It feels like time is dwindling

Realization: in a couple weeks time, I'll have hit the 3/4ths mark on my life in another place.

There are some things that have happened or happening that makes it feel like that day in August when I return home is much nearer than it is. After all, it's three months and a summer in Europe away from now.

First, I got a plane ticket from Toronto to Kansasland. My complaint is that our itinerary's are separated by Amsterdam-Toronto and Toronto-Home. Intermenno pays for our journey's between Toronto and Amsterdam and we are responsible for getting to and from Toronto. Those two different journey's completely unrelated to each other in the airline's eyes. It's unfortunate because a journey between the US and Canada is a domestic journey and you must pay for a second piece of luggage. On top of that, we are then forced to check-in again in Toronto. This makes for added time and stress. I hope the two hours and fifteen minutes I have allotted for that goes smoothly.

Second, I'm nearing the completion of enrolling in classes for next year at Bethel. This is another thing that is giving this year a sense of early closure. However, this is also giving me a good feeling since I'm not one of a handful of trainees who have no ideas of what they're doing when they're finished. The year of classes will be getting many required classes for my major that aren't in the realm of Communication Arts out of the way. Unfortunately, all but two or three or 100 and 200 level classes. I am looking forward to taking Mennonite Life, History and Thought. As the schedule stands before it's approved by my adviser, I will have 15 credits in the fall and 17 in the spring. Though this also means that I will not be finished with my Communication degree next year. Doing Intermenno, I missed a cycle of classes that I will have to take in the 2010-2011 year.

Now for a list of things that I'm looking forward to yet while I'm still here:

1) Next weekend we're having Super Awesome Swiss Weekend XVIII here in Hemberg. Debbie and Alyssa will come out and on the agenda is a trip to Liechtenstein.

2) We have our spring retreat as German/Swiss Trainees. It will be good to get together for a weekend in Meckesheim (near Heidelberg, train stop away from Tim and Heidi) and share new experiences with each other. Rumor has it that Heidi will be the chef for the weekend.

3) The last weekend in May, I'll be meeting Jessica and her family in Wintersheim and making a German/Swiss Trip from there.

4) Jessica and her family will head to Spain, but then Jessica and I will meet in Munich and then continue on to visit a friend in Prague. From Prague, we'll fly to Amsterdam for a couple days.

5) On July 4 I'll see Steely Dan, Dave Matthews Band, and Chickenfoot at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I'm excited to see one of my favorite bands share the stage with other such talented musicians at a world renowned festival like Montreux.

So those are things I'm looking forward to, how about a little bit of what's going on now?

Yesterday was a relatively bad day. I wish it had gone better. I was informed at lunch that I would not get my daily hour-long nap after lunch. I have gotten used to this time of rest in my daily schedule and did not know how things would go. I was doing without my pause to watch Salome for the afternoon. Dirk gave me instructions to take her out to the garden and pick salad plants, and she was to help me. Unfortunately her idea of 'helping' is not the same idea as mine. She found it necessary to put things like dirt into the basket with the salad plants, step on heads of lettuce and almost break them, and above all, she threw a sizable, quite heavy rock at my hand. After many tries at explaining to her that these actions were not allowed (verboten), she kept doing it. So I took her in and gave her a 15 minute time-out, the first time-out I've ever given-. She didn't like this, so she cried. But I'm not a fan of giving in so she cried that whole 15 minutes on her bed.

Then as it was getting close to time to do the stall, the doorbell rang, but I was keeping my eye on Salome and Cyrill. I go and sell a dozen eggs and I come back and Dirk is yelling (not really yelling, just explaining to me why I shouldn't leave them alone) at me for leaving them, "You must stay here to make sure there is order in the room at all times." Then I showed him the CHF 8,00 and things changed.

Today I finished removing the stones from the grass beside the driveway that the snowblower threw. It was hard and it took a lot of time, however I can be proud of my work. I was armed with a rake and a bucket and it's still not completely clean, nor will it ever be. As I said it was hard, the driveway is cut into the side of a mountain so I had to deal with a steep incline and not falling.

The hard work will be made better tomorrow. We'll be heading as a family to the First Annual International Beat Box Session in St. Gallen. It should be pretty rad. :)

With that,
Jon