Fall Festival!

A bunch of us got together tonight to have our own personal fall festival - pumpkin carving, fall desserts, chili, halloween movies, and (by necessity) the World Series.  The Cardinals won - yay!  My traffic woes are now vindicated.  But seriously, it was a really, really, really awesomely fun night.  A lot of laughter...in fact, "a lot" is probably an understatement.  It was truly one of the best times I've had this semester.  And the Cardinals winning the World series just put the icing on the cake!

The group getting our pumpkin carving on...throughout the night there were about ten people or so total, so a pretty good size group!

I bought a little pumpkin to carve this year, mostly because I didn't want to scoop out a whole big pumpkin and because the bigger pumpkins at the store were pretty picked over and sad-looking.  Only problem: when I carved out the top, I didn't take into account the size of my hand...I basically made myself a pumpkin-style raccoon trap (where you can get your hand in but you can't do much else.  After a difficult pumpkin-gutting process, I eventually had to recruit one of my smaller-handed friends to help scrape out the insides.  (This picture shows how small I made the hole:

What happens to the table when you have eight pumpkins being carved at once...

My finished pumpkin!  Because my pumpkin was so small, I couldn't fit any of the patterns on it...and since I've never been too good at freehand art, I decided to take pieces of patterns and put them together.  The result: Ichabod the Ghost and Thor the Magic Dragon.  They travel the Halloween universe upholding justice and fighting the good fight.  Ichabod is on the left, and Thor is on the right...he's magical because of the wizard hat.  

All of our finished pumpkins!!  From left to right: Dracula, a Winking Jack-O-Lantern, the Trinity (because we're in seminary, and it was bound to happen), a KU Jayhawk, Ichabod and Thor, and a Fleur-de-Lis.  Not too shabby :)

Like I said...it was a really, really, really awesome night.  What can I say?  I love my friends...and pumpkins :)

Proactive About the Future

Today consisted of 5 parts:

Part 1: IHop with a friend.

Part 2: Laundry.  So much laundry.

Part 3: Applying for post-graduation jobs.  More on this momentarily.

Part 4: Working haphazardly on my Doctrine of God paper, and frequently discovering that I'm a borderline heretic.

Part 5:  Watching the Cardinals KILL the Rangers 16-7 in Game 3 of the World Series, with three home runs by Albert Pujols (putting him on par with Babe Ruth).  That's some good vindication for a St. Louis girl who is constantly frustrated by Dallas traffic.

Now back to part three...even though I don't graduate for another 6 months, I went ahead and started the process of applying for jobs today.  Can't start too early, right?  Well, you probably can, but for motivational purposes I think it's a really good thing.  Generally, when I think about finding a job, it seems vague and intimidating, but after revamping my resume and writing up a good cover letter (both of which are obviously tweaked and edited for the job at hand), I'm actually feeling excited and positive about finding a job!  For one thing, I've discovered that while finding a job may be hard, applying for them is easy...it never hurts to send in an application, and now that I've got basic application documents at hand it's really easy to apply.  And even if it's only October, I figure it's never too early to get my name out there.  One of the churches already responded saying the position has been filled, and I haven't heard from the other one yet, but you miss 100% of the shots you never take, right?