St Patty's Day

Crazy, I've never properly celebrated St. Patty's Day til this year. Never have I ever had green eggs. And it wasn't just green eggs we had for breakfast, but green pancakes, fried green tomato(tillos), and green mimosas. It worked out really well. I had 4 friends over, and though we lost Maddy to her unfortunate flight, Sergio, Justin, and Leslie stuck around for Green Beer and Pictionary at the Broadway 50/50 bar. We snuck in a little re-enactment of a 6th grade science experiment because of all the excitement around Sun Chips's new 100% compostible bag. I'll let you know how that turns out in 13 weeks. To say the least about how the rest of the day went, hopefully Leslie and I will be staging a monumental comeback on Sergio and Justin for our deficits in Pictionary and Foosball because we have the skill. Justin and Sergio just had the luck of the Irish this day. (btw, I think Sergio might have some Irish in him).

A change of scenery

I knew I needed to do something entirely different from my normal routine, so for spring break, I got about 8 of us together for a camping trip. The best thing about camping is that there's so much down time that you don't know what's gonna happen. After getting our tents up, we decided to jump in the lake, and that's how we met Pete. Pete was just strolling along the banks with a stick in his mouth when we called him out to us. So he swam out to us, and we threw his stick back to the shore to fetch. Kind of backwards, but Pete liked it. His owner was nowhere around, and his bark of fear of abandonment was so awful that we called the number on his tag and soon said goodbye to our new friend.

The little things continued to make it a nice evening... pick up soccer, cooking, fire-making, lantern-whatevering... as well as the crazy things... walking on fire. Somehow we "all" slept til 1030 the next morning, and then we were off to Inks Lake. The castle on the hill made for an enchanting beginning followed by the perfect 5 mile hike we needed. To cap it all off, we found Devil's Waterhole for our cliff-jumping. Slightly dangerous, but exactly what we needed. The perfect 1 night getaway.

100% Pure New Zealand

Can I just tell you how beautiful New Zealand is... (rhetoric question, unless you just wanna say Yes.) I keep a running slideshow of pictures that my friend Kevin and I took in New Zealand as my desktop background, and let me just say that it never gets old. Beauty to one's eyes is also beauty to one's soul. It's beautiful what beauty does to one on the inside. I simply melt every time I see some of the pictures we took, and so to be touched in such an inexplicable but familiar way shows hows mysteriously beautiful our souls react to the beauty in the world around us.

This one photo in particular by Kevin that gets me every time. Just take a moment and look at the beauty, not just as one image, but as many images put together, making a truly magnificent whole. (I didn't upload a hi quality version of it, but it'll still do the trick.)