Food Service Feast

The warmth and bustle of the holidays are approaching. Tomorrow I'll prepare for our Thanksgiving feast by cleaning our bathrooms, doing some laundry and shopping for those last few items. Jon and I are sort of pioneering Sanchez Holidays in Portland. Our first Thanksgiving here was a month before our wedding. I cooked turkey breast using the ragamuffin appliances and cookware at 2nd base and if I'm not mistaken Eric Mora joined us. Last year we had the Albertson crew, who have since migrated to the East Coast. This year we are joined by Andy and Anne and a peach pie and cheesy Christmas music. And we've got a bottle of fine red wine.

In preparation for this year's Thanksgiving my mind has been mulling over the holiday meal we got at Drake, hosted by the cafeteria staff. It was a food service oddity, the holiday meal. All the staff would smile, slicing roast beef and setting up the tables of pie. I remember live music and Christmas lights. By my junior year every meal I ate in the school cafeteria gave me some sort of stomach ache, but those holiday meals are good, warm, well-fed memories. It seems that at the cusp of a homemade Sanchez feast, what I really want is to use my meal card for a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving.

Huzzah.

I'm lame. I'll be the first to admit it. I have a couple excuses I could throw your way. First, I nearly maimed myself in a bread cutting incident that involved a sharp serrated knife and my left index finger. Second, my typing skills are slowly declining making this harder to do. Did I mention I'm lame. Moving on though I just wanted to share a small triumph of mine. I recently discovered this Web site where you can sell and buy things in what they call an "online auction." It is called Ebay. I discovered the site shortly after discovering how amazing my feet feel while wearing very expensive hippie, negative heel shoes made by the company Earth. I wanted a pair to ease those long hours micromanaging people at work and Ebay was my means. So I've been spending the past few weeks passively viewing every pair of Earth shoes in my size, comparing styles, sellers, ending times, over and over and over again. Finally I took the first step and placed a bid on a pair. Then I waited patiently yet excitedly by the computer, clicking refresh every 19 seconds to make sure I was not outbid or "snipped" in the last few seconds. Jon's brother and sister-in-law are Ebay participants of legend status. In a way my own victorious shopping today made me just a little more of a Sanchez and less of an Anderson.

As an extreme sidenote: If you want to come to our home for Thanksgiving, you are invited.

what to say

all is quiet in the sanchez home. jon is sleeping and has been for forty-five minutes. i got off work about an hour ago and am awake. in rainbows by radiohead just finished another play through making things more quiet, more still. it feels nice. i feel a bit more calm than yesterday when i found a magazine blog by some college friends and began to feel completely inadequate, like i had just wasted the past three years in seminary, the past week at work and my entire degree. i had to remind myself that i was only at part b of my plan and part c is as of yet undetermined. i felt like dignan in "bottle rocket" pointing to the photo of the lawn wranglers. i had to get comfortable early on in college that my career path wouldn't look much like my classmates. in the past three years i've only drifted further away from the magazine mecca that is new york. though, i never wanted to go there. and i never wanted an internship at meredith. so, i suppose i'm doing fine. and though there are dishes stacked in the sink and bits of this and that strewn about the living room the house feels settled, because may will come soon enough and i'll graduate and move out of our apartment and someone will have an idea of what i should do next.

God Bless the Queen!...and Possibly Cadbury

Recently my dad was on a business trip in London. My initial plan to take full advantage of my dad's traveling ways was to get a flight out there the same weekend, shirk my work and school responsibilities, stay in my dad's hotel room and walk around the city, pretending I still lived there. I also attempted to have my dad live out certain key features of my time in London, going to church, going to the pub with friends, walking to Trafalgar and then Leicester Squares for a film, visiting various museums, taking advantage of the donation only admission by not paying. In the end I acquiesced. Could he just bring back some candy bars for me?

During the four days he spent in the city, we had a lively email conversation to determine the type of candy bars, how many and what purpose they would serve in my day-to-day life. He did a good job along with the work of my mom to get me the small packaged bits of joy I was after. We got a box on Wednesday chocked full of sweeties and since then I've been doing my best to show some restraint and pace out our recently acquired candy supply.

What else is going on? I felt a little despondent yesterday. Blamed it on getting up way too early for work and slept in a little too late today. I'm researching two papers right now for school. One is on civil disobedience and possibly civil disobedience as part of a holistic approach to living out the Kingdom of God. I'm also researching the concepts of Sabbath and rest in Hebrews 3-4. Andy thinks it's eschatologicial, which is pretty ambitious for an amillenialist, and part of the great meta-narrative set up by the seven creation days. That Andy, always has a theological answer for everything. In the immediate future I plan to eat some hybrid of breakfast and lunch.

The Last Sanchez Wedding

Alright. This will serve as a minor recap of the last sanchez wedding. we did a lot of scrambling around, resulting in fewer photos than i'd hope to have. please enjoy these snippets.


Here is Jon and I looking classier than we have in quite a while. I think the hotel bathroom setting really helps as well.
This photo was taken shortly after Jon hijacked a ten passenger golf cart and drove it around the country club until we found where we supposed to be for the aforementioned photo. Shortly after this we saved the day as snack crew, utilizing the nearby chevron to cure the hunger pangs of many.
Don't be fooled. These little girls are professional flower girls and this was their best showing. They had a long walk to make it to this point and brianna did well to steer Claire away from misdirection.
Matthew is in the middle and is the last sanchez to get married. The man on the right is Heidi's grandpa. He performed a very sincere and meaningful ceremony, which really challenged me.
I admit this is not a good shot, but I wanted to get Heidi in the shot. Two things to notice: the white blur to the right is Jon's grandma's hair and Heidi and Matthew are nervously not holding hands, a detail I kept noticing in the first part of the ceremony.

The wedding was in conclusion really beautiful, genuine and well done. The weekend was busy, stressful and crazy. We're looking forward to going back down to Santa Cruz to do some actual visiting sometime soon.

here we go!

i'm very very busy this week. but you wouldn't know it if you could see me right now. sitting around. looking at facebook. listening to the new radiohead album that i spent a total of 0.00pounds. waiting for my vietnamese sandwich to make its way home so i can eat lunch. and all this busy activity is aimed at this weekend and even tomorrow when jon and i embark on an adventure to sacramento for the last sanchez wedding. his brother matthew is getting married and i'm on stress relief squad. maybe i'll post amidst the trip with photos and updates. for now i'm going to eat the delicious sandwich that just walked through the door. yo.

Changed names and Cell phones

We have a friend who recently changed his name, and without us knowing so it caught jon off guard when he called rhet and got jude. I have a friend from high school, and junior high in fact, who always went by chris instead of his first name, rocco. we lost contact for a couple years and now he is solidly rocco, and in my mind solidly chris. I called him a while back and was left with the awkwardness of his awkwardness of me calling him by the only name I know him by. So I'm not sure how to proceed in communication. It's like in the morning before you've said a word to anyone and that first "hello" comes out in a squeak and a cough and full of hesitancy. I don't really like that.

Along similar terms, my cell phone and I are developing a tense relationship with one another and I am losing any interest and confidence in talking on the phone. I'm almost sure it originated when a friend told me she couldn't understand the message I had left on her phone. But now I'm left doubting if I am heard. And I have no control over the clarity of my communication at that point. I used to talk on the phone for hours with jon and now apart from my Sunday calling to my family, I'm more than hesitant to carry on a conversation.

So I suppose both of these small paragraphs should be apologies for my own projected awkwardness and instead I've really just presented an excuse. What really should happen is you should visit me in portland. And then we can get coffee and talk face to face. I'd like that.