Quiet Hours!

Well, here I am in my little apartment, the only person in the building (I hope). It's nice and quiet in here. I'm trying to enjoy this time while it lasts. I leave tomorrow for Vancouver, WA, to spend New Year's Eve with my friends Bill and Joy, Brad, and Nicole and maybe also Chris and Jolyn will drive up from Eugene. It is supposed to be snowy or rainy, so I'm hoping the roads are good. The good news is I have a friend who will now be riding with me, so I'll have company for the 6 hours and won't have to drive on scary roads alone if they're scary.

I must say I am addicted to knitting, which will from now on be referred to as 'clicking" on this blog. I got addicted a few weeks before Christmas when my hooking (aka crocheting) caused stress in my life. I decided to try knitting after some inspiration from my friend Esther and now I have been making scarves for people. They only take a few hours to make, usually, which is RAD. So, you can "bet your bottom dollar" (ha!) that I'll be clicking tonight instead of packing. And I heard there's a little clicking going on in another part of the country and that "The Liberal" has been converted. I wish I could be clicking and hanging out with you guys! I hope it works for all y'all to come and visit!

OK, I must update some more electronic gadgets and then get to some clicking before I head to the airport to pick up my friend Lesley-Anne!

Me, Tami, and Danyelle

Me, Tami, and Danyelle
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Here's a pic of me, Tami, and Danyelle. The three of us always have such a good time together and laugh heartily. We all go way back. Tami and I went to high school and college together and Danyelle and I actually went to preschool together, though we didn't see each other again until junior year of college when we lived (almost) across the hall from each other in G.I. It was good to see these two.

I must say that seeing good friends and family while I was home makes the thought of staying in the northwest bittersweet. I value the people who are close to home. I am glad I had good time with each of them while I was home.

Bolkema Kids

Bolkema Kids
Originally uploaded by schmann.

This is a picture from the 26th of us grandkids with my grandfather. It's weird to see how old we've all gotten. I had a great time with all of them. Colin (front row, yellow shirt) got Life for Christmas, so we played that after dinner, and it was a good time!

Noah and Olivia

Noah and Olivia
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Now that I'm back at home, I am able to add some photos to my blog. Yay!

I thought this was the cutest picture. It is my cousin Kristin's son Noah and my cousin Olivia on Christmas day. They are waiting for Santa to get their presents from his sack. Santa makes an appearance at our family Christmas each year, and each year Olivia thinks it's actually one of us dressed up--this year she thought it was my dad. But it's really Santa! :)

Christmas Break

That title is in honor of my brother, who said he was coming home for "break" today. He works for an accounting firm and it's not called "break". Ha! OK, so I thought it was funny.

So, I've been home for a couple of days and it is good to be home. Except for the FRICKING COLD WEATHER! Today, I tried standing outside talking to a friend for 3 minutes before we parted and by the time I got inside, I almost couldn't breathe and my face hurt. That is way too cold.

I have gotten a chance already to see some good, good friends. In typical Sioux Falls experience, my friend and I ran in to our campus pastor from college today. It is always good to "happen upon" great people you don't often talk to but have been important in your life.

So. yeah, tomorrow is the 24th and it's Christmas celebration with the 'rents and Mark. The 25th and 26th are time with the extended family. I'm excited to see them since I haven't seen a lot of them since 2 Christmases ago.

And that's about all that's happening in my life today.

Hey, Lara. Did you know that if you blog on a non-Mac, there are extra features like you can change the font color? You can even use bullets and change the justification and do a little formatting jig. Why can we not do this on our cute iBooks? (That last sentence is in Red for the rage I feel when I am oppressed for being a Mac user.)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Coming Home!

Well, the semester is officially over. The past two days have been very packed. Today, my RAs closed everything down...they got all of the students out of the building by 10am, cleaned and cleaned until this place was spotless, and humored me by doing some reflection on how the year has gone so far so they could have some closure. We had to say goodbye to one of the RAs, Nate, who is getting married in a few weeks.

