Greetings From Denver

Hello from the Mile High City! My, my, it's been a while, no? Quite honestly, it's been a while since I have been able to catch my breath. Life has been rolling along at full speed for the last month. I've moved to a new city, to a new house, acquired nine (yes, nine) new housemates, started breaking in two separate jobs in new fields, and...a million other things it seems.

As of tomorrow I will have been in Denver for a whole month. That's hard to believe mostly because it feels like it must have been at least 6 months.

In the midst of all this craziness I have been using just about every milligram of free time to sleep or silently stare at a wall to try to regain some strength. I've been doing a horrible job at keeping in touch with everyone, so, well, here we have it--a new blog! It's a bit impersonal, but I don't see myself having time for all the phone calls I'm behind on anytime soon. I'll see what I can do with reviving the Week in Review bit, but for now I'll throw in some tidbits from the past month. I haven't been doing a great job of taking pictures either (and they're all from my phone), but I'll share what I have. (Feel free to throw out questions in the comments if you're curious about anything.)

OK, a month in Denver in review!:

• My house is massive and laid out like a maze. I still forget where the stairs are that go up to the third floor sometimes. I think there are probably some secret passages lingering behind boxes in our basement. 
• A large chunk of my housemates are from the midwest. I'm already afraid of the things I'm going to start saying or how it will affect my accent. Hot dish anyone?
• Friday I learned how to harvest worms and how to put together a worm bin at work. (These are one of the gardening items we sell.) It's probably just as gross as you are imagining it.
• In the mornings I work at an organization called Earthlinks. If you want to learn a little more check it out here: Earthlinks-Colorado.org (You can also click over to the staff page to see their newest staff member!)
• In an effort to live a more sustainable life, to be in solidarity with the poor, and because, well, I am poor, I take the bus or walk everywhere I can. I take the bus in the morning half way to work and walk the rest of the way. At lunch I take two buses and walk a little bit to get to my second job, then I walk home at the end of the day. My attitude might change once it gets cold, but I love these times during the day. My morning walk is peaceful and full of gardens and snapshots of the skyscrapers and mountains. The bustle of downtown Denver at lunch hour is energizing. The walk home is stress relieving. 
• I've seen quite the characters on the bus, too. Sometimes these characters are people I know from work, so we chat for a while. (It's a nice feeling of connectedness.)
• Bus 44 frequently tries to ruin my day. 
• The weather has been fantastic. It got a bit cold for a day or two (high 40s in the morning/evening), but has been sunny and hovering in the 70s for the most part. 
• The sun really does shine constantly here. (Cue Ben Harper's She's Only Happy In the Sun)
• My room in the house came complete with a horrible painted mural. Since the room is pretty tiny it was dominating things. I don't have anywhere enough energy to paint the wall, so I got in a problem-solving mood and tacked up king sized sheets. Not beautiful, but satisfactory. 
• I have seen more rotten food in the last 3 weeks than in the rest of my life combined. (We get a lot of "day old" type donations at the house, and at Earthlinks we get food off a truck that comes by with expired or wilting food the grocery stores threw out. On top of that, many of us get random things from our worksites that they can't give out to their clients anymore (yes, we happily take the things they can't even give away to homeless people!). We try to use all this food on it's last leg, but, I'll be honest: a lot of it get's composted.)
• After this year, I will have cured myself of any desire to ever eat a bagel again. (Matter of fact, I'm pretty much there now.)
• We've actually been eating quite well. We rotate so that 2 different people out of the 10 of us cook and clean each weeknight. There's been a slight learning curve, but I'm pretty impressed with a lot of what we have come up with. 
• One of the perks I love about my afternoon job at the church is that I have an office. A real, downtown office. 
• I'm developing a healthy fear of the answering machine at work with all the sad and desperate stories I find there daily. 
• Monday afternoons at the church are exhausting--but the good kind of exhausting. The kind of exhausting where weekly we feed about 1,200 people in 4 hours. 
• Living between downtown and the huge city park is a great location with a lot of energy. It's also nice to head out to the foothills to the suburb where David lives once a week or so. It's amazing how much different it feels. 
• Actually, every 4 blocks or so Denver feels like a very different city. 

