i'm home!
my flight was ok, 11 hours and 24 mins is a long time on a plane, but i was relatively entertained most of the time. i sat next to this super obnoxious lady and her puking son, that was the only kind of rough part. but it was definatly better than london.

so i went to bed at 10pm last night (ca time) after being up for 32 hours and i woke up at 4am today. dang jet lag. but i should be adjusted soon, its lot easier to adjust from europe to america than the other way around for some reason.

despite popular beleif, i'm not home.
people keep IMing me with "youre home!"
its kind of sad
i just dont want people to be pissed off because they thought i was home (and avoided them), i'm not

i get home on sat
and i am hoping to see everyone on sunday (i plan on fighting jet lag and going to church...we'll see how it goes)

so for the recap:
i'm still in germany
but i'm so stoked to see all of you so soon!

today is christmas. i thought being away from home would be a lot harder. the time leading up to christmas was really hard, missing out on so many traditions and parties, but today wasnt bad at all. i guess being with thirty other people who are also away from home makes it a lot easier. its been a full weekend. saturday i went to liechtenstien (a small country, 62 square miles, between austria and switzerland) and then spent the night in zurich (switzerland). sunday we explored zurich and then headed back here. yesterday (christmas eve) i hung out, went to christmas eve service, and then hung out some more...we even played telefax (i taught them a while ago and they love it here). today i woke up early (6am) to help cook christmas breakfast at the mill (our hang out spot) and then hung out all day and played board games, it was pretty chill. but i'm exhausted, good thing i have a job where i can sleep until noon. merry christmas y'all.

i decided a while ago that i wanted to listen to every song on my itunes at least once.
i've actually started working on that.
i realised that i have a lot of crappy music. (i have a lot of good music too, but three albums of the backstreet boys, seriously? i guess thats how you know i was super cool in middle school)


i've been so frusterated recently with where i'm at with relationships with kids. but ive been encouraged by two things.
1. remembering that God gives us enough encouragement to keep us in ministry but enough discouragement to remind us whose ministry it is.
2. the fact that God gives us all the grace in the world, sometimes its ok to give ourselves a little.


my english has gotten so much worse living outside of america, especially on days like today when all the interaction ive had has been in german...like i was struggling to write that.

this week has been crazy and i'm so excited to sleep in tomorrow and catch my breath (figuratively speaking of course). on friday my good friend ashley (some of you know her as texas ashley) came in for the weekend. we went to cologne, luxembourg, trier and burnkastle, and saw a ton of chistmas markets. it was so good having her here and i love that God knew what i needed and totally provided at such a great time. ashely left monday night and tuesday was club. since john was still gone i decided to set club up as more of an event than club so we made gingerbread houses and watched elf. even though we didnt have a club talk and it didnt look like a traditional club i think it was one of the best ones we had. we've been having several new volunteer leaders coming to club and i think this really gave them the opportunity to interact with kids, it was a good night. the next day i woke up at 6am and headed for amsterdam (i convinced my friend phil that it would be a fun thing to do while we were in the airport with ashley), i loved it and it was such a cool cultural experience, hard to see in different parts but i'm so glad that we went. yesterday (Thursday) was spent getting work done in the morning and then i went with some friends to see maroon 5 and dashboard confessional (brooke, i dont know if youre reading this but i totally thought of you during dashboard), the concert was great, way better than when i saw them at the cowpalace (or wherever that was). today i came into the office at 9am to hang out with rosanna (shes kind of like my intern, shes a high school kid that comes in during school hours and gets school credit for hanging out with us), i'm teaching her guitar which is kind of fun. tonight were taking the high school kids to trier to go to the christmas market, i'm a little nervous about them trying to get gluwein (its a hot wine) because the legal drinking age here is only 16, but hopefully we wont have any problems. so thats been my week, it know it sounds like a lot of play (and honestly it has been) but because of how hard i was working when john and shannon were gone they allowed me to take an extra couple days to play.

so i figured out that three days after my yogurt that i bought today is set to expire i'll be on a plane headed back to cali (i never really decided how i feel about calling it cali, but it is easier to say than california).