Today has been devoted to getting ready for my trip home. I'm hoping I can get everything done tomorrow that I need to do! It's going to be great to be home for Christmas!

whew!

man, this is a crazy week. i realize the nature of my job is to always have a million things to do and always more than i have time for, but i don't know how i am going to get through my "to do" list this week. i'm just praying that i don't forget something. i was already 15 minutes late to a meeting with my new RA for january and spring, which stinks--i hate to be late and for it to be our first time meeting. ugh! i'm starting to panic that i won't have any time to do any christmas shopping when i'm home (and, really, i want to just enjoy being home), sooooo, i'm off to do a bit of shopping and then will work on making some gifts i have been wanting to do. i realize i could spend my night getting through my paperwork, but this other stuff is just as important!

tomorrow night, i am having my leadership team to my apartment for a study break. so, i will get to do a little christmas baking (and, of course, clean my much-neglected apartment). this is always a good time to connect with the team before the break and welcome in anyone new like our jan term RAs. i'm hoping by then a few of them will be stress-free from finishing finals!

in one week, i will be in sioux falls. crazy and exciting!

CuteColemans

CuteColemans
Originally uploaded by schmann.

I LOVE THESE TWO! These are my friend Dayna's two sons, Conner and Aiden. They are so wonderful and amazing. Because Brad has been living with them for the past several months, I have gotten to spend a lot of time with them and be blessed by them. I adore them.

AnnBradPhilipPaul

AnnBradPhilipPaul
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Here are 3 people you should know (besides me). First there is Brad, who is wondeful, as you can guess from other blogs. Philip (in the hat) was an RA for me last year and has been a great friend as well. He and I connect so much because we both love color and the emotions each color give to us, we feel things DEEPLY, we try to appreciate the little details about every moment, and we LOVE the line in the india.arie song: "a man who loves music, a man who loves art, is in touch with the spirit world and thinks with his heart." And Philip has found this type of man (yes, they do exist). The other person in this pic is Paul, his boyfriend. Paul is a wonderful and encouraging man. I don't get to see him often, but I am blessed by him every time I see him.

Ladies Getaway Weekend

Ladies Getaway Weekend
Originally uploaded by schmann.

3 years ago, Dayna, Brad, Nicole, and I were going to Seattle to see Ellen Degeneres. We found out Esther, our colleage, was going to see a film a friend of hers produced, so she rode along. This was the beginning of the Ladies Getaway Weekend and several exciting LGW reunions. These are such great friends. I have so much fun when I am with them, and we are all so very different. It is great. Pictured are Dayna, Esther, Brad, Nicole, and me at Brad's going away party.

good party, sad goodbye

Tonight was a night I've not been looking forward to: Brad's going away party. The party was a great time (so much fun, really), but the goodbye was as hard as saying goodbye to my parents 4 years ago. All I can think of is a Celtic saying I heard last spring: "Anyone without a soul friend is like a body without a head." I'm so glad I get to see him and the NABS crew on New Year's Eve. Portland/Bend/Eugene/Western Oregon, here I come in June!

Brad got a job!!!!

Great news to all who know and love my b/f/f Brad. He got a job! This is such good news for him since he has been searching for a while. He's going to be moving to Bend, OR, and directing housing at a college there. Yay for him!

This is bittersweet news since it means he's going to be moving in the next few weeks. So these weeks leading to Christmas will be sad for me and Jan term will definitely be a tough transition since he's my best friend here and I spend most of my time with him. As I look for jobs, it's one more person I love who lives in or near Portland, so it looks like that may be where I concentrate my job search. I think. I don't know.

This has been a great week for people I love: Lee and Kenna got engaged AND Brad got a job!! Praise God!

RA Team Christmas 2004

RA Team Christmas 2004
Originally uploaded by schmann.

What a hot RA team I have this year, right? This is a picture we took after our RA Christmas Party that we had on November 30. I guess it's never to early for Christmas in America! Lisa, Jessica, and Chelsea are in the front. The back is me, Michael, Keija, Dave, Elizabeth, Michelle, Nate, and Ellie. Amazing people you all should meet someday!

Congrats to Kenna and Lee!

Kenna and Lee
Originally uploaded by schmann.

This is a picture from Thursday night. I went to a local pub called O'Doherty's to help two of my friends (and RAs from last year) celebrate their 1-year dating anniversary. At O'D's, if you get on the bar and sing, you get to nail a dollar bill on the wall and become part of "the family", so they did it as one of the many events Lee planned for the night to celebrate. The night ended with Lee proposing. How great! I like them a lot and I'm so excited for them!

Thanksgiving 2004

Thanksgiving 2004
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Here's the pic of Bill, Joy, Brad, and me on Thanksgiving day. Such good friends. I hope to spend many more holidays with them.

Mocktail!

