This week Lindsay is spending all of her time helping her sister-in-law get married, so I thought it was a great opportunity to remember HER wedding in all its silly, beautiful grandeur. Check out my letter to Lindsay on her site, Wild Ginger.
Author: Trish
Language Learning Meltdown
An hour and a half into our Greek class today, I excused myself to the restroom, stared at my face in the mirror, and allowed myself a couple silent sobs before drying my eyes and returning to the classroom.
I don’t know what happened! Last week we started Level II, and I was feeling pretty confident! I knew a lot of vocabulary, I was translating for myself into Greek as I went about my day, and I was trying out conversations with strangers on the bus. But yesterday, something broke in me. Absolutely nothing was making sense, to the point that our teacher asked me the Greek equivalent of “a or the” and I thought she was talking about a verb. That is like, day 2 information.
But I left school yesterday determined to catch up. I copied everything into my Official Grammar and Vocabulary notebook. I spent four hours on homework last night, and I read through my lists of irregular verbs on the way to class this morning. The class started, and again….nothing. My brain could not process anything that anyone was saying. Hence the bathroom breakdown. Continue reading
My LIFE as an INFJ
I saw How You’ll Do Everything Based on Your Personality Type by Heidi Priebe for free on the Amazon Kindle site, and I’ve always wanted to know how I’ll do everything. She’s a writer for Thought Catalog, and I had seen a few of these before on Facebook. But I couldn’t resist knowing everything about myself all at once, and of course, then sharing my discoveries on this blog. Check the book out for yourself if you want to know about your own personality type!
Here are some of my favorite INFJ truths:
1| What Each Personality Type Does at a Party: Reluctantly holds a counseling session in the bathroom with some drunk girl they don’t know.
(But not “reluctantly” because there’s nothing I want more at a party than to find space for a one-on-one conversation.)
2| What Each Personality Type is Like as a Friend: The friend you have to plan a week ahead to see (in order to give them time to mentally prepare for the hangout) but then always end up spending ten plus hours discussing the nature of life, the Universe, and everything with.
(Nothing has ever been more accurate in my entire life.)
3| Here’s Why You’re Still Single Based on your Personality Type: I already covered this one in a different blog post!
4| Here’s the Most Attractive Thing about your Personality Type: Your Intensity. There is nothing meek or helpless about you. You are a highly intelligent, highly perceptive individual who understands others on a deep level. This gives you the unique ability to connect quickly with new people. It’s an intense experience for those on the receiving end of it and it makes everything about you seem hella sexy.
(Huh, and here I thought my intensity was what was keeping guys away. NOT that I would be less intense to please someone else….hmmm. There’s that “nothing meek or helpless” quality.)
5| Here’s How to Attract Each Personality Type: Be one big, walking paradox. Look them deep in the eyes and tell them that you ‘Need them’ to help figure yourself out.
(ELIZABETH, LOOK! There’s a REASON I always fall for fictional bad guys with hearts of gold!) Continue reading
Airborn by Kenneth Oppel
Tragedy averted! For the first third of Airborn, I thought I’d maybe found the first Kenneth Oppel book I didn’t like. While airships are always amazing, I just wasn’t hooked by Matt’s story. Not even the recklessly intelligent Kate could get me further than: oh, okay. BUT THEN PIRATES. Sky pirates! And shipwrecks on deserted islands that are not quite as deserted as previously assumed! AND CLOUD CATS, which are like dragons, but with cat features! It turns out Oppel couldn’t have tailored a book more to my tastes.
As always, I really like the way Oppel balances a kid-friendly innocent-seeming world with some really disturbing reality. Death happens, and not only to those who deserve it. The good guys are pretty uniformly good, but the bad guys…are not entirely bad. I really liked getting to see into the daily life of Pirate Captain Szpirglas, although let’s be real – a charming sociopath would have been fascinating to me no matter what.
Airborn has science, adventure, exploration, and romance bound up in a really fun slightly fantasy world. I’m desperate to read the next one in the series, but my library doesn’t have it available for Kindle checkouts! Agggh!
Book Jacket
Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city. It is the life Matt’s always wanted; convinced he’s lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. It is only after Matt meets the balloonist’s granddaughter that he realizes that the man’s ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious.
