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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Fall Projects!

     Since I'm at home all day, I'm looking for things to do. After I finish all my organization projects from this post, these are some of the things I have on my to-do list.


     I have a round accent table that I painted waaaay back in high school art class. Love the way I painted it, but it's really bright, orange and red and blue, and doesn't match anything I have. So I want to re-do it where I can actually use it.
     My idea at the moment is to sand it down to the bare wood, and then paint a design on in different colors of wood stain so it'll look more natural and match any color. The design I think I'm going with is a star quilt pattern, something like this, except without the really light and almost black.



    I also want to do a chair like this one I found on Pinterest, except without the gray stripe. Just the wood stencil against the solid color.


 
Branches sprayed and sprinkled with glitter. I think these would look so pretty in a vase for Christmas!


Pumpkins sprayed and glittered. Maybe a few of these and a few just white ones...pretty pretty fall decor!



I want to make one of these for our foyer or our kitchen. We always have a ton of sticky notes of to-do and shopping lists, and our fridge is always covered with pictures and memos and basically everything. So one of these would add a little class to our chaos.

 
Glittered Christmas lights...would be cute in a vase!

I have this newfound attraction to Christmas lights. I so want to do this for some of my gifts!

Pretty simple gift wrapping...since I'm the designated wrapper at my house :)

Confetti on double sided tape. This would be cute with Chrismas colored confetti too, or wrapped diagonally.

 
     Again, once I get these done, if they turn out good there will be pics to post. I'm hoping to make a whole post about redoing the table...it'll be quite a process! Wish me luck!

Monday, October 24, 2011

Organization Projects

     Lately I've become a Pinterest addict. I'd seen pins on several of my friends' blogs for a while, and finally I caved and joined up. Other than it's ability to make me waste hours at a time on the internet, it's pretty amazing. Like any girl I love getting great ideas for my future house and wedding, and you can find ideas and inspiration for pretty much anything else on there too.
     Season changing always makes me itch to get creative and organize stuff. I mean, you already have to switch out your wardrobe, break out the boots and coats and scarves, put up the swimsuits and flipflops...and if you're anything like me that involves a lot of closet rethinking switch-a-rooing. Its a good excuse as anything to go ahead and get busy.

     I kinda didn't mean to be here for cold weather this year, so I was a little unprepared this week when it got chilly. I had bought a ton of clothes for living in warm Ecuador, so this week I've been digging out winter clothes in a hurry! I'm super cold-natured. Winter in Mississippi isn't that cold compared to lots of places, but as cold as I stay here I'd never make it living somewhere like Minnesota where it snows ten feet deep for months at a time, and gets REALLY cold.
     Around this time every year, I rearrange my closet - tank tops, sundresses, and t-shirts go in the back, sweaters and layering longsleeves and hoodies come to the front, flipflops go in the storage bin, boots and tennis shoes go in the shoe organizer thingy. I don't like unorganization and not being able to find what shirt I'm looking for in a hurry, so I've got my little OCD system for what order things get hung up in.
     My new ideas to make it even more organizing-happy for me:

Source: bhg.com via Alyssa on Pinterest


All my purses are currently in a milk-crate in the floor. Which makes me crazy every time I have to dig through it to find the one I'm looking for. So, shower curtain rings hung on the bottom rod I don't use = easy to find, organized bags.

I have shelves going up the back of my closet. But I don't like using them because when they're full of stuff, my closet looks cluttered. So I've bought some big white canvas bins like these, and I'm going to use them for my flip flips, t-shirts and lay-around pants, my extra blankets, whatever.

I have a flat, sliding plastic tub that's going under my bed for all my summer stuff like swimsuits and shorts that I'm not going to see until next year. Out of my closet, more room for the stuff I actually want to see.


     I have a ton of bathroom stuff to find a place for, since I bought a year's worth of toiletry items thinking I'd be living in a country where they don't sell Neutrogena and Cover Girl. 

I bought one of these last year to put all the little bobby pins and chapstick kind of stuff that always ends up cluttering up my vanity. It might be the best ten bucks I ever spent. Girls, if you buy anything for yourself this year, buy one of these! You won't regret it.

