Pigpen takes a bath

One of my favorite parts about the weekend is that Carver still wakes up at 6:30 or 7:00, even though the rest of the world is sleeping in. This is also not my favorite part sometimes, but I really delight in being the one that gets up with him. We're both big time morning people. Much of this may have something to do with the reocurring theme of the act of drinking coffee making me feel real awesome about things. Anyway, this morning Carver gave me two unsolicited kisses, and that made me feel like the king of the castle. Right now his head is in a big plastic pitcher from the pantry and he's yelling. The hearing test lady from the hospital when he was born would be disappointed. She recommends wearing ear plugs like 8 hours a day or something.

So I haven't gone about earning my masters degree in the most orthodox way, so far. I could write a book on how this whole thing has gone, but about two months ago I wasn't sure if I'd ever finish. Now I think I'll have my initial draft, ready to defend, sent to my committee by this Wednesday. I honestly don't know what it will feel like to not have this thing hanging over my head anymore. I don't remember the last time I had the feeling of not having something enormous hanging over my head. Sometimes I would compare it to the dust cloud around pig pen, but instead of dust its residue of academic shame and pressure. Doesn't that just sound terrible? Wow. Well, in any case, I AM SO FREAKING CLOSE TO BEING DONE!!! I will bet anyone $83,000 that the day I finish I will be the happiest guy in America. Anyone.

So anyway, seeing as how I'm a morning person and I have about 60-80 hours of work to accomplish, it would probably be prudent for me to go write...not blog. Maybe next time I post I'll be getting ready to defend my research. When I started this blog I think I was about a year into it. Crazy huh?

Oh, I just remembered what my original reason was for blogging this morning. So Carver, Valerie and I have been sick. Some kind of sore throat, congestion, etc. type thing. Naturally Carver did not sleep great because he's sick. At 5-something this morning I went into his room to give him his pacifier (he had been crying), and the neighbors are tapping on the other side of his wall, like, "Hey 1 year old, you're keeping us up...please quit crying." Before they tapped I was about half asleep. Immediately I woke up completely and thought, who in the world knocks on the wall to get a baby to stop crying? Definitely my least favorite thing about apartment living is worrying about noise and neighbors.

Aubrey Michelle

I am now an uncle of three! I have an (almost) 11 year old niece whose smile is just like my sister’s, a 6 and a half year old nephew who I want to go on adventures with every day, and a brand new, beautiful, eight and a half pound niece who was just born last night. Her name is Aubrey and I love her. I hardly know her, but half of her is the most incredible man I know other than my dad and the other half is my faithful, honest, and beautiful sister-in-law, Natalie, who seemed to harness the redemption of labor and delivery for womankind with her strength, confidence, and peacefulness through the whole thing. I can’t even express how proud I am to be family with these three.

Guinea Pig

I am not up at 4:55AM because of my one year old, or rowdy neighbors, or insomnia. I am up because I would rate the pain level in my shoulder at 99 out of 100. As many of you may know, I am a sucker for giving back to science via being a guinea pig for research trials involving humans...and a sucker for the cash it pays. Among others, I have earned $300 for taking one dose of a diabetic medication (I am not diabetic) that had not yet been tested on humans, or a placebo. $200 for taking laxatives, or a placebo. $1,000 for going a month without and vitamin B6 and eating only bagels, jello, buttered pasta, and egg burritos for the whole month. And now I am being paid $160 to take part in a shoulder pain study. Day one they run me through these pain tolerance tests, and then have me work out my dominant shoulder until it is totally fatigued. Then the next four days I do the same pain tolerance tests. It turns out somewhere between 36 and 48 hours after the shoulder workout you experience the worst muscle soreness you've ever felt. And that's saying a lot considering I had rabdomyolysis about 2 months ago from trying to keep up with my brothers-in-law in a workout of push-ups and pull-ups. So, now I am awake because the pain is keeping me up. Did I mention I can't stretch or take any anti-inflamatories?
Sorry for the griping. I had to tell someone, and I didn't want to wake up Val. The good news is that I have been in the control group for all of these studies, which means I don't have diabetes, constipation, a B6 deficiency, or shoulder surgery.

Of goods and sundry

Well for starters, its Friday! This weekend is what is being called by many "man weekend". A bunch of us are headed to Chase's farm house to ride 4-wheelers, play football like B. Favre and his friends in the Wrangler commercials, and shoot clay pigeons...plus I told Danny I'm going to shoot him with bird shot from a fare distance away. I missed this weekend last year. Well, I wouldn't say I missed it exactly, but I wasn't there. Carver was just a week old at the time.

By the way, Chase lives in The Sudan working for Samaritan's Purse. We get him for just a couple weeks a year...otherwise he'd have to pay taxes.

So for an update to my last post, all seeds of bitterness towards said employer have been burnt up in a fire. Now it is spring flowers. He makes all things new indeed. Amen and amen!

In other news, I am on a campaign to not feel older than my age anymore. I have been doing crossfit endurance workouts on a somewhat regular basis, and I am JACKED AND PUMPED ABOUT GETTING JACKED AND PUMPED BRO! AMIRITE?! POUND IT BRO!

And to really make this one of the most random posts ever, my 2010 list of goals, in no particular order...

- Run a half marathon or an Olympic length tri-athlon,
- get excellent marks in PA school,
- finish my thesis (this is by May),
- have normal cholesterol levels,
- and turn a couple-o-haploids into one diploid IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN BRO!!! (FIST POUNDS HIS BUDDY WHILE ADJUSTING HIS NERDY LABORATORY SPECTACLES).