Mocktail Bartenders
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Here is the pic of Tim, Kelli, and I taking a break from bartending at the Mocktail party.

why am i still awake?

for some reason, i cannot get myself to go to sleep at a decent hour. ugh. i wanted to give a "shout out" to my friends who are reading this. i didn't mean to be passive-aggressive in my last post--i seriously thought i was just humoring myself. :) i'm so glad you want to know what i'm doing...now you need to create a blog for me to read! :)

by the way, i'm not typing in caps tonight and you're all just gonna have to deal with it. i don't wanna.

so.......this is kind of a crazy week. we are starting our ra evaluation process, which is so good but takes a lot of time to do the paperwork on. in an impulsive moment tonight, i e-mailed my ra's and told them i'd buy pizza for the first hall to get all their evals done. since we do them online, i already have a hall that's done, so i will be buying pizza for them!

we had a fun program tonight called sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. my medics did it and it was great--they talked about drugs and addiction for a bit and then our health center director talked about sexual decision-making and we ended with an air guitar contest that i got to co-judge. very funny. oh, and there were lots of condoms to give away. which is kind of ironic since students can't cohabitate (which includes having sex) on campus. :)

yeah, that's about all in my life now. we have jan term ra training all day saturday, so i am a little concerned that this weekend won't be restful. mainly because i'll have to wake up before 8am.

oooh, i'll post my pics soon.

Where have I been?

Wow. I kind of dropped off the planet for a bit there. I'm not actually convinced anyone's reading this AND I have reached my photo limit for the month, so I stopped writing. But here's a quick update on my EXCITING life.

Last weekend, my fellow RD friends Kelli and Tim and I bartended at the Westside Mocktail Party in my building. It was a great time. We spent 3 hours blending alcohol-free beverages for about 150-200 students from my buildling and Kelli's buildings. The students did a great job of planning and we had a ton of fun. I'll post a pic from that.

Then, this past week was VA-CA-TION! woohoo! Bill and Joy Stahley came up from Vancouver, WA, for the holidays, and we spent Thanksgiving day at Brad's home (which is actually the Coleman's home). It was a great "low key" day. We cooked and ate and talked about what we are thankful for and just chatted the day away. Kelli came in the evening just as we had begun playing games and, for the second year in a row, we played the great game of Life! We watched Will & Grace and the Apprentice, too, of course. And we had our annual photos. I'll post those as well.

Friday (day after T-day) was craft day for Ann, Joy, and Brad. We spent the first half of the day getting ready for craft day and then by about 4:00 we started making candles and crocheting. We ended up at Nicole's cozy home and crocheted and watched The Elf and Love Actually.

Saturday, I headed back to hang with Brad for the night for more movie watching and crocheting. It was that night that tragedy struck our scarf making. We realized our scarves were getting narrower and narrower (and looked terrible) and we had to rip them apart and start over. :( It was kind of funny, in the way things are funny when you are so sad that you laugh. But now I've got half my scarf made again and I'm back on track.

Right now, I am most thankful for friends and vacations.

Hair Show!

I had the funniest experience yesterday. I went to a Hair Show with my friends Brad, Kevin, and Ann. Ann's stylist was competing for the "All-Around" so we went to see him. It was crazy! The first competition that they had was in was the area of make-up. The professional stylists had like 20 minutes to do the make-up on their model; the students had 30. When they were done, the models had to put these frames on their heads so that all the judges could see was their faces. Ann's stylist, who I thought was best, had a frame shaped like cleopatra or something and the make-up job he did fit that theme. The next competitions were hair cutting--womens and mens. Timed haircuts. How funny is that? There was this really cool cut that was a blunt-cut bob. It was layered so the bottom layer of hair was black, the next layer was bleached yellow-ish, and the top layer was black again. It was cool. There was even a woman with a mullet, but it was kind of classy (is that possible?). We left in the middle of the mens haircutting competition, so I'm not sure if Ann's stylist won. How funny, eh? It was so worth the 5 bucks. I'm gonna rent "Blow Dry" now because it's about a Hair Show and it will teach me about my people...my haircutting competition people.

Karaoke

Karaoke
Originally uploaded by schmann.

