WelcomeAnd, Thank You!

An exciting few days, but we're safe and sound in the new apartment, and don't worry—all of our books made it safely too :)

Dining room is somewhere underneath all of that...

Really could not have done it without the help we had from my dad and from our friends Vince (you might know him as Uncle Vinny), Jen, and Wendy.

I'll fill you in with more photos soon, but for now how about a few things unrelated to relocation?

Actually, the day of the move also happened to be the Seattle U Faculty & Staff Service Day, which I'd signed up for back when I thought we'd wait until October to move...

So, this next comment might be weird, and it's a bit more confessional than I like to blog, but when I was a kid I read Magnificent Obsession, which makes of lot of these lines from chapter 6 of the Gospel of Matthew:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.*

I don't remember much of that book (either of them, for that matter), but that sentiment always seemed right to me.

The me I aspire to, in other words, would never tell you he did a service project...
But how can I not talk about how funny it is that volunteering around here always seems to come with a t-shirt?


Anyway, my group spent a couple of hours at the Rainier Beach Urban Farm, a new garden project (on the site of a former nursery) run by Seattle Tilth.



The other funny thing (aside from the free clothes) was that we spent a fair amount of time picking blackberries and bush beans... and then they gave it all to us!

A weird volunteer experience, but who can argue with delicious hand-picked produce?

Fortunately the weekend wasn't all berry picking and book packing—also spent some time showing my dad some of the sites:




All right reader, I had better get back to unpacking and syllabus writing: school starts in just two weeks!

*Translation from the King James Bible—I always liked the way that version sounds...