Thoughts on Christmas

After a couple near misses involving my hips and crazy people with carts at superstore, almost being bludgeoned at Costco and a eerily quiet visit to Shoppers, I am happy to report, that, I, Timothy Carruthers have completed my shopping. Good times.

What did I buy? Check back later for the next edition of the blog and I'll tell you then.

However today, I paused for a moment to eat a Poutine at the cafeteria at Costco (BTW, this is worthy of a blog entry of itself... if you want to eat a meal with so much fat that you can feel your heart slow, go for the poutine at Costco. But goodness, it is worth it!) and watched people scurry about with this and that, people were arguing and rushing. Employees being paid far too little to endure far too much from the idiotic masses we call the general public.

I sat behind the store manager and noticed that he was doing the same thing as well, sipping a coffee seemingly deep in thought. As my heart slowed from the cholesterol, my mind sluggishly awoke and I really thought about the insanity of this season.

As believers, we follow the example of Christ and his teachings. Yet as North Americans, we gather wealth and goodies for our own well being and enjoyment. I really am starting to wonder if there is a gap here that needs to be addressed. Particularly this time of year. Don't get me wrong - I love gifts and I love giving them to my friends and family. And I will this year; I have no plans to take a Martyr's stance against the holidays...

I spent some time looking through the World Vision gift catalogue today; it is a fantastic idea. Instead of giving gifts to loved ones, make a donation that will be used to buy a chicken or school supplies or medicine for a developing nation, and do it in the name of someone else. Check it out www.worldvision.ca.

Instead of reciting the traditional passages, this Christmas I am really reflecting on the words of Luke 6: "...and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic. Give to everyone who asks of you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back."

Just some thoughts. This Christmas, instead of giving to those who already have, try to give to someone who needs. And, overall, have a Merry Christmas.

Tim

Crime doesn't pay

Heh, this is beautiful.




They have pictures of the guy inside the gas station.

I don't know why I made it... I guess for some sadistic organizational purpose...

Latest music find

So, occasionally I find new music that I like. Sometimes this is a very precise process, sometimes this is by chance. I happened to come into a CD called "Fee" the other day. Turns out, this guy is good. Check it out.

Classes

Alot of people have been asking me how my classes have been going, so, I thought I'd give everyone an update.

ED3123 (Prof. Graeme Ching)
Teaching English as a Second Language
This class has been good, very entertaining and worthwhile. There has been a large amount of work (two assignments a week, at least two chapters of reading plus quizzes, midterms and exams), but the biggest struggle for me has been the emphasis on grammar. Apperantly you can't teach English well unless you can speak it and write it well. I agree, however I have spent too much time around boys from Carleton county who like trucks, potatoes and speeding tickets; not so much of the caring about proper grammar. Good pratical class, and I think I may enjoy teaching English overseas someday. Maybe.

ID34?3 (Prof. Dale Stairs)
Local Church Youth Ministry
Again, a lot of work, however not exactly a challenging class to anyone who has been in minstry for more than two weeks. I am one of three people who have actually worked in a Church in class, the rest are all frosh. Barely worthy of a 3000 level credit, but I won't argue. Latest thoughts from the class - single first year students have no qualification to say what a healthy marriage looks like for someone in full-time ministry and if someone doesn't like their job, they need to either: Change jobs, change situation or change attitudes. I got really tired of listening to kids who have spent 2 weeks working in a church whining about how bad it is that they are expected to show up on a weekly basis.

RS3463(Prof. David Graves)
Intro to Biblical Archeology
I'm writing this blog during this class. I really truly believe that this material is the heart of biblical studies (my major). We are studing the process by which we gain all our knowledge about the east between 5000 BC and the dark ages. There are weeks where I throughly enjoy the course material and wish I could come to this class every day... And there are times where these three hours each week could be spent on much more important things like reorganizing my wallet, retying my shoes or playing catch with some squirrels in Mapleton park, or reading readers digest in the bathroom. However, they tend not to give 3000 level biblical studies credits for that kind of thing.

RS4403 (Dr. Keith Bodner)
I Samuel
Finally a class worth a biblical studies credit. We actually study the book in a line by line way. It's going to be a challenging class as far as tests and papers go, but I think it will be good.

