the final countdown[s]

Thirty-seven days till Panama!  The lower the number gets, the more I am overwhelmed with... hmmm. "Excitement" won't suffice; "eagerness" is closer, but not strong enough.  You get the picture.

To add another day in the near future worth noting...
Three days till PCTC! That is the acronym for Pennsylvania Christian Teen Convention, a weekend conference that meets in Harrisburg, PA, annually.  Our youth group always takes a bus or two up there every year, and every year I've gone, it's definitely been worth it.

So, no, this has absolutely nothing to do with a one-hit-wonder hair band from the '80s.

Just in case you wanted to know.

[photo from PCTC 2009]

Be Thankful for Your Eyes

Especially if they are fortunate enough to allow you to see in 20/20 vision.   Even if they don't, be grateful for whatever smartypants decided to invent corrective lenses. Not to mention everyone after that who worked to further correct those corrective lenses, invent contact lenses, and develop the technology that provides laser surgery.

It just occured to me how much we take that for granted.

I know, because I do it every day, and my eyes are pretty ridiculously bad.  If I had no glasses/contacts on a roadtrip and you asked me what that sign up ahead said, I'd say, "What sign?"

I open my eyes in the morning and see nothing but blurry outlines of shapes.  I put my glasses on, and immediately head to the bathroom to put in my contact lenses. From then on, I see 20/20 like any other fortunate human on this good earth, and I'm content.  How quickly I forget about my unaided eyesight! Reality smacks me in the face again when I take out my contacts before bedtime.  It's like, oh yeah, I forgot I'm legally blind. Is that a doorknob or a cheeseburger?

Well, okay, I'm not technically legally blind. But practically.  I feel like I am, anyway.  Then again, at least I have correctable eyesight, because some people don't even have that.  

I love my eyes. Even if they are slightly crooked on my face and have a monumentally pathetic time seeing by themselves, I love them.

"No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight."

                                                                                         Jean Toomer

¡cuarenta y tres días!

That's how long I have to wait before I leave for Panama to visit mi prima (my cousin) Joy.  Forty-three days!  My passport is ready and my Spanish skills are sharpened -- all I have left to do is wait for April 1st to roll around.  As maddening as it is to wait, forty-three days will probably pass quicker than I imagined.

I'll be making this trip with my aunt, uncle, and two cousins (Joy's younger brothers), all of whom have been to Panama before and know what to expect. Of the whole group, I'm the newbie.  This is not only my first time to visit Panama; it's my first real voyage abroad. Besides my home country, I have only ever visited Niagara Falls, Canada -- and that, to me, hardly even counts, because it was just for a few hours! Panama will be a 10-day trip: a trip saturated with a series of brand-new experiences for me.  I'll get to be immersed in a unique Latin American culture.  I'll encounter certain animals that I would never see anywhere near my hometown, except at the zoo. I'll see exotic plants, try new foods, and get to see what Joy does for her mission work there in David (pronounced "Dah-veed") -- all in 10 days.

And I only have 43 days left to wait!

you have to try these.

They have no official name.  My mom's kindergarten teacher called them "raggedy robins"; my great-grandmother dubbed them "no-bakes."   I don't care what you decide to call them, but I do implore you: please try them. Please.

Unless you happen to have a severe allergy to peanut products. If that's the case, don't even bother reading the rest of this. That goes for you chocolate-haters as well; and for the record, chocolate-haters of the world, I don't understand you people at all. 

For all the non-peanut-allergy, non-chocolate-hating people out there: you'll fall in love. These masterpieces are just as simple to make as they are savory to eat. 

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mix in saucepan & boil for 1 minute:
1/2 stick butter
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp cocoa
1/4 cup milk

remove from heat; add & stir in:
2 cups Quick Oats
1/4 cup peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla

Spoon a dollop (or however big you want your cookies) of the mixture onto a cookie sheet covered in aluminum foil. Just stick them in the fridge till they're firm -- bon appetit!

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Boiling for 1 minute is the absolute key to the perfection of these cookies.  I speak from experience.   If you don't boil for that one required minute, the taste won't be ruined, but ideal texture certainly will be. Also, be sure to use Quick Oats, not just any ordinary oatmeal.  It makes a big difference.

Now, please excuse me while I go whip up a double-batch.

haiku. I'm not a poet, obviously.

The pure, weightless white

That wafted down to the lawn
Was a quilt of snow.
___________________

I promised this in the last post.  So there you go.

shakespeare & a snow haiku

Okay, I lied.  Just for the novelty of it, I started to write a haiku to go along with these photos; but it was not in the least bit ingenius. So I scratched that idea.  Maybe I'll sit back down and give it another go.  I suppose it would have been more beneficial just for me to finish it and share it, and brace myself for whatever everyone else thinks about it.  That's a big problem these days. Too often, people won't do the right thing because they are too focused on what others will think of them. Publishing an original haiku on this trifling blog may be a minor deed, but of all the reasons not to go through with publishing it... wondering about what people will think of it is probably more pathetic than the poorly-written haiku itself. 

Too bad I already erased the four stanzas I had completed.  Somewhere, some time ago, I read that a writer should never throw away anything he writes, no matter how displeased he is with it. It could possibly come in handy later on.  

Oops.

I can't bring it back now, but I could always start a fresh one. That would be a deed worth accomplishing.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.                   William Shakespeare

Maybe I'll sit back down and give it another go.

eighteen.

A teen at the threshold of adulthood.
It's a scary thought, yet somehow it's equally exciting.


Eighteen years ago on February 5, my brother Zach made his debut: the first of the four infamous Andrews kids. :)

Even though the coming snow storm will probably postpone all of the celebratory plans that have been made for this weekend, I still sort of like how it will be snowing just as it was 18 years ago the day Zach was born.

I was born about a year and a half later, and being so close in age, we were often mistaken for being twins. Since I've been around for the majority of Zach's life, I like to say I know him fairly well. We argue too much, and we tend to irritate each other for the most childish reasons. We're siblings, after all. Yet in the midst of all that, at the same time, we have cherished each other more than we probably care to realize, and that closeness has grown over the years. Together we created our own world with the LEGO collection we accumulated. We named our first two goldfish together. We listened to '90s CDs and pretended to play guitar with our plastic Hotwheels tracks. We learned to waterski together. We had the same first favorite band. Now we're growing up. We study together. We practice piano and guitar together. We talk about politics. We ask each other for advice, both about important things and about which outfit looks better. As we grow up, have so much to look back on. Then again, just look at how much we have to look forward to.

Happy birthday, Zachary.