United Nations Boys

I happen to be living in a house right now that is awesome in its hosting capabilities.  For about a week and a half, there were three directors from VisionTrust (i.e. a compassion like company), staying there.  With completely different schedules and no real time to sit down and learn about them when they first arrived, I started referring to them as the "UN boys".  I was blessed to go to their benefit dinner, also celebrating the founder, Earnie Dyke's 50 years in ministry.  The next morning, all the directors came to New Life... it was exciting to see them as they came in and welcome them...almost like I was back at the Vine in my typical run and squeal method.

 Monday night, everyone from VisionTrust came over for a potluck dinner.  Unfortunately  Mary became ill only an hour before everyone arrived, but the rest of us chipped in to host... I've become quite comfortable opening the door to strangers and inviting them in!

 I can say now that we hosted Jimmy from Maya mar, Sammy from Thailand, and Abraham from Cambodia.  Three sweet men, that are working with orphaned and underprivileged children all around the world.  I have such respect for them! I stole Sammy and Jimmy for a quick pic, complete with Reese, Mary and Doug's grandson!

Pie Rush Wednesday

I am continually excited about the free and cheap things I am finding to do here in the Springs.  Last wednesday I hit up Village Inn with some kids from the Furnace (another college age program at New Life) for "free pie with a purchase".  All I had to do was buy the scoop of ice cream to go on top of the slice of apple pie....amazing!!!!

I'm pretty sure I'll be making this a weekly tradition... it fits in perfectly to my wednesday evening right after voice lessons...:o)

The Green Bullet

I love this little car.  He's doing his best out here on the hills and inclines of Colorado and I'd like to think he'll adjust even more and soon we'll be rocking out on I-25 with the big dogs.  We've already got our own share of stories... being run off the road by a trucker in Indiana (don't worry they make really wide shoulders on their interstates), getting the back window shattered by a rock chipped up by a weed whacker, and for the first time ever getting out of a speeding ticket!

The only reason I could want to share this story, is the happy outcome.  I was going to be late for classes and this one road has a lot of downhill to it...well, suffice it to say that my car actually gained speed for the first time and I didn't stop it from happening.  At that same moment, on this two lane road, a cop happened to be driving towards me, flipped his lights on and slowed down to do a u-turn.  I didn't even try to pretend it wasn't me and seeing a side road coming up, I pulled off so we weren't left trying to have a conversation on this narrow, pretty busy road.  An article on yahoo from a couple of weeks back, actually came to mind, and I took the advice to heart.  I immediately apologized for speeding, kept my hands on the steering wheel, let him know I was reaching into my bag. He told me he was going to write me a ticket and as he headed back to his car, I'm pretty sure I said, "I am really sorry, my car just hasn't handled these roads well at all and I was just excited it was finally going somewhere."  I'm also pretty sure I saw him pause at those words and then keep walking.  When he came back, he handed me all my paperwork and said, "I'll let you off with a warning this time, but next time I'll write you a citation for $238."

Whew! I have never gotten out of a ticket before!  I credit it all to yahoo, the site that always has those catchy pictures that make you want to read the articles. I strolled into class 10 minutes late, but at least I didn't have a hefty fine on top of it!  So back to under the speed limit the green bullet and I go...my heart can't handle more legal confrontations.

Newest update on the green bullet: the plastic guard that one side was wired into place, has officially all disconnected... hopefully someone knows how to put that back on.....

World Figure Skating Museum and Hall of Fame

 Last Friday, a few of us checked out that World Figure Skating Museum and Hall of Fame, located in the southern part of Colorado Springs.  It was free admission for Museum Day 2010, and the ladies were quite excited to see us as we walked in.  We had a personal tour around the place and in the end walked away with some literature on the upcoming movie, Rise and postcards autographed by Evan Lysachek, an olympic figure skater.  Rise is based off of the 1961 plane crash which killed the entire U.S. ice skating team and many of their family members.  This fall all thirty odd members of the team that were on that plane, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

 We had a good time matching poses and finding the kodak moments within the museum... yep, we're nerds and proud of it!

 The first ice skates....bones attached to the shoe with strips of leather.

 This painting was made by a pair of ice skaters skating their routine on a piece of canvas stretched across the ice.  Experienced skaters can tell what some of the moves are purely based on how the lines are.

 The Hall of Fame with gold medals on loan and all!

 Did you know that Vera Wang was at one a figure skater?

 I was excited to see things on Dorothy, my grandfather met her while working with the special olympics back in Northern Virginia.

My favorite part of our time there....the trees and grass! Soft! Shade! Deciduous!!!! Content heart!

One Month Since I Left Virginia

It has only been three weeks since I have settled into the Eastern side of Colorado Springs,... really?  The days and evenings are filled with new things and new people...I actually spent yesterday by myself, a first since leaving home...and even then I passed up a couple of opportunities to just quiet my soul from the constant stimulation (I think I have the brain capacity of a two year old).

