Welcome to Summer

Sorry for the gaps between postings, but it's been a busy couple of weeks: busy because rather than getting a couple of days during the plant shutdown, I actually got to work both weeks (including Saturday, to make up for the holiday on Monday), and I will even get a small bit of overtime thrown in as well. At least I had Memorial Day off, and the weather stayed good enough to grill out a few times.

What I'm currently doing at the plant involves cleaning. Lots of cleaning, in the upper machine bay levels of the plant called the "High Bay", where the raw ingredients for making the insides and outsides of batteries (especially the graphite mix used for the outer casing that surrounds the metal core cannister and the graphite/metallic mix which makes up part of the chemical reaction that allows your Energizer battery to work) are piped, filtered, blended, and then fed into the moulding machines on the ground floor.

Yes, it's graphite. The same stuff that goes into tennis rackets. The same stuff that makes up the inner cores of pencils worldwide. And it sticks to everything. Despite the disposible clean suits we're issued, it leaves one dirty ... so much so that at the end of the work day, the second shower has become another ritual for me. We're hoping that with the various new equipment installs done over the last two weeks, the bay will become a bit less dustier and make my job easier (and perhaps cleaner).

So now it's June here, and it's getting warmer. Fortunately, Woodgie has been able to garden quite a bit and start up her worm farm (in case you hadn't guessed, Woodgie is as much of an organic gardener as possible). The worm farm, we hope, will provide some good ongoing soil treatment for the raised garden beds. Ultimately, it will also provide a source of fishing worms for when Lauren and I are able to get out to Mozingo and go fishing.

Also with summer brings a couple of traveling opportunities: next weekend, Lauren and I will head back to my hometown for my 20 year high school reunion. We'll miss the dinner and dance on Friday night, but Saturday, we'll be heading down for a picnic and meet and greet (which is more my speed than the beer bash on Friday night). Then, the last weekend of the month, we'll be heading back up to Des Moines for an impromptu post-wedding reception that two of my Tai Chi friends are throwing; this will allow everyone up there who didn't get a chance to come to the wedding (or who we couldn't invite, due to the small size of the church), to visit and bring gifts if they want. Following that, the book club gang will do their usual yearly solstice gathering and campout that evening.

And then next month, Woodgie is done with her classes, but after the 4th, which we hope to spend out at Mozingo Lake camping and fishing, the following week, Lauren will be joining several others from our church for a week long mission trip up to a South Dakota Indian reservation at the local Episcopal mission church. Since I'm stuck on a weekly work schedule and have no vacation, we've decided that I'm going to be the one staying home and tending the cats. Eventually, Woodgie will be visiting student interns in a few locations ... most of them are local, but one is down in KC, so a road-trip there may be in order.

And what I'm waiting for at the end of July is the release of this.

All in all, it's going to be a busy summer for both of us.

Rainy Saturday

It's the rainy season again here in Maryville this weekend, making a rainy Memorial Day for us and causing us to cancel plans to go camping out at Mozingo Lake. Instead, Woodgie's been doing some morning gardening between the overnight rains and the mid-morning rains, plus some maintenance (filter cleaning) on the watercourse in the back yard.

After that was done, we headed over to the Galaxy Store, a Mennonite-run bulk and discount grocery out near Wilcox, MO, for some grocery and household item shopping. A big find for us (especially since we're now up to two cats and two kittens in the household), was a large and cheap bulk bag of multi-cat cat food. In the greater scheme of things, that may not mean much, but when you have two cats and two kittens looking up at you trying to decide what YOUR protein value may be, it's a find.

We're hoping that we get a break in the rain this weekend so we can grill outdoors either this evening or tomorrow. EDIT: Given the rumble of thunder off in the distance at 4:30, we're now thinking this will be tomorrow or Monday instead.

Otherwise, it's rest and relaxation for both of us through Monday: we'll be staying in, watching Star Trek Remastered tonight and then some anime later on, and otherwise just staying in and enjoying the break. Hopefully, even with the latest rains, we won't have to pull out those plans we bought off the Internet for an ark ;-).