In my bathroom, Molly and I each have three big drawers, and for the stuff we share we have a cabinet under the sink and a tall linen cabinet. I want one of these big silverware organizer type things for one of my drawers.

  I want at least one of these to put all our curling irons and straighteners in. You ladies know how messy those things and all their cords can be.

We have a small one of these, maybe a foot and a half long with small pockets, on the back of our bathroom door. I think it was supposed to be a jewelry organizer, but it work great to hold hair clips and makeup and all the other little stuff that usually ends up running around the bottom of a drawer.

While they're clearancing out all the gardening stuff I want to make a set of these, in mixed teal colors, for our vanity. We have a big leaf shaped platter thats all different colors of teal and blue and green (TJMaxx find, love that place) that they would look so pretty on.


     When I get all these things finished, I'm hoping they look good enough I can post pics of the finished products!

I miss you BAM!

     This has been the first week I've gotten to go shopping (other than the one or two WalMart runs and Pontotoc errands), and while both days I went were great - one with my mama and grandmother, the other with my parents and sister - I was so sad and disappointed to see that Books A Million had left me while I was gone. Yeah, I had heard through the grapevine it had been booted out of business, but hearing it and seeing the dark, signless, empty store is another thing entirely! The little strip over there just looks plain naked!
I almost got teary when I had to take my members card off my keyring...it was an emotional moment!


     You see, I'm a reader. A biiiig reader. I get it honest, both my parents love to read, and my family is real booky as well. I grew up from a tiny baby being read stories to while we drove back and forth from Mississippi to Arkansas. So I don't remember ever, in my life, not wanting to read or not liking to read. I may not have wanted to read a particular book I was assigned to...cough,Animal Farm,cough...but that just meant I'd have much rather been reading something better.

This is me and my aunt Tiffany 'reading'. I'm sure the division of labor is totally equal there :)

     This is a really good habit in some ways. I can just scan over something fast to learn it. I'm never bored on airplanes or in doctor's offices, or even on long drives with my audiobooks. I read books in my free time growing up instead of playing video games or watching tv all day long, and I really feel like that had a huge impact of me as far as my learning ability and intellect. I may not have one whole degree's worth of one category of information, but I have about a tenth of about twenty degrees stored up. Too bad there isn't a 'random knowledge' major, and a job to go with it!
     But every good thing has its bad side as well. As a kid, reading a lot of big books and being smart meant you were automatically the nerd. Sounds stupid now, but it hurt a lot back then. Still does sometimes, but that's a work in progress. Other bookworm problems include space to put all your collection, affording all the new books you want, having to wait months for the next installment of your series to come out... all that jazz.
     Space is my biggest issue just now. When we built our house, I had two custom bookcases built into my room. Eight foot tall, three plus foot wide, customizable shelf height. I was estimating big then. That was almost two years ago...and they're pretty squished. Guess I'll be doing the box-under-the-bed routine again!
    
     Well, the space issue...and price too. I can't hide it anymore. This blog is actually a rant blog, in desguise as an innocent blathering about books!
     We ended our shopping trip Saturday night in Barnes & Noble. I haven't spent much time in Tupelo's B&N, since I was a loyal, card carrying follower of Book A Million long before Barney ever showed up, and pretty much any other Barnes and Noble is puny compared to MSU's awesome bookstore/monstrosity. And, there's always that ton of people in there just hanging out and never leaving...loudly.
     I kind of want to be like 'Hey thug people...do I come where you hang out and shush you because I'm trying to read? No, so lets try this the way it's supposed to be, okay?' and 'Hey mom with the five kids...they have a kids section, but it's not the equivalent of 'leave my heathen kids unsupervised so Mommy can have a Starbucks moment', okay?'
    