I am living in a beautiful place.  I don't think I anticipated only having the mountains on one side of the town, although it makes directionally figuring out east and west super easy.  I do miss the blue ridge...and fall leaves that are vibrant shades of red, orange, and yellow.  Apparently the aspens change here and are beautiful if you go out wherever it is that they are.... but just thinking of shades of yellow doesn't get me excited to go.

I love God's timing...what has put me in a place to have a particular conversation or see someone again.  I met someone from NOVA at church purely because the words "Northern Virginia" floated from her mouth to my ear as I was checking in for choir... an air force family that had just moved here from Burke, VA...how awesome!

I'd like to say that everything is super easy out here, but the things that are hard, are hard in good ways.  I am with a bunch of people that I hardly know, and we are learning each other's strengths and weaknesses, likes and humiliations.  I'm learning how to worship within the New Life Choir, i.e. 8 inches of space on rickety risers...although we are supposed to be getting new risers next week!  And I'm learning how to take all these amazing people I am meeting and establish friendships.  Colorado Springs is very small town among the young adults in that most know each other... yay for connections!

The Springs has cool things like this!

The next few months are going to fly by and before we all know it, I'll be home for Christmas (December 16).... even though I am so excited for the opportunities that God has put before me, there is a huge part of me that thinks of home and the people that mean home alot...and then I call up the fam and sing Wheels on the Bus with Nate for a while... that usually does the trick. :o)

McAllister House Museum

Museum Day 2010 was today!!!! Participating museums all around the country were free with a coupon printed off.  Yesterday, Ryan, Darci, and I went to the World Figure Skating Museum and Hall of Fame, but I'll post those pics later on...they were free yesterday (friday) since they aren't open on Saturdays.

But today, I ventured out alone, a definite first since being in the Springs.  I headed to the McAllister House, built by Henry McAllister, the first substantial home to be built in the Springs in 1873.  The walls are three bricks thick, based on their fear of the strong wind storms that knocked a train off the tracks while they were there.  The Mcallisters were a kind, sociable, comfortable but not lavish, Quaker family.  Their home is beautiful and filled with lots of original pieces despite the fact that the house was rented out in the 1920's before being bought and turned into a museum.

It's a quaint stop on the history tour of the Springs, certainly not in high demand, which is awesome because I got a personal tour and could ask all the questions I wanted and get to know the docents a bit better.  I love the feel of local history, roots that exist long before any of us here did, and the people that are passionate about sharing it!

Bible Putt Putt in Kentucky

A new friend Dustin is from Kentucky, that coupled with the great places we stopped there makes it one cool state.  Finally getting some of the pictures from these places up, but not having updated in a while, it'll be goo to have some blogs this week even if they are quickly becoming outdated...:o)

Daniel in the Lion's Den

the burning bush

Our first stop in Kentucky after 7 hours on the road, was this run down, more than slightly outdated Bible themed putt-putt.  I'm pretty sure it was a happening place back when it was built in the 70's, but nothing has been touched since then!  Most items were well... very specially molded by now.

There were only a couple of other people playing the course, and so we chose the miracles course to play.... highlights were the water into wine putting green where the course was shaped into a wine bottle, and Samson, which just had poles sticking up to represent the columns.  It was hot, sticky, and pretty gross, but PJ and I played our hearts out and I even got a couple of holes in one!!!! yay!  Unfortunately we did not play all the courses and so skipped out on the New Testament and Old Testament.

Jonah in the belly of the whale

A Saturday in Woodland Park

Whew, we have so much reading to do that I have found myself not in the mood to sit down and blog this last week.  And it's not all that much reading in the grand scheme of things, but we are in the middle of four different books all with big concepts of God and leadership and worship and they all blend together and there just isn't enough time to process all the great thoughts for our quizzes or even just life in general.

But!!! Two saturdays ago, Darci, Ryan, and I took a field trip up to Woodland park, where there was a huge garage sale, a car show, live music,...and the dinosaur resource center!  Ryan found a computer desk still in its original box for $10, and I bought Berenstein Bear books for only ten cents each.

PJ would have loved this car show, only half a mile from the garage sale... I don't know much about cars other than whether or not they look pretty.  I do know that Darci and Ryan both stopped in wonderment as a Bentley? drove by before we left.

One nice gentleman waited for you to walk by his car so he could pop the door open with a key fob in his pocket....pretty slick, and then he lets you take as many pictures around and inside the car as possible.

Woodland Park is one of those amazing one main street places, so we literally just walked everywhere.  After the car show we walked on down to the Ute Pass Diner, which has been there since the early 1900's.  THE best burger I have had in a long time...of course a huge appetite helps.

