More Kim & Jess memories

Jess, don't kill me for this trip down memory lane :).

10th grade Ski N Grow?

Beach trip after junior year of high school - somebody had an underwater cam apparently

That same year - seriously, we were rising high school seniors here?  I look about 12.

With Jules, again on a beach trip

The masked skier Jess was in high school

Spring Break senior year of high school - oh what a trip down to ol' Litchfield!  Actually, this picture is about all I remember from that trip.  What did we even do for fun?

Beach trip after we graduated from high school - this was the beginning of the Lindsay-Jessica-Kim trio.  Again, I look 12.

Trip to Charleston for Labor Day sophomore year of college.

Luau at the Duplex - beginning of junior year of college (my short hair phase obviously).

Halloween senior year of college.

Women's Beach retreat, senior year of college.  Or wait, was this junior year?

College graduation!

The crazy place where I spend my days

Growing up in Girl Scouts, I never imagined I would work for them one day. For that matter, I never knew there was a headquarters with staff at all. But things were meant to be I guess, because the job kinda fell in my lap years down the road. Now I've been working here more than 3 years, and I'm pretty sure this is not a very normal place to work sometimes. So here are a few quirky things I thought about us:

6 Quirky Things About Working At the Girl Scouts
(1) Almost 60% of our organization’s budget depends on a non-professional sales force of little girls selling cookies.
(2) Our staff meetings are half-day affairs, often including a large amount of food, word scramble games or craft-making contests.
(3) We get 20 vacation days, 2 personal days and 12 sick days a year, right off the bat (no tenure required), plus another couple vacation days for giving money to the Girl Scout and United Way fund raising campaigns.
(4) Only 2 men work in our office – and about 40 women.
(5) You have to wear your Girl Scout uniform to work on Juliette Low’s birthday and the Girl Scout birthday.
(6) My first day of work - no joke - was spent in a little cabin in Rowan County on the coldest day of the year, and we cooked our lunch over a fire and made brownies in a dutch oven (basically a cardboard box covered in aluminum foil that you heat with individual coals).

Where in the world...?

5 Places I Want to Visit Before I Die
(1) A beach with clear ocean water
(2) Spain
(3) Iraq (I don’t really want to visit there, but I would like to see it peaceful enough in the Middle East that I could visit if I wanted to)
(4) Maybe Argentina again, to see my old friends there
(5) The West Coast

The Fourth List

I got way out of the habit of cooking over the past two weeks, due entirely to lack of motivation and preparation on my part. So I brainstormed some ideas to get myself back on track:

4 Meals I Would Like To Cook Soon

(1) Barbecued beef in the crock pot, piled on a toasted whole wheat bun, with a side of sweet potato oven wedges and a nice green vegetable

I actually had this last night...delicious and lots of good leftovers!

(2) Pepperoni & cheese quiche, with broccoli and fruit

Planning to have this tonight...strawberries were buy one, get one at HT...sweet!

(3) Pesto chicken with roasted tomatoes and wild rice

(4) Pork tenderloin over baby spinach, with baked apples on the side

The Third List

3 Books I'd Recommend Reading:

The Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers
(1) A Voice in the Wind
(2) An Echo in the Darkness
(3) As Sure As the Dawn

I LOVE the book Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers, and I had heard from friends in years past that the Mark of the Lion series was good. I had never read it, but then Wade's mom had all 3 books and let me borrow them.

It's so fun to actually get into reading. I was a big reader when I was younger (Babysitters' Club, Nancy Drew, some of the Boxcar Children books, and some more intelligent reads...I'm almost sure). But then school decided to squash my desire to read for pleasure by assigning a million books to read for work, tests and papers for the next 10+ years. I never regained the desire very strongly, even after college, and when I tried I had a hard time staying awake when I read anything. But occasionally now a book will come along that I can really get into and read for hours and not be able to put down.

I've actually only read the first 2 so far. I just started the 3rd book this weekend. They are set in ancient Rome, about a generation or so after Jesus' death. The first two center on a young Jewish Christian girl who gets sold as a slave to a Roman family. I won't recap the whole plot, but let's just say I was sobbing at the end of the first one and cheering at the end of the second one :). I think the third one focuses on one of the other characters introduced in the first book.

Anyway, good reads... especially for girls who like a good romance mixed with truths about God.

The Second List

I hinted at this in yesterday's post, but for March 2, my list is...

My 2 Least Favorite Months

(1) January

(2) February

I dislike these months for a couple reasons. For one thing, I hate winter as a general rule. I am NOT a cold weather person. I have always vowed I could never move any farther north than North Carolina, because winters here are about as cold as I can handle. I would die if it was cold from October through April. I think I get Seasonal Affective Disorder to some extent, and if I were depressed for half the year, I would gain all kinds of weight and be a miserable person to know.

Though I hate winter, I like December well enough because of Christmas and parties and vacation time. And December in NC is usually not all that cold anyway - we usually have some random heat wave or something where it stays in the 60s or even hits 70. But after Christmas and New Year's are over, January and February are this vast wasteland - 59 or 60 days of ugly cold nothing. My motivation disappears, I have a hard time going to the gym, and I eat too much junk because I'm still in holiday mode and Super Bowl parties and Valentine's Day keep the flow of sweets coming.

I would never want to get married in January or February and don't really want to have my kids in those months either. With as many Jan/Feb birthdays as I know, though, that might not be avoidable (must be the spring fever that gets everybody pregnant in April and May). The 4 best things about the months are my dad's & my friend Jill's birthdays (both Jan 18), Wade's birthday (Feb 16) and my mom's birthday (Feb 26). Oh, and basketball season... I guess that's a pretty good thing too.

Maybe January and February aren't completely worthless...

The First List

I think I'm going to try to make the number of items in each list correspond to the date in March as much as I can, so sorry if you feel gypped by this March 1st "list":

The 1 Type of Orange I Like Best

(1) Florida Temple Oranges

These are the greatest oranges in the world. I know Wade disagrees and thinks clementines are all that, but seriously, there are few things better in life than a temple orange. They have an extremely short season - from the very end of January to the very beginning of March - so I try to eat as many as I can in that time period. Once January hits, I count the days until I see the first ones in the grocery store, and then I smile and jump with glee when I do. Temple oranges are pretty much the only redeeming factor about the last 6 weeks of winter for me.

There is a very specific way to eat a temple orange as well - taught to me by my dad many years ago. You put the orange on a cutting board, take a big serrated knife, and cut it in half. There are a lot of seeds, so you take each half over the kitchen sink and dig the seeds out with the tip of the knife. Then you sit the half on its round end (cut side up) and cut it in half again, and those pieces in half again (so you have eighths of the whole orange). Then you set each eighth on it's side and cut off the white pith stuff that was in the interior of the fruit. I then cut each of those eighths in half again, ending up with 16 glorious bites of joy. To eat them, you pick up the slice, which resembles a tall triangle, put the top point of the triangle against your top teeth, and pull the fruit away from the peel with your teeth. Savor the sweet and tart juicyness, and swallow.  Repeat 15 times.