Picture tagging game!

In solidarity with my illustrious friend, Athena...


The rules are simple:

1) Go to your photo files, select the 8th photo folder
2) Select the 8th photo in that folder
3) Post that photo along with the story behind it
4) Then challenge 8 blogging friends to do the same!


Here's my photograph:

This was the day of the JVC Camden Community Christmas Extravaganza (briefly referenced in this post from December). We had decided in the weeks leading up to Advent that we should dedicate a whole day to preparing for Christmas as a community, especially since we were planning to visit our families for the actual holiday.

The plan for that day was to run a 5K in the morning, take naps (this was added to the schedule shortly after the last of us crossed the finish line), snap a photo for the community Christmas card, decorate the house, put up and decorate the Christmas tree, go to dinner and end the evening watching It's a Wonderful Life while sipping on hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. (I just love recapping that day.)


Anyway, when we opened the box of Christmas ornaments, I was a little saddened when I realized there was no tree-topper in the box. Mark suggested that I just make one, but we had nothing around the house to create an angel or a star.


Undeterred by an apparent lack of supplies, I thought about it until I remembered that the volunteers from the Philadelphia Mercy Volunteer Corp had given us a box of Christmas chocolates when we invited them over for game night earlier in the week. The chocolates were individually wrapped in shiny, gold-colored cellophane. The six of us had devoured all of the treats the day before.


I rooted through the garbage until I pulled out all of the little gold wrappers. Then I tore a side off of a cardboard box and cut it out into the shape of a star. We wrapped the gold cellophane around the cardboard, and Voila! We had a tree-topper. Stephanie and I called it "the simple-living star" because it was made out of recycled materials.


Mark took this picture of me and Steph right before we put the star together. We were pretty pleased with our ingenuity at making out Christmas tree truly ours by rigging up our own star, (There's a great picture of Mark placing the star on top of the tree) so we gleefully held up the wrappers at the camera.


OK, I tag:
Lauren
Bridget
Laurie (or Ben)
Marc
Corina (do you still blog?!?)
...
I think that's all the blogger friends who haven't already done this or been tagged!

Summertime, and the living is HUMID!

If today is any indication of the kind of heat and humidity I can expect this summer, I may be in for a long haul…

Actually, I quite like the summery weather. New Jersey summer weather patterns are strange—it’s always humid, but very often a humid little rainstorm will roll in, rage for a while, and then blow away. For example, when I looked out my window this morning before I got dressed for work, it was really cloudy and big raindrops were falling. So I put on slacks and a sweater and went to work. It was humid, but I chalked it up to the rainstorm. Imagine my surprise when I walked home for lunch and found that it was broiling outside! The clouds had blown away, but the humid air and heat remained. I changed into sandals and a skirt before coming back to the office! Last August, during hurricane season, we had at least one thunderstorm per day the entire first month of living here. I have a feeling this morning was just the beginning of storm season. I’m going to have to learn to gauge the temperature despite what the sky looks like in the morning!

It’s going to be interesting at lunchtime from now until August because I’m used to cooking my lunch—that is, I’m used to eating hot food. It’s getting too hot to stand over a stove or eat a hot lunch. Today I had a nice surprise waiting for me in the fridge—Jenna and her boyfriend made devilled eggs out of a few Easter eggs, and they were nice and chilled and ready to eat when I got there! I’m going to have to start planning ahead if I want to eat a cold lunch.

One thing I’ve realized about summer is how much I love cold drinks, especially iced coffee (a la Starbucks) and smoothies (a la Jamba Juice). And before I became a JV and started watching where every cent of my budget is being spent, it was so easy to just step into a little bistro or smoothie place and spend four dollars on a cold drink. If I did that now, my whole monthly stipend would be gone in three weeks.

Consider this: a 12-ounce drip coffee from Starbucks costs $1.50 (and that’s the smallest option you can buy). If you bought one every work day for year (taking two weeks off for vacation), that’s $375 per year on corporate coffee. If you’re into fancier things like lattes or mochas (ahem… guilty…), it can cost at least $940 per year!

As a result, I’ve been making those kinds of drinks at home! It’s nothing revolutionary or spectacular, but it is simple and inexpensive (as opposed to Starbucks and Jamba Juice—which are both deceptively simple, and expensive!)