In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Oppel, author of the best-selling Silverwing trilogy, creates an imagined world in which the air is populated by transcontinental voyagers, pirates, and beings never before dreamed of by the humans who sail the skies.
Release Date: February 2004
Greek Homework
Our teacher told us, “Oh, just finish your exercise book this weekend,” like it was no big deal on top of four pages from our official workbook, creating questions and answers and stories for two dialogues, finishing eight pages in our second exercise book, AND transcribing an audio dialogue. It will come as no surprise that yesterday, I did laundry and homework. The end. Happy Saturday!
That little “finish your exercise book” is still to be done today, but I found a fun way to make it bearable: ignore the instructions and write whatever I want!
For one exercise, we had to read a letter from Sophia talking about how she will go to Hydra after she finishes her class to hang out with her friends Eleni and Alexandros. We were supposed to write back about what we, her fictional boyfriend Kostas, would do while she was on the island. This is what I wrote instead:
Σοφἱα μου,
Εἱμαι ευχαριστημἑνος για εσἑνα αλλἁ ανησυχὡ. Γιατἱ θα εἱναι ο Αλἑχανδρος στην ᾽Υδρα με εσἑνα; Σου αρἑσει ο Αλἑχανδρος; Τον ΑΓΑΠΑΣ;;; Εἱναι ψηλὁς και ἑξυπνος και πλοὑσιος…καταλαβαἱνω. Εμεἱς τελεἱωσε. Λυπἁμαι αλλἁ θα εἱμαι καλἁ. Σε θυμἁμαι πἁντα.
Καλὁ ταξἱδι!
Κὠστα
Translated, this means:
My Sophia,
I am pleased for you but I am worried. Why will Alexandros be in Hydra with you? Do you like Alexandros? Do you LOVE him??? He is tall and intelligent and rich…I understand. We are finished. I am sad but I will be okay. I remember you always.
Have a nice trip!
Kostas
Who knew channeling my inner jealous boyfriend would make Greek so much more fun? (Everyone knew.)
Okay, on to the next exercise!
A Week in Greece #6: Beginning Level II
This week has been great! Last Saturday I went to Sounio, which was a much-needed mini-adventure to somewhere new, beautiful, and fun. It really rejuvenated me and gave me the energy to jump back into life in Athens.
On Sunday, after church, Argyris and Dina took me to a lunch for a group of church planters. I was not excited about it, because church always drains me. There is so much Greek to listen to and so many introductions and opportunities to forget even the most basic of Greek phrases. But I went to the lunch, and I’m so glad that I did! There were a bunch of people there that I already knew, which was nice. I got to reconnect with Joy, an American woman who has worked in Athens as a counselor for about four years. And I met Sarah, a woman from Illinois who married an awesome Greek guy (Leonidas) last year and moved to Greece. She’s 33, and she told me to wait until I’m 33 (like she did) before I get married so that I can take advantage of being single in my 20s. It was the best thing someone could tell me on Valentine’s Day (which, wonderfully, is not really celebrated much in Greece). Her husband translated the mini-lecture at the lunch for us, and I like them both so much! Continue reading
10 Wanderlust-Inspiring Quotes
The Travelettes posted a list of 20 Paulo Coelho quotes that inspire wanderlust, which were incredibly effective in inspiring me to create my own list of quotes!
1| “If you are brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” – Paulo Coelho
2| “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” ― Cesare Pavese
3| 
4| “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Unknown
5| “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but, by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” ― Maya Angelou
6| “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” ― Pico Iyer
7| “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
8| 
9| “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
‘I don’t much care where -‘ said Alice.
‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.
‘- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,’ Alice added as an explanation.
‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.” – Lewis Carroll
10| “The open road is the school of doubt in which man learns faith in man.” – Pico Iyer
Do you have a favorite wanderlust quote? Share it in the comments!
Letters Between Friends: EXTERNAL PROCESSOR’S STRESS
Lindsay’s letter this week just makes me mad that we are writing letters to each other and not going out for coffee dates. I want to externally process Lindsay’s external processing problems with her!
Dear Tricia,
My goal is to do 2 things today…
Make you slightly jealous of the snow (because I hate it), then just blabber a little.