Seriously, it looks like I'll be working a couple of days during the plant shutdown pulling some overtime, with the possibility of more than a couple of days. I'm hoping that if I can get at least a full week of OT, I'll make enough that the shutdown won't hurt the cash flow that much. And in the meantime, I can continue my job search for a better job.

Plant sale at the Plant House! (Cheshirekitty blog)

Ok, you know what I did this afternoon...herbs were selling for $1.40 a piece at the Plant House here in Maryville (down from $3.99, which as we all know reads as "$4.00), so I bought a few more herbs:

Two Red Rubin basil and two garden basil which are in the rose garden, of all things, in a bench/double planter. They are keeping their companion plant trifetti pepper company. (I'm not sure you can tell this from the picture, but trifettis are variegated plants with hot purple peppers).

Two French tarragon to supplement the scrawny tarragon I rediscovered when digging up and renovating the herb garden. Note to gardeners: Do not buy tarragon seeds expecting good tarragon. French tarragon, the culinary kind, is sterile and can only propagate by cuttings. Any tarragon seeds you buy would be for Russian tarragon, which tastes like, well, a weed.

One "The Best" mint, which replaces a lackluster mint colloquially known as "Alex mint", for the ex-boyfriend who insisted he was growing peppermint from seed.

One garden sage, to keep the purple sage company.

While I was in the herb garden, I found more stray curly mint and chocolate mint and planted them in their respective sunken pots. I am hoping the containment scheme keeps my herb garden from being a free-for-all, with the oregano the clear victor.

Just in -- a severe thunderstorm watch till 8 PM. Guess the new plants will get watered soon!

One More Kitten

And this just in ... on a spur of the moment decision, we've adopted another kitten. A couple of weeks ago on our way back from a neighborhood walk, one of our neighbor's grandkids introduced us to a couple of darling cute kittens. Four weeks old and all females (the local male tomcat had unfortunately found and killed the males of the litter), they were in decent health and had barely been weaned.

Four weeks later, the mom appeared to be having issues nursing and was losing weight, so today, the neighbors relucantly decided to give away the kittens to the neighbors (including us), and take their cat to the vet.

After holding each of them to be sure of which one we wanted, we're (perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently if the other cats will accept her down the road) now the proud owners of yet another kitten, a Domestic Shorthair (gray tabby and white) that we've named Mimi. If the other cats accept her, then we've gotten another member of the household. If not, then Woodgie thinks that we'll be able to foster Mimi until we can find someone else to take her.

EDIT: After some discussion, the new kitten's name is actually spelled Meme (but pronounced "me-me", as in the name), and of course, she is named for the concept of Internet memes and in particular, the cat macro meme.

Sleepy Sunday

It's a sleepy Sunday here in Maryville. Most of the weekend plans (heading to Bedford on Saturday, etc.) were cancelled as Lauren's still recuperating from laryngitis, so we stayed home from church and vegged out a bit, apart from doing a little bit of chaos control in the living room.

If the weather cooperates (i.e., if the rain holds off), I may grill out later this evening.

Absent Posting

You've probably been wondering why we haven't posted a weblog entry in awhile ... there are a couple of reasons for this:

1)Since I'm working full-time now (or at least, until the plant goes into scheduled shutdown two weeks from now), I haven't had as much free time to post. Usually, by the time I get home at 3:30, it's time to rest a little bit and decide what to do for dinner (and then make dinner, if dinner involves staying at home vs. eating out).
2)Since the weather's improved a little bit, Lauren and I have started walking regularly, so we're both putting in about 5-6 miles per day; Lauren gets her morning mileage from walking to campus and back, while I'm getting mine from work: I took a pedometer to work one day, and based off of that, Lauren estimates that I'm getting about 3 miles per day there. The other 2 to 3 miles we get from our evening walks to Hy-Vee for dinner or elsewhere in town (we've found that Baskin-Robbins, not to mention $3.22 gas prices, are good motivators for a 2-mile round-trip walk ;-).
3)By the time we're done with that, it's usually about 8:00-ish, or just enough time to wind down, check e-mails, and surf the web for a little bit (in my case, continuing my job search). Given that I have to get up at 5:45 to pick up a coworker and be at work by 7, and Lauren has to be up and around so she can walk to school to teach her 7:30 morning classes, it's usually lights out by 9:30ish for both of us.