GG1013 (Dr. Bruce Martin)
Intro to Physical Geography
As part of a Bachelor of Arts, you need to complete at least 6 hours of sciences. Thus my options were physics, chem or Geography. I took Geography. That being said, I really appreciate the way the Bruce has been taking this class. Many ABU profs aren't overly keen on bringing God into discussion unless the course number starts with either "ID" or "RS". Despite this Bruce has continually encouraged us with reminders that this is not just playing with maps and compasses, notes on volcanoes and valleys, instead, this is a study of God's creation. It changes the way you look at things.

RS3343 (Dr. Barry Smith)
Pauline Studies
For anyone who has been to ABU, this is known as another "Barry Class." You sit, he reads his webpage aloud. He gives you the questions for the midterms and exams, you memorize the answers off the webpage. I've actually grown to like taking Barry's classes and once you adapt properly, I find them very helpful.


There you go. There are my classes for this semister.

On one final note; Go sox!

Storm - Part III

PS We had to call in reinforcements to fix our road. Luckily, Nova Scotia is "improving" the highway to Peggy's Cove and were working just up the road from the camp. They came in and poured some sort of special gravel that packs down hard (not quite as hard as chip seal but same kind of idea), which will hopefully prevent future washouts of this nature.

Storm - Part II

The next morning Tim and I woke to the sound of our cell phone ringing, which can only be bad news that early in the day. Sure enough, it was the boys at the top of the hill calling to say that our road was washed out, and it was going to have to be fixed before the cooks could get in to prepare breakfast.

Tim, Matt, Griff, Ben, and Brad spent an hour fixing the road with a shovel and a broken wheelbarrow enough so that an emergency vehicle could get in if necessary, but despite their hard work, the road was still most definitely impassable for anything other than a 4 wheel drive.

This is what the road looked like after an hour of hard work. Before they began, Matt could lay down in one of the washouts in the fetal position and be completely hidden from view. While it's a little hard to tell, the hole that I'm standing in is almost halfway up my shin.

We received so much rain that night that it added about 3 inches of water to the pool in a period of 2 hours. To put that into perspective, it takes 4 hours for the pump to add the same amount of water to the pool each week.

As they day continued, we searched for evidence of lightening strikes around the camp. It split a tree behind cabins 4 and 5 and may have struck the ground in front of the lodge, but the earth shattering strike that woke us up the night before remained a mystery. Finally, as I was walking back to the cottage looking for evidence of the strike in nearby trees, I stumbled over a bit of ground that as far as I remembered had always been smooth before. I looked down at my feet and realize that I was standing in a perfectly charred out circle of mud - evidence of THE lightening strike.
A path of flattened grass led from the hole to the edge of the pool deck. Closer inspection of the pool area revealed not only melted and charred plastic along that section of the fence, but also a fresh crack running through the cement from one side of the pool deck to the other.

If you look closely, you can see a grayish coloured building with windows in the background. That's our cottage, which is about 50 feet from the pool. No wonder I thought the roof was going to fall in!

Storm of the Summer!

One night I woke up to a thunderstorm raging over the camp. I would doze as it moved back out over the ocean and would wake up as the ocean pushed it back up against the camp. The flashes of lightening coming through the bedroom window were almost continuous and the rolling thunder sounded like a constantly grumbling stomach.

Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder unlike I have ever heard in my entire life. I curled into a ball and covered my head with my arms against the debris that I was sure was about to rain down on my head. After remaining frozen in that position for what seemed like hours (in reality it was probably only about 1 minute), I gradually realized that our cabin was still intact. I began to the process of convincing by body that it was indeed safe to uncurl and quickly counted all of my fingers and toes. After ensuring that I, as well as our cabin was indeed intact, I looked at Tim (who was also wide-eyed and awake) and said, "You should probably go see what's on fire.” After a brief argument, we agreed to BOTH go see what building had exploded.

We crept out to the living room and peered through the mini blinds looking for that telltale orange glow. Much to our immediate surprise the shower building directly beside our cabin appeared to be completely intact, as did the lodge and all of the cabins at the top of the hill. While we couldn't see the boys' cabins behind our cottage, we decided that if one had been struck, the cabin leader from the other would have come to get us by then. Relieved that we were not going to have to call 911, we faced the inevitable fact that we were not going to bed any time in the near future! We pulled up the blinds and each wrapped in a blanket on our big comfy chairs to enjoy the show. Only once have I seen the lightening light up the sky as many times as it did that night, but then we watched from across the lake, not the middle of the storm.

