New frontiers!

Woooo...I am blogging on my own computer at my parents' house! They have wireless now, and I got it to work all by myself.

Also, I just got a new phone with a keyboard for texting and the ability to take and send pictures. I love how if you just wait long enough, you can get up-to-date phones for free (with mail-in rebate). I would never have paid extra for such features, but since they were in the tier that I'm "due for," I'm like, why not? I love it already. And even though someone told me on the phone yesterday that the Verizon store was open at 10 and it really opened at 11 so I had to wait an hour at Waffle House, the service was very good and helpful. She didn't try to sell me anything extra or unnecessary. Then I had lunch with Keith, my parents' church's pastor, and brought home a whole bunch of pizza that I'll probably leave for Mom and Dad. A good day already, and I've got the whole church homecoming ahead of me still.

My Precious

And while I'm doing pictures, I decided to take some of my recent pottery purchases in Seagrove. In the group picture, the bowl is Chris Luther's, the teacup/teabowl/wine cup is Tom Gray's, and the light green mug is Travis Owens' from Jugtown. All three of those were part of the Seagrove Potters for Peace event, as well as the bird pendant at bottom by Jennie Lorette Keats at Jugtown. The plate is Tom Gray's, and the dark mug at right is Michael Mahan's of From the Ground Up Pottery. I call it my caveman mug because it's big and heavy. The others show some of the details.

This last is a group shot of some of the pieces I've had for a while. The wine goblet is part of a six-piece set my mom got in Scotland; the purple mug was a gift from Dr. Wills for graduation, bought at Summitt Coffee; the green mug I found at the Habitat for Humanity store in Cornelius; the blue bowl in the center is from Taize; the blue and green bowl is from Dirt Works Pottery in Seagrove, a gift from Mom; and the two small bowls in front, I made during my pottery class at the Icehouse in Davidson.

Hooray for pottery! Thanks for indulging my image fix.

Nest Analysis

I'm happy to present some pictures from my sea turtle nest analysis assignment.

Here are the two Sea Turtle Project area coordinators excavating the nest. Sea turtle nests are shaped like an upside-down lightbulb, large at the bottom and narrow near the surface. The left pile between them is hatched eggs; the right pile is unhatched ones.

Here is the baby turtle they found alive. They had to put him in a bucket and release him only after dark because baby turtles are too vulnerable and visible to predators when it is light.

Here they are using a flashlight to candle the unhatched eggs and tell if they are fertilized. If they had found any, they would have reburied them in anundisturbed nest.

Just a link for today

I've been reading my daily Sojourners emails much more attentively lately, because I may one day apply for their sweet internship. It's been extremely rewarding and enlightening, such that I mourn what I missed by deleting so many before.

Here's just one of the great articles they linked to.

http://blog.sojo.net/2010/08/19/football-and-ramadan

Very inspiring.

Driving along in the deluge today, just reciting the names of those I'm thankful for was such a powerful prayer that it brought me to tears. That includes my three devoted followers! Blog followers, that is. I don't have any personal followers. Yet.

Seagrove! Peace! Turtles!

I went to Seagrove this weekend for the second annual Potters for Peace event. It was great fun, especially since I didn't have any work or research to do at all. I bought a ton of great stuff that I will treasure for a long time.

Last night, I got to see my friend Stuart oh so briefly on Topsail Island. We got dinner and then went to a turtle nest analysis. 72 hours after the nest had hatched, they were counting the remaining eggs, seeing which might be fertilized (none), and helping the one baby who hadn't made it to the surface--the eggs are buried pretty deep. They put the baby in a bucket to release him after dark. In the daylight, he was too vulnerable to predators. It was sweet, and I got to take pictures so it counts as work, too. Times like that, I love my job.

Screwtape

I read The Screwtape Letters as a teenager, when I never thought about the devil or evil. Shows how very fortunate I was, and remain. I read it then as entertainment, because I liked the Narnia books and thought letters from a devil was a cool idea.

Now, I'm reading it again after realizing slowly that we really are exposed to bad, or evil, or Satan, or devils, or whatever you want to call it, ALL THE TIME. For serious. Otherwise, why would any of us think so negatively? I'm very lucky in that I have never had anyone tell me I'm fat or ugly or should really give up on dating or that I should be ashamed of myself or any of the wretched wrong things that occasionally enter my mind. So no person has given me those ideas. I certainly did not come up with them on my own. God does not plant them. "The media" and "society" do have some part in it, but I'm not convinced they're powerful enough to make me think such things. So I conclude that someone's out to get me. Thus, Screwtape revisited.

And dang. It is so good. I gave it three stars on Goodreads a couple years ago when I was entering books from the past, but I can already tell you it's going to get five this time around. Here's a sample:

"Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal....As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks."

And that's just leading up to the point! All hail Lewis. More to come.

Last night, I covered the queen's ball for the Sneads Ferry Shrimp Festival. I sat with Mrs. North Carolina and her husband, a delightful couple. The first thing they did was offer me a two-liter of Mountain Dew, saying, "There's no way we can finish this." This was one of those operations where, when you ask for water, they act like no one's ever wanted it before. It's sweet tea and soft drinks all the way. Even at its worst, my job never ceases to entertain me.