Lunch at the Ute Pass Diner.  

I love dinosaurs.  Maybe it's because they don't exist so they don't pose any sort of threat to me.  Or maybe it's because I grew up going to the National History Museum where the bones and skeletons seem ready to take on flesh and walk again.  Being out west, I am in the midst of potential dinosaur remains.  I think for the most part new discoveries are brought here and casts and replicas are made and sold.  The Dinosaur Resource Center houses over 30 skeletons on display, mostly replicas, BUT some real bones out as well.

The best part of the dinosaurs was our tour guide, Stephen.  Poor guy just wanted to go to lunch, but was cauaght into giving us our tour. He spoke at five miles a minute and when he paused to ask, "any questions?", only waited a beat before leading us on to the next thing. My favorite part: his rant about the most common dinosaur that can be found on any continent and of which they actually know behavioral characteristics.  He said that if we were going to ask any questions about dinosaurs we should ask about that one in particular (which of course I didn't remember the name!), because he knew so much about them.  I finally had to ask, "what do you know about them?"

This was the kind of fulfilling day where one good thing leads to another...after dinosaurs, we saw an ice cream truck..right next to the Ute Pass Cultural Center where there was live music AND...grass that was soft enough to walk barefoot on!!!! So of course we sat and listened and ate and just...enjoyed!

I heart ice cream. And days that are beautiful and friends that are adventurous...more stories to come soon!

Prairie Dog Town aka 6 Legged Cow-ville

Real Prairie Dog

World's Largest Prairie Dog

Also in Oakley, Kansas is a sweet little tourist trap by the name of Prairie Dog Town.  It has invested in wood painted signs all along I-70, trumpeting the glory and wonder of six legged cows, prairie dogs, foxes, coyotes, and more.  When we first arrived, the place was closed for lunch, so we headed over to the Colonial Steakhouse for a bit before coming back to see what adventure we could find.

Walking in to the small warehouse filled with stuffed dead animals and gift shop trinkets, we were welcomed by the owner of the place, charged $7.50 (we had picked up a coupon at the Buffalo Bill Cabin for a dollar off), and handed a small bag of dog treats with the simple instructions, "you can feed anything but the rattlesnakes." Quite comforting let me tell you.

The couple of acre fenced lot is full of various animals, and built on top of a prairie dog village. The prairie dogs run from hole to hole, only stopping to assess whether you have any treats to throw, before disappearing back beneath the earth.  Also comforting to be later told by bad intentioned friends that prairie dogs are the last known carriers of the bubonic plague.

Little Lake for ducks and geese

Regular Cows

Buffalo!!!!

Poor regular cows, without extra legs... they were cute though!

This donkey was my best friend, other than the goats, he's the only one who has the whole treat thing figured out... conned almost all of mine out of me!

Five legged Cow

One might feel bad for these cows with extra legs growing out of their shoulders.. but they pretty much act like any other cow... just standing there.... looking grotesquely awesome

Six legged Cow

Definitely worth checking out if you are ever driving I-70 across Kansas!

The Wonder Tower

Dustin said to me today, "You gotta stop going to all those crazy places." In honor of that thought here are all my pictures from The Wonder Tower, where PJ and I stopped on our way into Colorado.

First of all, the Wonder Tower is simply amazing. $1 gets you access to 22 rooms filled to the brim (literally) and a slightly sketchy tower from which the elderly couple, Esther and Jerry, claim you can see 6 states.  I don't know about six states, but you can see pretty far.

Jerry is a jovial tour guide, pointing out his favorite treasures and finds.  Everything is an "antique", including the piles of glass bottles and rocks that are seemingly everywhere! In fact, if you can guess the usage of 10 items picked at random, you can earn your dollar back and the whole visit is free! The only problem is that you probably wouldn't correctly guess that the particular piece of metal Jerry is holding was in fact used to castrate bulls over a hundred years ago.... Jerry gets a big kick out of it.

Old fashioned outhouse where I indeed did tinkle.  One of the many pleasures at the Wonder Tower.

There were so many items shoved into each room, that even the ceilings were covered with antiques and junk.  There are supposedly over 20,000 arrowheads on display and countless other collections.

The tower was pretty death defying; the last two flights of stairs were simply boards held into place with a single nail in each end...totally up to building codes.  I don't like heights, but decided to be adventurous and climb up anyways.  Up top it was beautiful and a perfect welcome to Colorado, but once I got back down to the ground level, my legs shook with the unreleased tension.

Actual two headed calf

This is Jerry, giving me things to take pictures with. This gun was really heavy, but so perfect!  If you ever find yourself on I-70 in eastern Colorado around mile marker 371, please stop! You will fall in love with this eccentric couple and their passion for their home.  You can find out actual information about this place on Roadsideamerica.com or in the book "Weird Colorado"... it's awesome!!!