hmmmmm... i've never really liked "titles" so much...

so i thought i would write another little hello... i am somewhere on the verge of buying my plane ticket to ecuador for barry and sofia's wedding. everyone was telling me i was crazy in thinking that ticket prices would drop, but a big BOOYAH to you! now i just need to pick my return date which, as anyone who knows me even in the slightest can imagine, is a rather overwhelming factor (ie "decision") to make.

so instead of making the large online purchase, i thought i would write and say that i had the pleasure this weekend of being visited by some of my favorite people in the world: the BAROLD, formerly of wisconsin and now (hopefully temporarily) and illinois cat, sandra, josh, isaac (who i am convinced is not all that fond of me even though "babies cry. don't feel bad. it's what they do."), and michael the stud gorter. the non-russows and i had quite the entertaining little self-portrait photo shoot as well (don't you just love digital cameras?).

and i also wanted to make mention of my week at the disciple farm (where i was buddied with the 18-year old named derek who is autistic). what a great week. i wish that i had some big reflection to make on it, but all i can do is thank god for having given me the opportunity. two observations i made were: 1) people don't give kids with special needs nearly enough credit. in SO many ways they just totally know what's up. and no matter how different we might think we all are, we all just completely need god's mercy to cover us in this life. -and- 2) in some ways, people don't expect enough out of young people (jr/sr high). i can't even explain to you how encouraged i was by seeing so many middle and highschoolers acting so lovingly and selflessly. it's totally in there. i suppose that's what happens when god comes to dwell inside you, though, right? it was a good week.

it was cool, too, because on the last day there was this barbecue, right? and there was like a parade that families were invited to and all that, so there were a lot of people there. so there were three different little tents set up as food lines to ease the whole line problem. and derek and i were in line (his family wasn't there), and he kept walking back and forth from where i was standing over to where the food was... some might have assumed he didn't understand the concept of lines, but i understood that he was totally just trying to figure out what kind of food they were serving. the kid was hungry. ha ha. and so then eventually he came back to me, kind of put his hand on my shoulder, looked past me a bit, and started saying something. and, see, he has a speech impairment and so it can be very difficult to understand him (in fact, throughout the week it had been quite the source of tension in some moments because i simply couldn't understand what he was trying to say to me and it made me feel awful and he would get frustrated), but i immediately knew what he was going to say. so i told him, "derek, there is the same food at all three tents; mr. rheinghans said that before we all got in line." and he looked at me and smiled and said, "how did you know what i was going to say?" and i asked him, "well, was i right?" and he said, "but how did you know?" and it was cool. because you might meet someone for five minutes and you learn a little something about them, but you get the privilege of hanging out with them for a week, and you can really get to know someone a bit. and so it was cool, because it was like hey; we're friends.

anyway, that was a long story i suppose. i will let you go. gotta go check out these plane ticket prices. god bless!!