It’s simple: make a pot of coffee in the evening and pour it into a pitcher. Chill it overnight. Whenever you want it (I like to drink mine right before I walk back to work after lunch. It gives me a little treat to look forward to), pour a glass, add milk, ice and a little sugar, and enjoy! There is a deep satisfaction in having a little coffee treat that doesn’t break the bank.

We just use a 39oz can of coffee (to my palette, poor quality coffee tastes the same as the good stuff when it’s chilled, but I’m sure there are those who can tell better than I can), which procures about 120 twelve-ounce servings (according to the label, anyway). A 39oz can costs about $10, so each serving evens out to about $.08. (Factoring in the cost of filters, milk, and sugar, it’s more like $.10 per serving). If you drank that every work day for a year (same formula as above), it costs $25 per year. You can save $350 per year!

The same thing can be done with smoothies. Investing in a couple of bags of frozen fruit (a big bag of store brand or, better yet, wholesale is the most bang for your buck), a bunch of bananas, and a carton of milk. We usually use strawberries, peaches, one whole banana, and a little splash of milk, but you can use any kind of fruit or berries, or yogurt instead of milk. Blend it up, pour it in a glass, and drink your daily servings of fruit! It’s a lot cheaper than the Starbucks smoothies or Jamba Juice. Some people even like to hit Super Supplements and throw a scoop of protein powder into the mix, so it’s an even healthier snack!

I never really had a problem spending money on blended drinks until a few years ago, but I certainly allowed it to become a habit. I don’t want to look back on my life at the end of my days and realize that I literally spent thousands of dollars on little treats for myself. Especially if I’m able to make them at home!

Anyway, I hope everyone else has the chance some time this summer to enjoy the sunshine and economically-savvy summer drinks!

Rice and Beans Fast

I was going to write all about the (optional) fast that JVs are challenged to try each Lent, but I found that Tom O'Keefe, a Baltimore JV, put it much more eloquently in his blog than I could.

My community is not taking it to the degree that JVC Baltimore is; we add different seasoning to our rice (for example, we've had Spanish rice and curried rice the past couple of nights). And we've only committed to it for our evening meal-- about half of my lunches since the fast began have been rice and beans; the rest of the time I've grabbed a yogurt or something. But still, "rice week" (we call it that, even though it's a ten-day challenge) has been really eye-opening for me.

I'm trying to take Friday fasts REALLY seriously this year, which is something that I'm struggling with even as I type this blog. I have dicovered this Lent something that either didn't occur to me that past few years, or I just forgot: Fasting is hard. I don't generally eat a whole lot to begin with these days because I sit still at a desk most of the time. I do consume more calories when I work out, but I don't remember being so hungry the mornings after I exercise during Lent. (And I was an endophins junkie all last year, as all of Vatican Row will corroborate. I managed to work out and fast without any problems all of last Lent.) At any rate, I don't remember having so much trouble concentrating or feeling so weak.

I remind myself that Christ pulled this off for 40 straight days in the desert. He was as fully human as He was fully divine, and His fast reminds me and that giving my body a little less of what it wants is a great way to prime myself spiritually. Christ's reasons for his fast were different. Pope Benedict XVI wrote about Jesus' fast and temptation in the desert:

The temptations are a descent into the perils bestting mankind, for there is no other way to lift up a fallen humanity. Jesus has to enter into the drama of human existence, for that belongs to the core of his mission; he has to penetrate it completely, down to its uttermost depths, in order to find the "lost sheep," to bear it on his shoulders, and to bring it home.

For the rest of us, mere mortals already ensconced in the drama of human existence, our fast helps purify us by stripping us of the rest of the drama and focusing on the basics of our human condition—that is, the only important part of the drama, which is our relationship with God. What do I truly need? What do I merely want? Can I, by abstaining from "extras" for forty days, unite myself more closely with God?

Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
But the space heater is so delightful!
And since they don't plow the roads,
LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW!

The JVC East Class of 2009-2010 has the privilege of living on the East Coast during the snowiest winter on record. About 28 inches fell last Friday, and before a substantial amount of it could melt, we got smacked with another storm this past Wednesday, and it raged on through Thursday afternoon. It was so bad that ALL of our (the Jesuit volunteers’) offices were closed for two days. The teachers in our house still have today off, and we’re going into a three day weekend.

