A post for the internet machine in the moon attic, circa 2108

I’m exhausted.

One day, when my great, great grandchildren fire up the old 2012 internet machine in the moon attic and they find my blog and my Facebook and my Twitter and my LinkedIn and my old college newspaper articles, and they read about my life in excruciating detail, they will look at each other and say, “She was always tired.”

I should be working on my youth group lesson for tomorrow night, but I haven’t blogged since before the health care mandate made it past the Supreme Court, so I figured I should say, “What’s up?”

Just in case you don’t stalk me on Facebook, I recently got back from a trip to Colombia for my candy job. Colombia, as in the country, not the Sportswear company, (which spells it with a “u” anyway).

It was awesome, amazing, fantastical and I would genuinely move there. To sum up: The drug violence is down, I never once thought I was going to be kidnapped, I spoke mucho Spansligh; the weather is 80 degrees every day there; they have fruit from the Garden of Eden because they grow it year round in their stupid perfect weather; 1,000 pesos is worth roughly 50 cents, which made me feel very rich all week; and some of the toilets don’t have seats on them, which kind of weirded me out.

Also, at one point, after a factory tour that left all of us sweating, I turned to our guide with all the Spanglish confidence I could muster and said, “Estoy” for “I am” and “Caliente” for “hot.” Except together, those two words translate to “I’m horny.”

“I’m hot” is actually “Tengo calor” for those wondering.

I went on that trip to Colombia just hours after giving the sermon at my church and having a huge pancake breakfast fundraiser for the mission trip.

And, the second I got back from Colombia, we had Vacation Bible School. During that week, I was truly blessed to have some amazing people around to help me survive not only sand art, but multiple renditions of Baby Shark, do, do, do, do, do, Baby Shark! (Hi Monica! Hi Sarah!)

On the last day though, I was a bit of zombie, and at one point a four-year-old girl was chatting with me and I thought she was pushing her chair in, and then in the middle of telling me about her the 12 pretend friends she brought so she could get a prize for bringing friends, she looked at me completely exasperated and said, “Umm, can you help me get my elbow unstuck from this chair?”

And I was like, “Oh, crap! Sorry! I didn’t realize you were actually stuck!”

Her arm had somehow been bent over the portion of the back chair where we store the Bibles and then gotten jammed.

Luckily, Sarah, the amazing youth who helped me run VBS, was smart enough to tell me to unbend the little girl’s arm so we could slide it out. If it had been left up to me alone, I would have probably resorted to lard and/or firemen.

Then, about an hour later, during our finale water balloon fight, the under wire in my bra broke. And it started jabbing into my skin like it was trying to stab me to death but it had patience to do it right and to cause as much torture as possible. So I ran to the bathroom, and grabbed some duck tap and tried to mend the problem “Burn Notice Style”, channeling Michael Weston:

“When your bra brakes in the middle of Vacation Bible School and you can’t leave to change it, the best thing to do is to grab some duck tape and make a patch. It won’t hold forever, but it will get the job done.”

Le sigh. I love Michael Weston.

Now, if only I could figure out how to fix my “over scheduled life” problem with Michael Weston wisdom, maybe I could finally get around to watching the latest Burn Notice. this could be the week Fiona finally gets out of prison you guys!

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Mad Men, golf and Instagram.

When I woke up this morning at 5 a.m., the first thing I did was hit my alarm clock. Four times.

At 5:40 a.m., when I was finally up and peeing, I made a goal — do not read anything at all about last night’s season finale of Mad Men.

I failed before lunch.

Actually, if you count the Ghirardelli Sea Salt Soiree I at my desk first thing this morning as breakfast, then I think I technically failed during breakfast.

Sigh.

The show is amazing though and I’m fully confident that I will still have immense pleasure from watching it OnDemand tonight, even though I know that (spoiler alert) Don will run into Peggy at a theater.

I would have watched it live, but a. I only pay for basic cable, so I can’t watch AMC live, only OnDemand and b. I was too exhausted from my trying to beat my pastor (who has a master’s degree in the bible or God or something) at Bible Trivia and then trying to hit get my golf club to connect to golf balls at the driving range by my church during our first Youth Summer Sunday Night Golf Outing.

Considering my pastor is well, a pastor, I think my bible trivia team held its own. If only I had remember that  Bathsheba was Solomon’s mom. Oh well. Next time I guess.

As for the golf stuff, one of the youth gave me a tip to line up my left foot with the golf while using the driver, and I have to admit, it totally upped my club-to-ball connection stats by like 44% and I’m pretty proud of myself for knowing what a driver is.

The golf outings are extremely awesome. What happens is, we have a regular youth group time at the church on Sunday nights like we do all year, and then anyone who wants to hops in our cars and we go over the driving range and try to see who can hit golf balls the furthest.

It’s a great draw to get kids to come to youth group during the summer months, and best of all it’s cheap. A large basket of golf balls is like $17, but the guy at the course knows us so sometimes he’ll only charge $12.50.

As with all life events these days, I took plenty of Instagram pictures at the driving range last night to document all the fun we were having.

Instagram is awesome by the way because I can now make all my cell phone pictures look like they were taken under professional lighting. I do worry about the day someone comes up with Writeagram though, and everyone starts thinking their writing can be fixed with an app and a word filter. I’m sure that would be just as annoying as I am to all the “real” photographers out there when I use the x-pro filter. But I don’t care right this second, because like I said, my photos are BEAUTIFUL now!

Behold:

Our awesome youth-helper-out and one of the youth.

And this one, of our pastor with a master’s in God, and two youth.

And this one, where we see what I would look like without bangs.

And this one, which I caught on accident, of a youth trying to kill our youth-helper-out dude. Fun times.

And, what the heck, here’s one more for the road of me in my all-time favorite sunglasses. I’m posting it so that one day, I can look back on this and think, “Man, with the right bronzer, a pair of dangling earrings and purple sunglasses, I was totally decent looking at 28 years old.”

Also, I’m slated to go to Colombia a week from today for work. As in the country that Google Maps tells me is at the top of South America, and NOT some place in Missouri. I’ve been told that if I’m kidnapped, they’ll probably use my passport photo for the news stories about the “American reporter captured by drug cartel” stories. Instead though, can you tell them to use this one? I did the double french braids myself! Thanks!

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