DStilled

Snow in all its forms

March 7, 2008 on 2:09 pm | In Blog |

Right now it’s a small blizzard in Looavul. It is beautiful - like my sisters. It’s exploratory weekend here at LPTS and all the people are going to be “blessed” with several inches of powder. Exploratory weekend is the time when lots of perspective seminarians come here and meet people, go to some classes, chapel, and generally gain a feel for what they might get into. I myself did not do EW because I was 500 miles away at UVa at the time. I did make a short individual visit later on but without any fanfare. Tomorrow we are also having a fundraiser auction for the South Africa trip I’m participating with next January. So I hope the snow doesn’t keep too many people away.

Two weekends ago I went skiing on fake snow in WV at Winterplace. Jeremy called me up and asked if I was able to chaperon a youth group skiing trip. I said sure and off I went. There were only three boys on the trip with over 15 girls but one of those boys was Garrett, my brother. It was really nice to spend some time with he and Jeremy both on and off the slopes. I didn’t get to actually ski nearly as much as I would have on my own due to the fact that I took a shift watching everyone’s stuff and I watched over a newbie skiing girl for well over an hour. Also, the lift lines were sooo long that we spent more time standing than anything else. However, I got to do my favorite run there and didn’t fall down all day! As you can see in the picture, it was all INCREDIBLY foggy! Going 30 miles an hour down a slope is not too advised when you can’t see 100 feet in front of you. That’s Garrett on the left too cool to smile.

I really don’t remember weather in KY ever being this moody. It was 70 degrees a couple of days ago! We had melted snow fall from the sky in torrents a few times recently too. I also have been cooking more for real lately. For my group supervision on Tuesday nights, one of us cooks/brings food. Last week I prepared fried chicken wraps, potato wraps, fried rice, sweet tea, and introduced a few of them to Ale-8. This week I’m going to make quesadillas, from scratch marble-pumpkin cheesecake, and from scratch blueberry cobbler. I anticipate a warm reception.

I also applied to the University of Louisville Hospital for a second unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). I need 500 hours to complete my MFT program at LPTS and it appears that will take a long time. So if I do CPE this summer I will be able to take 100 of those hours and apply them to the MFT ones. This is the most efficient way for me to get my hours and at the same time grow in new and (hopefully) wonderful ways.  UofL Hospital is apparently the only true trauma specialist in the region and so it could be a might scary at times. There’s talk of people going in for on call and having 7 people in a row die on them. Or the pressure of being with someone in the waiting room that’s just witnessed a murder or been raped. Needless to say it won’t always be like that but that kind of exposure is likely. I believe this experience will greatly help me in my pursuit of eventually being on the mission field in developing countries where trauma and violence may be an everyday occurrence. I know it certainly would have been nice to know certain things to help people when I was in Guatemala City. Here’s a picture taken at the end of my last CPE.