Feet Cleaning

I run my hands down the horse's front leg. "Come now," I tell him, "pick up your leg." I have to be gentle. No rushing him. I'm no horse whisperer, but I know that much. If I position myself just right, my head facing his tail, my left shoulder near his side--I'll be able to grab his hoof and pull it towards me. He'll lean his body weight onto me as as I hold his hoof to pick out the manure and stones that have collected there. I'll groan under the weight, but find comfort in it. It will be a strange intimacy. If he moves, spooks, stomps, or kicks--I'll be hurt. I'm vulnerable. Yet if ever I've known what it is like to love an animal it will be in this moment. I'll be simply cleaning his feet, but I'll love him in that moment.

God is a Singer

"God is a singer and songwriter and you are the subject of His song." Ty Gibson

I got to listen to Pastor Ty Gibson speak this morning for church. I loved this thought. I've always known that God sings over us (Zeph. 3:17), but I'd never stopped to think about where He got the content of His song. Pastor Ty joked that God does not download his music from the Internet, but that He writes it himself.

The other idea I liked is that when we get to heaven, the first special music will be God's song for us. :)

The Seasons of Mission College

Today, I came downstairs into my kitchen and inhaled the nice smell of chicken poop. "Ah," I wondered, "Is it time for the stinky chicken smell again?"

Over breakfast I pondered that Mission College has seasons. We don't have spring, summer, autumn, winter... No, no, we have the following seasons:

The season of the slugs (step, step, crunch, crunch, ughhh!)
The season when the snakes come out (My favorite time...sometimes we even get to spot a cobra or two.)
The season of the awful ants (These ants with wings invade our homes and donate their wings to our floors.)
And then of course--the season of the all-pervading-can't-quite-get-rid-of-it chicken poop smell.

There is nothing poetic about our seasons, but who needs poetry when you can have slugs, snakes, ants and the smell of chickens!

PS The chicken smell went away and then it rained...so I had another smell to delight in--petrichor--the smell of the earth after it rains.

See http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-pet2.htm for more information about petrichor.

New Views

My mom emailed me this picture today. This is a view about 10-15 minutes drive from where my parent's just moved in Redding, CA. It's hard to imagine that my old "house" in Antioch will no longer be occupied. Both the cat (he moved on to kitty heaven) and the dog (he was...ummm...given away) will not be there to greet me. Instead of driving an hour from San Francisco to my home, we'll drive three and a half hours.

My parents told me about my room. They told me they have saved the biggest room in the house for me. I don't know how long I'll live with them. I might live with them for a week or a year; it all depends on where I find work.

I've seen job openings in Weed (I love the name), Merced, Fresno, El Camino, San Bernardino, Mission Viejo, and Sacramento. I'm jumping and I don't know where I'll land, but I'm grateful for new adventures and new views.

I Like People Who Like Things

I like people who like things. I had a friend who once confided in me that she was fond of mushrooms (not the hallucinogenic sort); she liked looking at mushrooms and thinking about them. Some were inspired by superstars; she found her inspiration in fungi.

I had another friend who loved tropical fish. Once after not seeing him for two years, we went out to catch up on each other's lives. On the way to our destination, we passed a tropical fish store. He had to stop. We went inside and looked at all the fish and he told me how he had spent the previous year working on his tropical fish collection and how difficult they were to maintain. Later when we got back in the car, he turned to me and said sheepishly, "Do you think that it is nerdy to love tropical fish so much?" I said something reasonable like, "No, it's not that weird." What I wanted to say was, "Are you kidding? You're obsession with tropical fish is what makes you adorable."

I have another friend who loves talking about the brain. One of my first memories of her is a night she made me stay up late so she could explain the sleep cycle to me. I'll never forget learning about REM as I nodded off to sleep. (Even then, the irony was not lost on me.)

We all have our passions, peculiarities, loves. I love poetry and books about science. Others go for food or fonts. Everything we love is a lesson for the people around us. The artists teach us to see. The musicians to hear.

I like people who like things.

Some Unprobable Stories Involving Mr. Tokay

I babysat over the weekend. Saturday night the Ashlock girls wanted a story before bed so I had to make up a story on the spot since earlier they hadn't been particularly wowed by my "true" stories. Really, I thought the story of seeing a shark while swimming was exciting. (Katie told me I had already told her that story. Sigh.)

As I was grappling for a story when I remembered my own childhood stories. My dad always told my siblings and I stories about a worm named Mr. Worm and his friend Mr. Bumble Bee. Mr. Worm got himself in a lot of trouble and Mr. Bumble Bee often saved Mr. Worm's life.

Since I live in Thailand I decided to go for something similar but well-adopted to the climate. So I started telling the story of a man named Mr. Tokay. This is the condensed version I told the girls:

Mr. Tokay was short and skinny and lived in Chiang Mai. One day the city was surrounded by enemy soldiers. Since Mr. Tokay was so tiny the king of Chiang Mai (this is story occurred in some distant not-so-historical past) asked him to save the city by crawling through a tunnel and getting rice from a farmer outside the city walls. Mr. Tokay after many terrifying encounters with mice in the tunnel escaped from the city and found a safe house with a nice farmer who fed him mangoes and sticky rice. After resting for a night and a day with the farmer he returned to Chiang Mai and crawled back through the tunnel (with the rice bag tied to his feet) and saved the inhabitants of Chiang Mai. They all sang his praises and they even knighted him Sir Tokay. I ended the story by having a Chiang Mai resident tell Mr. Tokay, "Thank you for the rice. Next time can you please bring us bread?"

Well, the story went over well with the girls. And this morning at 7:00 am they came into the room I was sleeping in and said, "Ms. Julie, it is morning." They even went to the curtains and lifted them up just in case I had any doubts about the matter. They asked me for another Tokay story. As usually happens the sequel is not as good as the original and also--my story telling capacities are quite limited in the morning so I told the following story:

There was a man named Mr. Tokay who took a train to Bangkok from Chiang Mai. I asked the girls, "What do you think he did when he went to Bangkok?" They didn't know. I said, "Well, he went shopping at MBK." "And what was he shopping for?" I asked them. I told them, "Baby clothes, of course..." The story got more pitiful the more I told it so I decided to spice it up by throwing in an earthquake.

Because of the earthquake, Mr. Tokay was stuck on the 5th floor of MBK in complete darkness with people screaming all around them. Mr. Tokay was very brave and told everyone to shut up. Then he had them find their way through the darkness by asking them to follow his sounds, "Toooook kay....Tooook....kay." They all came to him and he had them hold hands so they could walk out the exits together. At this point in the story, Mr. Tokay befriends a scared little girl who finds courage to leave the building by singing, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." (The girls picked out the song.)

So that was my weekend. Babysitting and telling improbable stories about a man named Mr. Tokay who eats mangos and sticky rice on his adventures and sings "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" with scared children in MBK.