and I moved in with him, things didn’t get any better. I can walk across her path unintentionally and she hisses and growls and bats her little paws at me. If I try to pick her up (which is only in emergency situations like trying to get her out of my room), she turns into a screaming set of claws determined to tear me to pieces. I do admit that I haven’t really tried to help our relationship by being particularly nice, but really, she started it, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s just a little jealous of me.

As long as I’ve known him, Jed has sung the praises of this cat, saying she’s the prettiest cat in the whole world (and she is pretty, with long, shiny black fur and white boots and markings), and super smart, and altogether wonderful. Before I’m accused of being jealous of his admiration for his kitty, let me just say that she’s really not very nice to him either. She puts up with him whenever he picks her up, but looks miserable the whole time and will eventually growl and hiss to be put down. The only time she’s ever nice to him is when he feeds her, and she’ll do whatever he asks then. She even sits when commanded.

The other day, after Jed and I had a long discussion about all of our misunderstandings of the past couple of weeks (most of which were me misunderstanding him), we sat on the couch watching Lucy slink through the living room. She literally slinks. Most cats walk around with their tails held high, but I’ve had yet to see Lucy do this. I commented on this to Jed, and he responded that that’s one of the things he likes about her because it proves that she’s not like other cats. He then launched into his usual spiel explaining how wonderful she was and how she knows the word crate and will sit when asked and can probably speak English if she wanted to. After a minute, his attitude changed from his usual playful and slightly antagonizing tone as he began to tell the story of how he got Lucy.

His mom used to hate cats apparently (you wouldn’t know it now), but Jed always thought they were adorable. He managed at one time to convince her to let him have one. The one condition was that he would have to keep it in a rabbit cage outside. He, understandably, chose not to get one at that time. One day, some time later, he was visiting some friends in Farmington who always had kittens to give away. The litter was made up of almost all tabbies, except for a tiny black kitty that was sitting a little apart from the rest and mewing at him as he watched her. He picked her up, and was almost immediately attached to her. She purred and mewed happily in his arms, and he decided that he had to keep her. So, he took her home. Before his mom came home that day, he made a plan to put Lucy up on his shoulder and prayed that his mom would see how adorable she was and wouldn’t make him put her outside. When Jed’s mom saw her sitting there purring and licking Jed’s face, she exclaimed, “What a cute little kitten!” and Lucy was never put in a rabbit cage.

As she grew up, she remained a loyal kitty and followed Jed around constantly. She was, from what Jed says, a happy and sweet kitty, and he took care of her to the best of his ability. He called around for the best vet when she was sick and made sure she took her medicine. Then he moved out of his parents’ house. He took her with him as he moved around town, but he said she started to change a little. When he lived with some friends who had a dog, Lucy decided she no longer needed to use a litter box. She started getting crankier then, though she continued to be loyal and sweet to Jed. She finally lost it when he moved to the middle east for a year and a half. He forgot to tell her goodbye before he left, and his mom said she sat at the door for days waiting for him to come home.

When he finally did come home, she wouldn’t look at him for days. It’s taken her a very long time to adjust to him being home. Even now, as I said before, she tolerates him, but she isn’t the same sweet kitty that he brought home from a friend’s house 4 years ago. Yet Jed still sings her praises and loves her dearly. He said he believes if he just keeps being nice to her and saying nice things about her, she might just turn back into that nice, sweet kitty that he used to have.

As he told this story, I couldn’t help but think how fortunate I was to be chosen and pursued by such a loyal man. That sounds awfully sappy, but oh well. And before I’m misunderstood, I don’t mean I’m lucky because I get to get away with acting like a witch like Lucy. But, as I consider the vows Jed and I made 4 weeks ago today, and the current divorce rate, I feel God’s blessing on my life through Jed and am confident that til death do us part, we’ll be together.

It's about time!

This last week here’s flown by between meeting all sorts of new people and going to class for 5 hours a day and, supposedly, studying for however long you’re supposed to study when taking this many classes during the summer. I didn’t quite expect coming here for linguistics training to feel so much like being back in school. I’ve had to readjust to living in the dorms and walking everywhere and carrying heavy books wherever I go and eating in the cafeteria. (Fortunately, the cafeteria here is much nicer than Eastern’s.) My classes have been altogether quite interesting. Here’s a quick overview.

Second language acquisition is altogether the easiest and the most fun. We sit in a lecture every morning that is there basically so we can have the super cool lab. Our professor just goes over the psychology of how to learn a language and steps that can be taken to do so. The lab is the fun part. The class is divided into groups of 4 (or sometimes more) and assigned a coach and a “language nurturer.” The language nurturer is someone who’s native language is not English. Our coach sets up a variety of objects and has the nurturer (my nurturer is named Pascal) point to them and tell us what they mean. After that, he repeats the names of the objects and we have to point the one he said. He also acts out verbs for us and when he repeats them, we have to act them out. Already after a week, Pascal is telling us in sentences to act out different things using the objects we know the names for and we can usually figure out what he’s saying. Our language is Kirundi which is from the country of Burundi in Africa. Neat, right?

Articulatory phonetics is probably my second favorite class. We get to learn how to make different sounds that make up language (including the tongue clicking everyone keeps asking about). So far we’ve been learning what words like bilabial, labiodentals, alveolar, and fricative mean, and the difference between a voiced and a voiceless consonant. It’s a funny class, too, because for homework we get to practice making all the funny noises which is pretty different from any other class I’ve taken.

Syntax and morphology is the study of the grammatical makeup of sentences. I like this class because it’s mostly made up of trying to figure out puzzles. We’re given a couple (or quite a few actually) sentences in another language and then given those sentences’ English gloss (translation) and told to find the stems and prepositions and pronouns and whatever else we can find. It’s pretty fun.

