a short post

this will be a short post because there are too many things to recount and i need to get to bed at a decent hour, but for real- probably not.

i am home and mopey, having obtained a gross amount of mosquito bites and gone through the typical couple of post-travel days where i cry myself to exhaustion. instead of plodding off to bed like a whimp tonight and succumbing to the lazy practice of once-a-month blogging, i have decided to sit down wearing a random pair of old man slippers that i just dug up from inside my closet to recount the past couple weeks that changed my life no doubt. how about that.

really, this year's christmas smacked me in the face and left without much magic or snow. i got many nice presents, but the problem with any sort of present is that they are more often than not impractical and unnecessary. don't get me wrong, i love presents, just not as much when bank account sizes are shrinking and you receive expensive designer kitchenware and all you want to do is return said presents and get cash back. dull, no? actually, the best present i got this christmas was from myself. i bought it on christmas eve while FRANTICALLY racing through the aisles of target looking for impossibly perfect/cheap presents for every single person on my list. this on-sale-for-a-mere-$9.99 present was none other than the FREE WILLY trilogy. can you say perfection??? you have to understand, i have pretty much been waiting for something like this to come along since 3rd grade. ah, life is beautiful.

i spent new year's eve with scott, a bottle of wine and bad movies. it was uneventfully fun. we made some delicious bruschetta and a top things list for 2006, here are some of the big ones:
1. got hired at IBM/made millions
2. summertime country drives to promiscuous
3. cinemagic and hollywood domination
4. homemade pizzas
5. invasion of the polos
6. more dorky habits acquired
7. california, utah, korea
8. new apartments
9. medicore to bad drive-in movies
10. boggle/top 9 nights

the next night, new years day, i left for guatemala totally unprepared. after one car, two planes and one crazy chicken bus, i arrived at a retreat center in lemoa, guatemala with my church group of 25ish older adults and college kids. i remember the first night there as terrifying because it suddenly occured to me how far away i was from the comforts of home and daily life. luckily, erin was to my right and em to the left so i wasn't without family. although living great distances away from home tends to shake you to your core, that is one thing that i really appreciate about traveling- its ability to separate yourself from every mind-numbing day that you cannot remember and to alert you to pay acute attention to yourself, others, everything because you are among the unfamiliar.

my team, the day camp, was one out of three (the others being medical and construction). we held a very successful week-long day camp for the kids of the town. an inital anxiety was that i do not really like working with kids. however, as i soon found out, these kids are the exception. they characterize childhood at its best- unconditionally loving and open to all differences. i love them. i wish everyone could participate in this mission trip or others like it in order to raise awareness of the world and their individual place in it. i also wish that i would have learned spanish eariler on, although i can now sing the best kiddie songs in spanish, the real, important stuff.

right now i am getting over post-trip sickness of bad asthma and a regular old cold, otherwise known as BLAH. i dread going back to school for several reasons. for now, all i want to do is keep watching season 5 of 24. scott and i watched 12 episodes in 1.5 days. we are pretty amazing! and that is my past few weeks life in a nutshell. whew, i swear typing takes energy. and to end, two really good movies that i have seen recently: "children of men" and "brick". check them out if you don't mind violence or really great innovative film.