     I've always preferred BAM. Fully half of my bookcases have been filled by their clearance or sale books. Where else can you get new release hardbacks for six bucks? Or three for two on audiobooks? Regular prices aren't too bad either. Plus, I always felt their selection was wider, and they were great about ordering anything they didn't have in stock. Always nice and quiet, like my brain needs a bookstore to be, always friendly over-the-top helpful staff everywhere. And open late! One of the few things in Tupelo open past 9 pm.
      Barnes & Noble has not impressed me much before this weekend. I haven't bought much in there, a book or two if I wanted it and was already in the mall, a cheap audiobook. The audiobook I had to return because one disk came up blank. Their policy on returns is that you can only return for exactly what you have, no refunds. I wouldn't have minded that normally, as I was enjoying my audiobook up until the blank cd. However, they didn't have any more of them. Nothing even close. So they tried to tell me I had to keep it. When I had the receipt, in less that 30 days of my purchase, when the item was defective. No sirree. I got a manager over there, and I got an exchange like normal people do. Not a great way to make me a repeat customer.
     Another way to ensure I'm not buying your merchandice...100% markup. Saturday when I was with my family in there, I was looking for one specific book I had been watching for. I knew that it had just come out in paperback, and on Amazon it was going for around $13-15. I really didn't want to fool with shipping costs and all that, so I thought I'd just buy it at B&N. Wrong. That book was the same price as the hardcover - over $20! - and was the same huge size too. No paperback about it. I'll wait another six months when it's in WalMart.

The gigantic copy of Fall of Giants, with giant pricetag to match. Must be a theme sale.

     They mark up everything so high! I saw one book, it's been out for a good long while. Long enough to have been sitting on a WalMart shelf with a $4 sticker since I lived down in Columbus, at least. Cheap paperback edition. Same copy at B&N...$11.99. That's triple price. For a cheap trade paperback. Who is crazy/gullible/desperate enough to pay that much? I love to read, but I also like to eat places other than the dollar menu.

$4 Walmart book, $12 B&N book. Wonder if it ends better from B&N?

     And don't even get me started on their lack of clearance and sale racks. They have four towers of clearance oragami kits and magic kids and grow your own bonsai kits...but I'm sorry, I'm in a bookstore to buy books. The twenty or so clearance books they have are so bad beat up and ratty they're no doubt why they're on the Last Chance rack. The sales...let's just see I haven't seen any of my $6 new release hardbacks yet!

     Okay, end of rant, I feel better. I just hope there's a Book A Million within driving distance, or Amazon.com is going to love the TLC I'm going to start showing it! 

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Changing Plans

     I haven't blogged in quite a while. Life has been pretty hectic for me in the last few weeks! And, speaking of that, some of my readers already know the news I'm about to write about in this blog, and for some of you you're going to sit there going 'Oh my gosh! What?!'. But even if it isn't new to your ears (or eyes, rather), I do feel like I need to explain the very abrupt turn my life has taken.


     Tuesday afternoon I left Macas on a plane bound for Quito, and Thursday morning I touched down in Memphis. I am currently at home in good old Thaxton, Mississippi. Not for an impromptu visit, but for the forseeable future, at least until Global finds me another job (this would be the 'What?!' part). This definitely isn't what I had planned, and it definitely isn't ideal for me or Global either one. But I've learned the hard way that life isn't always about what you had planned working out, and it usually isn't about what's convenient or easy either. It's about doing your best with the cards you're dealt, and then if you eventually have to fold, doing it with maturity and grace and trust in God.

     Most of you know, especially if you go to church with my family, that I've been having trouble in Macas pretty much since I got there. And instead of everything getting better after me being there a week, then a month, then six weeks, things were getting worse despite my best efforts to make it otherwise. So, even though it's almost impossible to try and condense the past month and a half of my life into a neat little blog, I'll try to explain all my reasons for coming home, what's been going on lately in my life, and why I'm seeking another job.

     First off, my Spanish. On the job/life description for going to Macas, it says that 'a mastery of Spanish is not needed' for the job I took. I voiced my concerns to the missionaries I would be serving under about my low Spanish skill this summer, back in the thinking/praying phase way before ever signing up to go, and was assured that since I would be teaching English I wouldn't use much Spanish anyway, and anything else I needed I would pick up in a month or so. That turned out to be very, very, very wrong.
     For one, yes I was teaching English and was supposed to use English in the classroom. But there's a lot of time that I am not in the classroom. I still have to talk to other teachers, buy groceries, ride in taxis, eat in restaurants, all the things you do at home. Except that in Macas English speakers are very rare. I can probably count on my hands the people I met that could talk with me in English. And that's in six weeks of going out in town every single day.
     Also, just because I teach English doesn't mean my students are going to understand it. My kids were 2 to 5 years old. Some didn't have Spanish down that well yet, and most of my younger students weren't even verbal at all in class. So naturally they didn't understand me when I said 'sit down' or 'be quiet' or anything else. And in turn, I couldn't understand if they had a question or if they wanted to tell me anything. My fellow teachers were also all non-English speakers, so I could only communicate with them via guestures or the very few phrases that I knew or looked up before class.