Anyhoo, Lauren is done teaching for the week, which is good because she's developed a case of laryngitis. Hopefully, she'll recover by Monday for her classes. In the meantime, this gives her the opportunity to rest and continue exploring the world of "image macros" on the web: otherwise known as LOL cats, these are usually Internet memes involving Photoshopped (and funny) captions onto pictures of disgustingly cute cats:

Examples abound here at: http://www.icanhascheezburger.com

Speaking of recovering, I've belatedly discovered (with Woodgie's help), that I seem to have developed (or have developed over the last few years) a case of sleep apnea, which would account for a few things:

1)My near-legendary inability to get up in the mornings, especially in wintertime.
2)Why my snoring seems to have gone from very mild to very loud (annoying Woodgie to no end and, despite my use of Breathe Right strips, almost causing her to sleep on the couch).
3)Why I seemed to be unable to have or rarely remember dreams ... this is probably because I've been unable to hit REM sleep long enough to have them.

Because of this, Woodgie has been asking (no, too mild ... demanding is more like it) that I start sleeping on my side, which seems to alleviate the symptoms, but causes me some mild discomfort as I try to position pillows "just so". Also, during the first couple of nights of sleeping on my side, I had dreams (and remembered them) for 3 nights in a row ... something that I have never done before.

Anyhoo ... that's the week so far; if Woodgie is up to it by then, this weekend should see us road-tripping up to Bedford, IA for their annual Iris Days festival on Saturday.

Cheshirekitty speaks: My week of gardening

I don't write in here often, because Richard is far better than I am at documenting day-to-day reality here in the Cozy Kittys' Household. But it's my week off between semesters, and it's drizzling outside -- which curtails my usual May activity of starting up the gardens.

I must admit, I think I am hyperactive. Literally -- ADHD, heavy on the H, light on the ADD. Also known as "predominantly hyperactive type ADHD". I prefer to think of it as "neurodiversity". I've never been formally diagnosed, but have been informally diagnosed by everyone who knows me. I think I get it from my dad -- he can't sit still, and has to be doing something else -- even reading -- at the same time he watches TV.

I can't really sit still either, until I get tired enough that I fall over. So my "vacation" has consisted of the following:

1) Fixing the watercourse/pond. The watercourse was leaking water badly -- it would bleed itself dry overnight, which is not good for water plants or fishies. I discovered that natural ground shifting had created a gap between the watercourse liner and the pond liner, which allowed water to leak under the pond liner. In addition, upon reading how to create a watercourse (which, I admit, I should have done BEFORE installing the original watercourse last summer), I realized that I should have sealed seams. So Richard and I cut a patch to join the now-skewed elements of the pond, and sealed seams with EPDM tape, black caulk, and waterfall foam. The watercourse is now up and running, and has lost no volume in two days.

2) Planting the watercourse. The whole reason I wanted a watercourse, other than to make the small deep pond and shallow overflow look less like a well, was to provide running water to plant watercress and Vietnamese coriander, two plants which require a lot of fresh water. I have not received my Vietnamese coriander yet (it's on order from Richters.com, I believe) but watercress seeds have been planted.

3) Enlarged the borders of the moon garden by about 18 inches on each side. I am learning, through my trial-and-error garden design experiments, that I think too small in the initial project stage. Hence the too-small pond, the too-small front border, and the too-small moon garden.
I also planted jasmine tobacco and woodland tobacco (plantlets and seeds), night phlox (seeds), evening-scented stock (seeds), moonflower (seeds) and white dame's rocket (seeds). I will also get a couple of white datura plants and a John F. Kennedy rose to complete the picture, and maybe some fuzzy foliage from "Helen Von Stein" stachys. These plants join the perennial "David" phlox and autumn clematis already there. If you're getting the impression that all in this garden is white and most of it smells good, that's the purpose of a moon garden.