Just within the last few days, it has been warm enough that if the kids wanted to play in the snow, they wouldn’t freeze. I believe I am truly blessed though, because all the girls really want to do is find the fresh snow and put their shoe print in it. They hate the idea of being wet or dirty. Tess did realize though, that if the snow is too deep, then her foot gets wet. …and she stepped in a puddle the other day because Ruthie did in her purple rain boots…that’s didn’t work out so well for Tess in her crocs.
So, it began to snow when we got out of the car on Tuesday night and Ruthie was determined to catch it in her mouth…and Tessa was determined to do whatever Ruthie was doing, but she couldn’t figure out the whole tongue thing.
Now, in the mornings when I wake the girls up, Ruthie, in her groggy 3 year old morning voice, asks, “Mommy, is it still Christmas out?” and I usually reply, “Yes, but it will probably melt some more today.” It’s supposed to be in the 60s this weekend!!! WHAT?!?!?
______
I don’t know if you can speak into this slightly, but alls to say all I really need to do is externally process my external processing.
At the Hearts @ Home Conference last year, I shared the stuff with you about how I was blown away, but all totally clicked that I was an introvert because of how I recharge, AND an EXTERNAL processor by how I make decisions. When I make a decision, everyone around me will know my reasoning because I have talked them out over and over again. This also means that if I say I will do something, you can’t count on it until I actually do it…me externally saying something is BIG step toward the end result, but I needed to hear myself make the commitment, before I actually MAKE the choice. Does that make any sense?!?
Well, currently, I am in a situation at work, where things have to remain confidential. AND I’ve made a commitment to myself, that I wouldn’t post work issues on here, first, because they are kids, but mostly because my work peeps read my blog and this is not a place to hash that out! Alls to say though, this situation at work is causing LOTS of stress and I CANT TALK ABOUT IT!
Then, I talked to you about this a little Sunday (that was wonderful BTW), but there are some family opportunities and news at home that we can’t talk about publicly for the sake of family business stuff, but its BIG decisions. AND I CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT!
My externally processing self is EATING MYSELF ALIVE from the inside out. I avoid blogging, because I can’t physically think about anything else, and I am over agitated and anxious which I know others can see. Tuesday night, I was up journaling/reading/working I didn’t even go to bed. I finally closed my computer at 4:45am and jumped in the shower for work. NOT OK.
Counselor friend, I need you.
DO NOT BE ANXIOUS about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Phil 4:6
BUT knowing what God’s capable of gets me MORE anxious and excited. Um. Now what.
Ok, I’ve talked too much about myself this time…
I miss you like CRAZY! I pray for you constantly. Let’s Skype again soon!
Love,
Lindsay
The Boundless by Kenneth Oppel
I am totally in love with Oppel’s writing style. I will probably say that at the beginning of every review of his book, because I keep thinking something will break the spell, but every single book is amazing! He is fantastic at creating worlds that sit just this side of reality…everything is recognizable until it isn’t. Whether it’s a sasquatch or a truly creepy hag or a painting that grants immortality – Oppel keeps us guessing about which ones are real, and which ones are imaginary. I may be hasty in proclaiming this, but I think it’s my new favorite kind of fantasy.
In addition to the awesome overarching setting, the plot is completely fascinating. A cross-Canada train ride full of nighttime adventures running the roofs and daytime performances with a circus troupe, every single page is exciting. Will and Maren and Mr. Dorian are great – another one of Oppel’s talents is in creating characters that are neither good or bad, but somewhere in between. The other circus performers are super interesting, and I wish we’d gotten even more of them. The danger feels real, the stakes are high, and now I really want to go on another cross-country train trip of my own. Continue reading
HD Update: Renovations Begun and People Connected
Every time I get together with Dina to work on emails or foundation requests, I leave feeling so encouraged! Every new story is one more piece of the puzzle that spells out “God is working RIGHT NOW.” It’s incredibly cool to be a part of something that is forming from scratch….if you can call HD “from scratch” when it has been a dream of Dina’s for seven years.
The last time I blogged about HD, we had just found our house through some-might-say miraculous means. In the weeks since that announcement, so much has happened! Continue reading
It Is Trish 