OK, that's plenty of bullet points. Some pictures to finish things up: 

My, um, interesting, whole wall, multilingual mural. Complete with mirrored flowers. Yeah. 

My solution. 

Our first day of work dinner. I helped cook this meal that turned out to be a bit overzealous, but delicious. (Seriously, cooking for 10 people mostly from scratch (because that's cheapest) can turn out to be like cooking a Thanksgiving-esque meal every night.)

Work in the morning

My afternoon office!

After a particularly long and heavy day (and week) I spotted this guy on the back of a wall. I figured no one was looking at it anyway, so I might as well take it...

During our first week or so of orientation we were subsisting on basically nothing but carbs: bagels, rice, pasta, bread.  We hadn't yet received our weekly batch of produce from the farmers market that gives us their unsellables, and we were longing for pretty much anything that came from the ground. That day our generally kind and well meaning director showed up at lunch with a peach. A peach that she ate in front of all of us. Waved it around a bit as she talked. (Oh man, we were all experiencing a range of emotions that were not the most generous!) After relaying this story to David, he showed up later with...giant peaches! Best. Peach. Ever.  

We also found a park throwing an end of summer festival--complete with a hot air balloon "glow" and fireworks. All for free! (It's true. We make poor look exciting.)

And finally, some shots from my morning commute:

Somebody forgot a few important things at the bus stop...

I'm not sure why, but I love this building.

My morning worksite is in a bit of an industrial area that is full of interesting artwork. 

Waiting for good ol' bus 15 (hotbed for interesting and/or homeless people) downtown at lunch. 

The End. 

NaNoWriMo

So you know how I was talking about studying for the GRE a while back? Yeah. Well, I changed my mind. (Surprise, surprise. I know!)


What am I doing now, you ask?

I'm writing a novel. 

(I love how when I say that in person it garners a round of uproarious laughter.) 

OK, so here is the deal: For those of you who are uninformed, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, if you will). People all over the world sign up to write an entire 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I love the idea and the challenge of it. I decided way back in Belgrade, as I browsed through a bookstore on a rainy evening that I would give novel writing a shot this November. Even though I already have a book with my name on the cover, writing a novel has always been on my bucket list. This seemed like a fun way to spend the month!

Until I decided to study for the GRE, and well, when you are learning 100 math concepts and memorizing Greek and Latin roots you don't have a lot of time for novel writing. I thought, maybe next year. That is until I put the whole PhD idea on pause...

And now, it's novel time! Why not? At least I'll have something to show for myself a the end of the month. Besides, it's incredibly fun to tell people you are writing a novel. I started a whole 9 days late, but hey, I like a good challenge!

So far, it hasn't been too bad. But, in what seems happens around the 5-10,000 word mark, last night I was so sick of my main character. My plot was boring me. You know what is the worst though? Well, my main character is mainly me. The plot? It's pretty much my life.

Why I decided to do that is beyond me--I have no idea what to do with my life at the moment, so how am I supposed to move my character along? I'm much better at solving problems that aren't my own though, so what did I do? I drank 4 cups of coffee, got a piece of scratch paper and let the ideas flow.

Nobody's actually going to read this, so I might as well have some fun, right? So, just for fun here are the random things I'm contemplating for my character (and...may or may not be contemplating for myself):

• Alpaca farming (Oprah gave me that one!)
• Move to Haiti
• Learn to make coconut flan
• Marry a crown prince
• Become a mail carrier
• Be a professional canned-laughter laugher
• Go to the circus
• Fortune cookie fortune writer
• hot air balloon racer
• quilt sewer
• befriend monks
• turn Nancy Drew on her neighbors
• Road trip!
• become a travel agent
• set more things on fire
• move to the north pole
• get a grant doing research somewhere
• sail the Mississippi
• start a band
• learn to dance flamenco
• volunteer at a hospital?/prison?/nursing home? and meet some interesting people
• deliver flowers
• give myself an education in the public library
• write a lot of postcards 
• raise armadillos

See? The novel is looking much better. I'm at 10,000 words and things are about to get interesting!