Life...or...Why I need the Gospel

The Gospel is hard. Or at least I should say, if the gospel means suffering with Christ, and allowing Christ to suffer for other people, then the gospel is hard. Over the last couple weeks I have been treated pretty poorly at work, and at least from my perspective have not been communicated with well or respectfully and have been somewhat misrepresented to the powers that be. At the same time I was cut to 20 hours because of "cut backs". The hardest part is not that we are missing half my income, but that if I am to live a life worthy of the gospel of Christ, I am supposed to forgive them. I'm supposed to let the perfect Messiah suffer in their place. If I don't, surely I don't deserve His suffering in my place.
The most striking realization I've had of this came Saturday night. Carver has been sick and was up almost the entire night, unconsolably crying. At one point I got so frustrated that I had to just set him down in his crib and walk away. I was extremely frustrated with a one year old who cannot control how he feels when he gets sick or his perspective on when the symptoms will end. If I can get that angry with my incredible, perfect son, I need the gospel more than any of you.
The gospel does not come down to making wrongs right, it comes down to the unjust being completely justified. This is why the world has a problem with the gospel. It does not fit well in our current system.

Haiti

There are so many ways to wonder about this earthquake and why something so unbelievably devastating can happen to someplace already so devastated. I am just mourning for Haiti. If you want to keep up with what my friends who live there think of what's going on, I'm posting links to their blogs below. We have no idea how terrible this actually is. If God is both good and sovereign we cannot fathom what His justice and final redemption of creation really will be like. I cannot imagine what goes on in a child's heart and mind in Haiti today.
Here are their blogs:
http://jayanddiana.weebly.com/

http://jershurk.weebly.com/

http://zacharykee.blogspot.com/

Cold blooded blogging

That has to be the problem. As the temperature drops, so does the rate at which I write blog posts. Actually, I have just been really busy. Let me do you the disservice of "catching you up", which is to say, tell you what's been going on without giving you the interesting details.
Haiti was incredible.
When I got there I could not stop thinking about how amazed I am that the Americans that are there long-term are there long-term. It is a hard place. By the time I left I realized that i could be there long term if my family was with me. The reason I went, if you recall was to assess whether or not Lespwa could develope some kind of tilapia production system to either 1) feed the orphans and alleviate their anemia, 2) feed the orphans and the school's students and alleviate their anemia, or 3) feed the orphans, the students, and sell some fish to other villagers to help alleviate anemia, maybe create a job or two, and maybe start to develop a little economy in Mesaye. The highlights of the trip for me were: *being near/around orphans (expounded upon below)*, meeting the other people on the trip, wonderful friends that I wish I lived with on a cul-de-sac, perspective of life in Haiti, Haitian people, Creole, and the farm we saw that looked more like a farm in Cuba than Haiti. (Did you know Cuba has a really incredible agriculture system?)
Christmas was great!
I can't tell you how excited I was to get back to Valerie and Carver. We spent the days surrounding Christmas in Tampa. I am in love with Valerie's family. They have each become so special to me, and I love sharing the holidays with them.
For New Year's weekend we went to merritt Island to be with my family where we had our Christmas. It was awesome. We always make a huge deal out of the food, and no one dissapointed. Ayden got me ladderball and my folks got me a Wake Forest hoodie. I'm super pumped about both, but I'm kind of affraid to wear the hoodie around Gainesville because I can imagine someone just like me yelling out there car window, "Why don't you go there if you like it so much!?" And I'd be like, "Gators wear jean shorts!" And the guy would never know it was meant as a compliment.
Gainesville is great.
And cold! It may snow tonight! It is hard knowing this is our last semester in Gainesville for at least 2 years. I want to say that I am firmly confident that we'll be back here. We want to be in Florida. We love being in a college town. With that said, though, my other goal in the next 2 years, and in the next 60 years for that matter, is to do a better job of discerning and obeying what God wants me to do. He does put our desires in our hearts, though.
Well, I guess that's a sufficient catching up. I'd like to really get my thoughts down about Haiti sometime soon. It would be a shame to let any of what I experienced be forgotten. If you are ever interested in going to Haiti and helping out, this aquaculture project may eventually need some hands to get started.
For now, thanks for reading. I'll look forward to posting more this semester since I'm not in school full time.

(The orphans standing in front of a cargo container that was washed into the compound during the Mesaye flood on Sept. 7th, 2008.)
*As mentioned above, being around orphans was really challenging for me. Not challenging in the sense that it is hard to be around orphans, but that it challenged my perception of orphans before I went. In a few thoughts, they are very independent for their age. They have no one to rely on, so they make do...emotionally, physically, socially, and I'm assuming mentally and spiritually, other than what they get from the Americans that live there and their house mom. I love these boys. There are 12 of them, and it is so hard to look at each of them and realize that they do not have a dad. It is so unspeakably unfair that they don't get a dad. I cannot tell you how many times this thought went through my head while I was in Haiti. They are better off than most Haitian kids in their provision, because they are at this orphanage. But they don't have a dad or a mom, and that is and was so hard for me to process. The only place I can turn is to a deep deep aching and hoping that God is good, sovreign, and just.
By the way, if you would like an illustration for how God can possible be good, sovereign, and just in a world that contains orphans, read "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton.