Adage #12: Learn to make coffee so well you can do it in your sleep.

My wonderful co-worker and friend, Laura, gets annoyed with me when she tries to have a conversation in the morning with me, but I am too tired to know what's going on. After waking up for 3 years before 6am (to work at a coffee place, nonetheless), one would think I could handle being fully aware of my surroundings by 8:30am, but this is not the case.

Yesterday I came into the office and after unsuccessfully trying to hold a normal conversation with Laura, she considerately suggested that I should make some coffee before I attempted to talk with her again. I then spent 15 minutes in the kitchen trying to figure out how much coffee to make. Here is the internal conversation I had with myself:

"Where is the measuring spoon?"

This took me approximately 3 minutes to locate. Mind you, you can hardly fit two people in this kitchen, so there were not a whole lot of places for the measuring spoon to be.

"Now how many tablespoons of coffee do I put per cup of water?"

"If I put 6 tablespoons, then I need 3 cups of water..."

"But wait, 3 cups of water will make 3 cups of coffee and that won't even fill up my mug!"

At this point, my mind thinks 3 cups = 3 ounces.

"So if I put 10 tablespoons of coffee in the filter, I will need 5 cups of water which will equal 5 ounces of coffee and that's less than a cup of coffee which is 8 ounces."

I had this part of the conversation for a couple of minutes, using different tablespoon amounts to try and end up with a full cup of coffee.

"How in the world do people successfully make this stuff everyday! You have to use so much coffee to get one little mug of it. 12 tablespoons is a lot to get just 6 ounces of coffee. How can this be right!?"

"Ugh, I don't know!"

At this point, I preceed to stop counting any sort of measurement and just dump coffee and water into the coffee pot.

After 15 mintues in the kitchen, I emerge:

Laura: "So, you were in there for a while."

Me: "I know, wasn't I!? I had a really rough time making coffee this morning."

Laura: "Did you figure it out?"

Me: "I'm not really sure, we'll find out when it's done."

Adage #11: Stop for the surprises in your life.

My dad, sister and I had just spent the whole day traveling from Los Angeles to London. I think we arrived at our hotel around 7PM. We unloaded our stuff, grabbed some dinner and started wandering around. We stumbled upon a nice looking town square with some fountains and decided to sit and do some people watching.

We sat down on the edge of a fountain and looked up to see a tall statue of a man with four lions at the base. It was then that my dad realized that we were in Trafalgar Square, a place he looked for every time he was in London, but hadn’t been able to find.

It’s funny how often we end up stumbling upon things on accident. Places we could never find when we were looking for them. While driving around Spokane, I often stumble upon interesting places that I can never find again when I’m purposely looking for them. I can never seem to find the particular article of clothing I am shopping for, but when I go without a purpose, I find tons of stuff. When I am looking for God to do something specific in my life, He does something I wasn’t planning on.

So when you find unexpected things, take a minute and pause there. Enjoy it because who knows when you will find again!

Adage #10: The best part of traveling to Europe is the Kinder Eggs.

Seriously, that's not a joke. These might just be my favorite part of going to Europe and I have managed to find them every time I've gone over there. They are hollow, egg-shaped chocolates (milk chocolate on the outside and white chocolate on the inside) that have a little toy on the inside.

The anticipation of what toy you are going to get beats any Happy Meal toy ever. Maybe it's because things are just better when they are not allowed in the US (I think it's because little kids can choke on the toy found inside). Maybe it's because you have to hunt around for a while before you can find them (they're everywhere in the winter, but a lot harder to track down the rest of the year). On this trip, I couldn't find them until half way through at a random little shop in the countryside of Bavaria.

So if you find yourself in Europe, make sure you buy a Kinder Sorpresa, Kinder Surprise, or Kinder Überraschung.

Adage #9: Make sure to leave your glass slipper on the stairs before you leave the party.

I have loved the story of Cinderella since I was a little girl. It is the only movie I can tolerate watching over and over and over. I will watch any version of it I can get my hands on, no matter how cheesy it might be. So when my sister, my dad and I talked about what we would go see while on our trip to Europe this May, I only had one request: to see the “Cinderella Castle” (Neuschwanstein) outside of Munich. This castle inspired Walt Disney and it did not disappoint, the place looked like it was straight from a fairy-tale.

The castle was built by “Mad King Ludwig.” He built some gorgeous castles - these castles he dreamt up were not your run of the mill. They are everything you think of when you think fairy tales and princes and Disney movies. But Ludwig never finished Neuschwanstein Castle and never got the chance to begin construction on his next castle project because he was arrested for being an unfit king.

