Life in the Northwest

Ah, Rachael, I am so glad you started a chain of posts again, and so glad that so many of us are jumping back on.  I have missed all of you so much and it is so good to hear from you a little, to have just a bit of a clue what is going on with each of you.

So... what's going on with me?

Well, I'm still working.  I'm not as happy at my job as I was.  Doesn't mean I'm unhappy, though - just that this isn't turning into my dream job.  There's a lot of pressure to work faster and better and harder than I can work... and I routinely feel inadequate... and often I feel bored.  The Real World doesn't give me time to be gloriously impractical and think about tangents... it forces me to think about, well, rather repetitive tasks and problems.

But it has its moments, it really does.  Ask me about gray code sometime.  Okay, you'd better not - happy babbling Melanie probably will continue long after you're sick of the topic.  ;)

Meanwhile, I'm still enjoying English country dance class.  I'm drinking up Once Upon a Time and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  :)  Twice a week I visit the homes of two families I became friends with at church and help their kids with math and eat dinner with them and play games and hang out and talk and generally enjoy myself.  I *love* that.  And the gaps fill up unbelievably quickly.  Reading and singing and jogging and writing and hiking and playing games with friends and errands and so much more...

My brother and nephew (not his son) just moved from Portland to Beaverton - from 40 minutes away from my apartment to just about 10 minutes away.  They are between me and my other brother and his wife, who just a couple months back moved from an hour and a half away to fifteen minutes away.  :)  I'm liking this consolidation.  Back in LA, my sister is just about to have a baby... and up here, my brother's wife is just entering her second trimester.  :D

My mom's dementia is getting worse; she has started to forget my siblings' names and is no longer very able to carry on a conversation.  So sometimes I just kind of think about that and start to cry.  :(

My cousin Keith, who I think a couple of you know - he was Torrey class of '04, I believe - just published a book this week, Sola Scriptura.  It's a Socratic dialogue about theology with Dr. Reynolds as a character.  I bought it for my Kindle, read it, and loved it.  It reminded me I've been meaning to investigate Eastern Orthodox theology more thoroughly.  I read another book he recommended, Becoming Orthodox, and immediately felt that I really needed to see about visiting church with one of my friends up here who is in the process of "converting" to Orthodoxy.  I did that yesterday and enjoyed it immensely, though I really need to find a better word than "enjoyed," because that makes it sound like a consumer good, and I have rarely experienced anything less like a consumer good.  Anyway, my thoughts for the next while will probably be rather heavily consumed with Orthodoxy.  Good theology is important and I want to "follow the logos wherever it leads" - and wherever I end up, I think I will come out the better for the exploration.  And yes, I think God wants me to investigate this, too.  Don't worry, I won't do anything hasty.  :)

I'm rather seriously considering heading back into academia and aiming to teach or some such down the line... but I just don't know, and it is the nature of such things that when you make a decision it's a long time before you can act on it.  By rights I should be doing applications now if I want to go to grad school next year.  Oy.

I do feel at home in Oregon now, though I miss you all ferociously and if we were together again I would feel ten times more at home.  And I really want to show you guys off to my friends up here.  In a great many cases, you would really like each other.  So the moral of the story is, you should move to the Portland area! ;)  I've got room in my apartment... 

I'm planning on being in LA for the week of Thanksgiving and Christmas.  It makes me sad how many of you that doesn't mean I will get to see... but Lydia and Rachael and Ellene, I really really want to see you.

It's hard to summarize... life.  But this was my best attempt for the moment.

Love to you all,

Melanie