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Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up.
≈Anne Lamott

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hung out with jill and whit on sunday. ate burnt pizza. laughed a lot. defended my burping title against whit. watched a pointless movie.

it was good times.

when i got there, i looked out the back door and saw something lovely. it snowed quite a bit here on friday and was quite cold saturday. sunday was an incredibly lovely day and most of the snow was gone by sunday evening. in the process, tho, the snow on the roof of jill's house was melting and making a fun pseudo-waterfall.

being the nerd that i am, i grabbed my camera and went to town shooting. :)



while we were sitting in the kitchen eating, jill regaling us with stories from the night before, i looked down and saw this...


i almost fell off my stool laughing.

i'm so immature. ;)

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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
≈Marcel Proust

looking underneath

A few months ago, inspired by her husband, Lauren began blogging about five defining moments in her life. After reading the first, it was difficult not to be inspired. So here I am. Attempting to do the same.

**If you're interested in Lauren's other defining moments (and you should be), they are here and here **

Looking into my life for those moments that shaped me wasn’t an easy task. By any means. But I’ll try not to let that stop me. (c:

Defining Moment #1:

Anyone who knows me knows that I went to Africa when I was 17 and that the experience changed me indefinitely. Of all of the amazing moments that I was granted during my time there, there was one that hit me to the core and changed my perspective on love.

The last full day that we were there, Melissa and I were in our room packing and getting things together for the trip home. After a while, a number of the kids began trickling into our room to spend time with us. Helen and Rose and their cousin were sitting on the floor telling stories, playing with each others hair and giggling. Timo was running around, like 4 year old boys are so good at. Melissa, Arthur, Jonathan and I were sitting on Melissa’s bed. Arthur and Melissa were reminiscing about our time there and Jonathan was sitting quietly next to me, his arm linked in mine and his head resting on my arm.

I was drinking in the moment. You know those moments that you wish would last forever? Those moments that you step back from and do your best to take in everything about it… This was one of those moments.

Helen was telling the girls a story. Her clear, high voice like a light in the room. She was very animated and the girls were smiling and laughing. She was speaking Lugandan, as she was still quite young and wasn’t entirely comfortable with English. I couldn’t understand a word, but I listened. Then Arthur’s voice broke into my reverie. Quiet and low. It made me think of the first day we’d arrived and how timid he’d been. In the weeks that we were there I had watched this shy, unsure boy slowly open up to us and he’d become our closest friend.
He and Melissa were talking. I can’t recall what they were discussing because I’m not even sure I was listening at that moment. It was their voices and their faces that were saturating my memory.

Then I felt something warm and wet on my arm. I looked down to see tears falling on my arm. Jonathan was crying.

He was only 5 and spoke no English. The entire time I was there our relationship was one of smiles and laughter, not of words. I looked to Arthur, who was sitting on the other side of Jonathan and I asked him to find out what was wrong. Arthur spoke with him for a few minutes then looked at me with a sad smile. “He’s going to miss you and he wants you to stay”, he explained softly.

I didn’t have words of comfort for Jonathan and he would not have understood them if I did, so I just wrapped my arms around him and held him. I don’t know how long we sat like that…sometimes it seems like it was a minute, other times, like it was an hour.

When I finally let go of him I looked into his face and smiled in an attempt to comfort him. He looked back at me and, with a voice strained with tears, whispered “Don’t go.”

My heart broke into a million pieces.

I had never seen a more tangible expression of friendship and love in my life. I learned that day that, at the core, friendships and trust don’t require words. They come with a language all their own.

shooty shooty

last weekend i had a shoot with my old roommate (annette), my old boss (debbie) and her daughter (nikki). annette and debbie work for the same company and needed PR shots for their website and nikki just needed some new pics. we also threw in annette's husband for the website for their church.

annette and debbie are seriously a couple of my favs. they are incredibly fun and sarcastic. perfect. (c: i hadn't spent a lot of time with nikki before this, but she was so much fun too. it certainly runs in their family.

here are a few of the out-takes. (the "good" shots are boring)

awkward.... (c;

we are hilarious.

no...wait. she's hilarious.

contemplative

i don't even know...

goofs. :)

i think annette pinched debbie...and evidently, she's pretty proud of that. (c;

awww...aren't they cute?

i love this shot of debbie. (c:

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• i know money doesn't grow on trees...but evil apparently does.

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• he likes to stalk squirrels