     The Spanish barrier makes even church a hardship. In Macas, our church was totally in Spanish. So sitting through two hours of someone talking, singing, praying in Spanish turns church into not a want to, but an 'ugh, I just have to get through this'. And that's no attitude I ever want to have regarding church. Laura and I have been listening to podcasts of sermons or devotions on Sundays, just to feel like we actually were getting some spiritual feeding, and we did have a small Bible study on Monday nights at one of the other volunteers' houses, but even so I've never felt so spiritually unconnected. Coming from an enormously rich church environment: Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night services, amazing Sunday school class, worship that involves your mind mentally and spiritually, church family in the most literal sense...church in Macas was so different.
     That all was this huge struggle for me. The main part of what I was down there for, what I wanted to do in my volunteering there, was to make relationships and be able to show God's love through my getting to know them. I've always believed that your actions outside of the realm of church, your helping someone out and just showing your love, have more of an effect of spreading God's love than trying to preach or witness to some stranger would. Having this brick wall of a language barrier made it basically impossible to do that, and that made it really hard for me to think that I was accomplishing anything close to what God had wanted me to do. Most days it felt like I was working in Macas only for me, trying to fix my problems and to make myself into someone else just because that was who they needed.

     The second main part of my problem was that my job was to teach English, and I am not a teacher. I was completely honest with my supervisors before I ever signed up to come that I am not a teacher, have never taken a single class on how to teach, had no experience in teaching whatsoever. Beyond babysitting, taking speech class, and speaking very good English, I had nothing. They assured me that was fine. They said they would give me the easiest level, preschool. I wouldn't have to worry about planning out lessons or any of the formal teachery paperwork, since my supervisor's wife was currently working on the preschool curriculum. I would have an assistant in every class to help me out. The wife of my supervisor had been teaching the preschool English classes for the last several years, so she felt it would be really easy for me to pick up, and if I had a problem she was still going to be working in the office and could help me out. The rest, they said, they would tell me when I got to Macas, since it would be a breeze to learn.
     The day after I arrived in Macas, I went to my supervisors' house to look over my material. There was a literal suitcase full of books and manuals and flashcards, plus a jump drive full of files for my computer. And more in the preschool office. I'm instantly overwhelmed. Why do I need all this material, all these books and files, if the lessons are already planned out? What do I even DO with all this stuff? Well, surprise number one, the lessons aren't planned out. By that they meant that they know what units the kids will have in the year, and when. As in 'Unit 1 will be focusing on Back to School, and it's from September to the first of October'. After that, it's up to me.
     I had to prepare three separate lessons, one for each of my three levels. I had a class of 2 and 3 year olds, two classes of 4 year olds, and two classes of 5 year olds. Each class required me to use several different books to pull information and visuals and activities from to make up a lesson, plus each week they were supposed to have phonics lessons, an English bible story, crafts, songs, all that jazz.
     From the beginning I was totally overwhelmed, drowning in the complexity of a job I had no idea how to do. I'm a smart lady, I know this, but I still need to be taught to do a job just like anyone else. There's a reason teachers go to college for years. My supervisor's wife was having to sub for a sick teacher at the main school, so for two weeks it was just me and my 'assistants', who spoke no English and therefore were no help to me whatsoever - through no fault of their own. I had no idea how to fill thirty minutes of class, how to make a lesson out, how to keep twenty kids sitting down and quiet and paying attention while I was teaching. In short, a horrible two weeks. I was doing great if I made it through ten minutes of a class without my students holding a riot.
     After those two weeks, I asked my supervisors to meet with me. I told them straight that I was having problems. Big problems. Their solution for the teaching struggles was for me to watch my supervisor, who taught these classes the last few years, for a week and then start back teaching the next week once I got the hang of things. Well, that Monday, my supervisor taught and I watched like I thought I was supposed to do. Afterwards, she told me that she was disappointed that I wasn't more active in the teaching, that I just stood there watching. The next day I went back to teaching on my own, still as clueless as ever.
     That Friday, I confronted her. I was so frustrated I almost cried (my tear ducts are wired to my frustrated/angry hormones, so annoying). I told her I absolutely couldn't teach without a whole lot of major help, not just a small idea or a little question answered here or there. I had to be trained properly, or there was no reason for me to be there except to babysit.
     I had been in Macas a month. Almost every night I was calling home in tears because I felt so lost. I started having constant stress headaches, and got to where I couldn't sleep at night because I was stressing so bad over what would happen the next day at school. I have always been told 'just do your best, and that's all we ask for', but there I felt like I was doing my best and then some, and then I was being told it wasn't good enough. I had told them up front what I could and couldn't do, and then they were expecting a miracle, a fully trained and qualified preschool ESL teacher.