4) Planting beans, cukes, and nasturtiums in the raised beds. The beans this year are Hunan winged bean for Asian cooking, and two runner beans for green beans, shell beans, and edible flowers -- "Scarlet runner" and "Sunset". The cuke this year -- I am picky about cukes, and don't feel secure enough to grow Asian or European cukes yet -- is "Sweetest Yet". I'm skeptical; we shall see. Nasturtiums (happy salad greens and edible flowers) are "Dwarf Jewel Mix", "Whirlybird Mahogany", and "Peach Melba". I ran out of nasturtium seeds before doing the center bed, which still needs to have a debris burn before planting out with squash and melons.

5) Planting herbs. Joining the mints, oregano, and edible flowers in the new herb bed is midget savory, borage, golden feverfew, dill, and rosemary. No picture links here because herbs aren't as exciting to look at.

6) Weeding. Enough said.

7) Starting production on two Anglican rosaries. I figured another new hobby was needed to watch TV by.

8) Assorted school paperwork including setting up course sites and writing up a human subjects form for some new research.


And this was my week off. That's okay, it's only Thursday, and I've run out of stuff to do. Naptime!

Graduation

This weekend's been quite busy for both of us, between graduation, mowing, and cleaning the house.

Oh yeah ... and recovering from my first day on the job. I may not have been the fastest trainee, but I managed to make it through the shift. Some thoughts on that:

Manufacturing work is like being inside a casino: there are no clocks in the manufacturing area, which means you tend to lose track of time. The shift went from 7 until 3, with a morning break and a lunch break, but it felt longer.

Of course, when you spend several hours packing boxes, loading double AA batteries into blister packs, or loading the blister packs into the rotary turntable to be sealed, it does wear on you.

Lauren got to do something special, however: she carried the banner for her college and led the undergraduates into the arena for graduation:

Work

Today was my first experience with manufacturing work: a local temp firm held a cattle call for the local Energizer battery factory, and I made the cut to start tomorrow morning on 1st shift. Yes, I'm glad, because it's work, even though it's part-time and temporary (in other words, it will last as long as the work is there). I do hope to find something better for the long-term, and I am still looking, but at least the job drought is broken.

My initial impressions:

1)Discomfort: We stood outside in the cold, damp, and drizzly air and froze outside the employee entrance to the plant for about 20 minutes, because they started the orientation 12 minutes late.
2)Fear: like it or not, it's manufacturing work, and despite the facility's near-perfect safety record, there are a lot of ways to get hurt there. And there's a little bit of fear of failure, too: I don't want to fail, but I've never done manufacturing work before; I'll do the best I can with it, but I'm not sure how well I'll do.

It is a bit of a rude shock going from white-collar down to blue, and Lauren is sorry that I have to take work that isn't that desirable. But at this point, we don't have much of a choice: starting this month, it's costing us an extra $600.00 a month to put me on Lauren's health insurance. While it's very good coverage, the expense is really eating a chunk out of our monthly finances for now, and anything that can help toward that is welcome. Still, it's not the ideal job, and because it's temp work, it probably pays nowhere near what I'm used to making.

But at least it's something until something better comes along.

Moving Forward

Well, it's been a busy, productive, disappointing, unnerving, but overall good week so far, for various reasons:

