Sisters are cool!!!!

My lovely sister Hannah is in town visiting for a few days.  This has improved my mood drastically, although I'm already sad about her leaving Friday night.

This is a short post because I absolutely MUST take a shower and go to bed...I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night, and need to catch up.  But, to list things off, today's activities included frolicking about the apartment complex lake with turduckens, eating Tex Mex at Chuy's (awesome!!), making muffins, making cupcakes, watching "The Man in the Iron Mask," and making a list of potential Dallas area celebrity homes to track down...so far the homes of George W. Bush, Chuck Norris, and the Jonas brothers are probable candidates.  Unfortunately, the Jonas brothers live like 45 minutes away, so we'll have to see how serious we are about that.

Anyway, stay posted.

Das ist nicht so gut

Stressed out.  Cried the whole way back from campus tonight.  Feel sick and jittery.  Don't particularly want to type about it.  Going to sleep.

Stuff to Doooooooo....

This post is short and sweet because it's 12:30 and I have a massive pile of laundry sitting on my bed that I've vowed to fold and put away before going to bed, and I have a short response paper to write before 3:00 tomorrow, but my brain won't hold still long enough to write it.  SO, I'm going to fold the laundry, go to bed, and try to get up at a decent hour in the morning and write said paper then.  The next two weeks are going to be RIDICULOUS in the amount of homework I have to get through...so sorry, but this is all you're getting on this post.  Have a good night/day.

Dance It Off, Yo!

So I took a foray into the world of cheesy workout DVDs today.

I was going to just do the Wii Fit as usual (if you count my rather sporadic habits of using it recently as "usual"), but then I remembered this workout DVD that I acquired some four years ago called "Dance It Off!"  Yes.  Weight loss through dancing.  I've used this DVD a couple of times before, but I've never really had the space (or the solitude) to really be able to do the workouts without falling into a dresser or being mocked by passerby.  But, now I have a single-person apartment with a wide space in the middle of the main room, and no excuse not to get my groove on.  Maybe it's because my friends and I watched "Center Stage" last night, or maybe I  just wanted a change from the Wii Fit exercies...but I decided that dancing for exercise was the way to go.

Let's just say that I'm happy that there was no one around to witness the event.

But it WAS fun...although I'm an absolutely horrible dancer (something I was already well aware of), I am able to laugh at myself, and that happened frequently and made the general workout experience much more entertaining.  The DVD has 4 dance routines, including hip-hop, latin, jazz, and ballet.  Since hip-hop was the first one listed, that's the one I chose.  I'll let you all just rest for a second, picturing me hip-hop dancing.

Yeah.  There isn't a drop of hip-hop in my blood.

My little sister has always been oddly hip-hop, and we've never quite known where it came from.  She probably has this double life dancing in hip-hop groups on the streets.  In any case, I was generally falling all over myself.  Also, that funky bouncey-ness that you always see in hip-hop some how evades my suburban white girl persona, and I bounce more like an excited child than like someone who's dropping it like it's hot.  After the general hip-hop experience, I opted for the ballet routine, which is WAY more up my alley.  Not that I'm good at it (flexibility has never been my strong suit), but I had my fair share of pliees and feet positions back in the Color Guard high school days.  And ballet uses all these French phrases like "rond de jambe" that make me feel all important and experienced because I understand them.  I may not be the most graceful person in the world, but I made it through the ballet routine as well.  Toss in a warm-up and a cool-down (in their appropriate chronological positions), and I was WELL worn out by the time I decided that I'd had sufficient exercise for the day.  Even dancing horribly is a workout, it would seem.

So anyway, I just wanted to let you all know of my dancing adventures of the evening.  For your enjoyment, please refer to these clips from the DVD to better picture how ridiculous I looked doing these various dance moves.  If you know me at all, you will appreciate the mental image.   

"So, wait, what do you do?"

I find that my job perplexes people.