We made a real impression at this conference for a lot of reasons besides the odd van and getting lost. Karaoke was another of my favorite memories and we (actually, Alan) made a real impression on people. This is a pic of Alan, Lesley-Anne, and Tim singing a great rendition of "If I had a Million Dollars", which is a more exciting photo than the one of Alan singing "Ice Ice Baby" by himself. He didn't even need to look at the words. If I figure out how to do it and I've got enough memory left, I will post the video I took of him. He's good. The only picture I didn't get was of us scrunching Tim's hair because he wouldn't let us. Just you wait, Tim, just you wait..... :)

Get Lost

Get Lost
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Imagine a group of 8 in an odd-looking Dodge Sprinter van. City kids, most of us. Driving from Bozeman, MT, looking for the Broken Heart Ranch. Now, you'd think the ranch, being in the middle of nowhere, would have a sign labeling it to welcome guests. You'd also think the people driving shuttle buses to the event would know where the BHR is. But, no. So, we in our odd-looking van "took one for the team" so the bus driver wouldn't have to drive around looking, and we tried to find the place. We didn't realize that the place we stopped when the bus driver said "do you know where this place is?" was actually the place we were looking for! No, we drove and drove and we almost made it to Yellowstone (if you count "62 miles to Yellowstone "almost"), that's how far we drove. We turned around about 30 times (in a van that BEEPS when you are in reverse, I might add! I think Alan just liked to make the van go "beep"). Kelli and Lesley-Anne walked through the dark wilderness to a lumberyard/hunters lodge to ask for directions (isn't that the first scene in most horror films?). We eventually walked into dinner 45 minutes late. This is a picture of a mailbox at the lumberyard place as a memory of that unforgettable night. The whole ordeal was so funny that I laughed until I was weeping.

Silliness

Silliness
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Well, the AIMHO conference was great and here's one of my pictures from it. While we spent the day in some great sessions learning how to better serve students and be more effective Res. Life professionals, the nights and in-between times were a great time to bond as a team. Here's one of the moments when Lesley-Anne laughed uncontrolably (prompted here by Nicole).

Going away!

Well, I'm off to a conference in Bozeman, MT, from Sunday to Wednesday with the Res. Life team. They are so cool, so it'll be nice to hang with them. It's kind of a crazy time to go, but I am sure we'll be so glad to be away as soon as we hit the Idaho border. Pray for good weather Sunday and Wednesday in the Passes while we drive through them. You never quite know how much snow there will be. Happy day to everyone!

Dave and Lisa wet their pants...almost

Dave and Lisa wet their pants
Originally uploaded by schmann.

So, at the retreat, we were playing the Name Game round when you can only give a one word clue, and Michelle said "TV. Go!" for the clue. Since that's a REALLY specific clue (note the sarcasm), Dave and Lisa laughed until they nearly wet themselves. It made my entire week. I have never seen Dave laugh that hard in my life, and I love when Lisa laughs that much. I asked them to reenact the moment for a photo and they didn't think they could, but all they had to do was remember the moment! I love my leadership team!!

More Name Game!

The enemy team
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Another Name Game pic, the rival team. Check out Ben and Elizabeth intently guessing. This team didn't scream the answers like ours did. :) You'll notice Michelle is getting ready to say the funniest clue of the night. I love playing this game with Michelle!

The Name Game!

My silly team
Originally uploaded by schmann.

I went on a retreat with my Leadership Team last night and we had such a great time. We went to the slightly creepy and oh-so-cool Knox Presbyterian Church and played, laughed, and had great conversation. This is a picture of some of my Name Game teammates intently listening to the other team: Ben, Jessica, Ellie, and Michael. Hey, Michael, you should've said "Mocking" or "Boo". :)

Stress Relief

Mentoring Group
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Here's my cute mentoring group for this year: Meg, Ange, and Erin. If we look a little crazy-sexy-cool it's either the stress we were all having that day or the alcohol. Maybe both. At least we're cute!

Smoke and mirrors

Creepy Boy
Originally uploaded by schmann.

See previous post, lesson #2. This is one of the many moments with dry ice during Halloween night.

Halloween

IMG_0347
Originally uploaded by schmann.

Here are Aiden and Brad dressed as "2 am" and "Midnight" (yep, the times). I dressed in my witch "costume" from Spring Leadership training, including the paper plate/poster board cheepy hat I made. Lessons learned on Halloween: 1) there are not a lot of trick-or-treaters at the Coleman-McKerihan household, 2) Aiden likes dry ice, 3) tiny kids in costume are very very cute.

welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I am excited that I have found a place to publish photos and updates on my life for my friends to see! Enjoy...