     In addition to the stress of teaching, I was also being given extra projects to do. My limited Spanish meant that I wasn't going to be as much use to them as they thought. I couldn't help teach music; the books were all in Spanish, and I know less about teaching music to little kids than I do English. I couldn't help with church praise band like they kept pushing me to do, because for one I didn't speak Spanish and two I don't know how to play keyboard for a band, much less one whose songs I don't know/can't understand and who does everything without music, ear only.
     Up front, I was told that I would be doing tutoring two afternoons a week, but that wasn't supposed to start until about a month after school started to give the teachers time to get grades in. I don't mind the occasional little afternoon project, but when my supervisors say project, they really mean something like 'extra job that might take you a few days to do'. Underexaggeration is big in Ecuador, I've learned. My last project, making/typing up about 100 spelling worksheets for another teacher, took three weeks to finish and that was with me working on them in the evenings at home in addition to school hours.

     Needless to say, the situation in Macas was nothing like what I was told this summer it would be. I understand that you can't prepare a volunteer for everything, but I also think that when someone is coming to give you their time for a year, in a foreign country and culture, you need to be totally and blatantly honest about what their situation is going to be. Understating is not going to help anything.
  
     I spent the last six weeks stressing out about school, worrying about how I was ever going to learn how to do my job, how I was ever going to learn the Spanish, beating myself up so much about not being good enough. Every day that's all I thought about, all I focused on from waking up to laying down at night. I worried and stressed so much I didn't have any room left over to even think about God some days, except to just pray for something to give, some help to appear, for me to become what I thought needed to be. I've never been so consistantly depressed about anything ever in my life like I was. I hated setting my alarm clock at night, just because I knew the next day would be one more day of stress and frustrations. I didn't feel like I was doing any volunteer work whatsoever. When I signed up to volunteer I signed up to be a help, to make a difference, and to have an amazing year doing it. All I felt I was was a big handicap to them. I wasn't equipped to do any job I went down there to do, and couldn't get to there by myself. Everyone kept telling me that my teaching didn't matter so much as just the fact that I came down and the relationships I was making, except I wasn't able to make them. I honestly had never felt so strongly that I was nowhere close to doing what God had planned for me.

     So, I prayed. A lot. My parents and I talked. A lot. And I talked to Global. We decided that the best thing for me to do would be to find a new place to finish out my volunteer time. The last thing Global wanted was for me to have a bad nine months worth of volunteer experience, and to miss what God had wanted me to do with the whole thing, and I kind of agree. No news yet as to what country they're thinking of sending me to, but most likely it will be in Central America. I'll know in the next few weeks. So...that's the end of my story. I'll be in Mississippi until they find me a job that my talents are a better fit for. And yes, it's very disappointing that the first part of my volunteer experience was such a complete and utter disaster, especially for someone like me who's a perfectionist and needing to do things to the finish and do them right. I'm having to work really hard on accepting that this isn't a 'me' problem, but a 'circumstances beyond my control' problem. However, I think I've made the right choice. 




This quote pretty much sums up my 'live-by' verse for the moment: You may make your plans, but the Lord determines your steps. Proverbs 16:9...pretty relevant today.