1)Busy - Lauren had her annual review at work, and it went really really well. There are a few things that suggest they are grooming her for something bigger and better, so that's a good sign.
2)Productive - we both got our taxes in. I'm going to get a small refund (no small feat given how much I paid in tax and withholding), and Lauren will likely get an adjustment, because she forgot to file for the energy efficiency credit. That will get back most of what she paid in Federal this year.
3)Disappointing - because I didn't get the job I interviewed for earlier this month. Nothing wrong with me as a candidate; in fact, the interviewers commented that I interviewed well and would be a good fit for their company. However, the fact that I would have to commute down to KC did factor into their decision. It's a little frustrating; the local job market (poor as it is) is taken up by college students from campus, and for those jobs that I've applied for, I think I'm being considered too overqualified for them. I just have to keep looking.
4)Unnerving - because the events at Virginia Tech made me think about something that ordinarily no one should think about (i.e., the safety of your spouse). Granted, something like that probably would never happen here in Maryville: the staff at Northwest are well-trained and prepared, and the students (at least those I've met) are all good people. But still, it raised a worry that for me that I hadn't dealt with since working in a high school following Columbine: the tendency that you take the safety of your workplace (or your wife's workplace) for granted, and seeing events like that play out on a college campus are a little unsettling. And yes, my sympathies and prayers go out to the families of those killed or injured. No one should have to go through that kind of tragedy. Ever.

Taxing Weekend

Quick note: This weekend's been a bit busy for both of us. Thankfully, it didn't rain or snow as Weather Channel had forecasted, so Lauren and I were finally able to get outside and start gardening and mulching.

I'm still waiting to hear back on the interviews, and in the meantime, we're both filing our taxes and sweating out how much we both owe. We'll make it until Lauren gets paid again, but it's going to be a near thing to the end of the month.

Wedding Pics Now Posted

The first batch of pics from our wedding are now online. To reach them, simply find our online photo album here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/steffens.richard/WeddingPics

We're not done resizing and posting yet; I hope to get to that later this evening.

Food Notes: Bubba's and Ali's Bakery

Just a couple of in-town notes on current/ongoing favorites:

1)Bubba's, the award-winning BBQ restaurant, is now offering $9.00 buffet-style orders on Sundays ... since the place isn't big enough to hold a full buffet line, what this means is that for $9.00, any item on the menu board (assuming it's available) is available for multiple trips. We like it because it allows us to try out items that we don't order that much (such as the rib tips appetizer).

2)Lauren's Egyptian baker friend Ali, who formerly had a small place in Burlington Junction, has now opened a small bakery at the back of Happy Garden Chinese Restaurant (the small restaurant on Main across from what used to be the Subway). We stopped off this morning for coffee and some of his pastries (apple fritter and filled donut), which were some of the best scratch pastries that we've ever had. Oh, and Ali also does breads as well. Ali's hours, in his words, go like this: "We're open at 6 until about 2. But if I'm here, and someone wants something (for example, later in the afternoon), I'll open".

Wedding Photos

The wedding pictures finally came back, and our photographer did an outstanding job. Lauren has been busy sorting and printing pictures (her coworkers asked to see a small sample of the prints, but our old HP photo printer died, so we had to purchase one). On my part, I've been preparing for and off to a job interview in KC Monday and Tuesday, so that's why they haven't been posted to the weblog yet. We will post the pics as soon as we possibly can, so please bear with us. Thanks!

It's DONE!!!!!

It's finally DONE!!!!! And with no major hitches, Lauren and I are now MARRIED!!!

Can you tell that we're excited??? We're also very tired ... we stayed overnight at the hotel after opening gifts, attended a late dinner at Las Palmas (the Mexican restaurant next to the hotel), and then bade goodbye to the last of our family and friends this morning after breakfast. Then we managed to load our gifts into the car, get home, unload them, and then crash for a few hours of sleep. We both needed it.

We had roughly 76 people at the wedding (we'll wait for the final catering count to be certain), and we had a great weekend making lots of memories with family and friends. The weekend started out great: our bachelor's and bachelorette's parties were combined for a co-ed party over in St. Joe, where we dined at Fuji, the new Japanese steakhouse and teppanyaki place. Afterwards, we went over to Terrible's Casino to see how slowly we could lose the $30.00 limits we'd placed on ourselves. The rest of the weekend ranged from the absurd (our maid of honor gave us a Hallmark soundbite card featuring the "Chicken Dance", so now THAT's stuck in our heads), to the worrisome (at the Student Union, Lauren and I were stuck in the elevator for 5 minutes on our way to the reception ... and no, we DIDN'T push the stop button intentionally ... the poor elevator's brain just hiccuped, that's all), to the thankful: the weather forecast had been for light snow that morning, but it missed us, leaving us with sunny weather for the wedding and partly cloudy for the reception.

