useless in seattle

this weekend my mom took my dad to the hospital when he had trouble with his left side. he had a ct scan which showed some claudification, but didn't stay long enough for an mri. so he had an mri done on wednesday which showed that he's had two strokes.

they live in miami. Jak and i live in seattle.

he's going in for surgery this afternoon (friday @ 1 eastern time), but we're not arriving until saturday night.

there's a real sense of impotence being so many thousands of miles away while my family goes through this, especially just over a month past my grandmother's passing.

i'm thankful that we'll be able to be there as of saturday, but this week that has passed in between his visit to the er and now, has been one of worry and frustration (hence the silence in this little corner of the blogosphere).

so for those who are people of prayer, i ask that you keep my family in your prayers in the coming days. i probably won't be posting for at least another week and a half or so as i don't expect to have the time or much to say for a while.

[updated 1.5.07]
my dad had his surgery today (a stent inserted into his right carotid artery which had been 90% blocked), and all went well. he should be out of the hospital and recovering at home tomorrow, just a few hours before we arrive.

a crazy week

i haven't been blogging much. i've had too much going on in my life to worry about something like blogging.


thanksgiving night, our water heater broke, setting off an alarm in the middle of the night and leaving us without hot water for a couple of days.


later that weekend, from sunday to monday, it snowed. it doesn't snow in seattle. seattle doesn't know how to handle snow. a mere few inches of snow paralyzed the city. my usual 45 minute drive home from school took me six hours on monday night. six hours. a week later, i still can't believe it.


in between those two things, my grandmother passed away. she's been sick, and we all knew it was coming, but even that never makes death easy.


of course, my passport had expired. i desperately wanted to be there for the memorial service, so i had my passport expedited so Jak and i could go to panama on tuesday to be there for the service on thursday night.


i picked up my passport tuesday morning, we got on the plane that night, and arrived in panama on wednesday afternoon. we were only there for a few days, before spending all day saturday traveling back here to seattle.


it was a hectic week or so, to say the least.


now, as i sit here procrastinating on my studies, i find i have so much more to say, about my grandmother, about our relationship, about life and death, about grief. . . all while knowing that i have many pages to read and several papers to write before my semester ends in a week and half.


so instead of lengthening this post, i'll keep those thoughts for another time.

maine-ly maine

Jak and i have been living in the Boston area for nearly three years now. we've ventured up to new hampshire a couple of times, but had yet to make it all the way to maine. since we're hoping to move to seattle soon, we wanted to take some time to make sure we saw the coast of maine before leaving new england.

did you know that nearly every store in maine has the word "maine-ly" or "mainely" in their name? i don't think a single child in maine can grow up knowing how to actually spell the word correctly.

we camped at lamoine state park, right around the corner from acadia national park.

the weather couldn't have been better. the temps were in the seventies during the days, and just cool enough at night to be comfortable in our tiny tent.

we arrived in the late afternoon on saturday, having taken the scenic route up to (and then past) our destination. we set up camp and relaxed for the evening, enjoying our shishkabobs and the gorgeous moon that rose with a brilliant orange color.

we spent sunday relaxing on the rocky coast, with the end result of our looking like maine's renowned lobsters.

monday we kayaked along the bay, between the mainland and the islands, stopping for a snack on an island owned by the rockefellers. the wind was at our back the whole way, making it a nice, easy paddle.

we headed back after i ate a quite disappointing lobster roll, and drove up to our house around one a.m.

yeah, like anyone wanted that little rundown.

it was just nice to get back outside. we haven't camped in a while, and we certainly are the sort of people who need to do it much more often. it was so refreshing, physically (even with the resulting aches and pains), spiritually, and emotionally.

i couldn't have imagined the views we had, or what the maine coast looked like, had we not gone. the full moon rose glowing bright orange the three nights that we got to see it. everything was perfect and beautiful.

when i see things in such ridiculous colors, like the orange moon in maine, or the sunsets in florida, i have to laugh at God's sense of humor. i mean, if we draw anything like it, if we try to paint an orange moon, or a pink and purple sunset, it looks like some semi-abstract work, or some cheesy commercial painting. yet, God uses this absurd colors in nature, that we are never able to reproduce in any sort of meaningful way. we can create this colors through artificial means, but they remain artificial, they never look like the beauty in nature. we simply fall short in all of our attempts. so much so, that when viewing these colors in nature, that they can seem unreal if we take a moment to think about it, as if they shouldn't really exist naturally, but only artificially, while the artificial versions look so fake.