I'm not super surprised by that, really...since I work from home, there's rarely anyone around who actually witnesses my work, and it's not the sort of thing that you just happen across.  One of my best friends works for JCPenny...that's much more self-explanatory and familiar to the general public than the organization I work for which, besides having a lengthy name, has a repetitive acronym that people generally don't even remember either.  No, people really have no idea what I do.  One person I talked to lately thought I sold insurance, and when I mentioned my job to another friend he just said confusedly, "Uh, wait, you just mean seminary?"

So, I thought that I'd take the time to explain this mystery job, so that maybe people will know what I'm talking about when I say that I'm "working."

The organization that I work for is called The Christian Community Foundation of France, commonly known as the CCFOF.  Long name right?  It's not so complicated; community foundations are, to quote Wikipedia, "instruments of civil society designed to pool donations into a coordinated investment and grant making facility dedicated primarily to the social improvement of a given place."  So, essentially, we are a non-profit Christian organization that acts as a mediator for financial donations to ministries located in France, as well as providing resources to pray for said ministries.

Besides redistributing financial donations to French ministries (fun fact: 98.5% of all financial gifts goes directly to aid French ministries; the rest is retained for administrative necessities), we do several other things.  Most notable among these is the annual Pray for France movement, a worldwide prayer movement for France that takes place during the three weeks before Easter (aka, starting tomorrow) in which we partner with a French ministry group (Objectif France) by translating their 21-day devotional prayer guide to English and making it available to the English-speaking community.  We also support various missionaries to France, and are in the process of developing an online resource for Christian students studying abroad in France to help them connect with a church in their area and meet French Christians.

So, why bother praying for France, you ask?  Good question.  On the whole, Europe is a widely forgotten mission field for the Christian church, because the Christian tradition is so steeped in its history (gotta love those French gothic cathedrals, right?).  But, Christianity in France has been on the decline; things like the Crusades and rigid church/state connections are so deeply embedded in French history that the French people, like much of Europe, have a very negative opinion of the Christian tradition.  Furthermore, since the concept of Christianity as a personal relationship with God is often lacking in French Christianity, they see faith as entirely irrelevant and archaic.  Basically, the people who go to church are old people and the infant grandchildren they bring along, and most of those people don't go to church regularly anyway.  In addition to this, French society promotes the value of laicite, loosely translated as "secularity," which essentially bans religious expression from the public sphere, making freedom of religion the freedom of a PRIVATE religion.  This is causing all sorts of problems with the influx of Islam that has been happening over the past couple of decades, as religious distrust and political complications fuel racism against Muslim people in France; a situation that is being revealed by the political tendencies displayed by early polls for France's upcoming elections, in which Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the leader of the bigoted Front National group of the 1980s, is carrying majority numbers in the race for the French presidency.  People in France were horrified when the Front National got a significant amount of votes in the 80s...apparently, that horror is wearing off, or the memory of the racist atrocities committed by the Front National is becoming a distant memory.

SO, to sum things up, praying for France is worthwhile.

Now, where do I come into all this?

My job position at the CCFOF is the Executive Assistant, meaning that I provide information management support to the president of the organization, represent the president to others when needed (primarily through email communications), and manage special projects (aka, the Pray for France campaign, and the student website development I mentioned earlier).  I also have an honorary title of "Pray for France" coordinator that pops up at this time of year - as such I translate portions of the prayer guide I mentioned, email people to coordinate prayer groups and generate interest, provide encouragement and support to prayer group leaders, and oversaw development/maintenance of the Pray for France website (which can be seen here).  Other common tasks include the paraphrased translation of weekly French prayer newsletters to English, assembly of monthly prayer letters, updating the prayer calendar, current event research, media research, and managing social networking resources.  I'm also hoping to get the ball rolling on Students for France (that student website) following the busy-ness that is Pray for France.  Also, hopefully I'll get to travel to Paris in the fall for a ministry conference, provided that I can raise the necessary financial support.