PS. Want to join me?!? It's not too late! (And as you can tell from the list above, no skill or grammar is required.) I know some people who have barely started, and next week is Thanksgiving--lots of time to write folks! Check out NaNoWriMo.org for more info (and graphs and pep talks!)

PPS. Friends are giving me even more fun ideas! Feel free to comment with more ideas! : )

Opa!

Well we have already had a full day of touristing in Athens. For those unaware I am helping to "chaperone" (don't worry, I'm using the term loosely) a student trip from my university. So far, so good--we only lost one person climbing around the Acropolis today and surprisingly I managed to find them. Gold star for me.

I also got to hang out more with Fylenia the otherday and we had lunch at her local tavern, aka her mom and dad's place. We also got to make tourist history by making me probably the first tourist to ever take a drive through the hills outside of Athens (where we saw snow!) and then we went for a walk to look at houses and window shop in one of Athens' richest and oldest suburbs. Overall, it was 24 hours full of fantastic food and fun with Fylenia!

Some pictures below:

Our breakfast mixture of Greek yogurt, apples, bananas, exotic raisin-y things, honey and tahini. Delicious!

We found a house that was built around a tree

Fylenia's mom with Nida, Fylenia's dog. Also, in true Greek mother style, she insisted that I try a special Clean Monday (aka like "Fat Tuesday") Greek desert. It turned out to be helva, which is the Greek version of the Arab helwa! I was so excited to see helwa that she packaged up the rest of it to send with me to eat this week in the hotel. I'm telling you, this family is awesome. 

Postcards and magnets on Fylenia's fridge

I let the group go ahead into the Acropolis Museum while I chilled on a sunny spot of grass. Unfortunately I got shooed away after about 10 minutes...

Olive trees in front of the museum

Random Athenian buildings

Odeon of Herodes Atticus

Parthenon

View of the ancient agora and part of the big city that is Athens

A shot of the Erechtheum

And it begins...

Well, I am starting to wrap things up on the homefront. I leave in a measly 9 days, and I am feeling it more and more each day. (And a paper update: I am down to 12 papers left! My goal for the day is to break into the single digits. I thought I would warm up my writing with a blog!)

Anyway, the goodbyes have begun. Today I went up to work for my "goodbye potluck." I still teach 3 more times, but because I work in the evenings I don't often see everyone at once. It's a bit odd because while some of the people are relatively new to the IRC others I have known for 3 years now. Afterward I was chatting with a couple of our caseworkers who are from Rwanda and Burundi and they told me that there are fantastic African neighborhoods and restaurants in Brussels. One said that he has 4 sisters living there. I feel better knowing that if I start to miss my students I will be able to just follow the kangas and brightly printed clothes to that part of the city. The other caseworker said that the neighborhood I am going to be living in is full of good food (even if she did also say that it was really loud and always had fights!). My Latvian coworker told me she has an old Latvian friend in Brussels working for the EU. It somehow makes me feel better that I could run into someone with a connection to home while I am there. I am also really excited to be living in such an international city.

So yeah, the goodbyes start to get rough, especially for the people that I won't see when I return, but it's amazing to think back over all the great experiences had and the wonderful people I have gotten to know these last few years out here. It's a good start on the goodbyes. (Saying goodbye to my students won't be so easy! But more on that later...)

Anyway, we had some sweets to make it all go down more smoothly. Above is my "BYE" banana pudding, and below is my ESL/book cake my coworker made for me.