My first JV Thanksgiving

Why, you ask, do I have a photo of the Pirate's of the Caribbean in my Thanksgiving post? Well, I'll tell you. Our annual JV Thanksgiving conference is our most relaxed conference all year. It's mostly about fellowship and food and "family," with a few sessions of Biblical teaching mixed in. One of the activities we all take part in during this conference is the "Family Frenzy" time. This is an allotted time when there are lots of different games, sports and activities for us to sign up for and enjoy. Well, Katka (Yes, the same one who helped me move, and who is in the senior photo shoot. I know, we spend a lot of time together.) and I decided we wanted to find something low key so we could just chill during that time, and, sure enough, there was a puzzle to work on. Perfect. Or so we thought.

Above is the puzzle we took on with our bare hands that fateful day of the 23rd of November 2007. I'll tell you what. All that green mess = impossible. I became slightly obsessed once we began the project and found that it stole many minutes of my life away from me this past week. And I say stole because, you guessed it, it was never finished. NEVER FINISHED!!! You might as well tell me my dog died, because an unfinished puzzle sucks just as bad. Okay, maybe not just as bad, but it's not fun.

Besides the unfinished puzzle, the retreat was great. And so was the FOOD! Before we started eating on Thanksgiving day I started to get a little sad, not just because I was missing family, but also because I was missing good Southern cooking. You see, in JV, Southerners are a minority. In fact, besides my friend Brittany who is heading to Ukraine, I think Slovakia is the only JV country that has any Southerners! Such a shame! So as I sat there preparing myself for the feast, I started to miss 2 things that I know I would have gotten at home: sweet tea and cornbread dressing. Well, the sweet tea was unavailable, but my amazing teammate, Kim (from Arkansas), filled my need for cornbread dressing. She had made one and it just wasn't out on the table yet. And it was glorious. I don't know if many of you know the joys of a good cornbread dressing, but I know my brother does, and I hope he is delighted when reading this.

The Move

Clearly lots of things have happened since I last wrote on here, but I will simplify it greatly for two reasons:

1) I don’t want to bore you with tons of details.
2) I don’t want to bore myself with having to write those details.

So, here we go. Most of my October was spent trying to find a place to live in Bratislava, and, after finding one, the beginning of November was spent trying to find a way to move my junk there. And this past Saturday it finally happened! I moved my butt to Bratislava!

Here’s a little recap of how the day went:

6:00 am – Woke up to a bunch of snow in Zilina. Great. Snow + Moving = Gross
9:00 am – A few friends came over to help move stuff out.
10:30 am – We are already done, and (by the grace of God!) all my junk fit in the Kompas van and Mike’s car. Woot woot!
11:30 am – On the road to BA.
1:30 pm – Arrive in BA and begin moving my stuff up 4 floors, with no elevator. And what really sucks is that the building has an elevator, but you have to have a special key for it to work. Well, we don’t have a key, and it seems all of my neighbors decided to leave town the day I arrive with 2 car loads of heavy stuff. Thanks for the warm welcome guys.
3:00 pm – Finished moving in!!
3:30 pm – Katka comes up with the amazing idea to hit up Ikea since we have the van until the next morning, and there are lots of things my roommate and I need get soon.
4:30 pm – Arrive at Ikea. I could spend days there.
7:00 pm – Arrive back at my place with 6 heavy boxes and no guys to help us carry it up. However, after circling the block for 20 minutes, we have to stop in the middle of the road (with 3 cars waiting behind us) and “quickly” remove all boxes from the van and onto the side walk.
7:30 pm – Katka and I stare at what we have to carry up 4 flights and wonder what the heck we were thinking.
7:35 pm – All of my neighbors are still mysteriously missing/ignoring our knocking on their doors, so, yet again, no elevator for us. Curses!
8:00 pm – After 3 boxes I literally think I’m going to pass out. This is when a single girl wishes she had a husband to take care of the heavy lifting. We decide to open up the rest of the 3 boxes and carry the pieces up individually.
8:30 pm – With one box left I try to persuade Katka to just leave it down there and we will get it in the morning. Thankfully she smacks some sense into me. It wouldn’t be fun to only have half the pieces to my new bureau.
8:45 pm – We are finally done. We quickly get into our pj’s and reward ourselves for this impressively productive day with last week’s Grey’s Anatomy.

8:00 am – We both wake up feeling every muscle in our body ache.



Here are some pics from the day:

What I woke up to:


Friends that came to help. I was pretty excited everything fit in two cars.


All my stuff.




The four flights of stairs.


My new building. I promise I wasn't lying about being on the fourth floor, you just can't see it here.


The park across the street from my place.


A view from inside the park.


Ok, well I hope this was a sufficient update on my move. On another note, I haven't had internet at home for 5 weeks now, which is extremely inconvenient. I'm kind of going crazy. That's another reason for my lack of posts lately. Yep, I'm still giving you excuses, but this one is pretty valid. I'm hoping it'll get set up here on Friday. We'll see.

A real one is coming soon...

Ok, so I promise a new blog is coming soon! I just moved to Bratislava, so things have been a little crazy and I don't have internet yet, but I'll get one ready this week. I PROMISE!!! (don't hate me for sucking at this!)