We’re supposed to host a Valentine’s Day party this weekend, so we’re doing our best to get ready for company. (The biggest development in trying to prepare the house—CHRISTINE FIXED THE VACUUM CLEANER!!!! We have not had a functioning vacuum EVER since we moved in. That’s right; our house had never been vacuumed before this week. Simple living is one thing, but that was ridiculous.) I made some red velvet cupcakes for the party. The recipe called for two ounces of red food coloring, but if I ever make them again I don’t think I’ll use so much. The dye is expensive, and those are some RED cupcakes!

I’m a little bummed out about the party happening this weekend, though, because I think I’m getting sick. I started feeling a little poorly around this time last week, and so I decided to take is easy and rest up. But we had company on Friday night and went to a Super Bowl part last Sunday. I didn’t sleep well Sunday night, so I woke up at five and just stayed awake. The following morning I awoke feeling worse than ever (I could hardly peel myself off of my bed in time for work), but I went in to the office anyway, popping Tylenol and drinking as much detox tea as I could find.


We decided at work that day that the coming storm would make the drive to work too dangerous for my coworkers to go to work. I would have been able to make it because I walk here, but if I had been running this place all by myself, all hell would have broken loose. Then, since the storm was just picking up speed on Wednesday night, Irma sent me a text message that the offices were closed again yesterday.


On Tuesday night/Wednesday morning I slept for fourteen hours (told you I wasn’t feeling well!), and spent most of the day sitting still and reading. But yesterday (Thursday), cabin fever kicked in.


I woke up in a hurry, stripped my bed to wash the sheets, and started baking those cupcakes. As soon as they were finished, I finished the laundry, cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed my room and put the bed back together. But I was still itchy for activity, so I walked downtown to run errands.


But I STILL had insane cabin fever, so despite how crummy I was feeling I went to the building I work in, put on my running shoes, and started running up and down the 23 flights of stairs for exercise. Then I did those 8-minute exercise videos in my office, which I watch in YouTube. Normally I sleep like a baby after exercise, but my muscles ached so badly and my throat was so sore that I didn’t fall asleep until around 3am.


It might go without saying that I don’t feel so hot today. The idea of company and a loud party over the weekend isn’t that appealing, but maybe I’ll perk up after some rest.


Work is a little nutty today—all of the medical transportation companies cancelled their services these past two days, so we had to scramble to reschedule a bunch of appointments for our clients. Now that that’s over, it’s slowed down. February has been oddly slow for us (knock on wood).

On a lighter note

It hit me after posting yesterday that I’ve put some pretty heavy stuff on the blog since I arrived. I should try and lighten the mood around here.

Good or funny things that have happened in the past few weeks:

The Camden JV house pooled its resources over the weekend to enter a raffle, and we ended up winning FREE ORGANIC MILK for a WHOLE YEAR! Woot! Simply living is awesome when you get 52 coupons for free anything, let alone organic dairy products!

Last night Mark, out of the kindness of his heart (and his stipend), bought flowers for his roommates. :)We are a lucky group of girls to have him around.

None of us has gone running for a while because there’s been some pretty shady activity on and around the bridge. Our favorite bicycle cop told us a few times once we got there not to cross the bridge because it didn’t look safe for us. I knew it was too good to be true, having a safe place to run. I think the shady stuff picked back up as soon as the mornings started getting darker. But the happy phoenix from the ashes is that we’ve been doing yoga together to get some exercise in. Yoga and weight routines… I’d better have some decent muscles come springtime!

We’re a particularly musical household. Mark practices guitar a lot, and I’m sure I’ll start borrowing his chord books to learn as soon as my guitar arrives. Last night, after the guitar’s curtain call, I was drying my hair and belting out selections from Les Miserables, which gave us all a lot to talk about. Good times.

I’m developing a fascination with Lady Gaga. Between a beautiful voice and the masquerade thing she has going on, I’m overlooking how weird she is. Wouldn’t it be fun to be her for a day?
My birthday is coming up and all I really want to do is go to Independance Hall and check out all the historical stuff in Philly. I've been there before, but I'd like to go refresh. I have a sentimental weakness for American history.
We used our leftover apples to make apple crisp for dessert last night. Hello, autumn. You smell like baked apples and cinnamon.
It feels good to write about less heavy things than work. I'll remember to do this more often.

A day in the life...

To give you, my loyal readers (all 2.7 of you), an idea of what a day in the life of a JV is like, here is a typical synopsis of my day.

Every other day, I get up around 6:30 to go for a run with Amber and Jenna, my roommates. On the days that I don’t run, I wake up around 7:30 (don’t worry—I lift weights after work on those days). We get moving around 6:45, and typically get back between 7:15 and 7:30. The three of us share a bathroom, so we have to get back in time to get cleaned up before work.

