2 tales

**UPDATE on the water story below**

Here are two tales from my last week.

I've told a number of you about this already, but my first assignment for Stuttering Therapy and Research was to go out in public with two of my classmates as witnesses and pretend to severely stutter to three different strangers. If you are unfamiliar, severe stuttering includes not only frequent, severe speech disfluencies (part- and whole-word repetitions, prolongations, blocks), but also secondary behaviors to try to get out of the stuttering patterns (such as head jerks, interjections, foot stomps, tongue protrusions). Needless to say, I was quite wary of this assignment, though I understand the point of attempting to get a glimpse into what a severe stutterer experiences. I also felt some ethical dilemma with this assignment due to the attempt at emulating what people actually have to go through in their lives. I think my ultimate fear was -- and I will admit, the chance of this happening is quite small -- pretending to stutter to someone who actually does and him/her knowing I was faking. What if s/he thought I was making fun? Anyway, I got through the assignment and experienced some interesting reactions from those I interacted with, including avoidance, giving the answers to my questions to my classmates with me instead of to me, finishing my words or sentences for me, and even physically sliding away from me to more directly talk to my classmates. I am grateful that part of it is finished and I can focus on the paper instead. Plus, we got to celebrate that part being over with happy hour at Beau Jo's with the rest of our year (people I am really enjoying, might I add).

Today when I got home from my morning classes, I discovered a very large pool of water on our bedroom floor. There was no water trail from the bathroom or evidence that the bathroom had been wet (what I thought would be the most likely source of this problem). I called emergency maintenance. It was determined the water was entering our apartment at the wall that is shared with our neighbors. Awesome. Maintenance went to their apartment and could not find the source of the problem either. I was in the office a while ago and was informed they never did find the cause, so I am just keeping my fingers crossed that it does not happen again. Wonderful. Also, since we moved most things from our bedroom floor to our living room, I am just surrounded by stuff right now. I'm not sure what to do with it since we don't know what kind of water this even is. I'm waiting for Brian to get home to decide with me if we need to try to clean the floor or all this stuff or what. We will definitely have to launder our bedding and cloth items that were on the floor. Gross.

**UPDATE**
So earlier this evening there was a knock on the door. I answered it, and it was apparently my next door neighbor (3.5 weeks here, and I have not seen one other person on our hall yet). He has a maintenance note in his hand (they leave them on your door if they come while you are not home) and asks if I got one too and what was going on. At least, that is what I got; I am pretty sure he is not a native English speaker. I explained that they thought the source was his apartment but had not exactly found it. What followed next continues to baffle me and Brian still. The guy says (again, as far as I could make out) that he meant to call because he noticed water on his floor LAST NIGHT but FORGOT! What?! And apparently WENT TO BED?? How is this possible. Then he says, "And when I woke up [makes gesture with his hand about how high the water on his floor was in the morning -- like 4 or 5 inches]." And still, NO CALL TO MAINTENANCE?? Why, oh why, was I the first person to call maintenance after it had completely filled one apartment so much that it went out under the wall into our bedroom leaving behind about 1.5 inches of water?? Does. Not. Compute.

it's been 11 days

Since we left KS. Our leaving was kind of undramatic, likely because we left in two shifts. My parents and I left mid-morning to ensure arriving in time to get keys to the apartment, and Brian and his parents left in the afternoon. This is because packing up our house turned out to be a much bigger project/take way more time than we thought it would, so they stayed behind to continue working on it. In fact, our parents have done tons of work in the house after getting back to KS, which we feel really bad about/grateful for, and we are sure we can never repay them. This new place has been fine so far, but does not (at least yet) feel like home. A few quick notes:

• Moving to a new state is really expensive. Suck.
• Make sure you have your address correctly memorized before changing everything. Suck.
• I got snowed on twice on Sunday. August 16. Kind of cool, but since I'm not big on snow...semi-suck.
• 425 square feet is really, really, really tiny. It is too tiny for two people. Suck.
  
• This school definitely has its differences from Bethel: 1. Today I remembered cheerleaders; 2. Our student government alone manages a $34 million budget, which is how many times the size of Bethel's overall operating budget? (I forgot to ask Brian if he remembers.); 3. A non-dry school is kind of exciting. Case in point: The big and many times repeated selling point of a back-to-school picnic for grad students was, "Beer! Free beer!" Um, yes, I'll take it!
  

i'm 14.

I passed this sign on the way back to work from the press. I turned the car around to go back, pull into the parking lot, and snap this photo. After I was done and circled around by the drive-thru to go out the exit, I saw that that side of the sign had been changed to "half-assed drinks," but in that short amount of time I remembered I'm 28 and did not roll my window down to photograph that part of the prank.

sand hill plums

A few Sundays ago I accompanied Brian on a cicada hunt. That's when temperatures were still over 100, and I was kind of a wuss. The heat sort of knocked me out, and I was not super helpful with the hunting. I was pretty good at being hot in the car. Near the end of the day at a wildlife preserve we went sand hill plum picking and that I really got into. Here is our bounty and me mashing them after cooking them. Whenever we finally have some time, we will make jelly, but for now this beautiful, tasty goodness resides in our freezer.











































I will also note that the next Sunday I went on another cicada hunt and was much more a part of it. I spotted several, and I also netted my first couple! That was exciting. I didn't completely get the hang of netting and trapping them smoothly, but I imagine I will have more chances to get better.

garden update

Here are our pumpkins. It's funny to us how one is really branching out and putting out a lot of tendrils, and the other is not and has no tendrils. These are plants we found coming up volunteer in our compost pile, presumably from a pumpkin we threw in there last fall. We know we won't get to harvest anything from them, but since they were just volunteer, we thought it would be fun to watch them grow.


They sure do put on beautiful flowers.





























A patio tomato. The bird who pooped on it must have been marking its territory because pretty much every one of our larger variety tomatoes gets pecked to death by birds as soon as it is slightly more than orange. Very disappointing for us.





























We have been able to harvest more of our cherry tomatoes, though. This is fun, but the fun is usually over in about 30 seconds since we'll get maybe five ripe at one time and just eat them right away. The plants are kind of comical with how tall and not bushy they are. We believe this is because they do not get adequate sun, but we had to work with what we have and this is the sunniest spot in our very shady yard. It's been fun to check the "garden" daily, and it will be kind of sad to leave these plants behind.

small group picnic

A few weeks ago our small group celebrated the end of the year with a picnic in the park. It was also the final group get together for me and Brian. It's been a good group that I've enjoyed getting together with. We ate some good food and played a variation of bocce ball. Below is the cake I made and also a group shot: Esther, Nate, Mariah, Brian, Paul, Judy, Craig (actually a cross-county cyclist who happened to be camping in the park and who joined us for the evening), Karen, and Ron.

our tree is trying to compete with yours, wiebes

Last night I was sitting on our front porch waiting for a friend to pick me up. I heard a bit of crashing in the branches and leaves above me. Although it was dark and I don't see a lot of squirrel action after dark, I assumed this is what it was. But then I did not hear any further crashing around or scrambling. I investigated and discovered a snake! It was quite a ways up and out (this is in large basswood). I know black rat snakes climb trees, but this was in kind of an unlikely place and plus there was that crashing as if it had fallen to that particular spot. I alerted Brian to come outside to see. He got a flashlight so we could inspect it better. Sadly, it seemed injured along one of its sides. The skin looked whitish and kind of torn where it should have been a dark color. One of Brian's speculations was perhaps it had been captured by a hawk and managed to get free of its clutches, landing in our tree. Crazy!

[In case you missed them, there are another two new posts below this one.]