The wedding itself went off very smoothly, as well as the reception dinner (kudos to the ARAMARK staff at Northwest for their hospitality), and we thank everyone who participated in the ceremony: Mike Kyle, our minister; Dr. Jeff Loomis, who assisted; our parents and families, who travelled many, many miles to get here; our Best Man, Micah Joy, and our Maid of Honor, Jenny Heitoff; and our readers, Les Savage and Ken Sarno, who drove straight through from Urbana on Friday for the rehearsal.

Thanks also to our musicians: Tony Brown (who can play the piano very well, despite his claims to the contrary), Brent Chappelow (who got the pacing on the Bach pieces just right), Megan Wyant (who graced us with her flute playing), and especially our vocalist, Rachel Ost, who stepped in as a substitute and did an excellent job.

Also due thanks are our friends the McGary's (Frank and Dixie) who helped with the flower arrangements, and also helped us haul gifts from the church to the reception (and then from there, back to the hotel), as well as their sons, Craig and Philip, who served as our ushers. Also, Lauren profusely thanks the "Flower Assembly Group" from Friday morning, which includes the aforementioned Dixie McGary, plus Jenny, Celia Hayhoe, Lauren's Aunt Peggy and Uncle Dean, and Lauren's mom and dad.

And finally, a warm thank you to our friends, who came from places as far away as Blacksburg, VA, and as near as Des Moines, IA, to share the weekend with us.

We don't have many pictures back yet from the weekend. We're sorting through the rehearsal pictures we've gotten back, and we'll have a few more of those up in a couple of days. For now, here's a few we took on Thursday:

The sign at the Comfort Inn welcoming our family and friends:















And here's a quick cameraphone shot of my Best Man, Micah, who kept me sane throughout this weekend (hard to believe it's been 26 years ... count 'em, and we're still friends):
















We'll have more pictures two weeks from now; it will take that long for our photographer to sort through everything and burn all of it to CDs. After that, we'll be posting pics up on the wedding weblog.

Rib Crib, or The Worst BBQ We've Ever Eaten

When we're on the road, Lauren and I have usually made good choices about roadfood (either that, or else we're very lucky in that regard). I think yesterday our luck on that ran out (or at least, ran away from us).

On the way home from her friend Jenny's open house, we had hoped to stop off at Swagat, the Indian restaurant at the Zona Rosa mall complex on Barry Road. We both love that restaurant. Unfortunately, they were closed Sunday, as they were between their lunch buffet and dinner hours.

After grabbing a map of the mall to discover what restaurant choices we had available, we settled on a local Rib Crib, which appears to be an Oklahoma-based chain which is expanding in the Midwest. They had a special for all you can eat Burnt Ends, which we love but we're rarely able to get locally at Bubba's, so we ordered, expecting succulent, slightly crispy, BBQ.

What we got, we were a little embarassed by what we were served. After we walked out the door, I coined the phrase: "Dinty Moore beef BBQ", because that's what we had gotten: it looked like they had used the pre-cut, perfectly square roast beef chunks you normally see on salad bars, barely burned them, and then served them liberally doused with leftover BBQ sauce. The sides were good, especially the coleslaw. But we couldn't finish the meal, because the BBQ itself was the worst we had ever eaten.

We understand that they've won a lot of awards for BBQ in Oklahoma, so we'll reserve judgement on the whole chain, but last night's meal left us very glad that we have our local Bubba's.

Wedding Parking

Hi all,

In a previous post, I mentioned that the church we are having the wedding at does not have very much parking. Since then, we've talked to the manager of the Dollar General store next to the church, and she will let us use the row of parking spots next to the street. This is only 12 more spaces, but it's a little bit more parking. She cautions us to not use the spaces close to the store or close to the rail tressle between the parking lot and the church parking lot, because there will be some truck traffic (trash truck and a shipment truck) loading and unloading that day.