The last class is the one I still haven’t figured out if I like or not because a lot of it seems like psychology. It’s called Introduction to Sociolinguistics and is basically the study of the uses of different languages. I like it because it kind of addresses questions I’ve thought about before, but everything is pretty fuzzy. It’s like trying to explain to somebody how you know the sky is blue.

Well, that’s kind of a general overview of everything. There’s a ton of other stuff I want to talk about but I either have forgotten it for the moment or am too lazy to write more. So hopefully I’ll be blogging a little more later on.

Where's the reset button? Dang it!

I've been having one of those months where I wish I could just wipe everything off my plate and start over. Little things just keep piling up and I feel like I don't have any control over it. I don't really have any control, though, which is probably why I feel that way. The feeling that's bothersome and unnecessary is the panic and worry that can be quite a pain in the neck to ignore. But, I found some time to sit and "be still" for a little while today and found that to be quite refreshing. I also found some time to go through some pictures I got to take over the weekend and enjoy them. They're rather peaceful.

Art class fun-ness

So I've been taking this art class for a couple of weeks now and wanted to share a bit of my work with my loyal readers. This is the first drawing that I've done that I'm quite pleased with. I have a picture of some oranges that was our first assignment, and a purple daisy that turned out pretty nice. This is the one that I've put the most work into I think. It's also the first drawing that I've completed with ink, and ink is scary because there isn't an eraser. I wonder if white-out is an acceptable tool in art. Probably not...

Here's the process (kinda boring, but just wanted everyone to know how hard it was :) ):
Draw the outline of the flower with pencil
Using tracing paper, transfer the outline to a second piece of paper (so I still have the original in case I mess something up)
Sit for 2-3 hours putting little dots in the outline until it starts looking something like a flower
Erase the pencilled outline

It was fun and rewarding but also very frustrating. My teacher gave us the option of stipling (which is what I did with the little dots) or line drawing. Stipling, she said, is easier since it's a lot easier to mess up lines if your elbow gets bumped or you lose track of what you're doing.

Next week, we're supposed to start working with colored pencils... should be exciting :)!

Switchfoot, green chile, and a whole house to myself

One of my roommates in college loved Switchfoot to death. She said once that Jon Foreman wrote everything her heart wanted to say. I'd gotten sick of everything else on my MP3 player and for some reason avoided listening to a lot of Switchfoot, but I finally hunkered down and paid attention to some of their more recent CDs. They get down to the nitty-gritty of humanity and ask a lot of questions most people are afraid to ask. Jon Foreman, their lyricist, digs deep and asks questions about life and love and what it means to be happy. I'm not saying other bands don't ask these kinds of questions, but somehow, Switchfoot is one of the few that has helped me understand myself better.

I've still been asking myself lots of questions about the choices I've made and what my life actually looks like right now. At this very moment, I just finished enjoying an especially spicy dinner of ground beef with pepper accidentally dumped on it, mixed with green chile, cheddar, and whole wheat pasta. The house is unusually peaceful as both of my roommates are out to their various errands and events. And I'm at home with nothing huge looming over my head (for the moment). And I'm really not questioning anything right now either. That's an unusual feeling for me to have, especially lately. Some things I've been thinking about have become more clear, while others still need to be addressed. For example, I "decided" (I try to use that word as loosely as possible) that I am not going to Cameroon for a Vision Trip in May. I hadn't really had a lot of peace about deciding to go in May and have had trouble getting myself to move forward in working through the logistics. A lot of people had been questioning that decision as well since the Field Director in Cameroon wouldn't actually be in the country at that time. I think I was just trying to move forward too quickly. Sometimes, I get too caught up in all the action and trying to "keep the ball rolling" to really stop and pay attention to what my heart is telling me.

For now, I am still looking forward to not working in medical records any more when the summer comes. I'm planning on going to school for linguistics in June and am praying about getting a job as an "educational assistant" when I come back. And I'm still trying to draw pretty flowers in my art class and record sort of pretty music with my new microphone. (I've also "decided" that I have way too many hobbies, but I'm not willing to give any of them up, so I guess nothing will change.)

Well, that's it. Life's crazy. And there's a crazy dog who's licking my shirt because he wants his dinner. I'll end with Switchfoot's quote: "Life begins at the intersection".

It's already 2010???

So, it's already almost the end of January and it still hasn't hit me that it's 2010. I will never cease to be amazed out how quickly time goes. I have survived my first semester of not being in school, am on my way to Africa at the beginning of the summer, am taking "Botanical Art and Illustration", and randomly decided to buy some recording equipment so I can make a cd of music that I wrote. (How I will find the time to make this cd, or whether or not I will actually like this cd is another story.)

I've been feeling like I'm in the middle of a little bit of a crisis with so many choices to make and so many choices that have already been made. Now that I've officially joined a missions agency and am working towards getting on the field, I am freaking out a little and wondering, "What if I had decided to join the Air Force?" and other random things like that. A little bit of "the grass is greener" syndrome, as my mother pointed out

In the midst of all of this, however, I am always refreshed whenever it hits me that none of it is in my hands anyway. One of my good friends said something quite poetic over coffee the other day. "We are stuck in this constant cycle of humanity in which the only relief is the Divine." Something like that. She said it much better and I can't remember her exact wording unfortunately. Anyway, the point is, every time I freak out as I'm trying to figure out my exact plans, God just puts his hand on my little head and tells me to stop worrying. I can't really have exact plans, anyway. They're really more like guidelines.