We normally eat breakfast on a rotating basis in the kitchen. I put on coffee and get to work on eating because I only have to walk two blocks to get to work. We see very little of each other in the mornings because there are six of us going in five different directions (Jenna and Mark work at the same school, so they have to leave together). I make it out the door by 8:50 every morning and walk to work.

Once I get to my office, I read the reports that our security guards write up from the day before. They typically deal with 911 calls (as this is a building for elderly and disabled people, many of them are frail or in poor health. Since we have over three hundred tenants, the odds are pretty high that someone’s going the hospital), harassment issues, fires, noise complaints, and illegal guests. Then, when it’s warranted, my office (usually me) writes cease notices (As in, “We demand that you cease this behavior, or your lease will be terminated.”). I only recently learned to write them, but I’ll be doing that on a daily basis this year.

The social services office concerns itself mostly with getting tenants to and from the doctor, getting their prescriptions filled and delivered to them, helping pay the bills (it’s their money—we just fill out the forms. Many of the tenants never learned to read, so we do a lot of that stuff for them), and making sure that everyone is generally healthy, well-fed taking their medicine, etc. It’s sort of like being a professional mom. :)

We also handle a lot of emergencies in conjunction with the security officers and medical personnel. Since I’ve been in this office, there have been three emergencies situations that I’ve been part of. One turned out to be a false alarm, but we couldn’t find a tenant and had to go into his apartment—in case he had died. Evidently, that happens a lot around here. But he wasn’t there, dead or alive, so it turned out to be a mere blip on the radar. I won’t lie, though—my heart was pounding pretty hard when we first walked in that door. The other two involved getting a lady to go to the hospital because she was quite ill but refusing treatment; the other involved protecting one of my coworkers from someone who was threatening her. I can’t really tell any more about those situations, for obvious reasons.

But, though exciting (if not fun) little crises like that pop up on a regular basis, it’s pretty standard office work.

I walk home at 5pm and meet up with the other Camden JVs, my housemates. We make a point to eat dinner together every night, which is really wonderful for all of us. We take turns cooking, though for a while we just let Mark, the only man in the house, do it because he’s a REALLY talented cook. After dinner there’s usually tea, and often a game or discussion. We like each other a lot, so this is quite a balm for our weary minds after a day of work..

Then we get up and do it all over again in the morning. :)

This has been A Day in the Life of a Camden JV… tune in next time!

Itemized lessons

After a whole week of work and community living, I feel I much present some of the things I’ve learned so far as a JV. In the spirit of JVC, I shall categorize them by the four values of JVC.

Community
Sriracha tastes good on everything. Everything.

Boys don’t like to hear about the gynecologist or the mechanics of natural family planning, but the ones who pretend it doesn’t bother them are really sweet.

Dance parties: very good.

The day revolves around family dinners.

Social Justice
The system is flawed! Burn down city hall! Storm the capital! March for systematic, structural change! (Please note the incredibly facetious tone of my writing…)

On a more serious note: Social justice is difficult. Read the Oscar Romero prayer about it—it consoles me. I have said from the beginning of this process that social justice begins and ends with the dignity of the human person. Where that dignity is not being affirmed, there is injustice. The issue is that a person’s pride is deeply entwined in their dignity, and it is easily wounded when they are in a vulnerable position. So they don’t always want help, or at least, not the help that we can provide them. My job is to find a subtle way to affirm dignity without wounding pride.

Simple Living
Despite the fact that it would save money, mouse traps are not reusable.

Investing in plastic containers to keep ants out of the food is a good idea.

Gym membership be damned—all you need are motivated roommates, running shoes, one absurdly long bridge, and a weight bench in the basement to stay in shape.

Ants will survive a fall into the honey jar. They try and swim their sticky way home. It’s funny to watch.

Spirituality
It’s OK to disagree, as long as everyone is respectful. (Which everyone here is.)

It will get you through everything from uncomfortable meetings with tenants to, to homesickness, to the latter part of a three-mile run.

More to come later. I promise my updates will be more regular in the future!

I'm here: A Camden update

Hey, everyone!
As you may or may not have surmised from my long (or so it feels) absence from the Internet, I a) have been very busy since I left the Wednesday, and b) have been without Internet that entire time. Look for updates here and there, but don’t be surprised if it takes me a day of two to respond if you email or Facebook me; I’ll only have access to the web at work.