There is also a park nearby that you may be able to park next to; the north side of the park is open to parking; however, parking is prohibited on the remaining 3 sides.

Otherwise, we would suggest trying to car pool from the hotel as much as possible or parking at the campus near the student union and car pooling to the church from there.

And Speaking of Snow ...

The blizzard that was supposed to hit us lightly before moving on to Iowa started this morning at around 8. It's still snowing as of 10:00, but not as hard as it was earlier.

Driving was proving interesting at some intersections. I snapped these after taking Woodgie to work, when visibility had dropped down to a quarter-mile or less. You may not be able to tell from these pics, but by that time, the snow was falling near-horizontally, due to the wind.

Looking East Down Edwards Street















Looking South Down Our Street















Looking South Down Market Street
















EDIT: It's now about 12:30, and it's back to snowing and blowing as hard as it was doing before 10:00.

More Snow, More Snow ...

Just a quick shoutout to my friends up in Iowa. We're supposed to get about only 3-5 inches of snow here (I say only ... it's still a bit of snow), but we're hoping it melts off by the weekend.

However, in the last week, you guys are suffering through the nastiest winter weather the state has had for years (and I should know something about Iowa winters, having lived there the six years previous, including the year the state set the record for longest snow cover on the ground (late October through early May)).

Everyone please drive safe, stay warm, and be very careful, especially if you have power outages ... I'm hoping to see you at our wedding in March.

On a Serious Note: The Millenium Development Goals

Neither one of us are Catholic (although Woodgie used to be one growing up), but we both decided that we would observe Lent in a small way by doing a water/juice fast on Sunday evenings in lieu of dinner, and at the end of Lent, donating the money we would have otherwise spent on meals to a church charity. We thought it would be fitting to do this, in light of both the Episcopal Church and Lutheran Church's support of the UN Millenium Development Goals.

One of the MDGs is "the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger worldwide". While we often think of poverty and hunger as far off events in foreign countries, I'm finding as a food pantry volunteer that often, poverty and hunger are as close as your next-door neighbors or your community.

Personally, I've never experienced extreme poverty or hunger for a prolonged basis, but there have been a few tight moments in my life, especially while growing up. We were a low-income farming family who managed to squeak through every year, but we never felt that we were "poor", and there was always food on the table (although there was one Thanksgiving while I was in graduate school that was pretty bleak due to a lot of bad weather and poor crops). Apart from doing a 20 mile CROP walk fundraiser in middle school, the closest I came to hunger (in the sense of deprivation) was watching "Save the Children" fund-raising appeals on TV, and those were always far away, somewhere overseas, or in Africa. Certainly not close to home.

Both my own past experiences and my current ones have made me realize until we see poverty and hunger up close, that as long as we think of it with mindsets of "it's a far-off problem" and "it can't happen here" and "it's too big a problem to be dealt with", these mindsets intimidate us and blind us to what is needed, both locally and in other countries.

Trust me, the need is there. According to the USDA (http://www.secondharvest.org, 2007):

• In 2005, 35.1 million Americans lived in food insecure (low food security and very low food security) households, 22.7 million adults and 12.4 million children.
• In 2005, 55.6% of food-insecure (low food security or very low food security) households participated in at least one of the three major Federal food assistance programs Food Stamp Program, The National School Lunch Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, an increase from 55.2% in 2004.

And that was roughly two years ago.

Rather than watching it from a distance, I now see it every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, as families come through who need help. They may be struggling single parent families, or they may be single-income families with kids who have gone a week without groceries, or individuals who simply need help supplementing what they do have. And they are grateful, as we give them what we can give.

Granted, the Millenium Goals are ambitious in their scope, but it can start locally: doing such a small thing such as donating regularly to the local food pantry or to a local branch of Second Harvest, or volunteering time to work at one a few hours a week, or working on a Habitat for Humanity home is something positive. And it is something that can be done here and now.