Winter Wonderland

As I write this, I am curled up under my blanket with my heater going. It's literally freezing outside and I just got back from watching Elf with a bunch of the staff in the club room. Christmas in the Canyon is proving to be similar to Christmas everywhere, a time of cozy busyness. A time where your thoughts turn to friends and family, where the days are short and the nights are long. I love Christmas time.

I'm coming home in 8 days! And I am very excited about it. Although, I have a certain amount of anxiousness as well, which is surprising. I have just realized that Christmas at home will never again be the relaxing month-long break from real life that it has always been. When in college, Christmas was the time I got to come home and not worry about seeing any of my friends because I saw them all the time. Oh yeah, and I got a month worth of it. Now I have a week and, not only do I want to spend time with my family, but this is also the only time I get to see all my friends back home as well. It's just a little stressful to think about how much I want to cram into my time at home. And I'm wondering if I'll find it changed at all. Weird. But I miss Missouri a lot and really can't wait to see everyone. I'll just have to budget my time well.

The Christmas festivities have definitely continued since I last blogged. Tuesday was Craft Day at the Milstens which was very fun and relaxing. I learned to knit and have made a decent amount of a pretty awesome scarf for myself. We watched 5 movies including Elf, Little Women, Polar Express, Muppets Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street. It was really cozy and informal and everyone just came and went all day long.

We met the boys at 8:00 that night to practice our skit for the Christmas party the next night. We got it pulled together, although it is definitely a trial to get 14 people to focus on something, especially when there's no clear leader. We got it done though and the went back to the condos and hung out. I got Darren addicted to the West Wing, which is fun for me. We've been watching episodes here and there for the past couple weeks, so that's what we did after rehearsal.

I got up around 10:00 on Wednesday and headed into town with Lacey and Shea to go grocery shopping. It was a fun trip with Shea in the car blaring LL Cool J and Boyz II Men. We went to Thriftway and all Shea bought was an onion, gizzards, cow tongue and Shake n' Bake. He then cooked them and brought them to the Christmas party. It was hilarious.

We got back in the afternoon and spent some time cooking and then got ready for the Christmas party. The party was in the Orchard Inn and it was fun to see everyone all dressed up. They had set everything up really pretty and fancy. The kitchen had made rack of lamb and some pork and everyone had brought sides and stuff. It was really yummy.

After dinner was the kids program which was one of the cutest things I've seen in my entire life. The kids out here are so sweet and fun. And ridiculously cute. After the kids program came the white elephant exchange which I did not do well in even though I brought an awesome football phone.

And next came our ridiculous skit. My parts included singing the German version of Silent Night and singing Oh, Holy Night in my church lady voice, all while wearing a shirt that has cats on it and says Meowy Christmas. I was pretty sure we were bombing but we had a lot of people tell us they thought it was awesome. It was a lot of fun to do together and I feel like people got to see more of our goofy personalities. Rich told us that no other intern group would have ever gotten up in front of the staff this early in the year and that he was really impressed with us, which was really to hear. So it was definitely fun.

Thursday was back to work, although it didn't really feel like I had a weekend. We did perif buildings and then spent the rest of the day continuing the deep clean on the quads and laundry. Friday morning was much of the same. I did make it to Morning Mudd, but just barely. The Sassy was open Friday night, so I only had to work in HK in the morning. We did the Sports Center and the Sassy and then continued deep clean.

After lunch, I trained Kristen and Drew in the Sassy because they were working there this weekend. They were the first group I've trained, so they were my guinea pigs. I'm excited to train and to plant some of the vision I have for the place in others, but it's hard to train other interns. I have kind of a weird role because I am running the Sassy but I'm not their boss, so it's a little weird. But we got it done and the group rolled in that afternoon.

We had an Assemblies of God youth group camp here this weekend. They were a first time group and most of the people had never seen the place. They were fun, but there's definitely a learning curve with first time groups. We opened the Sassy from 11:30 to 1:00 Friday night which is the latest we've stayed open since I've been here. It was also really slow. So that kind of sucked.

I slept in Saturday because I wasn't scheduled for morning espresso. We went in at 1:00 and did devos and set-up. The afternoon open was better than the night before. Our kid this weekend was Brandon. There's always at least one kid that spends all weekend in the snack bar and this weekend, it was Brandon. I really feel like that's the point of what we do in the snack bar. There are some kids that aren't going to be comfortable in the Sports Center or out by the pool, so the snack bar is a place where they can hang out and feel comfortable and welcome. I pray a lot that it's a place where that can happen. It's cool to see those kids and remember their names and get to see little glimpses of their time here.

We had late open again Saturday night, but we were packed all night. It was pretty crazy and people bought pretzels like they were going out of style. I was exhausted by 2:00 when we got home and passed out, only to awaken 5 hours later to be in HK this morning at 8:00. Late night, early morning is killer.

I ended up spending most of the day today in the Sassy, doing vending and ordering. It was fun to work by myself and probably better because their was a good chance I would have been cranky.

After work, we made some taco pie and then went to watch Elf, which was hilarious as always. That movie does not get old.

Also, we got our personality tests back and mine is almost exactly the same as the last time I took it. I'm still an otter, still talk a lot and still really love people. I work at a relational level and tend to be emotional. It's freakish how right most of the stuff they put was. It's been fun reading everybodys.

All Clean tomorrow and then the weekend! I'm so excited.

See you all very soon!