Ludwig was too caught up on building his magical castles to care about running Bavaria, . His whole story is very interesting and his death is shrouded in mystery (check out the links above for more info). As my sister and I were taking in all this information while on a tour of two of his castles, it occurred to me that Ludwig got so caught up in the magic of other people’s stories that he never lived his own. He built a castle based on Versailles because he wanted his own version and Neuschwanstein was based on the music of Wagner. He had the power to do incredible things as the king of Bavaria, but instead he chose to build castles and ignore what was happening in his kingdom.

I love stories: telling stories, hearing other people’s stories, and watching stories unfold on TV shows, in movies and in books. The life of King Ludwig reminds us that we can’t get caught so much in the fantasy of other people's stories that we forget how to live our own out. You are in the middle of an incredible story. You might be in the part where the characters are being introduced, maybe you’re building up to the big battle or maybe you’ve just won a huge victory. But you’re story coincides with The Story, the one God started in the Garden of Eden and ends with eternity (which is more of a beginning than an ending).

What are you doing right now to live out your own story?



Suggested reading:
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
To Be Told by Dan Allender

Adage #8: It's true, patience is a virtue.

The other day after work, I was driving to my friend Kym’s house. I got on the freeway onramp and was greeted by a traffic jam. Spokane traffic jams aren’t close to what I’ve been stuck in while in LA, and yet I found myself annoyed and impatient. So I decide to get off the freeway and go another route.

This backfired on me pretty quickly. The off ramp I chose was in a part of town I am not very familiar with so I was just sort of guessing where to go next. I found myself somewhere I recognized but misjudged my lane choice. And there I was, getting on the same onramp I had started on 15 minutes before and sitting in the same traffic. I was too busy trying to figure it out my way, that I just ended up wasting gas and taking even longer.

I often try to take shortcuts and go my own way. I’m pretty stubborn and I refuse to ask for directions - whether they are from the guy working at a gas station or from God. But in the end, I usually end up getting to my destination with a lot more heartache because I decided to do it my own way instead of God’s.

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart;
      do not depend on your own understanding.
 Seek his will in all you do,
      and he will show you which path to take.
Proverbs 3:5-6

It will probably take me a lifetime to figure this out. The bad news is that I will probably repeat something like that freeway incident next week. The good news is that I’ve progressed a little bit in patience: if this had happened a couple of years ago, I would have gotten off the freeway a second time and repeated that whole process at least one more time.

Summer Adventures in Spokane: Lind Combine Derby

This might have been the best experience I’ve had so far this summer and I’m a little worried it won’t be topped. Laura Arner and I hopped into her car and took a mini road trip to the Lind Combine Demolition Derby last weekend. Basically, people take their wheat combines, paint them and then go after each other until they either lose the header in the front or lose their steering which is in the back.

We weren’t totally sure where it was and the directions were vague. They said to get off exit 220 at Ritzville and take the Lind exit about a mile to the arena. I was somewhat concerned that we would not be able to find the arena. This was one of those times that I overestimated eastern Washington. As we entered Lind, we saw were cars and RVs everywhere, it looked like the town had been turned into a giant parking lot.

In case you are wondering this arena is nothing like the Spokane Arena. There were probably 10 or so bleachers ranging from grand stands to that-looks-like-it-might-collapse-at-any-minute stands around a pretty small dirt arena. Apparently, this is a much bigger event than we expected; it took us a good 15 minutes to find a spot because the place was packed.

It was well worth the trip. Who can go wrong watching things being destroyed? We were also surprised at the diversity of people attending the event. There were some rednecks as expected, but there was also a large population of Harley-lovers and quite a large group of seemingly totally normal people. I even saw a few people I recognized from Spokane.

I can’t describe fully in words how great this event was, so consider this your formal invitation to join Laura and I next year for the 25th anniversary.

Adage #7: Never underestimate the power of sticky notes to help you organize.

In an effort to be more organized at work, I devised what I think to be a brilliant plan. I started to prioritize what needs to get done by using numbered sticky notes. I end up with a lot of paper on my desk throughout the day, so this allows me to keep focused on the most important things. I love lists, so I made a little pros and cons list of my new system:

Pro: Save time so I don’t have to pull all the papers out and figure out what I should do next, I have already decided that.
Con: Sometimes I find something I need to do after I’ve applied my sticky note system and then I have to move all sorts of stuff around. I devised a decimal point system to help out.

Pro: Allows me time in the morning to figure out my plan for that day which translates into less time where I feel like I’m running around with my head cut off.
Con: The sticky notes have begun to lose their stickiness. I had not really anticipated losing track of my priorities because the sticky note fell off in the middle of the day. Today I discovered I had three sticky notes with the number “3” on them because I thought I had lost them due to the unstickiness.

Pro: I get to excitedly explain my brilliant plan with friend and co-worker Laura and how this will revolutionize the way I get work done.
Con: Laura tries to be a supportive friend by pretending to like my brilliant sticky note priority system, She then changes the subject to what kind of dog should she get so she doesn’t have to fake interest for too long before falling asleep from boredom.