As the lightening snaked down toward the camp, we speculated on which ones struck trees (or the ground) and which ones missed and tried to figure out where the lightening struck that so abruptly woke us up; if not the shower building, perhaps the pool again? We also watched a few brave souls make mad dashes to the bathroom through the torrential rain (ask Darrell about his adventure) and thanked God for the foresight of the board to include a bathroom inside our cottage.

Leak

For the record, this is NOT supposed to happen when you backwash the pool!

SALT Water Pool

A young lad came up out of the water this afternoon sputtering and spitting. I (Aneke) asked him if he was ok. His reply, "Yeah, I think so. This water is a little sugary... Actually, it's a lot sugary!"

I nearly wet myself.

Camper Quote

"This camp is the best! We have breakfast and supper...

Ooohhh! Do we get to take lunch too?!?!"

- Beginner Camper

Yay Sun!

Today was hot. Very, very hot. Today's heat easily matched whatever our hottest day last summer was. Actually today was muggy (which made it feel incredibly hot), and in a strange twist of fate, there also happened to be no breeze coming off the ocean today to speak of. While we all lost about 2 liters of sweat, there really wasn't much complaining from the staff. A hot summer (or warm summer) would be really nice since it tends to be on the cool (even cold) side here so close to the ocean. Warm days would mean more time spent in the pool and more wet games during canoe sessions.
The staff are all here now (arrived today) and we had a great time in the pool this afternoon since it was, I as I already mentioned, way to hot to continue doing maintenance. This evening we had a session in the basement of our cottage (which doubles as missions and crafts) to beat the heat. It's funny, somewhere else I would probably be complaining about how warm it is, but here it's such a nice change that we celebrated while we fanned ourselves!
Please pray that the weather continues to cooperate throughout the summer as the campers arrive. Last summer it rained only at night - that would be a really nice repeat if it could be arranged!

Buttercups and Lilacs

Tuesday was a beautiful sunny day at Bayside (something we have not seen a whole lot of here at Bayside until this week) so Tim and I decided to take a little walk out to the mailbox to enjoy the nice weather. Along the way, we discussed such important issues as yappy dogs and... really that's about it. Life is quite relaxing right now.
Unfortunately, upon arrival at the mailbox, we realized that we forgot the mailbox key... no wait that was a different day... On this day, we learned that the big brown mailboxes have evolved into a gathering place for the community.
Urgh... This blog post has been suddenly cut short by yet another thunderstorm. Today we have had steady rumbling from 12 o'clock to about 6 o'clock with absolutely no lightening in sight to sit back and enjoy. The fact that the lamp on my desk just rattled with the rolling thunder indicates that I should probably wrap this up post-haste (no pun intended).
PS. I was going to tell you that on the way home, gigantic buttercups line all of Faders Road. It was quite stunning! I picked a large handful and even found some lilacs to create a bouquet of my two favourite colours: purple and yellow.

New Glasses

As you can plainly see my husband has new glasses. While this picture may not fully depict this reality, they look really good on him!

Chess

I (Aneke) learned to play Chess today, AND I won both games! I must admit that winning the first game was likely just beginner's luck since I had no idea what I was doing, but the second I won fair and square.

Well, mostly fair and square. It is probable that doing things like trucking the little tower piece diagonally across the entire board may have made it difficult for Tim to anticipate my next move; trying to remember what each of the pieces is allowed to do can be quite confusing! Luckily, Tim patiently and kindly corrected my mistakes (HEY! What do you think you're doing?!)

I'm sure that the next couple of weeks will be joyously filled with many more Chess games, and if I am indeed on a winning streak, I will be sure to mention it in future posts.

Oasis

I wish I had a photo to visually portray what I am trying to describe but that will have to wait for another time. We have safely arrived at the camp and are already feeling the peace that accompanies being cut off from the world. We've been enveloped by a light cloud of fog for a couple days now which has helped us forget about life's worries; we're cut off from the world literally and figuratively (no television, internet, telephone, etc...). Our pace has slowed down exponentially. We're already beginning to get up and go to bed with the sun after only 2 days! We've also found the time to play board games, read books for fun, and finish fun project that we started long ago. It's hard to believe that in less than a month, the camp will be filled once again with laughing children, splashing water, and boisterous singing!

Please stayed tuned for future posts.