So, we (the Camden JVs) have arrived! The reception in the community so far has been very positive, and very overwhelming. Former Jesuit Volunteers (hereafter referred to as FJVs) came to visit us within hours of our arrival, most (thankfully) bearing food or beverages for us. I don’t think we’ve touched any of the food we picked up at the grocery store yet, and this is our fifth day here!

But before I get too far into our time in Camden, I should start with the journey out of Seattle to Baltimore.

"The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human
experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don't
ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking... It
would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to
stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be
missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and
how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist."
- from the book "Sea of Cortez" by John Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts

My last few days out west were full of that “warm sadness without loss.” I hugged goodbye most of the people that I meant to see before taking off, especially at the lovely shindig my family threw for me before going. Thanks to all the Bellingham people who make the drive to Everett to see me off! Love you!

I visited some good friends before going, too. When I walked away from a few homes that held the people I love, it felt like my heart was ripping through the muscles of my back. But even in those moments, I feel absolutely certain that this (Camden, and more broadly, JVC) is exactly where I am supposed to be.

I flew out of Seattle around midnight on Wednesday night/ Thursday morning. Since it was a red-eye flight and I was flying toward the sunrise, I basically skipped Wednesday night. So it felt like Wednesday and Thursday were all one, long day. At the airport in Baltimore, I managed to grab a latte and some breakfast before taking a cat nap by the baggage claim. Eventually I found my community hanging out near where the bus was supposed to pick us up, and after the standard confusion of moving sixty people to one location on a bus, we got on a charter bus and drove to Blue Ridge Summit in Pennsylvania.

Blue Ridge is simply gorgeous. It’s owned by the Jesuits in the area, and frequently is used for retreats like the one we were on. We had a lot of talks, small groups and presentations on the core JVC values: community, spirituality, simple living, and social justice. We had Mass three times: once to kick off the retreat, one for the feast of the Assumption, and one we call the missioning liturgy, when we are all blessed and sent forth to our cities. At that Mass we each received our Jerusalem cross, which is a traditional symbol of missionaries. It’s one large cross, representing Jerusalem, and four little ones around it, representing the four corners of the earth. In JVC, the four crosses stand for the four values.

We got to Camden without incident and found our little house, which is downright luxurious by JVC standards. Carpeting, two stories plus a basement, laundry machines, a dishwasher, 2.5 baths, 4 bedrooms. The dining room table is a big, beautiful, sturdy thing that just screams for people to sit around it and be a community every night. We are VERY well taken care of around here.

The only drag, and certainly what will become the cross that I bear in terms of staying connected with my family and friends, is that we have very limited access to the Internet. I do have a computer at work, but I can't use Facebook or anything like that there. This is all part of learning to live simply, which is one of the main reasons I became a JV; I wanted to purify my faith and life by rooting it in the Gospel, and part of that is giving up worldly goods. Having such a great house makes that a little more difficult, but we're at least going to try going without internet. I don't know if it will last; we plan to revisit the issue in about a month and make a decision as a community. Until then, my apologies if I'm slow to get back to you!

We visited each other's placements the last two days (after a lovely tour d'Camden led by Nick, an FJV, and my amazing cousin), and I have to say that I think we were all placed really well. I like my supervisor, Irma. She's a cool lady, and I look forward to working with her.

Also (I don't have photos of it yet, but believe me), I got a pleasent surprise: I get my own office!!! I am officially a grown up, with a job and an office! Granted, my computer there leaves something to be desired, but I'll take what I can get.

Last night marked our first trip to Philadelphia, so we hopped a PATCO subway to the big(ger) city. We had a great time with some Philly FJVs at a bar called Noche, and then headed back to the Philly JV house. It was a good time. Those of us who headed back last night got caught in a truly diluvian rainstorm last night. I actually took out my contact lenses and carried them in my hand because the rain kept washing them out! Some of my clothes (the ones that can't be dried in the drier) are STILL not dry yet! It was quite the adventure.

I'll write more later about our neighborhood and work-- I start at my job on Monday.

If you want to reach me, PLEASE email me instead of using Facebook (call me for the address; I don't want to put in on a public blog.). It will be easier for me to respond to you. Or you can send me snail mail (like my lovely friend Sara did-- I got a letter this morning!)-- call, text, or email for the address. :)

Take care, everyone!

Molly