Because of the wonders of technology, our entire organization is run online; the president to which I am the assistant lives in Atlanta, yet I'm able to successfully do my job from Texas, Missouri, or wherever I happen to be.  The important sounding word that my college career center came up with is that I "telecommute."  This tends to sound very important and impressive on resumes even though it's just a fancy way of saying that I work online, from home.  So I may work from my couch, but I do a whole lot of stuff from it.  It's really cool, too, because I get to keep my French active and regularly communicate with people from all over the world - example, Pray for France currently has groups in the USA, France, Australia, Benin, Canada, Peru, South Africa, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.  It's a sweet gig, and I feel really blessed to have been able to work with the CCFOF for the past year and a half.  It's an organization with a lot of potential, and I'm excited to watch it grow and grow with it!

I hope that clarifies some things...at the very least, it shows that I don't sell insurance, and that even though I wear pajama pants to work, I have a real job :)

PS, if you want, you can check the website, yo!

Je suis fatiguee...

You know those moments when you're so tired that even going to bed seems like too tiring of an activity to engage in?  Yeah...that's where I'm at.  Metaphorically, anyway.  Physically, I'm laying on my couch, staring at my laptop with a Snuggie thrown haphazardly over my upper body and cartoons playing on the TV in the background.  I would get up and go to bed, but it just seems so far away at the present...

I blame the present exhaustion on three factors.

Factor #1: I had to wake up 2 hours earlier than usual to welcome maintenance people who came to "inspect the GFI outlets in the kitchen," which apparently meant just replacing the outlet covers?  I don't know what they did exactly, it all looks the same to me...they're doing this to all the apartments, not just mine.  Basically, there was a pounding on my door along with an enthusiastic declaration of "maintenance!"  I opened the door to a cavalier company of three men, who marched into the kitchen and messed about with the outlets for 10 minutes or so while I chatted with Ruben the lead maintenance guys (we became BFFs during all the flood nonsense, you know), and then they all marched back out and the outlets all looked basically the same as they did before they started.  Weird.

Factor #2: An extensive quest all over the grocery store in search of red lentils, which I know for a fact used to be abundantly available for sale in the rice and bean isle, and which naturally vanished the week I decide to make sweet potato and red lentil soup.  I settled for some non-red lentils eventually, which still took a great deal of work to hunt down.  I'm pretty sure that they just magically appeared there on my 4th trip down that aisle.

Factor #3: I did my socializing thing at a triple birthday party for much of the night (my friends Rachel and Sarah and this guy George all have March birthdays so they combined parties into one celebration).  As parties generally do, this required general extroversion and merry-making and standing and sitting and chatting and laughing and loudness and the like.  It also included grilling out and assorted cupcakes and taco dip.  Tasty tasty things.  It also included alcohol, of which I did not partake, although I did vastly enjoy the comment my friend Erin made when she saw me holding a red Solo cup (of water) in one hand and a chocolate cupcake in the other and, sizing me up, said "You lush!"  That's me...lush-ing it up at the party.  All in all, it was a fun night.  All in all it was a fun night; chatted with friends, met new people, looked all cute and stuff.  And, despite the presence of approximately 18 cars crowding the (albeit spacious) driveway, I actually didn't get horribly blocked in, which was also good.

So now I'm all sleepy and stuff.  But I'm still awake.  Why?

I don't know really.  So I'm going to bed.

Bonne soiree :)

Things I Love Thursdays

My friend Ashley has been doing this thing called TILT for the last year or so, otherwise known as "Things I Love Thursdays."  You can read about things she loves in more detail here.  I forget whether I've done a TILT post on this blog before, and if I have then there's no point in me explaining it.  In any case, since today is Thursday, I thought I'd list off some things that I love :)

*This new top I bought at Target yesterday:

*Saying intelligent things in my church history class and having my professor praise my Blackboard post

*The final segment of Lost in Austen that I'm currently watching

*Listening to The Band Perry while driving with the windows down*

*Saying "Molly, you in danger, girl" at random instances:

*Orange Chicken bowls at Panda Express

*Writing stream-of-conscious French poetry that sounds lovely when read aloud

*This picture:

*Summer weather in March

*New cookbooks

*This clip from Sense and Sensibility:

*Browsing ridiculous jewelry and dresses at the fancy mall with friends

*Reading through family genealogy charts

*Free boxes of Thin Mints

*This video:



*And, of course...the fact that in my present life, the weekend starts on Thursdays :)